#802 - Arthur Brooks - How To Stop Feeling Lost & Find Your True Purpose

25:55you want to talk to him, you miss him, you actually miss him. If you don't miss the person, it doesn't kind of hurt your heart because you haven't talked to him in a while in a week. It's not a real friend. What's the difference between real and deal? How can someone tell? A lot of the time we feel like real friends are also impressive. If you're on the personal growth journey, it's difficult to distinguish real and deal from real ordeal. Yeah. The difference is that with a deal friend, there's something front, there's a transaction that's happening that's more important than the emotion. Transaction, Trump's emotion.

26:29There's nothing wrong with that with people in your life, by the way. It's not like you should fire all of your transactional friendships. No, because you'll wind up without a career, to be sure, it's very good to help each other. But if the emotion that you feel for the person is more important than the transaction you could undertake, okay, that's good. in which case you can actually have deals with your real friends. But that's the key component. And if for all of them, it's like, I care a lot more about how the person is useful to me than the person's life. That's when you know. Go ahead. Final one.

27:00Look. Yeah. Work is, you know, people listening to us right now, they want an edge in their lives. And I understand that. In a way that they measure that edge frequently is in their success. I think I probably had first listened to you three years ago. Maybe the first time I heard your show. And I think you just passed, I don't know, a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers or something. That was a long time ago because you have a lot more than that right now. And I remember you're like, I can't believe it, man. And your career was kind of blowing up. I remember thinking that because I was thinking, yeah, this young guy is doing great.

27:38It's very inspirational. I love people who are in the hunt. I really, really love people who are in the hunt. The problem is that when it comes to work, the hunt itself doesn't give you, doesn't give you the satisfaction that you're gonna Desire. Mother nature lies to you in many ways, but and we've talked about it before. But here's one of the biggest lies that Mother Nature gives you. If you're successful in making progress in money and power and the Admiration of other people, then you'll be happy. You get happiness for free. Success first, happiness second. So you don't have to worry about happiness.

28:10You just have to be successful. Money power, admiration, maybe a little pleasure thrown in there along the way. Those are the worldly idols. By the way, St. Thomas Aquinas and paraphrasing Aristotle in the Sumith theologia written in 1265, classified those as the world's idols. He was an excellent social scientist because it turns out that those are the intermediate good. It's nothing wrong with those things, by the way. I'm not condemning those things. They're just incomplete for your happiness. If you have those as the goals, you're in real trouble. Okay, so what are the right goals from work?

28:41It's twofold. Number one, earn your success. That means create value with your life and work in your life and the lives of other people. And you have to be rewarded and acknowledged and recognized for the real value that you're creating. Ten years nonsense, loyalties nonsense, merit, hard work and personal responsibility, and you're rewarded and recognized for it, and you believe it. That's earned success. That, by the way, that's why I'm a complete advocate get for the free enterprise system. Not because like, you know, it's like, raw, raw, raw capitalism. Adam Smith, no, because it makes people happy when they're succeeding in the, in a, in a system that rewards merit and personal responsibility.

29:19It's not perfect, but it's the only system we got that really does that. That's number one, two. Now I'm going to sound like a commie. Service to others. Service to others. You need to actually believe, actually, that's not communist and that's capitalism too. I can take it back. And service to others is incredibly, it's this will bring you joy to your work. You have to know that people need you. The essence of human dignity is about being needed. It's like feeling like an asset in society. The essence of despair is feeling like a liability to be managed by your family, by the welfare system, by anybody else, which is why it's so terrible to be in poverty because of the way that we treat people in poverty.

30:00We don't look at them as assets to develop what they should be because human beings are human beings with equal dignity. We treat them like, you know, liabilities to manage by whatever system that they're talking about to create value in the lives of other people to serve others means that they need you. And that is the true secret to everything else. Now, you get it like crazy because, you know, you know, you're going to have gunned anybody's head to listen to modern wisdom. They're coming to you voluntarily. And that is this affirmation. They need me. They like it. It's in the comments. Thank you.

30:33My guess is you get 20 emails a day from people who say that that podcast really changed my thinking. They need you. Well, everybody needs that. Every single person needs that, whether you're, you know, picking apples or, you know, trying to, you know, running for Congress, you actually need that in your life. Those are the two service to others and earning your success. I had an essay that I wrote probably about a year ago now. I want to read it to you about the tension between success and happiness. One of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough.

31:09Success is a strange thing. Presumably, we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem. We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure that success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high -performers is this. Parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding.

31:39This lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into, I am only worthy of love, acceptance, and belonging if I succeed. Now, powered by an internal feeling of insufficiency, This person is driven to achieve many things that are prepared to outwork out hustle and out suffer everyone else because they're not just running toward a life that they want, they're running away from a life that they fear. Success and progress ameliorate the feelings of insufficiency. Therefore, success and progress becomes prioritized above everything else. Now, don't get me wrong, many high performers genuinely love the work that they do, and many are driven by a well -balanced, simple desire to maximize their time on this planet, rather than trying to fill a void inside of themselves.

32:16But if I was to place a bet, I'd guess that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better. I think people who are high achievers on average are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we admire most are the ones with the least admirable internal states? If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy and in the pursuit of success, we make ourselves miserable, why not just shortcut the entire process and just be happy? Is that even possible? Now, external accolades count for a lot, and I don't think that recanting all worldly possessions and retreating to a cave in the woods is an optimal strategy.

32:52Some degree of external material success is important to make us feel validated and satiate our desire for status and respect. But external success will not feel an internal void, and insufficiency adaptation is this. If your drive comes from a fear of insufficiency and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world, and yet the feeling of insufficiency persists, what makes you think that the answer to this problem is more success. Nice. Very astute. You're a natural social scientist. I admire it. And it's all true. Look, everything is a ton of science that backs all that up, but you don't need it.

33:30Everybody knows that that look, if you go for the success to get the happiness, you're going to get the success because will be unto you if you have the wrong dreams, your dreams are going to come true if you work hard on them, but you're not going to get to the happiness. The right strategy is to shoot for greater happiness and then you'll have enough success. Now those words for a guy like you, a striver like you, they give you a little chill, don't they? Because enough success doesn't sound right. No, no, man, I'm not doing this for enough success. I know tons of guys back in high school who have enough success.

34:05I don't want that. I want to be, I want to be special, Chris. I want to be special. How many people with a success addiction, which is the fundamental brain delivered underlying dopamine, a moderated or mediated addiction, which lies behind workaholism, by the way. How many of those people have chosen specialness over happiness? That's what you're talking about. Any loser can cultivate all these relationships and all these friendships, but not every loser can work as hard as I do and become a Navy SEAL and do, you know, 50 pull ups and have, you know, 40 million Instagram followers. I don't know.

34:49You know, that's specialness. And by the way, Mother Nature is driving you once again. Mother Nature does not care if you're happy, but Mother Nature wants you to be special so that you'll be able to survive more easily by having a higher rank in the kin group and being able to pass on your genes because you'll be the alpha. But that's not what you want. That's actually not even what you want. You're going to get enough food and you don't want 750 kids. You what you want is a really, really good life. And you're being driven by these ancient impulses. That's exactly what you're saying. And you've walked into a dopamine, ergic, moderated, and I don't know why actually had this thing come up on my screen right now.

35:32It's fine. It's fine. It's a why we walk into a success addiction that makes your brain look more or less like a methamphetamine addict's brain. How can people learn to unwind and detach themselves from their desire for success? You don't need to unwind your desire for success. You need to understand and manage your desire. That's what we need to do on all these things. You don't need to want different things. you need to manage your wants for these different things. Look, what does that? I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink alcohol. And the reason I don't drink alcohol is because there's a lot of alcoholism in my family, and I drank way too much when I was your age.

36:13I drank a lot when I was your age. And so I stopped. And I stopped a long time ago. I stopped over 20 years ago. I still want alcohol. I'm not going to stop wanting alcohol. What I do is I manage my desire for alcohol through vis -a -vis my behavior. That's what we need to do. Look, of course you're ambitious. Of course you're driven for tremendous success. That's wonderful, but it can't manage you that drive that ambition, that intense visceral sense that you'll only be special if you have enough success. You can't let it manage you is what it comes down to. Of course you have these desires. By the way, Chris, you're going to get married at some point.

36:51And after you're married, you're going to look at a woman and she's going to be incredibly beautiful. and you're going to have a sense of natural human desire for her and you're not going to act on it. That's the same thing as true when you could work the 14th hours that is spending the first hour with your kids, you're going to make the decision to sublimate that desire and manage it. Yeah, that's interesting. I remember David Busce told me the story that a reader sent into him saying that his book had saved his marriage because this guy had been married for a while, maybe between five and ten years, something like that.

37:26And he'd found himself being attracted to other women. And he took that attraction as some sort of sense that his existing relationship was wrong. If I was fully, totally Renaissance period besotted with my partner, I wouldn't have eyes for any other woman for the rest of time. And David explained that there is a very, very well -embedded reward system that men get when they look at even a pair of rocks that slightly resemble boobs. Like you are driven to just sexualize and look at anything, whether it's like, you know, geological or otherwise. And he said that it sort of liberated me from this sense that I can't...

38:11The desire itself is wrong and I must tell myself a story about it. It feels a little bit to me like this line that we have drawn between when I get enough success, I will allow myself to be happier. I will have justified happiness. Happiness will come as a byproduct along for the ride with success. It's kind of the same. Look, your desire to continue to chase this thing may not really cease all that much, But your choice about whether or not you do work the 14th hour today is one of those and it's not just about You know, it's kind of further upstream I'm gonna guess what you need to do is go further upstream than this and think about how many hours a day Do I want to work how much work do I need to put on my plate in order for me to need to work those number of hours?

38:56Because otherwise what you're going to end up doing is failing at things that you've intended to do Like if you've put 14 hours of work on your plate like you kind of need to do it until you no longer need to do it And that is a more sort of life design position. That's right. The unfortunate fact is that you won't know how to do anything else once you become hopelessly addicted because these behavioral patterns feed on themselves, notwithstanding the fact that you're getting unhappy or an unhappier. Furthermore, there's one other thing that's worth pointing out. If you were an untreated alcoholic, nobody would say like, dude, last night, You put away two bottles of vodka.

39:36That was impressive. I admire you for that. They'd be like Get some hell man. That was it's pathetic But if you work 14 hour days, they're gonna be like man. You're gonna be the next Elon Musk What do you admire about Elon Musk? He works all the time He and you know people will admire the fact that he says I haven't taken a day off since 2008 or something like that We love workaholics in our culture. We love success addicts We love people who are self -objectifiers. But let's just think about that a little bit. I mean, I bet when you were a kid, did you have a good relationship with your dad? Yeah, not bad.

40:13And I bet that he said that you shouldn't objectify women. You shouldn't look at them and say that they're nothing more than sex objects or that you should treat them like real people, right? You know, why? Because you're a boy and you have an impulse to not do that for all the reasons that David Buses has made very clear in your show. Okay, well you shouldn't objectify yourself either Chris and a self -objectifier is somebody who looks in the mirror and says That's a success machine that's somebody and you know that these affirmations It'd be like looking in the mirror and saying that's somebody who can say stay stoned all day You wouldn't do that that'd be pathetic it could be weird and yet That's kind of the thing that we do with the self -objectification which is downstream from success addiction which actually is related to workaholism, which all these weird patterns of behavior that we establish often before, even before adolescence.

41:03All right, let's get into the macronutrients, the component parts of happiness we've got three to go through. What are they? Yeah. And joint met satisfaction in meaning, and they seem self -evident, but they're not. To be, I'll give you an example, enjoyment sounds like pleasure, but it's completely different for all the reasons that we've kind of discussed. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Pleasure is a set of signals in your limbic system saying that something is either really good for helping you survive to get calories or really good for getting mates and passing on your genes. And we become ingenious in the laboratory creating new ways to get those sensations.

41:46So, you know, everything from gambling to pornography to methamphetamine to fentanyl, to alcohol, all these things do is they mimic different ways that in the place to see before we had substances in these behaviors that we would get pleasure from something that actually helps us survive and pass on our genes. Unfortunately, all those things that I just mentioned are addictive and bad for you. Because what you're doing is you're artificially stimulating something you don't need to do and in a way that your body and brain are not accustomed to and so they're incredibly unhealthy. A lot of guys, especially your age, don't realize how dangerous pornography is for the brain, for example.

42:21But what it is, is just it fires up that impulse to pass on your genes in an artificial way. Okay. So why do I bring that up? Because all those limbic searches for pleasure are different than enjoyment, which is fundamentally an experience in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. And you don't have to not have pleasure, by the way. I'm Catholic. I'm not a Puritan. And what you need is the source of pleasure plus people plus memory thus delivering the experience into your prefrontal cortex which is part of happiness. I give an example. I was doing work with a big beer company and we were talking about these ideas and I said, look, associate your product with enjoyment not pleasure.

43:00And I said, what do you mean? Well, don't run a commercial of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12th pack. Why? Because that's the pursuit of pleasure and everybody knows as addictive and dangerous and irresponsible and pathetic. Do the ad where the guy is having a beer with his brother or his friends. You've taken beer plus people plus memory and that equals enjoyment and that's part of happiness. If you're doing something as pleasurable and it can be addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's where pornography comes in. That's where gambling by yourself comes in.

43:34That's where eating a whole cake by yourself comes in. That's where using what drinking alone comes in, all of these particular behaviors. And that's an example of how the neuroscience of this can be intensely practical in helping you to lead a better life and change your habits. What else is there to say about the way to use pleasure, people, and memories? Is that something you should do to embed memories more effectively? Are the types of pleasures that seem to be better for happiness or not. Are the types of people? Is there a way that you can reinforce this? Do I need an ebbing house, forgetting curve, flash card, anky deck to be able to remember all of the shit that I did?

44:12I mean, hey man, let's make it. Let's make some money. So, I mean, see, you're such a natural entrepreneur. It's unbelievable. You go right to product, it's great. Yeah, the people shouldn't be addicts. You know, it's not gonna be helpful to you. If you're a community of people who help you enjoy things that are pleasurable are also drunks. So it's obviously the case that you want people who are trying to enjoy each other's company as opposed to simply focusing on the source of the pleasure, the chemical or behavioral source of the pleasure. That's really important. Just to interject that, I wonder whether there's an analogy to be drawn between, let's say that a bunch of people in a crack then, all of whom are just smoking crack and the only reason that they're there is to be around other people that also do crack that's just environment that they exist in.

44:59I wonder whether there is kind of an equivalent if you were to let's say be a professional athlete of some kind training in a facility with a bunch of other individual athletes, but all of whom were only there because they also needed to use the facility individually, that they were there for the personal pursuit. Now obviously the pursuit of training versus the sort of direct pleasure that you get from taking drugs. But my point being that there's a lack of interaction between each of those individuals. They're very much siloed within their own experience of whatever the pleasure might be. You were at a gaming, a games place where a ton of people can play Call of Duty, but none of you were playing against each other and none of you were speaking to each other, right?

45:46Like you're with people, it's doing it in community, but it's not integrating with the people. Yeah, interaction is critically important. You're not with other people. You're not actually with other people. If you're just in a crowd. I mean, you can feel unbelievably lonely walking up the street in New York City. You're technically all walking down the street in New York City. With little kids, you'll see this when you have children. Before they learn how to interact with each other, they do something called parallel play, where you'll bring two little kids, two little two -year -olds together, and they'll be playing with blocks, but not together parallel.

46:20Like they want to be looking at each other's whether that works. That doesn't stimulate oxytocin. And so if you want to get into the neurochemistry of what we're talking about here, you're not going to get the benefit of pleasure plus people plus memory unless you're doing something that really stimulates oxytocin, which means intense interaction, eye contact and ideally human touch as well. Right. Okay. So this is an argument to give your friends a hug when they just win at a board game to like reach up in high five. I play a lot of werewolves. Have you played werewolves? No, I haven't. Okay, so werewolves is like a it's a role playing card game where everybody in a circle is given a particular character.

46:59Some are good guys, some are bad guys and you don't know who's who and you have to bluff your way through the game and so there's another game called Mafia which is basically the same but with different characters. And I have observed people that have been married for 15 years with a completely straight face, just lie to their partner about what their role is. No, of course not. Honey, I love you. I would like, so we've had to make a rule that like what happens during Werewolves stays during Werewolves because the potential blast radius of sort of the loss of the loss of certainty. Loss of trust.

47:33Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of a, I play with a lot of like world class pro poker players too, which is just like a kind of, to be honest, an unfair fight. My point being that with that as soon as the game's finished, everybody gets up, everybody's sort of high five. There's been a ton of tension for a long time. Some people have been working together. Some people have been working against them, but they've been working together too. Everybody's sort of high five in and all the rest of it. And it's very enjoyable. What is there to say just around this out? What is there to say about memories?

48:00What can we do to maximize the yield of memories when it comes to enjoyment? The key thing is actually to do something that's not part of your ordinary routine. The more that you'll actually disequalibrate your experience around, for example, a particular occasion or in a particular place, that will add to the memory such that it will be easier to recall, to put together and to recall, and you'll be able to recreate that enjoyment again and again and again. What you want is to do something where the experience doesn't stop at the end of the action. That's what you really want. What do you mean that it dis -dis -dis -equilibriates?

48:40Dis -equilibrate what your ordinary routine is. So you'll notice that the things that you do every single day, you don't remember them. The things you don't do every single day, you remember them. And that's how the recalls that you can have the duration of the experience be richer and longer to do is to, you know, when you're gonna hang out with your friends, go someplace with your friends. Right. So this is a degree of novelty? Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that I recommend that couples, for example, leave the house. that they do things together outside of the house. So they're not, you know, they don't get into too much of a domestic routine, which is a very uninteresting way to run your marriage is to do the same thing over and over and over and over again.

49:21You're just not gonna get the benefits of enjoyment in the same way. I had Susanna Hallenan on the show forever, ever, ever ago. Now remember, she had this really great book talking about how to make time move more slowly. It was so fascinating and it seems to me, at least my current sort of conception of it, which may need to be updated now, is novelty and intensity. Those seem to be two of the things that increase the frequency of memory blocks sort of being dropped in. Someone that's listening has driven to work a thousand times. That's a thousand journeys, but it was always the same route.

49:56So you have condensed a thousand, fifteen minute half hour blocks down into essentially one memory apart from that one time that there was a car crash next to me and it was different because novelty and intensity. And yeah, I think just trying to keep that in mind, to turn left instead of turning right when you go to the shops to go to a different restaurant, to travel to a different hotel, to do the whatever, I think important. It is important and there's a lot of ways that you can do that. My wife and I have tried to do that. We've moved 20 times in the 35 years that we've been together. I mean, it sounds like we're in the witness protection program, I realize.

50:33But it's part of it is just because when we decide that we want to do a new thing, we do a new thing. We've moved three times in the past five years because, you know, where do we want to live? Not here. I try that. And it's not a search for novel. It can become a pathology, to be sure. You actually can't stop any place. But the whole idea that you can live in a new way, try a new thing, and not letting it turning to kind of a groove. One of the reasons that the perception of time speeding up happens as people get older is because their openness to experience starts to decline, particularly after 55.

51:06Your openness to experience increases through your teenage years, into your early 20s, and it stays relatively constant until you're mid 50s, and then it really takes a big dip as a matter of this, the way that we've typically measured in what we see. Your love of new things starts to decline. You've got to fight against that. If you don't want time to go terrifyingly fast and suddenly life is over. What are the best ways to do it, as you correctly point out, is to inject more, more, you know, newness of the ways that you do things in your life and to do that with your partner as well. All right, satisfaction.

51:40Yeah, satisfaction is a weird one. So satisfaction is, you know, we talk about it all the time, you know, but we don't really define it. Satisfaction is the joy that you get after struggle. And this is the weird human mystery. Only humans want pain. Only humans want a sacrifice and struggle, because then the rewards are sweeter. The more you struggle before and everybody knows that's true. And yet we don't follow through on that very often. We're always looking for the easy way out. That's the reason that there's this kind of this call of the wild that people have when they listen to people like David Goggins or Jaco Willink, because their whole or rich These are all mutual friends of ours, obviously.

52:23And it's like the thing that's kind of calling from nature to people when they hear this and they find it so attractive, it's like, yeah, man, I need more pain. I need more pain in my life. Because then my life will be sweeter. And yet they're going through life trying to find the easiest way out. This is a real mystery. Actually, it's not. The divine path requires struggle. And the animal path wants convenience and ease and a complete lack of pain. that wants sort of an analgesic existence. So one of the things that we do is we try to teach our kids this. You know, when your kids are a little you say, don't eat before dinner.

52:59All parents say this. And the kid is I was like, why? And you make up a bogus excuse, like it's bad for you. You're not gonna get your proper nutrients. It's all nonsense. You don't want your kid to eat before dinner because you want your kid to be suffering a little bit of hunger before dinner. So they'll enjoy their dinner and be happier. That's what you actually want, but you can't quite articulate it and you don't want to tell the kid It's because I want you to suffer you want the kid to suffer And so that's an important thing to keep in mind and that's a real conundrum and the more that we can understand that the more that we can expose ourselves to Suffering for the right reasons you really should get up before you're ready and while it's still dark It's best for you to do that you should work out in the morning.

53:44It's a good thing to do I mean, I get it, not everybody can do that. You should do these things that actually hurt, and your day will be better, and your life will be happier. That's the first mystery, is trying to sort that. The second mystery, however, is bigger in satisfaction, which is that Mother Nature tells us that if we get that thing, like that millions YouTube subscriber, you're gonna love that forever. How long did you enjoy that? Like half an hour? Five minutes. Yeah, that's pretty good. All right, five minutes, right? But your brain told you the whole way that when you got that it was going to be awesome.

54:18So Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. That's wrong. You wouldn't try and try and try and try. If you couldn't get no satisfaction, you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the real problem. And you try and you try and you try. And the reason for that is what neuroscientists call homeostasis, which of course you know about. And homeostasis is the tendency of any physiological system to go back to its baseline. So you're ready for the next set of circumstances. It's true for your emotions. It's awesome It's awesome forget it I got to go back so that I'm not distracted from them so I can stay in the hunt Is what it comes down to otherwise I'd start to death after I got food you know be like I was good enough And then you died and you don't want that So that's the key thing and we the mystery is that really smart sophisticated people never figure that out and they conclude that They just didn't have enough and this gets back to your success problem This gets back to the success conundrum.

55:12It's like, yeah, I got that thing, but I'm still not satisfied. So I guess I needed five million. I guess I needed 50 million. The first thing that a billionaire concludes is that he needed another billion. Have you seen that study when pretty much anybody is asked, what level of wealth would you be satisfied with? It doesn't matter what level of wealth you're at. it tends to be almost exactly three times your current income. It's like, it's about three times where I'm at now. That's my sudden settling point, but it scales all the way up to a billion. Yeah, yeah. There are different studies that, one of the studies, I mean, some studies say it's 40%.

55:51Some studies say it's 300%. The bottom line is more because that's what your brain is telling you that the secret to satisfaction that endures is more, more what, more money, more power, more pleasure, more honor, more Instagram followers, more sexual partners, more, more. And the problem with that is that it doesn't recognize that there's a divine version of that that actually works. There's a, I did it again. I keep getting these weird effects on my camera. That there is a way to hack this, this, this neurophysiological matrix, this evolutionary matrix. And the way to think about this so that you're not subject to this, you can be free forever, by the way, is by remembering that satisfaction and endures is actually a function of all the things you have divided by the things that you want.

56:41Havns divided by wants is the right mental model for you to pursue. And that means, of course, you have a have more strategy. Of course, you do. You also need a want less strategy. You need to manage your wants just as much as you need to manage your house. I realize that's very Buddhist, but it's actually in every spiritual and philosophical song, the traditional. And so the way that I do that, the couple of ways to do that, one one way to think about that is to think about the metaphor. The metaphor of success for entrepreneurs is kind of like you're an artist and you're putting a brush strokes on a canvas of your life.

57:13The right metaphor is at some point in your life at least is actually the sculptor where you're chipping away the jade or the marble to find the true work of art within and that means getting rid of the detritus, the part of the block of marble that's not the horse or the rider, so that you can find the horse and rider inside. And one way to do that that I often do is I used to have a bucket list, everybody listens to this podcast, those are bucket list. I have a reverse bucket list now where I take my worldly cravings and desires and ambitions, which I still have, I'm turned in 60 in two weeks, and I still have these dumb, you know, this craving trivial desire, so I'm a weak, weak man.

57:57But I actually will write them down on my birthday and I will cross them out, not because I'm not gonna get them, but because I want the management of those cravings and desires to be in my prefrontal cortex and not in my limbic system. And we give us some examples of what you cross out. Yeah, so one of the things will be, for example, these worldly metrics of success in my particular industry that are trivial. So for you, it would be a certain number of YouTube subscribers. For me, it would be a certain number of sales of my latest book or prestige inside the university or whatever it happens to be.

58:35Now, and I realize, I know, I authentically know as to you that these things are trivial. And yet we look at them as a marker of our own specialness and our own sense of accomplishment. When I write them down, I acknowledge that I have the desire, when I cross it out, I say, I have the desire, but I will not be attached to this goal. That you're physically negating the attachment from the goal. I mean, of course, the attachment, understanding, you know, dukkha is that concept of the first noble truth of Buddhism that life is suffering because of duke god because of this sticky craving for the inadequate things.

59:13But it is not saying I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to get that. It's saying that I'm not going to be attached to that. And it's incredible. This year on my birthday, by the way, I got a big one coming man with a zero. My attachment is bothering me right now. I'm going to admit it. I have too many political opinions. I really do. They're weighing me down. They're making it harder to have friends than they should be. So I'm going to write down my 10 strongest political opinions and I'm going to cross them out. Not that I'm saying that I don't believe these things, but I'm not going to be attached to my rightness.

59:47That humility is going to set me free and that's kind of a metaphor, tick not hon, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He wrote that our greatest attachments are to our opinions. And that's, you know, triply true for me right now. So, man, I need freedom, and I'm going to get it by talking about the wants, not just the house. That practice, the exercise of writing down the things that you want and then crossing them out, sounds great. Symbolically, lovely, the writing, the physical writing of something lovely. Presumably, that's not just a master key that downstream from that. And yes, I'm still going to have it.

1:00:25But where are you going in your mind? Is there a practice which is more repeatable and robust that when your desire to correct somebody about their view on abortion arises, that where are you going to there, to permanently be crossing it out? When it does is it makes you remember the attachment in the moment of behavior. That's what that thing does. That's what the important thing is because when it's in your prefrontal cortex, then it's not, then it's a behavior that is manageable in the executive centers of your brain. And so what will you do instead? When somebody sits down next to me and says something that I really just, I don't believe about abortion.

1:01:07And I think that, I think, now I have my opportunity because my prefrontal cortex is managing. And I say, tell me why you think that. Would you please tell me why you think that? And you listen to learn. It's an extraordinary thing. And by the way, you get smarter and you're wrong less often and then you get less embarrassed and you lose fewer friends. And when you do that, the other person that you're talking to, I just gave a long lecture on the neuroscience of the absorption of messages and political communications that I just gave the lecture to that. And one of the things that you find is the more that you do that, the more people think that you're a very smart person who makes very good points and that your point of view is actually quite persuasive.

1:01:46To shock how that happens, can you mentioned earlier on something I've heard you talk about up a thought to do with the common idols that people kind of get way laid by. Can you just go through this? Yeah, that was, we mentioned that just a minute ago, that was the Aquinas Four Idols, Money Power Pleasure Fame. Money Power Pleasure Fame. Now Aquinas asserted, this is 1265, you didn't have data, but man, he was the best. And Aquinas said that everybody falls prey to one of these things more than anything else. That this is an exhaustive list of the things we care about the most. Now, money is pretty obvious, money or wealth, or financial resources.

1:02:24Anything that actually allows you to buy stuff and shows that you're a very important person, that these markers, these medium of exchange and store value. The second is pleasure. We've talked about power. Power is the ability to control the behavior of others. The last is actually a really kind of a lot of people listening to us are like, I don't care about fame. I don't want to be Instagram famous, but that's not it. It's really the prestige and the admiration of the right people. I mean, if you can be completely screwed up if you were on the Disney Channel as a kid, and what you want is the admiration of strangers.

1:02:59And there are literally people's brains who are wired like that because they got famous before they were while their brain was still in formation. And they'll be like somebody who got addicted to meth amphetamine as a 14 -year -old. They'll never be normal. This is what we actually know. But most aren't like that, but they still want to be considered somebody for the people who's who's opinions actually matter. Those are the four idols and I play a game with my students. What's my idol? Because once you know your idol, you can actually control your behavior and manage yourself in a much more effective way.

1:03:31You have to know your weakness is the way that this works out and a lot of people don't. So do you want to play the game Chris? Hit me. You want to play what's my idol? Okay. The way to play what's my idol is not for me to say what which of the or really controls you is to say which of the four do not care about and start eliminating them? Because then we're gonna wind up on the one that's really harder for you. So money, power, pleasure, honor. You gotta give away one, which one are you gonna give away? Power. How come? I don't notice in myself a desire to really accumulate power of any kind.

1:04:10Okay, so I'm going to make a prediction about you. You hate it when people have power over you. Oh yeah. That's it. People who hate having power over them are averse to having power over other people as well. You're a non hierarchical person. You're a non hierarchical guy, right? Yeah, the org structure of the business would suggest that as well. Yeah, and that's almost all the case. Okay. So now we've got money, pleasure and fame or honor or prestige, average. You got to give another one away in this harder now. What are you going to give away next? Money. Money, how come? One of all of the different mental pathologies that I have, materialism, desire for sort of flashness in terms of possessions is just not something that I have.

1:05:03I have a degree of scarcity mindset, which a abundance kind of ameliorates, but for me, it's just, it's not something that I really think about very much. Did you grow up with nice things? We were like lower working class, I think. Okay. Lower middle class, kind of like lower working class. Lower working class. Okay. Like my wife grew up in Barcelona. So it was, you know, sometimes you paid the light bill and sometimes you didn't pay the light bill. Okay. You didn't grow up with nice things. This might be the case. Now, when it comes to this, there's very interesting set of sociological theories that you can never be actually comfortable more than one and a half classes above that in which you were a child.

1:05:43So if you were kind of lower working class, that means that the tastes above upper middle class are gonna be like, that stuff is boring, man. That's like, you want me to collect art? Why would I spend my time collecting art? I want to talk about stuff and ideas and things that actually excite me. And so that might be part of it, but also you've had a pretty, I mean, at age 36, you've had economic success beyond your wildest dreams, right? And you probably figured out that there's not that much stuff that you can buy. That's really that fun, right? As soon as you can fly business class and not have to think about the cost of a coffee, most stuff downstream from that.

1:06:27I mean, you know, there'll be some things once they get a family, they'll be, I think that you kind of transcend your own desires in that way and it's more to do with providing for the kids and so on and so forth. But yeah, you know, I'm very, very glad of that. And I think lots of people don't realize that they're kind of blessed by having no or a limited materialism set point that like if you look at how much money you need in order to be happy with the worldly possessions that you have with the degree of keeping up with the Joneses that you're motivated by with the shows of affection and love and gifting that you need to do to other people that you need from other people in order to feel loved.

1:07:08If you don't have that, that's basically like you needing, you being a much more efficient system financially. Like there is somebody else out there who needs 10 times your salary to get the same level satisfaction out of life. So I reframed that probably about five years ago and just it's one of the things that I'm a genuinely feel blessed about whether that's from jeans or environment. I'm like, I don't need it. And it's by the way, it's great, but it's not a super virtue because we haven't gotten your idol yet. We're getting that. Don't worry. We're getting that. And what you find is that there are certain there are certain guys who are way, I mean, they they they they objectify themselves with their relationship to money and the same way that women often do for the same reasons evolutionarily and they're and their physical appearance.

1:07:59Why? Because this is going to predict your you know, sort of as a predictor of your success in making markets despite the fact that you're not even in making markets. So a lot of that primordial in has to do with you know what the idol is for all kinds of reasons that we could talk about. Okay, now it's getting uncomfortable because there's to left and you've already through process of elimination told me that these are the things that you care about. Okay. So number one, let's put these in order because you got to get rid of one of these. Pleasure and honor. You got to get one. You got to get rid of one.

1:08:31Pleasure can go. You like pleasure, don't you, but now I know what you're really like. I found out what you really want. I've not a surprise to anybody. my desire for prestige, to be recognized and validated by the world. Yeah, I know, I know, because you're doing something, you're performing in public. And most people who are, you know, you're in a strong extrovert, clearly, you have openness to experience, you have an agreeable nature, you're probably not highly neurotic, you've got all the things that actually go in to somebody who's in your work. If you do a big five on me, I come in. Neuroticism is moderate.

1:09:10Get most of my energy from being on my own. I'm an only child. I choose to work on my own. So, you know, that turn it on, turn it off thing. It's definitely there. But yeah, I'm glad that I managed to lap as an extraverted alone neuroticism person. But I fear that the source code may be slightly different. It might be. It might be. You know, you don't know until you know. And they're people who present in a particular way and have a habitat that's quite different because they've been able to, they're so good at getting along in society. But what we do know now is what your weakness is going to be.

1:09:46So five years from now, I predict you're going to be married. And the argument you're going to be having with your wife is because you're going to be doing something that is going to bring you new heights of success. And your wife is and then you're going to have this argument with your wife who's going to say I don't want you to I want you to be around more Chris and you're going to say yeah But you love all the great things that this lifestyle brings and then you're mad at me for doing the things that it takes and she said I'll take you I mean I'm going to accept those things that I don't have you but I'd prefer to have you That's what I predict is the argument that you're going to actually have with your wife because You love success you love success.

1:10:24It feels good That's the thing that actually, and what do I mean by it feels good? That means it gives, there's a lot of dopamine that comes from success, which gives you anticipation of reward. And when you get the success, it taps the ventral -tagmental area of the crisp brain, which gives you this little burst of joy. That's what's happening when this, when these weird things, these markers of success actually happen. And those things happen to be that centering around the admiration of other people. That you got to keep your eye on because all the mistakes you make in your life that you look back on with regret are going to be because you followed that particular idle.

1:10:58Meaning, final horsemen of the apocalypse. Yeah. So this is the most important meaning. I can go because I'm very disciplined. I can go a long time without enjoyment and I can go a long time without satisfaction. But I can't go 10 minutes without meaning it'd be a happy person. And this is the biggest problem that we have among young adults today. I have all kinds of tests that I to give people to see whether or not they have a proper sense of meaning in their life. And I'm not judgmental about what that meaning is going to be. But I do know, I can tell people when they have a crisis of meaning, and this is the biggest predictor of unhappiness for people in their 20s today.

1:11:36Now most people in their 20s are actually not in the active pursuit of meaning. Whereas in about 1960, most people were in an active pursuit of meaning. That's a big generation, a set of generational differences that we have. And it's a big one of the biggest explanations for the things that we talked about earlier, which is the degradation of general societal happiness, and particularly among the young. So, meaning is actually kind of a combination of three things. It's coherence why things happen the way they do. You have to have a theory of the case about why things happen. It doesn't mean it has to be right or it has to be mine.

1:12:12You have to be like, this is why things happen. Yours tends to be very scientific about why things happen. Second, you have to have a sense of purpose, purpose and meaning are not synonymous. Purpose is a subset of meaning that is direction and goals. Purpose is I'm going in a particular direction towards specific things. That's what it comes down to. And significance is the belief that your life matters. So it's coherence, purpose and significance. Now there's a test that I give my students, and by the way that I give my children, my kids are younger than you, my kids are in the, all three of my kids are in the 20s.

1:12:47And all three of my kids had to answer these questions. I made them write a business plan when they were coming out of high school, which is like a business plan for the enterprise of their lives for the next five years. I'm a B -school professor, I can do this. And I'm the venture capitalist, so I deserve a business plan. And the point was, what are you gonna do to find the answers to two questions, the two meaning questions? Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to give your life joyfully at this hour? You need answers to those questions. You need to be alive for a reason and you need to be willing to stop being alive for a reason.

1:13:25That was a meaning question. So what are your answers? Why do you believe you're alive? Why are you on earth? As sperm and an egg is not the right answer and a stork isn't either. I think the thing that I often come back to and I ask myself this question is to understand myself and the world around me. I get so much joy. I'm at my best when I'm learning about things and engaging with ideas. Downstream from that, I can teach it to other people and do all of the rest of the stuff, but maybe I'm revealing my sort of only child bonafide is here, but so much of it is just me understanding myself and the world around me.

1:14:10Like that's, it's been the single lineage trajectory throughout all of the good things that I've done. Yeah, no, and you just told me what you want to do with this life that you have, what you enjoy the most, where you find the greatest productivity. But this is a little bit different. Why do you think that you were placed on this earth? What is the purpose for which you were placed on this earth. Now if you're a radical materialist, you might say it's just all random, man. I wasn't, I wasn't nobody in the middle of the way down. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But my guess is you don't believe that. Why, why did the universe create Chris Williamson?

1:14:50Nothing to find and talk about good ideas. That seems to be the thing that comes to me. You want to serve others? You just told me. Why, why do you want to talk about things? Otherwise, otherwise you wouldn't bother, we wouldn't be having, we're having a conversation in public because we want people to listen to it. And it might just be completely venal on your own, my part, because by the way, my idols map exactly onto yours. I'm the 60 year old version of you. Sorry, I know, I know it's like, maybe you'll still have hair. But if you're lucky. But okay, if it's purely venal, that's just not good and that's a bad answer to the question.

1:15:29but if it really is, I want to serve the world by uncovering its mysteries. And in so doing, people will be able to lead better informed, better lives. In other words, you were created to serve in a certain way. Solid. Now it gets harder. For what would you give your life joyfully at this hour?

1:15:53Mom, dad, and like perhaps a golden retriever that's younger than five years old. Would you really give your life for your mom and dad? Yeah. You would die for them despite the fact that they're old. Yeah. I mean, they would be, I would be in a lot of trouble. But it's something that I would be prepared to do. There would absolutely, as with almost anything I've ever had to do with them, there would be a very long, protracted negotiation, which all of us would be dead before that was finished. So it might be a moot question. It's a hard one. And it's a specially hard question for young adults who don't have children yet.

1:16:30It's a really hard one, right? Well, where are we getting that deepest sense of meaning from? What is the that we transcended ourselves with? Exactly. You know, from the utilitarian perspective, when you think, ah, how much longer have mom and dad got left? And what do they really want to do? You know, what do you look at? Well, you can give it the world. You haven't even passed on the genes yet. Like even from their perspective, they would probably say, even fuck you, like just don't let, especially because I'm an only child, like don't let the bloodline end here. Like God, dammit. Like at least, you know, like come into a cup before you do this so that we can, you know, you've some lady in a turkey base to someone I can actually keep this guy.

1:17:03I don't know. But yeah, it's a, it's difficult one. It's difficult one, man. Like to talk about. First of all, it wouldn't be my country of birth and it wouldn't be my new country of adoption. it wouldn't be the faith that I don't have. It wouldn't be the sports team that I barely keep up to date with. What's your sports team, by the way? Texas Rangers. Really? Oh, yeah. I'm a Bar - I'm a Bar - I'm a Bar -so -man. Well, we both - we both swapped sports. I followed an MLB team and you've followed a, like, Spanish football team. I - I married a Catalan. There's no other way. There's no other way to keep family harmony.

1:17:45Well, do you have a best friend? Yeah. Would you die for him? I definitely consider it. I bet you would. He is younger than me. The utilitarian in New York. Yeah, I just can't get out the front of my brain. But this is the point. This is that this is the introspection that's required to actually find a full sense of meaning. This is worth going away for five days on a silent retreat and thinking about these questions. And it's funny because my adult kids have come to very different revelations about this because I push them, push them, push them, push them. I have a son who's a sniper. I have a son who's a marine sniper.

1:18:26And he just got out of the Marine Corps and now he's in the reserves. But he was active duty for four years as a marine sniper. This is a scary job, man, for me as his father. And he went in as a knucklehead, you know, and he came out at 23, married. He's now five months out. His wife is pregnant. And here's his answers. I mean, because he found his answers by actually putting his life in danger and doing all these really like wicked things. I was created because God made me to serve other people. He believes that. These are not the right answers. These are his answers. I would joyfully die for my faith and for my family and for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America and our allies Chris.

1:19:10So this is, this is solid stuff and he's, I'm telling you, he actually has called me. I screamed his call because he called while we were talking. Sorry, sniper. Don't shoot me through the window. Carlos, he's the best and he's six foot five and he's covered in tats and He's he's happy because he has these answers to these questions But he did the work is really what it comes down to and this is what I recommend to a lot of people who feel That little bit of hollowness that slight bit of deadness within Were things that I'm doing every day, you know, it's like I don't know I don't want to stand in this line.

1:19:47What's the meaning of me actually drive sitting in traffic and doing this? When you have the answers to those questions, there's a why for even the most trivial things that you're doing in your life. And that's a really, really beautiful thing. If I can do one thing for people, it's actually to encourage them to look for the answers to those questions. How can we improve our coherence? So our coherence is the why things happen the way that they do. And that theory of the case is really tricky, but it gets back to the sense of transcendence. If you pursue a strategy of transcendence, coherence comes in its wake.

1:20:22Even if you can't quite articulate why things happen the way they do, you have a sense of why things happen the way they do. If you study dystopic philosophers with the utmost seriousness, the understanding of why things happen the way they do, even if they're random and even if they're unfair becomes acceptable to you. And that acceptance of that is a sense of coherence on his face. Maybe you're a complete, radically physicalist atheist who denies the utter existence of free will. If you study the science with enough seriousness of that, you can make your peace with a coherence that actually comes from the randomness of the universe.

1:20:58My father was a PhD bio -statistician. He was the smartest guy ever met. He said when he was dying of cancer, when he was just a little bit older than me. And I said, it's just sucks. It's not fair. And he said, somebody's going to be on the left side of the distribution.

1:21:27He's smoking like a man that looked at a lot of graphs throughout his career. It's coherence, baby. But he doesn't get coherence in a lot of his ways. You just have to do the work to figure out what you believe. Purpose.

1:21:46Purpose to create the goals and the directionality of your life. Now, this is not a sense of attachment. A lot of people will say, well, I'm going to make my bucket list. And I'm going to earn this, and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to meet this person, and I'm going to shake hands with the president. I don't know whatever the dumb thing is that people are really into. That's not it. The Buddhists talk about intentionality without attachment. Now, there's a there's a the way to think about purpose. There's a do you speak Spanish, right? Chris. No. Okay. There's a word in Spanish. It's a very evocative word.

1:22:19Rumble, which in English is it's not common. It's called Rumline, R -H -U -M, Rumline. It's a navigational term. That's the straight line that goes from where you are to where you want to wind up. To do navigation properly, you need a rum line. Rumbo is actually used in Spanish in the vernacular to say, this is your directionality, this is to figure out your purpose in life. What you need to figure out is where you think it would be good to end up, to have a straight line to get there, and then have a complete other lack of attachment on whether or not you're sitting on that rum line. That turns out to be the way to understand purpose.

1:22:56That's intention without attachment. Of course, I'm going to lay out the things that I want to do. Of course, I'm going to. And I am completely flexible if life takes me in another direction for something that actually meets my moral metaphysical my love goals in a better way. That's the way to actually be thinking about purpose. If suffering and difficulty is so important to meaning, how do you advise new parents who are successful because of the challenges in their past but now have more resources to make life easier for their kids than their parents did when they were growing up, that by using the things that they've worked for, they may rob their children of the very challenges that would make them happy.

1:23:37Yeah, guilty, by the way, guilty is charged. You know, it's a, it's the greatest privilege is feeling like you've had a lot of success and you earned it. That's an incredible privilege. The greatest, I mean, the worst thing you can do for your children is making them wonder whether or not they earned their success. I did I did it to me or is it my dad? You know was somebody kicking down the door for me? Am I a baby Nebo? I mean what what what right that's a real problem and a lot of that has to do the fact that that we're We're simply trying to make it so that the difficulties are cleared away exactly as you say This leads to a lot of problems that we see today Safety as um, you know the fact that we're we're completely Freaked out about a lot of difficulties that don't exist and we're and we're inured to the problems that really do So we don't let our kids walk to the store, but we give them, you know, as unlimited access to smartphones and social media at age 13 and like predators and creeps and God forbid politicians and, you know, dictators, a pick talk.

1:24:43Yeah, our climbing out of the screen and into their brains and, you know, and and and destroying their sense of self worth and creating social comparison and all these deleterious things. what we need to do is to set our kids up to do really hard things. And it's telling them that it's okay if they fail. Because what we tell them when we're protecting them from everything is that it's not okay to fail. And we create a pathological fear of failure, which is a death fear. We're giving our kids a death fear. All death is the death of who you are to you. There's an essence to you. So a clientist would say that your soul is your Christmas, that a dog soul is this dog -eaness.

1:25:26Each one of us has an essence to us. No, we define that essence on the basis of who we see ourselves. And if you are never allowed to fail, you've become the person who doesn't fail, and failure becomes a death fear for you. Why would you install a death fear on your kids? Well, because you want to keep them safe, and that's a terrible thing to do. So the way to get beyond that, even if you're blessed with tremendous financial resources, So they don't have to worry about making rent when they're kids. They don't have to worry about getting their caloric needs. As you have to say, I expect you to be doing difficult things.

1:25:58And I don't expect you to succeed all the time. If you're not failing enough, you're not doing it right. That's and and okay, now you're going to say, how do I do that? Okay, here's how you do it. Do it yourself. It does not matter what you tell your kids. All that matters is what they see. If you want your kids to grow up in the Catholic faith, make sure that they see you on your knees on Sunday. That's all that matters. If you want your kids to do hard things, do hard things. If you want your kids to deal with failure, fail. And have them see how you fail. And that's why these lessons in modern wisdom are important for 60 -year -olds and 20 -year -olds.

1:26:34And kids. Talk to me about the difference between happiness and unhappiness is unhappiness. simply the absence of happiness? Are they different networks, the ways to avoid them separately? Happiness is not the opposite of unhappiness in the contrary. So the experience of happiness has a lot to do with negative, positive emotion, and the experience of unhappiness has a lot to do with negative emotion. We go through life with different kinds of positive and negative moods, and they're largely produced with different structures of the limbic system of the brain because we're reacting to different outside circumstances, some of which are opportunities and some of which are threats.

1:27:15So it makes perfect sense that that unhappiness is not the absence of happiness. These are different sensations, largely unhappiness is experienced on the right side of the brain and unhappiness on the left side of the brain. And we know this because of the lamasculature of the face. When people are experiencing a lot of negative emotion, the left side of the face is more active. And you can tell, you know, when somebody's about to cry, the left side of their face is more active, of a twitch is a little bit. You get when you're married, you'll see this. And you're like, uh, uh, uh, uh, you get like a five second warning.

1:27:48It's just amazing. It's like, it's what it's like if your husband is studies neuroscience. So it's important that we understand that because then we can manage both our happiness and our unhappiness and we can see which is a greater, which is a greater challenge. Happiness or unhappiness in our lives. For me, happiness is not the greater challenge. For me, unhappiness is a greater challenge. I have very high negative affect. I'm a normal, I'm a naturally negative affect person because I fall in this personality characteristic called the mad scientist, which is unusually high positive mood and unusually high negative mood.

1:28:24That's important thing for us to understand that you know which is your challenge. And so I'm spending a lot of my effort managing my unhappiness as opposed to trying to boost my happiness. And there are lots of terrible ways to do that like drinking alcohol, looking at pornography, gambling, workaholism. The best way to do that by the way is vigorous physical exercise seven days a week. And so that's what I do to start my day, the first hour of the morning. Not because I'm some sort of, you know, look, vanity doesn't favor me. The reason that I do that is because I want to feel less unhappy. So there are different pathways for making people more happy versus making people less unhappy.

1:29:09And all of the stuff that we've gone through so far, although fantastic and maybe great for refining your happiness level, you can still be pressing the accelerator harder whilst you've still got the break pushed down. If you don't look at these things which cause unhappiness. So what are the other biggest strategies beyond high intensity training that you do seven days a week? What are the highest return tactics that you use? Clear away the barriers to your happiness because one of the sources of unhappiness is not having access to the sources of happiness in your life. That's the source of aggravation and frustration.

1:29:46So clear away the barriers by getting reading, reading your prejudice is against trying to develop your faith or spiritual life. Clear away the barriers to the prejudices that you have and the difficulties that you have toward family life, friendship, the behavior and attitudes that you have toward work, etc. That's really important. Third, and probably for many people, the most important, is taking seriously the mood disorders that are so common in our society today. Understanding and the essence of what chronic and generalized anxiety is all about in people's lives. What clinical depression actually means and how to treat it, because the greatest source of unhappiness in misery for a lot of people is just straight on common mood disorders, and they can't actually even get to the better things in their lives because of these barriers that are actually coming in terms of these sources of unhappiness.

1:30:36That's the big ones that I'm talking about. General high levels of negative affect that do not go into mood disorder, I strongly recommend physical diet and exercise, you know, the kinds of self -care that have a lot of discomfort attached to them. Always be thinking about the hygiene of removing barriers to your happiness and taking care of your mental health. Those are the best ways to think about it. Why do you think it is in the modern world that anxiety appears to be the most prevalent emotional state that people are in? Why has that one emotion and grabbed a hold of the 21st century so much.

1:31:15Anxiety is unfocused fear. Fear is a natural physiological phenomenon that comes from a stimulus that then lights up the amygdala in the brain, passing a signal through the hypothalamus into the pitudary glands, thus leading to the adrenal glands, putting up an effort and later on cortisol, stress hormones, in response to some sort of a threat that should be intense and episodic. The problem in modern life is that we don't have these intense episodic episodes of fear. On the contrary, we have minor threats that are very diffuse but chronic. And that is at least to an unfocused fear, aka anxiety, which is a very slight drip of cortisol going into your brain again and again and again and again.

1:32:01And how do you get it? By opening up Twitter, how do you get it? By being on an overly long Zoom call when you need to pee. How do you get it by actually being in a, you know, a work relationship that's ridiculously tense that you're not doing anything about? Modern life is all about not having your life threatened, but feeling constantly under a little bit of threat, which gives you unfocused fear that leads to a stress response that comes from your adrenal glands, and that gives you a tremendous amount of agony that's just spread out in constant. that. I, I, one of the things that you've mentioned there, you, you said that you have a disposition towards negative emotional states.

1:32:44How much have you found in your practice and also with yourself that people can rewrite their childhood and their past history? Because I think a lot of people feel trapped by their past and that they're stuck in their patterns and that, But this all sounds well and good, Arthur. But really what you're talking about is sort of putting a little bit of icing and some sprinkles on the top of a dog -shit cake. You can rewrite your past. You can't actually make a different past, but you can do is understand your memories in different ways. And it starts with an understanding of how memory actually works in the brain.

1:33:20Memories are not extant. They're reassembled from all different kinds of parts. That's the reason that memory is so unreliable. You can remember with incredible vividness what happened on 9 -11. I was in New York on 9 -11. I saw the first plane hit the first tower. I mean, it was, I remember it vividly. But the data show that what I remember vividly is probably not completely accurate because I'm reassembling that memory so frequently from different, literally, I mean, the different parts of the memory are stored in different locations in the brain. And those will get corrupted, just like files will get corrupted in a computer from time to time.

1:33:56And one of the ways that look at corrupted is because of the biases that I have in my ordinary life This is the reason that you and your sister I realize you don't have a sister But if you had a sister you and your sister could be looking back to a Thanksgiving 15 years ago Which I realized you didn't have and have to get your British but and and one of you could say oh that Thanksgiving with uncle Mark and Aunt Betty it was so great and your sister was like wasn't it the wasn't that the one where uncle Mark got, you know, blind drunk and then beat up the neighbor and passed out in the front yard.

1:34:28That was terrible that year. You're both right, but you're assembling the memories from different places with biases and embassies placed in different parts of the memory with different corruptions that have happened across the decades. That's a really important thing because you can reassemble your memories in different ways by helping people to emphasize the parts of the experiences in your past that were positive and not just negative. Some people are retrospectively unbelievably negative. And that has everything to do with the way that they've stored and are reassembling their memories. And you don't have to do that.

1:35:04You can actually choose to look back on the parts of your childhood that actually were sweet. And the more that you do that, the better you'll get at doing that and the more that you'll naturally reassemble those memories in ways that favor you more. And you're not wrong. You're just looking at different parts of the experience and repairing the memory assembly process. Yeah, I love that. What about the role of envy? Another emotion that's very prevalent in the modern world. What is that to say about envy? It's evolved and the reason is because we live in a hierarchical kin -based species. We actually were tropical, we're a tropical species evolved to live in kin groups that are hierarchical.

1:35:44Now some of that we can get beyond like, you know, we invented coats so we don't have to live in really hot places anymore. But some of it we haven't gotten beyond. We're still kin -based and we are still very hierarchical. And the way that you tend to see your likelihood of survival and gene propagation is rising in the hierarchy. And the way that you know that you're rising in the hierarchy is paying attention to people who have more than you and wanting what people have who have more than you, aka NB. Now, that's a big, I mean, that's a survival tendency in the place to seem, but it's maladapted to the modern world, and it's exacerbated by the technological innovations that we've had such that we're aware of the hierarchy of the entire human race all the time on social media.

1:36:30The biggest problem that we have is you don't feel envious of the loser down the street from you who has a slightly different RV up on blocks in his yard compared to yours. You envy the Kardashians, which is completely absurd. You envy somebody who's got all the wealth in the world. You envy a billionaire, despite the fact that you've never met one in person. So that's the biggest problem that we've taken an evolutionary tendency and we've blown it up with our technological means and turned it into an actual form of mental illness. That means that we have to take it on on his face and use our prefrontal cortex to combat these limbic tendencies that are ruining your lives.

1:37:10That's a lot of what I talk about. You mean making sure that you're consciously not comparing yourselves to people outside your group. If you need to get rid of the apps and stop paying attention to these rich people only because you enjoy watching the lifestyles of the rich and famous folks, that's an unhealthy thing for you to do. A lot of the things that I often talk about to get rid of this as well is to separate your envy from the malicious. Milicious envy is that you feel envy is the people who have something that you don't feel that they've earned. Ignore that and pay attention to where you have benign envy where you think that they've done something that's really virtuous and turn your envy into admiration.

1:37:52And then you've actually made it into something that's really beneficial that will benefit you and won't make the world worse. Yeah, it's so interesting to think about how that very adaptive impulse that we had, I need to track my place within the hierarchy, but you know, that was 150 people. If that, it was probably actually 70 people. Oh, 30, 70, yeah. Just speaking of what we were talking about earlier on when we were discussing the slot that your intimate partner takes up, I had Robin Dunbarat. He's been on to show twice now, maybe three times, he's so fantastic. The first time I ever recorded with him, it was I think 8 p .m.

1:38:35on a Friday evening in the UK, 2 p .m. here in Austin, and he just had a big glass of wine that he slowly worked his way through is he was just an unloading evolutionary psychology, social psychology on sites. But one of the, you know, you've got this sort of small group within maybe a slightly larger tribe, and you can track your place within that hierarchy keep relatively easily, but if envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good, which is kind of an interesting insight, not even fun. Not even fun, not even fun to do it. You have essentially an unlimited way that an envyous mind can find to subjugate you below someone else.

1:39:17Well yeah, sure, I've got more money than them, but they seem to be a little bit better educated than me, are their wives slightly hotter, are they drive a faster car, or they they seem to be a bit more muscular or whatever. There's a million different ways that you can do this, with now essentially an unlimited global marketplace hierarchy within which you can compare yourself. Yeah, this is one of the reasons that men have now become orthorexic. That men are now weirdly comparing their biceps. Men my age are paying attention to the physical prowess by looking at these YouTube channels. in a way that we wouldn't have any concept of it.

1:39:56They would have lived happily. But instead, they're like, I don't know, man, I think I need to go on TRT. Why? Because I don't know. I mean, I'm looking at all these other guys. They look great. You wouldn't even have a conscious of this. You'd be happily living your life in your own silo. But this exposure that we have to this massive comparison group is unbelievably unhealthy because you're always doing this hierarchically evolved thing, This tendency, this habit that we actually have, and you have to combat it on purpose. There's no way that you're just going to make it go away by changing your environment.

1:40:29This brings up one key point, by the way, because of all these things that we're talking about. It's very efficient, inefficient, to try to improve your life by changing the whole outside world. It's very inefficient, to curate the entire outside world. It's efficient to work on it yourself by moving your experiences from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex, aka, to be metacognitive. That's why that's what I talk about all the time. We've gone through a lot of the big sexy things, I think, from your recent thesis. Is there anything from your book or from your work and from this kind of domain of work in general that people, you wish people paid more attention to?

1:41:10Is there something that is seemingly unpopular and sexy but has more bang for its book that you wish you could bestow more people to remember it when you, when they read stuff that you've put out. Yeah, I mean, there's a concept that people don't pay attention to very much because our world is largely been organized over the past 30 years by technicians, engineers, and bureaucrats. We've actually, we've handed the keys in our culture over to people that say that if we can solve a series of complicated problems, we'll live in peace and happiness forever. That's a completely misguided understanding of the human experience.

1:41:54There's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems that engineers solve. These are problems that are ferociously hard to solve, but once you solve them, you can replicate them with effortless ease. That's like making a toaster or a jet engine. Those are complicated problems. All the problems that we really care about in life are complex problems, which is to say that they're very easy to understand the solution and completely impossible to solve because they're dynamic in nature. Your toaster is complicated, your cap is complicated, is complex. It's, you know what it wants. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, scratches and a litter box and food, but you never know what it's gonna do.

1:42:37That's why it's interesting. Your, your marriage is complex, right? It's very complex, you know what it means to be happy in your marriage, but you can't get there with any amount of stuff and any amount of money and any amount of technology. A war is complex. I win, they lose. That's the solution. How do you get there? I don't know. A football game. Look, you like sports. I like sports. I love Barça. I love watching soccer. I love watching Spanish Premier League soccer. You know, the best day is Barça wins, but I don't know. That's why I watch. Because it's a complex thing. The biggest mistake that we make is thinking, and a lot of what we've talked about in this episode comes down to this, is thinking that my complex human problems are going to be solved by external complicated solutions.

1:43:23And that's what the world keeps trying to tell me. The world says, if you take this and you try that and you buy this and you adopt that, then you're finally going to be happy. And it's not true. It isn't true. Here's the thing about life. life. Life comes down to the complex problems of the heart, which are all about love. And you can't solve that with a product. You can only, you can only live that in real time. You want a better life, live it in real time, be fully alive right now, suffer with it, experience it. That's what you have to do. That's what we had to do two million years ago. And that's what we still have to do today.

1:44:06Yeah. Oh yeah. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen, Arthur has been really great. I adore this sort of blend that you have of Eastern and Western, of sort of neuroscience with the mindful with, it's really, really great. I'm very, very glad that we stopped circling each other and finally wanted us to sit down. I look forward to speaking to you again soon as well. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Where do you want to send them? Arthur Brooks .com. That gives you, you know, links, that I write a column every week in the Atlantic on the science of happiness every Thursday morning and it has the books and has you know the videos and the workshops a lot of free stuff and surveys and clips to my favorite podcast like Modern Wisdom.

1:44:44Well that is the way that I wanted to, he finished out. Dude I really appreciate you, it's been really really great to catch up. Thanks, thanks for what you're doing. You've made my life better and you're making millions of people live more mindfully and better and their lives with more love. Thank you for doing it. I appreciate you. Thank you, man.