The Science Of Building The Life You Want | Arthur Brooks

20:54Arthur Brooks:and you get the point, right? I mean, I don't want people to starve, but the truth is when you're actually on a diet or you're trying to tune up your nutrition and you're purposively fasting a little bit, food is a lot better and brings you a lot more enjoyment, pleasure, but if you're eating with people and making a memory that much better. And that's what people used to get from these big festivals and the Thanksgiving feast when people were just, they were always a little bit hungry. And then they got that Thanksgiving dinner and it was so wonderful. It was satisfying. And if you're not hungry, it's not satisfying.

21:31Arthur Brooks:Now that's the same thing with anything else. My students, if they cheat on my exam and get an A, there's no satisfaction in that. If they work really hard, even stay up all night studying for my exam and they get an A, it's enormously satisfying. And that's what we want. We want to defer our gratification for real rewards. And that's important because that talk that helps us understand that struggle and sacrifice are not necessary evils. They're built into the process of satisfaction. There's another problem behind it, though, that's going to get more into your world as a practicing, you know, a practitioner of Buddhist meditation that we all need to understand.

22:07Arthur Brooks:Mother Nature tells us that if we get that satisfaction and that reward, we'll keep it, that we'll just get to enjoy it forever and ever and ever. That watch, that car, that house, that relationship, that millionth Instagram follower, whatever your thing is, that once you get it, it's going to be so wonderful. But it isn't. It just, it's evanescent. It just wears off. That new car smell goes away. You know, you move to a really sunny place. Six months later, you've accustomed yourself. You've habituated yourself to it because the brain experiences what's called homeostasis. It goes back to its baseline.

22:43Arthur Brooks:So your emotions are ready for the next set of circumstances. It has to, or you die. It'd be actually dangerous if it didn't happen. But we never learn. And the only way for that not to wreck our satisfaction and lead us to frustration and disappointment is for us to fight against Mother Nature's little trick, which you do really well. And you talk about an awful lot. So I'm in Dan Harris territory now. So I say this with appropriate humility. You don't need to have more. You need to want less. If you want stable and lasting satisfaction, your satisfaction is actually all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want.

23:20Arthur Brooks:Most people have a numerator increasing strategy. More. What's your goal? More? More of what? All of it. Money, power, pleasure, fame. Lay it on me. You need to be working on the denominator of your satisfaction equation, which is to want less, to think seriously, not about your bucket list, but about your reverse bucket list, crossing things out on that list. That's the secret. And only being very present, thinking very carefully about these things, interrogating your wants on a regular basis. This is why meditation is so critically important. It gives you the space to actually interrogate your wants, some people for the very first time in their lives.

24:01If you are wanting less, are you less ambitious, less effective, less impactful in the world?

24:10Arthur Brooks:So theoretically, yes, but I've never seen it. I've never seen it in the wild. You know, my students will ask me that, but you know, my students are MBA students at the Harvard Business School. These are some of the most ambitious people walking the earth. And I say, I'm not worried about you guys. I'm not worried about you, you know, and anybody who's listening to 10 % Happier is a striver. They're working on the enterprise of their own lives. They're ambitious about getting better off in life. If you're actually working on your wants, as opposed to just your haves, as a striver, you're just simply going to get closer into balance than you were before.

24:46Arthur Brooks:Think about it this way. Stop thinking about building your perfect life, like putting brushstrokes on a canvas. If you're doing well, that canvas is probably full and a brushstroke will be indistinguishable from what's already on the canvas. It might even get worse because it'll just get darker and denser and uglier. Think about your life as a sculpture that you're chipping away. And you need to chip away the detritus of all the things that are distracting you from the true you. All of the obsessions and desires and toxic relationships and the search for money and status. Think about how those things really do affect you and start chipping them away.

25:25Arthur Brooks:That's why I have a reverse bucket list. I write down my worldly desires the money, power, pleasure, fame matrix. And I start crossing those things out, not because I won't get them, but because when I'm fully conscious of these desires, I'm less attached to these things. By naming these things, I'm less likely to chase them subconsciously. It's less likely to affect my unconscious behavior. And boy, oh boy, it just, it gives me a tool of management over my life that I never would have imagined 10 years ago. So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that if we approach our goals, not as a painting where we're adding more and more paint, but as a sculpture where we're taking away clay or stone or whatever the material is, that actually we can be more effectively and wisely ambitious because we're getting down to the nub of what actually matters.

26:20Arthur Brooks:Yeah. And if you're doing the work to think of what you want that sculpture to be, it's very unlikely to have a dollar figure attached to it. It's very unlikely to have a Instagram follower number attached to it. What it's going to have is something to do with your faith or life philosophy, something to do with your family relationships, something to do with the depth of your friendships, something to do with how you're actually creating a mark on the world that's lifting people up and bringing them together. These are the things that really matter. And so deeply considering what you want that sculpture to be will give you the right ambition.

26:55Arthur Brooks:And then you can shed the less meritorious ambitions and the ones that actually lead you onto this hedonic treadmill, this homeostasis, this more, more, more, more that never leads to real satisfaction that lasts. Can one really shed the less meritorious motivations and aspects of ambition? Not that I've been meditating that long, but it's a non-trivial period of time. And I'm still spotting all sorts of noxious tendencies flitting through the mind. Well, Mother Nature, she's cruel and she's wired us in particular ways. Mother Nature really only has two goals for Nan and Arthur and everybody watching and listening to us, which is gene propagation and survival.

27:38Arthur Brooks:Calories and mates, man. And the result of that is that we follow all of these weird imperatives, not quite understanding why we're doing it. Now, I do a lot of work in evolutionary social science. And so I'm charting these impulses back to the Pleistocene all the time. You know, why do I want all these Instagram followers? Not me, but why do people want that? And the answer is because they want prestige. They want a higher place in the hierarchy. Why? Because they want to be admired by other people. And that got back to the idea of being more likely to survive in a tribe and getting more mates back in the old days.

28:12Arthur Brooks:So you're going to have these impulses. But the point is you need consciousness of these impulses. Vipassana meditation is a really interesting thing. because when you sit in meditation to try to get insight about yourself, you'll look at yourself in a certain remove. You say, Arthur is feeling envious today. What is it? Arthur is feeling fearful about losing something today. Why might that be? And that remove, that metacognitive act, metacognition is the thinking about thinking. That's why Vipassana meditation is one of the very best things that people can do, not to shed these attachments, but to be aware of these attachments.

28:52Arthur Brooks:Now, I do a lot of work, as you know, with the Dalai Lama. He's probably shed the attachments. I mean, he's a living bodhisattva. I mean, he's enlightened, but the rest of us, probably not. But I'm telling you, I know it's true for you, and it's certainly true for me, that awareness of this, awareness of these tendencies is 80 % of the way to not being controlled by these tendencies. That's been just a watershed achievement for me in my life, is becoming conscious of these things and systematically reviewing them through my own meditation practice. Yeah. I mean, that's the way I would describe it for myself, that I'm more aware of the, as I said before, noxious tendencies implanted into me through the culture and through natural selection, et cetera, et cetera.

29:41And theoretically, depending on the day, depending how much sleep I've got, depending on the circumstances of my life at that moment, I'm less yanked around by them.

29:50Arthur Brooks:Right, and I make bad decisions all the time too. But the time I make, it's interesting. There's a game I play with my students to figure out what kind of bad decision you're going to make based on your noxious tendencies. It's a game called What's My Idol. Do you want to play? Sure. So What's My Idol starts with the insight of Thomas Aquinas, who is paraphrasing Aristotle, very solid social science, before data were a thing, saying every person has a tendency to follow one of four big idols in life. Here are the four. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Now, fame means admiration of others or prestige.

30:29Arthur Brooks:It's a hierarchical thing. It's all that means. It doesn't mean having millions of people know who you are. Fame can be very local, but it means the admiration of others. Money is self-explanatory. Power means that you have disproportionate influence over other people. And pleasure, well, it's pleasure. You could be a pleasure seeker. Nothing wrong with pleasure, but the point is if it's your idol. And the idea of Aristotle and later Aquinas is that these things distract you from your ultimate bliss. If they become the goal in and of themselves, you're in big trouble. But they also assert that everybody follows one of them in particular.

31:03Arthur Brooks:So when I'm playing with my students, and I'll play with you right now, I start by saying, think of those four, money, power, pleasure, honor. Which of those is not your idol that you'd get rid of right now? Maybe you don't even like it. So which one would you hive off? Which one would you shed, Dan? Power. Yeah, me too, baby. How do I know when somebody doesn't like power? Because they hate people having power over them. And I'm sure that's true for you. Yes. You don't want any – I mean, that's why you struck out on your own. I mean, you're an entrepreneur because it's like you're like Sinatra singing my way.

31:37Arthur Brooks:I got it. Okay. There's three left, Dan. Money, pleasure, and honor or the admiration of other people. You got to get rid of a second one. Which one are you getting rid of? You don't get it in your life anymore. Which one? Shit, this is hard. It gets harder. It's going to get harder. Yeah. I guess money? Yeah, me too. Me too. Money's fine, but really, is it that great? I mean, really? Do you want a 10-bedroom house? I mean, do you want a third car? It just, it usually, when people like money an awful lot, it represents something else. So I'm with you. Okay, you like it, but not that much. Now it's getting a little hot in here, right, Dan?

32:29Arthur Brooks:Because you're down to two. And now you're going to have to get rid of one of them. I can already tell you like both because you're human. But which one do you like less and would you kick away now? Pleasure or honor? Honor. All right. So now we know that any time there's something that is going to lead you to look back on a moment in your life and say, that was the wrong thing. It's going to tend to revolve around giving in needlessly, not necessarily thoughtlessly, but not mindfully to that idol. And that's a really important piece of information because, look, you're only human. You're going to have these things.

33:09Arthur Brooks:For me, it's honor. For me, it's honor. It is. And, you know, look, I'm a university professor and we're all kind of this way. It's not like you want a billion people to be uttering your name, but you want the right people to know who you are and appreciate your ideas for their quality. That's a very common thing in my field. And it's certainly true for me, too. And so I know every time I every time I look back on my life and I say, I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I hadn't said that. And I wish I didn't have these fears. And I wish I didn't have these hang ups. It's all kind of honor based. And that's because it's my idol.

33:40Arthur Brooks:Now, that's important information for me because now I know what I have to have sword in hand to slay, which is my tendency toward that. Yeah, I mean, I was really torn at the end because, I mean, I think fame slash honor, I mean, that is an idol for me. I just couldn't imagine a life with no pleasure. Yeah, I mean, that's too extreme, of course. You know, and you would never have a life without honor if you're doing something useful. You're going to have people even in your neighborhood who say, Dan, he's a good guy. And that's a form of honor as well. So we don't want to take this to ridiculous limits and say you're going to live a life bereft of pleasure.

34:17Arthur Brooks:What we're really talking about are these pleasures that we chase to the exclusion of more meritorious goals again and again and again. And, you know, the little things that give you that sort of spice in life that you really enjoy and you're not really very proud of. That's really what we're sacrificing here. So I don't want to set it up in such a way that you have to live a great existence.

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38:19just to remind people where we are we're walking through the three macro nutrients of happiness from the standpoint of arthur brooks and we've talked about enjoyment we're on satisfaction right now and there was something you said early in your brief discourse on satisfaction that i i want to loop back to uh you talked about the necessity of struggle and pain right and suffering for satisfaction. That is, you need to go through that. You need to move through that in order to get the good stuff. This is a common theme among, I've noticed, among my recent guests on this show who have argued that we've created a world where for young people especially, and this is not their fault, this is the world we've created for them, where young people especially have lives of, one could argue, insufficient friction and struggle with helicopter parents and technology that allows them to get everything they want on demand.

39:20So that when they do experience the anxiety that is non-negotiable and inevitable in life, they react disproportionately and that that, the theory goes, is producing or contributing to this explosion of anxiety we're seeing, cultural, broad in the overall culture, but especially among young people. Would you agree with the foregoing?

39:41Arthur Brooks:It's completely true. I mean, it's empirically robust, as we, you know, academic weenies like to say. It's all over in the data. You can't miss it. The truth of the matter is that the explosion of generalized anxiety among young adults is basically a social peanut allergy. That's what it, you know, what's come of it. You I mean, I'm not casting aspersions or people with a peanut allergy, but the truth of the matter is that people have these particular medical aversions because they didn't have any exposure to the pathogen. You need exposure to pathogens for you actually to build up defenses. That's just truth.

40:19Arthur Brooks:And that's as true psychologically, emotionally, spiritually as it is anything else. And when, you know, I just made fun of the hippies a little while ago about that if it feels good, do it. That's sort of the 1960s version of self-care. Well, self-care today, the explosion of self-care, which is a very misguided concept. The truth is you want to get happier. You should be doing other care. But even on campuses, we talk about radical self-care, which is serving your own needs first. The big way that we do that today is sort of turn the hippie maxim inside out. If it feels bad, make it stop. That if something feels rotten, it means there's something wrong with me.

40:59Arthur Brooks:It means that I have a pathology. And that's not true. You know, life is tricky. And again, negative emotions, negative basic emotions or fear and anger and sadness and disgust, these keep you alive. Negative experiences are the ultimate way that we grow. We can get the satisfaction. You know, later we'll talk about meaning. You can't get a sense of meaning in your life unless you've actually suffered. There's a reason that most religions feature suffering in the religion itself, because they understand that spiritual growth actually comes from adversity. We're doing our kids no favor by trying to protect them from the normal pathogens of social life.

41:37Arthur Brooks:I don't want my children to be hurt. I don't want my kids' hearts to be broken. I don't want that. But I need that, and so do they. And so the result of it is that I have had to practice what I preach to keep my hands off. It's hard. I mean, as a social scientist, I know the stuff that's going to break their hearts. I know full well, I'm looking at the data right in front of me, but I have to say, okay, okay, you got to let them live because if they don't live, they're going to miss whole swaths of the happiness that should come their way. They're not going to learn. They won't grow up. And as a result of that, they're going to be frankly anxious and depressed.

42:18Yes. And this for parents and we're both parents, I have a young child, yours are, yours are less young. They're young adults. Mine's like nine. I'm a grandfather. Grandfather. Congratulations. That's incredible.

42:33Arthur Brooks:Since last time I talked to you, I'm a grandfather. Seriously, congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, no, they say my kids had kids earlier. As they say, raise them Catholic. They do Catholic stuff. I was just going to say, talk about enjoyment. Oh, it's a whole, Dan, it's God's reward for not killing your children when they're teenagers.

43:01Yeah. But this does raise such a, for grandparents, for parents, this does raise such a, you know, this is something we need to be thinking about. Totally. I keep thinking of something, and I apologize to longtime listeners who might have heard me say this before, but something that my dad once said to me, which was the hardest thing of parenting is just letting your kids make their own mistakes. Yeah, for sure.

43:28Arthur Brooks:No, it feels horrible. And, you know, the hard part is that, you know, it was easier for my parents to let me suffer because my parents didn't have any money. And my wife was literally raised by a single mother in poverty in an apartment where that periodically the lights would go out because they didn't pay the bill, you know? And so how are they going to bail her out? You know, she dropped out of high school at 16 to sing with a rock band. Her parents are like, I don't know, maybe it'll work out. You know, it was a different time because our parents had fewer resources, but, you know, we've been blessed.

44:04Arthur Brooks:And so the result is I can solve lots and lots of problems for my kids, but I can't do it. I can't do it. If I really want them to have a full life that has all of the experiences in it, they're going to let them grow up and learn and have the full range of emotions that helps them find their sense of meaning and get the satisfaction that actually comes from working through struggles and challenges as opposed to having, you know, dad solve the problem. Okay, so we've talked about enjoyment, satisfaction. Let's talk about purpose. It seems not unrelated to everything we've just discussed. Yeah, it's a different species of problem, however.

44:41Arthur Brooks:Meaning is funny because, you know, I can go, I'm really good at deferring my gratification. And almost everybody listening to this podcast is as well. I mean, if you're spending a bunch of time on something called 10 % Happier, you see your life as an enterprise. You're a startup entrepreneur and the company is you. That's the one thing I'm going to, I'm just going to assert that your listeners have in common. because that's the title of the podcast and indicates that you're gonna self-select into that group. So I'm not really worried about people listening to us saying, yeah, I can defer my gratification.

45:11Arthur Brooks:I can go to the gym for 60 minutes a day. I can do cold plunges or whatever the heck people are doing these days. You can go a pretty long time without satisfaction either as well. However, I defy anybody to go for one day without having a sense of meaning about their lives and be happy, happy, happy, as happy as they can be. On the contrary, if you don't actually have a sense of your life's meaning, you will be rootless. You will be at loose ends. You will be discouraged. And, you know, there's a lot of psychological and philosophical research on this, but it's common sense tells us that that's the case as well.

45:46Arthur Brooks:Now, meaning, you know, people always say it's almost a joke. What's the meaning of life? That's a big question. It's too big, as a matter of fact. There's three sub parts to meaning. The first is coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? The second is purpose, which is why is my life unfolding the way it is? What are my goals and what's my direction? And the third is significance. Why does it matter that I'm alive? Those are the three subparts, coherence, purpose, and significance. And I have a test that I give people to see whether or not to ascertain if there's a meaning crisis in their life, which for a lot of young people, there really is.

46:22Arthur Brooks:And the way to fail this test, which is not failure, it's actually a really good outcome if you fail, because that means that you know what to start looking for, is not having answers to these two questions. There's no right answers. There's only no answers, and that's the problem. So do you want me to give you the little quiz? Sure. All right. You can tell I'm a professor, you know, so it's very Socratic. So Dan, why are you alive?

46:54that's a big question um the proximate cause to my being alive uh would be um my parents meeting and having sex and um bringing me into the world what's the big why as in what are you

47:10Arthur Brooks:why uh what are you on earth to do okay well that's a different question it is different because you could actually talk about, you know, there's the biology, there's a sperm and an egg. Or for me, it would be God created me. But why? You know, why are you on earth? Why are you alive? What's my job on the planet? I come at this, belatedly, I would say I come at this from a Buddhist perspective of benefiting all beings. And for me, a key is the letter A there, all beings. That doesn't mean that I'm wearing a hair shirt and I'm endlessly self-sacrificing. I am part of all beings. So it's hopefully an omnidirectional benefit machine.

47:54Arthur Brooks:Yeah, it's beautiful. And that's not belated at all because it takes people their whole lives and perhaps many lives to come to that conclusion. So there's no lateness to that. On the contrary, it takes a lot of work to come to the conclusion. As I agree with you, I'm on Earth. I was created to love and serve. I was created to love and serve. And that means a lot of different things. I'm still trying to figure out what serving is and what serving isn't. And when I have to make a choice between serving this or that, how do I make that particular choice, et cetera? But that is a solid answer to the why question.

48:30Arthur Brooks:That's a great answer to the why question. Now it gets harder for the second question. Maybe it's easier for you. For what would you be willing to die today?

48:42my family anything else

48:48if somebody said hey you can we'll put you to sleep um and it would solve climate change uh i would do it yeah um and i suspect the more i think about it there are any number of major issues i would do it for world peace um

49:10hunger. Yeah. So if somebody said to me, we can, if you will euthanize you in the gentlest possible way, and it would meaningfully reduce suffering in the world, that's a deal I would probably take.

49:24Arthur Brooks:Yeah. And then of course, to be, you know, really rabbinic about it, we would say, okay, well, how about two people? Well, how about three people? Okay. But that's neither here nor there. So this is, you would die for others. That's what you said. And there's some very specific others like your wife and children. And there are some non-specific others as well. These are very solid answers. And the reason that you give these solid answers, which shows me that you have lots of meaning in your life is because you've thought about this. I mean, look, you're the guy who created 10 % happier. Of course you've thought about this.

49:56Arthur Brooks:Like, I don't know. I mean, it would be very, very strange to me if you didn't come up with these. But a lot of people haven't given this very much thought. Yeah. So, I mean, you try this with your kids. Nine is a little bit young, but I remember, you know, my kids, it's actually kind of brutal being my kid because, you know, when your dad is a social scientist specializing in happiness, you're always in the middle of some sort of human subject experimental design. And, you know, all my kids had to write business plans when they were in high school, a strategic plan of how they wanted to spend the next, I'm also a business school professor.

50:28Arthur Brooks:So the next 10 years of their lives, not that they're going to adhere to it, rigorously, but so that they have a sense of direction. And I would ask them these meaning questions. And I would say, okay, put together a business plan that is going to teach you your answers to the two meaning questions. And one of my sons, you know, when you have three kids, my kids are now 25, 23 and 20. My 23 year old's name is Carlos. And when Carlos was in high school, I mean, he's a middle child, he got 90 % of the family oxygen thought he was getting 10%. That It was just, you know, it's middle children, right?

51:00Arthur Brooks:And he was goofing off, but he wasn't even having fun. And the problem was a sense of meaning. So I said, what are you going to do to find the answers? And he said, well, I'm going to go to college. I said, no, you're not. How do I know you're not? Because I'm Carlos too. I went to college and I wasn't ready and got kicked out. I spent 10 months in college and then spent my entire 20s working as a musician. It was my gap decade, right? I made it back to college at 30. And I said, you're not ready for college. What are you going to do? And he put together a plan to find his answers. And he went away and he worked on a farm for two seasons.

51:36Arthur Brooks:He was a dry land wheat farmer in an 8 ,000 acre working wheat farm in Idaho, Grangeville, Idaho. And then when he was 19, after his second harvest, he joined the Marine Corps. And he spent four years as a special ops combat Marine. He was a scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps out of Camp Pendleton with his, you know, doing his deployments overseas. And today, I mean, now he's 23 years old. He's married. He's going to be a father soon. And he's got answers. And he got the answers in the Marine Corps. You know, I'm not saying this is right for everybody. I'm just saying that this is the experience that my son had.

52:13Arthur Brooks:I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And he'll say, because God made me to serve others. I say, for what are you willing to die? And he will say, I'm willing to die for my faith and for my family and for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America. that's he's it's just it's it's clear to him and he's happy my son is happy happier happier than I've ever seen him because he knows he he's finally acquainted with Carlos and that's what we can all find when we actually go and search truly of the answers that we have to those two questions and just to say it again if anybody's listening and feels like they don't have their answers.

52:51That's per Arthur good news, because that, that tells you what your work is to do.

52:57Arthur Brooks:Totally. You know, the worst thing is I don't have, I don't have a sense of meaning in my life and I don't know where to look, you know? And so you look on the internet and the internet is kind of the, the go find a rock theory of management where, um, the, you know, you, the, the boss says, go get me a rock and go get a rock and bring it in. He says, that's the wrong rock. Go get another rock. I mean, this is unhelpful. There's a lot of rocks out there, man. If you don't have any concept of what you're looking for, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. And the beginning of the search comes with the why am I alive for what am I willing to not be alive questions.

53:33Arthur Brooks:And that will lead you in a lot of unexpected directions that might be philosophical, they might be secular, they might be spiritual, they might be non-traditional, who knows, they might just lead you back to the faith of your youth. And again, we're talking about happiness here. Your contention is it's not a state of uninterrupted bliss. It is a state of growth and relative improvement, understanding that there's also going to be suffering and pain as part of the deal. Yeah. And as important parts of the deal, especially in this last part of meaning, I don't know anybody when I say, when did you find the answers to your two questions?

54:12Arthur Brooks:When did it really become clear? My son would have said, I don't know, infantry training battalion on my 40th mile of a march without sleeping. Or, you know, people will say when I got sick or when somebody I love abandoned me and then I saw that I didn't die and that I was resilient. You need suffering. Suffering is unbelievably sacred. the worst thing that we can possibly do is to try to avoid our suffering because in so doing, we avoid our sense of meaning. And when we avoid finding the answers to our meaning questions, we avoid actual happiness. Imagine you finally have a free day out of town.

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57:09So did we cover the three component parts of purpose, coherence? Sorry, of meaning, coherence, purpose and significance? Did we get all three? We did. Thank you.

57:18Arthur Brooks:And because, you know, we actually covered happiness. Yeah. When we talk about enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Yes. Those are the three parts. Now, again, you know, you can spend the rest of your life setting up an agenda to discover and track down those things in your life. And that's in point of fact what I do all day long. Next Monday, I start my new class, my brand new semester, my spring semester class. And we're going to spend the entire semester looking at enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. I'm going to say something that's going to sound like a criticism, but it's a compliment. I'm just going to hold up this sheet of paper.

57:52It's got two sides. These are all the questions I had for you. And I have asked the first four. So we've got a little bit of time left. But I just want to point out that there are so many things we really we really we we did a nutrient dense discussion of of happiness there. And the book gets gets pretty tactical and practical on on on on ways that we can increase our happiness. And so I want before we run out of time, I want to touch on some of those if you're game. Of course. Okay, so there's a big chunk on how to manage your emotions in which you talk about things that you've already mentioned a little bit like metacognition.

58:41But let's tee it up for us. What's the top line on managing our emotions and why that's so important if we're interested in happiness?

58:49Arthur Brooks:A big error that people make about their emotions is that there's good feelings and bad feelings. We literally use those expressions. Good feelings. I want more good feelings and I want fewer bad feelings. That's exactly the wrong way to be thinking about emotions because there are no bad feelings. There are negative emotions and positive emotions, but all emotions are information. So the brain basically works in a triune way. It works in a three-part way. The most ancient parts of your brain, they ascertain what's going on outside of you. You know, you smell things, you see light, you get an idea of something is good or bad around you.

59:24Arthur Brooks:and it's very autonomic, it's very automatic, that sends information largely to your limbic system, which is a console of tissue deep inside your brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years. The limbic system has the job, as we discussed a little bit earlier, of creating emotions and feelings and cravings and desires. All that is is data. And all these data are designed to do is to inform you of what's going on, whether you should approach something or you should avoid it. That's what it comes down to. If it gives you pleasure, it's something that's probably a source of mates or calories or something like that.

59:57Arthur Brooks:If it gives you fear or anger, it's stimulating a part of your limbic system called the amygdala, which is saying that this is a threat, so you should fight, flight, or freeze. I mean, all of these things that we do, they have to do with the way that we react to the outside world, and we send signals. Now, where do we send that information? It's to the third part of your brain, which is the neocortex, the wrinkly outside tissue of your brain. It's wrinkly, by the way, Dan, because it's a one square meter sheet of brain tissue scrunched up inside your tiny cranium. And so it's just huge. It's just, it's the most amazing supercomputer ever created.

1:00:33Arthur Brooks:And the most sophisticated part of it is called the prefrontal cortex, which is a bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's the C-suite of your brain where you decide what your emotions mean and how to react according to them. If you give it time, that's the important thing. The most important way for emotional self-management to occur is to give yourself time for your limbic system to send the information to your prefrontal cortex. And most people don't do that. Most people are, as we say, reactive. When they're angry, they yell. You know, they just – people who have horrible temper problems.

1:01:07Arthur Brooks:They're basically reactive people and they're not giving time for their prefrontal cortex to catch up to the activity in their limbic system. Just to put it in sheer neuroscientific terms, metacognition is awareness of your thinking. It is awareness of your emotions. It's putting space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. And it's a whole suite of techniques that you can use to do that. So you have more time to catch up. So you're not managed by your emotions. You're managing your emotions. You're deciding how to act according to the information that you get. We already listed one of them, which is Vipassana meditation, insight meditation, where you're looking at yourself as if you were someone else noticing your emotions, interrogating your emotions.

1:01:53Arthur Brooks:That's a good example of a technique to make you metacognitive and to manage your emotional life. But there are many others. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I quote in pretty much every episode of the show, which sorry if that's annoying. But he has this great little thing that he says to people. he'll say, imagine that your thoughts are coming from the person next to you. Right, right, right. And, you know, a great way to do that also is imagine the advice you would give somebody who's feeling the things that you're feeling. You know, somebody's saying, I'm really sad because, you know, I'm really, I'm fighting a lot with my spouse and the whole thing.

1:02:30Arthur Brooks:And you'd be saying, well, tell me about it. Tell me about it. Well, what did she say? What did you say? What usually leads to this? You wouldn't be freaking out. You wouldn't be crying on behalf of the other person. Your heart wouldn't be breaking. You'd be treating it like an analytical problem because it is an analytical problem. It's just that when your limbic system is in charge, it inhibits your ability to be a good analyst, to be your own meditation teacher. Yes. In this section of the book, when you and Oprah talk about managing your emotions, one concept you introduce is emotional substitution.

1:03:06What is that?

1:03:07Arthur Brooks:Emotional substitution is the idea that you can choose an appropriate emotion that's different than the one that you're feeling. Now, you can't do that if you're taking as given what your limbic system is delivering up. You have to have lots of space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex, and you have to be able to say, I'm feeling sadness. I'm going to choose humor, which people can actually do. I pal around with a guy named Rainn Wilson. You probably know him. He's been on the show. Yeah, he's terrific. And he and I grew up about five miles apart in Seattle and we're close to the same age and we're both classical musicians.

1:03:43Arthur Brooks:We bonded over that. We didn't know each other as kids, but... He plays the bassoon, if memory serves. Yeah, and I was a French horn player. And I went pro. He became an actor and I became a professional classical musician. And now we goof off all the time. And it's interesting because he did a little documentary about the fact that professional comedians often suffer from clinical depression. And Sarah Silverman was talking about that. A whole bunch of very famous comedians talking about that. It was a super interesting show for me as a social scientist. So I asked him, I said, Rain, what is it about comedy that tends to make you depressed?

1:04:15Arthur Brooks:And he said, no, no, no, you got it backwards. It turns out that depressed people, when they find out they're funny, they start using comedy as a means of self-defense. In other words, they notice that when they're feeling really crummy and they make a joke, everybody else laughs and they feel better. That's a classic case of emotional substitution. It's highly metacognitive. And he happened across it even when he was a kid. But all of us can do that in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, you might find that you're really resentful. That's not the only emotion that you can be experiencing.

1:04:49Arthur Brooks:A lot of the times it's a more relevant or a more realistic emotion to express gratitude than resentment. You know, if you're lucky enough to be sitting in first class on the airplane and your dinner is cold, you can feel resentment about that. But if you actually focus on the experience of actually having, you know, not sitting in the back and having a little bit more room to work and being more comfortable in your seat and deciding to experience gratitude because you're metacognitive enough to have the space to choose an emotion, it's really transformative. It really is. But it requires that you have a presence of mind, that you be practicing metacognition.

1:05:28Arthur Brooks:And when you have these negative emotions, you interrogate them appropriately to say, what part of this is helping me and what part of it is actually unrealistic? And can I substitute with something that's better? You say, and I, please correct me if I'm, if my notes are off on this, but you, you list some other ways, four ways to learn emotional substitution, journaling, laughing, which we've talked about, hope and compassion. Do I have that right? Yeah, these are certainly, and there's lots and lots. Those were simply four of the ways that we actually do that. Hope is an emotional substitution for pessimism, typically.

1:06:08Arthur Brooks:Compassion is a good emotional substitution for sheer empathy, is what we find. Now, empathy sounds like it's really wonderful. Everybody wants to be empathetic. Empathy is a virtue. it turns out it's a hugely overrated virtue. I mean, you know perfectly, and we talked about this earlier, the worst parents are the sheerly empathetic parents. You know, I'm going to feel your pain because then you become bound up in your child's pain and you don't actually do what you need to do, which is with a little bit of remove, allow your child to experience an uncomfortable situation. Compassion is one that incorporates empathy, but you're not paralyzed by it and you can act according to the interests of the person that you love.

1:06:46Arthur Brooks:And that's a choice. That's a choice that requires intellect and introspection and metacognitive work, quite frankly. You know, one of the things that I find, you know, having survived a bunch of kids through their teenage years is in my prayers, my wife and I, every night before we go to bed, we spend a half an hour in prayer together, which is the most intimate thing with your spouse is to pray together or to meditate together. It's incredibly intimate. And we would say, we would say, ask in our prayers, help us to do the right thing for our children, even if we don't want to. Right? And what that was, was a prayer of compassion to replace the empathy.

1:07:24Arthur Brooks:Hope is an act of agency that when you're feeling pessimism, why? Because pessimism is just a, it's a negative prediction. Hope, you might have a negative prediction, but it gives you a sense of strategy that something can be done and you can do it. And that's an emotional substitution that you can actually make. Hope is something that's like, yeah, I think it's pretty rough. The doctor said that the prognosis is pretty grim, but hope means that I can actually do something that's going to help my health. I can put it in my own hands and I'm actually going to do that. So you see that these emotional substitutions are very appropriate, even more realistic than the one that you happen to be feeling and they can actually lead you toward greater happierness.

1:08:07Okay, so that's managing your emotions, the brief overview. If you want more, obviously read the book. One of the other things you talk about in the book is going to be counterintuitive. And you mentioned it earlier, but I think it's worth dwelling on for some period of time here. It's going to be counterintuitive for many people who are interested in getting happier. You mentioned it earlier when you said we shouldn't be talking about self-care, we should be talking about other care. So one of your arguments is that the counterintuitive route to happiness here is to focus less on yourself.

1:08:41Arthur Brooks:Say more. Yeah. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature, once again, wants you to survive and pass on your genes. And happiness, that's your business. Now, what Mother Nature wants you to do is to focus intensely on yourself all the time, to be the star of your own psychodrama. Me, me, me, you know, my lunch, my money, my friends, the traffic that I see, the, you know, everything, my job. It's just, and I'm telling you, it's just so boring. I mean, it's like watching the same tedious episode of the same reality show over and over and over again, involuntarily and being simultaneously fascinated, terrified and bored.

1:09:20Arthur Brooks:It's so weird that we do this. And you have to be quite conscious once again to stand up to mother nature, stand up to your impulses, and to get from being the object to being the subject. This is what the Buddhists call the I-self versus the me-self. You know, it's interesting that there's a Zen koan, which everybody who listens to your show knows. A koan is a riddle that the Zen Buddhists use to train the junior monks, to contemplate a riddle. And when it becomes clear, it means you're getting closer to enlightenment. There's a famous koan of two monks that are approaching each other on a road.

1:09:54Arthur Brooks:There's a senior monk and a junior monk. And the junior monk, when he gets to the senior monks, they're coming in opposite directions and a little path through the forest. He says, where are you going? And the senior monk says, I am on a pilgrimage. The junior monk says, where's your pilgrimage taking you? The senior monk says, I don't know. The junior monk says, why don't you know? And the senior monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate kind of knowledge. Now, that's a riddle. It sounds nonsensical in this way. But what the senior monk is really saying is that I'm not completely awake and aware of my pilgrimage when I'm thinking about me in my pilgrimage.

1:10:40Arthur Brooks:I'm the object. No, no, no. Look outward. Observe. Judge not. Be paying attention to what's going on outside you all the time. I have a guy I work with. And he's a former fitness model. Can you imagine? I mean, this is a guy who, you know, took his shirt off on Instagram. So other people could see his abs for a living. This is quite something. And he realized in his late 20s that he had been miserable for 10 years, miserable for 10 years. He had not eaten a single thing that he liked for 10 years. And all he ever did was look in the mirror. And he said, you know what, this is going to come to an end.

1:11:24Arthur Brooks:So he literally took every single mirror out of his apartment. And he started showering in the dark. And he did that for a year. And the reason he did that was because he didn't want to see himself at all so that he could just observe the world as opposed to observing himself. And he said it was the game changer. Now what he was doing is he was practicing Buddhism without knowing it, right? He was actually practicing I self as opposed to me self. And I put my students through a rigorous set of exercises on how to do this, on how to actually go through the day, go through an hour, go through five minutes, never judging anything, using no judging language, which is referring everything back to your own tastes and needs.

1:12:04Arthur Brooks:Not this coffee is so crummy. And I was like, this coffee has a bitter flavor. saying, oh, the traffic is horrible. No, no, no, no. A lot of people are on the road today. Now, of course, the Buddha taught this all the time, but we can practice this like any other part of Buddhism and ordinary life without calling it anything that we want. And that's really important for happiness. This can be the big game changer for a lot of people. So I is our capacity to discern, to know, and me is the self-referentiality that we add on top of the bare knowing. Yeah. I is me looking out. Me is the mirror. Got it.

1:12:49So what do you do in this regard? Do you keep mirrors around the house? You're a guy who writes books. Do you look at your reviews? Do you check if your social media or newsletter are growing or shrinking? How do you manage all of this as a public figure?

1:13:02Arthur Brooks:I try to be pretty serious about it because it could drive me crazy, as a matter of fact. You know what it's like to have a book on the market. When I have a book that comes out, the first thing that I do is I get rid of social media apps on my phone, which by the way, it's a good idea to get rid of the social media apps on your phone if you have a tendency to check them too much. I don't, I'm old enough that social media is not, hasn't wired my dopaminergic channels. So my brain isn't wired to get satisfaction from social media because it came when I was of age. But I will be really curious about what people are saying about my work if I can, and I don't want to make it too easy.

1:13:35Arthur Brooks:So that's one of the things that I do. I don't read reviews of my work. I actually don't do that because that's like looking in a mirror. I find it intensely uncomfortable. I don't like it is one of the things that I find. I don't look in the mirror that much because let's be honest, Dan, I got a face for radio. You know, if I had, if I had your hair, I'd be president of the United States, but at least we all, all bald guys think that, right? So, but I do, I do follow certain protocols. You know, I, I work systematically, usually about once a quarter, I'll try to go a certain period of days not using judgment-based language.

1:14:09Arthur Brooks:And for judgment-based language for me is generally complaining. I'm just such a whiner. I don't really like that about myself. Now I'm complaining about my complaining. You can see how this is like, my complaining is like a self-licking ice cream cone. I never get to the end of it is what it comes with. And so I declare a moratorium on the judgment-based language. and the result is I'm immediately calmer. You know, when Jesus says in the Bible, judge not lest ye be judged, it's incredibly important happiness advice. You know, judge not and don't feel like you're judged and enjoy your life, he might as well have said.

1:14:46Arthur Brooks:And so these are some of the protocols that I engage in. One of the exhortations in this section of the book is don't water the envy weed. What do you mean by that and how do we do it? Well, we are inherently hierarchical beings. We're pack animals. Humans live in tribes and kin, in groups of kin. And the result of it is that for them to be self-governing naturally, you have hierarchies. You have people who have more status and people have less status. People have more power. People have less power. That's always been the case. And it's a natural facet of almost all primate communities, including human communities.

1:15:26Arthur Brooks:The result of that is that Mother Nature gives us an impulse to want to climb in the hierarchy. And the way that we do that is that we have to understand ourselves in relation to other people, to see ourselves in relation to people who have less status, prestige, admiration, and people who have more. And Mother Nature imbues us with this tendency to want what the people have who have more than we do, because it's obviously advantageous for us to climb in this social hierarchy. You get more mates, you get more calories when this happens. So this is, look, the evolutionary biology and psychology couldn't be clearer that this is absolutely normal.

1:16:03Arthur Brooks:There's nothing wrong with you. You're not defective because you tend to feel envy. However, like anything else, don't choose the animal path. Don't choose blindly, you know, Mother Nature's prerogatives for you. Take the divine path by understanding what Mother Nature is doing and actually standing up to it in a very mindful way. And the way to do that is to say, hmm, there are emotional substitutions that I can make even in the case of envy. Case in point, there's really two kinds of envy. There's benign envy and there's malignant envy. Both of them, by the way, are bad for your happiness. Even benign envy is bad for your happiness.

1:16:40Arthur Brooks:Malignant envy is horrible for you because it torques your morality. It makes you do things that you really hate about yourself. at the end of the day, the way for you to actually turn envy into something that's more nutritious in an emotional substitution is to practice admiration when you feel envy toward people that really have earned something. So start trying to disregard the attention that you're paying to people who believe that they have things that they didn't earn. You know, influencers, people who are famous for being famous, internet famous people, stop talking about them, stop forming these virtual relationships with them.

1:17:19Arthur Brooks:Stop paying attention to them. Don't watch them on TV. And then for people who really do enjoy a kind of life and of their own merit, you're really, don't be envious of what they have. Be more envious of who they are for the reasons that they have these things. And then turn that into admiration. Then state the admiration. If there's somebody around you, if there's somebody at work that's really doing a great job, and you wish you had that job and you wish you had that promotion, tell them that you admire that and tell them specifically what it is that you admire about their status. Now, that's it.

1:17:55Arthur Brooks:By the way, it's really, really, really good for your career. But more importantly, it changes your soul when you do that to be a person who's openly admiring as opposed to somebody who's secretly envious. You know which person you want to be of the two. I guess the Buddhist add on there would be this notion of mudita, which is sometimes called sympathetic joy. I mean, happiness, taking delight in other people's delight and happiness. And there are specific meditation practices you can do where you imagine people you might be envious of and send them phrases like, may your happiness increase. Yeah.

1:18:31Arthur Brooks:Loving kindness meditation is really good for that. Really good for that. And I believe we all should practice that. It'll make us a lot better off. but to have a list, I'm a big lister because journaling is one of the best ways to be more metacognitive. When you have a pencil in your hand, you can't be limbic. You have to be experiencing your emotions in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. You can't write it down otherwise. And so one of the things that I like to make lists of, I make lists of failures. There's all kinds of reasons to do that. I have all kinds of lists of the goals that I'm making, etc.

1:19:07Arthur Brooks:but one of the things that I really like to list is the list of people and things that I admire, you know, the things that I, and then finding a way without, you know, without being a kiss up to actually express that admiration, you know, to make it public, you know, people that I admire, sometimes they'll just talk about it because, you know, I do a lot of, I do a lot of press, I do a lot of media stuff and just talking about it, even people I've never met before. and it sets me free, Dan. It really does. You know, the envy just releases when I actually, when I voluntarily, when I decide to turn it into admiration toward others.

1:19:46We're not going to get to all the questions I wanted to ask you, but let me ask one last question, slightly difficult one. I know you said you don't read your own reviews, but I'm curious, I haven't read all of your reviews. They seem to be largely positive and the book is very successful. The one interesting critique I saw that I would love to hear your thoughts on, and I've had this critique directed at me, is that there's a – that when you talk too much about – and this is the critiquer talking now. When you talk too much about the individual responsibility for happiness, you overlook the systemic structural contributors to human flourishing.

1:20:25And in your case, there have been some add-on of like, hey, this guy used to work for a center-right think tank and advocated for cutting social programs. And so who is he to tell us that responsibility is on us, et cetera, et cetera? What's your take on this?

1:20:39Arthur Brooks:Well, my basic take is that there's never a good reason to overlook your own journey toward getting happier. And one of the reasons is that nobody makes the world better who's miserable. Being miserable doesn't help the world. There's a reason on the airplane they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping somebody around you. And the reason for that is that you're useless when you're struggling. You're useless when you're gasping for air on an airplane and you can't help your kid. And so you're risking both your lives under the circumstances. You need to work on yourself so that appropriately you can work on other people.

1:21:14Arthur Brooks:There's nothing selfish about trying to be a happier person. The best gift you can give to your spouse is getting happier. I'm telling you, my wife has told me this, by the way. I mean, the reason that I study happiness is I wanted to be happier. I wasn't happy enough. I became a happiness professor because I wanted to see whether or not the science could be applied to my life and make my life better. And I'm literally 60 % happier than I was five years ago. I measure that because every semester I have to measure it with my students. And I have very rigorous ways, metrics on how this works. And I answer the questions honestly in relation to the other people that I know.

1:21:48Arthur Brooks:and I've seen a 60 % increase in my own personal happiness. That makes me a much better happiness teacher. It makes it possible for me to act in a more empathetic way, in a more social way. Now, the problem that we have in our society is that we have people who are activists who use misery as a tool. That's the truth. I mean, I would argue that one of the biggest problems that we have in American politics today is that the political parties and the social activists are dominated by people that are trying to use misery to manipulate other people to do their work. I mean, you can mobilize people in all sorts of ways that are good for demagogic leaders, but bad for them if people are miserable enough is what we find out.

1:22:31Arthur Brooks:So when somebody says, too much work on happiness, how selfish is that? My rejoinder is, why do you want me to be miserable, man? Why do you want that? Now, of course, politics is politics. I get it. And I've said a lot of things politically that I'm sure I would take back at this point in my life. I don't know anybody who, well, I know some people who still adhere to everything they said when they were 25 years old, but I certainly wouldn't. There's a lot of things that I would take back. There's some uncharitable things that I've said and done. But at the end of the day, my goal is to, and Oprah Winfrey's goal and the people who are part of this movement, their goal is not withstanding their politics.

1:23:09Arthur Brooks:Look, you got right-leaning people and left-leaning people. And the goal is to lift people up and bring them together so that we can understand ourselves more, so that we can love each other more freely, so that we can actually talk to each other in ways that we wouldn't have been able to before. I want people to have a hunger for love and for a hunger for happiness. And then who knows, maybe we can find solutions to the intractable problems that we're still screaming at each other about and miserable and saying that people who disagree with us or the devil. And last I checked, nobody has ever been influenced by hatred.

1:23:45Yes, I believe you in one of your columns said you can't hate or shame people into agreeing with you. Not an effective technique. Yeah. I tend to agree with that. But I still, though, struggle a little bit with the micro and the macro here, because I don't know that I would want to say that, hey, we can't make the structural changes that I think would lead to less environmental degradation, more equality, etc., etc., until everybody gets happier. Right.

1:24:25Arthur Brooks:No, I mean, I think we can actually do both. I think that we have a responsibility and an opportunity to try to get happier. And we also have to do good. And one of the things I've written about a lot is one of the best ways to get happier is to do good. One of the best ways to get happier is actually to work on the things that you actually care about, but to do so not with misery, to do so not with hatred and contempt, but to do so with joy and love. That's really important. And think about it this way. The things that we're talking about here, whether you're talking about immigration or or environmental protection or whatever the cause is that really animates you, you can think of the values that undergird that as a weapon or as a gift.

1:25:05Arthur Brooks:You're going to be ineffective if you use them as a weapon. And if you're miserable, you're probably going to use them as a weapon. If you think of these things as a gift, you're going to be wanting to share them with other people with love. And the way that you're going to be able to do that is by listening to them to understand why their point of view actually differs from yours. So it's an endogenous process. It's a self-contained system in which if we're happier, we're more effective in social causes. And when we share our values and social causes in a spirit of love, we get happier. And that's the positive feedback loop that we actually need.

1:25:42Arthur Brooks:And I think that we actually can. And I've seen it a lot of times in people. Unfortunately, right now in American politics and the highly ideologized environment of media and politics that we see today, we're in a downward loop where people are unhappier. And so they act with greater contempt and hatred toward people who disagree with them. And that makes them unhappier. One of the things that we find, one of the great teachings of the Buddha is that hatred is like picking up a hot coal to throw at somebody else. You're the one who gets burned the worst. And never truer than in American politics circa 2024, right?

1:26:18indeed is there something you were hoping to cover today that we didn't get a chance to get to

1:26:23Arthur Brooks:no i mean you're i mean you're an old hand at the best interviews in the business it's actually kind of kind of great talking to somebody who's in the business of happiness like you and who spent all your formative years um grilling people on television you always you're you're incredibly adroit at getting to the most interesting questions i have to say thank you i appreciate that. But before I let you go, I do want to say that my younger brother over the last year has gotten increasingly interested, even though I was, I have been his brother his whole life. He has not been super interested in the stuff I'm interested in, but over the last year, he has gotten interested in meditation and doing life better generally.

1:27:04And I saw recently that he put together a list of the books that have been most influential for him over the last year. My book was not on it, but your book, your last one, From Strength to Strength, was on it. So I was very pleased to see that, and I wanted to pass it along to you.

1:27:19Arthur Brooks:Thank you. I'm delighted and delighted to help out your brother. Please give him my very best. And on my list is your book. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Can you, before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book, of the new book, and any other stuff that we should know about that you've put into the world, your column, your website, your socials, whatever. Please get us all. Yeah, sure. So the last book is Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which I co-wrote with Oprah Winfrey. At arthurbrooks.com, which is the website, kind of the omnibus website, that's got all the stuff that I do.

1:27:54Arthur Brooks:It's got a lot of free resources, personality tests that you can take and media that you can download and videos that you can watch. And every Thursday morning, I publish a column about 1200 words on the science of happiness at the Atlantic.com called how to build a life between those three things. Um, people will be overdosing on happiness and who knows, you know, if we're overdosing on that, it's not so bad. Yeah. And don't forget from strength to strength that I'll put a link in the show notes to the interview I did with Arthur about that. It's a, it's, it had a big impact on me, that book and, uh, Arthur's column is excellent.

1:28:29And I've, uh, there are nuggets from that column I've saved and kept in my notes as I'm writing my next book. So it's been all of your work has been quite meaningful to me. So it's always a pleasure to see you. Thank you for coming on.

1:28:41Arthur Brooks:Thanks, Dan. Thanks you for your work, too. Your work is lifting up millions of people around the world, and I'm one of the millions. One last thing before I let you go. If you want to listen to this show without ads, check out 10 % Happier Plus, which is a subscription that is available right inside Apple Podcasts. If you become a subscriber, you'll get every episode ad free. That's new episodes and all the episodes from our vast 10-year-plus archive. Look for 10 % Happier Plus in Apple Podcasts and just hit subscribe. And a quick heads up, if you're already a subscriber to my app, 10 % with Dan Harris, you've already got access to ad-free podcasts.

1:29:20Ad-free listening is baked right into your app subscription along with everything else, so please don't pay twice. You can check out the app at danharris.com and you can check out 10 % Happier Plus inside Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I deeply appreciate it. See you soon. Deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broom. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. and Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

1:29:58Thanks for listening. Peace.

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