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24:44I mean, there are certain, you know, the sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive, but they don't have the same properties of brain capture in the same way for sure, because they don't stimulate as much dopamine as something like alcohol does. And so they're less likely to make you really addicted. But the whole point is that it does give you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment and you only get that when you're doing it with people. Satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You're an entrepreneur. You understand this one really well.

25:15You're good at deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs are good. Successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification, which means I'm going to do this hard thing and it's going to get big payoff and that payoff is going to be sweet. that satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we see and that's a really important part of our happiness. So you find the people who are better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction and they're happier. There's a lot of memory you've heard about the marshmallow experiment.

25:47And people have debunked it but they actually haven't. So the marshmallow experiment was taken place, it took place in the late 60s or Walter Michelle was a psychologist at Stanford on Palo Alto. He had a little laboratory setup where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table. And it was a kid on the other side of the table between four and eight years old. And in front of the kid was a marshmallow. And so he says to the kid, you want the marshmallow? And he's like, yeah. And he says, tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back here. But when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you another one.

26:19Can you wait? Every kid's like, yeah, totally, totally worth it. He comes back five minutes later. So 80 % of the kids that eaten the marshmallow, 20 % of the kids hadn't. Now that's a lot. 80 % of the kids could not defer the gratification. So the real question is, who's the 20 %? It's Steve Bartlett. That, these are the people that went on to do distinguished things. They did better in school, they got better grades, they went on to have more job success, they had better relationships. That's what they found, that the most successful kids, Now, what people fight about now is why, whether it's nature and nurture, it's probably 50, 50, like everything else in life.

27:00It's both nature and nurture. But the bigger point is good things come to those who wait and when you wait, you suffer. And you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience. Now, the bigger problem with satisfaction is that mother nature is a big lie at the end of it. Mother nature says, if you get it, you're gonna love it forever. And that's not true. See, the brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline physiologically and emotionally, because you can't stay in an unusual physiological state.

27:38Unusual states are a reaction. You need to be ready to react. And so you step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated, your heart goes back to where it was, so you're not dead in a week. The same thing is true for you emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you. You think it's going to last forever so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing, but it doesn't last forever, does it? That's the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it's going to be really great. And the first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her himself is, I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis.

28:17And that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. So that's the great conundrum of the striver, is that there's never enough, never enough, never enough. I deal with people all day long. I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful, but not happy. And a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that, but also gives you the solution. which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have. So have more is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want, have divided by wants.

28:57Successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their halves. They need to want less. And that's a whole kettle of fish, that spirituality, that's discipline, that's fitness, that's diet, that's a whole lot of things that go into that. And that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction. So it's like a contradiction, doesn't it? It sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is gonna make me happy, but I should want less. Yeah. What people actually who crack this code, and a lot of Eastern traditions actually get into this, is not the striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it.

29:40that the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not arrival, what you wanted was progress. And then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There's a funny thing in the research on dieting. We all know that it's the most expensive, unsuccessful industry in the world, right? 95 % of diets fail, which means within a year, people have gained back all the weight that they've lost. But they're successful in so far as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here's the thing about diets. Every day you're willing to forgo the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down.

30:15When you hit your goal, it's gonna be so great. It's gonna be so great. You know what the reward is, you never again get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Once you've got that. That's why you fail. And the arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it's gonna be sweet when I get to the goal. It isn't. where you're going to have his homeostasis when you get to your goal, frustration and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less, you need to think about that, about less about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey.

30:50That's really what it comes down to. And people who crack that code over the course of self discipline, self understanding, self management, they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama, I've been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years. And I asked him this question, how can I get lasting satisfaction? And he said, you need to want what you have, not to have what you want. And that's what it comes down to. It's the management of my wants, not my halves.

31:25On that point, we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that there. So for those people that are approaching that moment and they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things What is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What's a better more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success? Yeah, but it's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homestatically return us to the baseline that won't throw us onto this just hedonic treadmill over and over and over again.

31:57Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life and the more you have the better off you are, where more actually is better. But they don't fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and fame, which are the typical kind of goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or whatever it happens to be. The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have. No, there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame. There's nothing wrong with those things.

32:29But only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life. I'm not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily. Better family relationships, which are very mystical, poorly understood, even in neuroscience in a lot of ways. Friendship. Deep friendship. It's hard for a lot of people, especially successful people, and work that will earn your success and serve other people. That's what it comes down to. So those are the right New Year's goals that we need. This year, what am I going to do? How am I going to grow closer to the divine?

33:05How am I going to do that? This year, what am I going to do to draw closer to my family and to have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year? and how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people? How am I going to do that? Why is it... We haven't gotten to meaning yet. Yeah, we haven't got to meaning yet. You said the word there, but I want to make sure I close off from this point about a better goal because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go, listen, I get it, love it, I believe it.

33:34Yeah. But I hate this belly fat. Yeah, I got it. And this belly fat yo -yos every year. No, I get it. So those are intermediate goals. So there's nothing wrong with those things. The problem is where they become satisfying and self -destructive is when that's the final goal because by the time you get there, you think, why? Why? That wasn't as meaningful as I thought. That wasn't as good as I thought. That's the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. The reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and see your and you're dandelier 11 grandchildren on your knee.

34:09That's the reason you want to do this because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason. It's supposed to an extrinsic reason having to do with people will love me more. I mean, it's amazing to me because I do a lot of wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness. I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community because I have sort of the happiness console, the science of the happiness console that I put into those things. And so I meet a lot of people that are really into the fitness part. And what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these fitness goals.

34:38Like, I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year, and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing. And by, if they stick to it by September or October, whether they're finding is that, you know, they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women. But a lot of dudes are going, look at good dude. And they're like, that's not what I wanted. And part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what will actually come from the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals. These aren't the right final goals. You got to have the right final goals and then set some intermediate goals along the way.

35:16But let's not kid ourselves. And when you think carefully about that, that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs, which by the way is not necessarily that healthy, is going to material improve your life and your relationships. It's not just isn't. What's the better end goal then as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health? It is something that's actually sustainable and how you do with health also with happiness is the way that this works. So I work out 60 minutes a day. It's not because I'm vain. Look, I got a face for radio, Steve.

35:50I mean, it's good. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I know, but it's age -adjusted. I look good. You know, this is a good period. I'm not, you know. I'm better girlfriend, but. I'm kind of way credits, too. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. But you made my week. See, this was my goal. Yeah. The reason that I do this is because I find that for me, that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can. Yeah, right? Yeah, and practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient.

36:30Eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day. So the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life and I'm a much happier guy. Look at lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high, I'm a very anxious person. And I understand anxiety, I understand the cortisol production, I understand how to manage and this is one of my management techniques. Thing about fitness to understand is, when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn't, it lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness, largely, the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they're produced in different parts of the limbic system.

37:08So you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that when I put my students through. You're probably somebody who experiences is both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We've only met, but my guess is that you're a mad scientist. That's the profile. And so that means as you've got two strategies, you want to keep your positive affect high and you want to manage your negative affect. And one of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous physical exercise. Today, today for me was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now.

37:42OK, that makes sense. I've got an answer there that I'm super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short -term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal. And the real key here is consistency. This was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing, because I was that person, which will be 90 % of people listening now that made the goal every year that I was going to go change my life every year. never worked, because I was aiming at getting a six pack for summer. So when I arrived with a six pack.

38:18It worked? It was great. I look great. I actually got, I think I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished, or the six pack arrived, I could not find for the life of me the motivation. So I'd go into winter and I'd become like a world power. There's no world power. Look, you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life. Consistency. making my goal consistency and having habits. Was the big unlock for me. For sure. Because then, okay, the goal becomes, if I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I'm gonna be healthier, happier, better at my job.

38:52The fact that there's anything more important, is that less important than a six pack? And that mindset shift changed my life. For sure. Meaning then, meaning was the last of the three. Yeah. Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. This is really, really hard. So, meaning is really a combination of three things. It's coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. And so, meaning in your life means you've got to have a theory about why things happen. Like, it's one damn thing after another. I mean, you've got to have some concept of why things happen.

39:27Purpose is my life has direction and has goals. That's what purpose really is. I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. and the last but not least is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't here. I'm significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people's lives. According to philosophers and social psychologists, so there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompass these three ideas so you can remember them into two questions. And you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe and there's no right answers.

40:04You gotta have your answers. You wanna play? Yeah, here's the quiz question number one. Where are you live?

40:13You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on earth to do. Yeah, okay So why am I alive? That's something that I get to answer every single day I get to define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up. What was it? I went to the gym Yeah, I was on the running machine because I know I've got to not gonna be able to today And then I came here and had this conversation with you. But why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve? The Ikeguy theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is, it's incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation.

40:46Uh -huh. And I know that it pays, um, pays it forward to other people who are going to learn from it as well. And that makes it feel worthwhile. So you said two things. Fun and service. Yeah. Right. Which is more important to you. Transcendently, which is more important to you. It's the service part. Okay, good. That gives me, that gives me, well, my, yeah. Left. The more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So now thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, does it, does it serve? Is that guest going to serve? Is this question going to serve?

41:20Is this show going to serve? Is this sponsor going to serve the people who are watching this podcast? then suddenly meaning starts to go, pff, starts to really spread out of the soil because we got to that. If it's like, is it fun? Yeah, good. So look, my whole have a company and that rides alongside what I do academically. And everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations. And the order of operations are, these are the four goals, but they have to be in this order. You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That's what you basically said.

41:55It's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure. That's probably an intellectual adventure, right? But the order of operations has to be right. If you're having fun more than you're serving other people, you're not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question. So you see where we're going with that, right? So the second question is harder. For what are you willing to die today? There's a couple of people in my life that I die for. I die for my romantic partner. I die for my brothers and sisters, any of them. Mm -hmm. Interesting that I don't know if I die for my parents, which is interesting.

42:32Would you die for an idea? Would you die for your country? I would die... When you say for my country, do you mean to save the country? I don't know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous, even if you thought it would were ridiculous, would you die because you love your country? It depends what you mean by that. What's the cost if I stay alive? No, I know. And everything is context specific to a certain extent. But I'm really trying to see what your kind of reaction is to this. To see what the, there are good things in there. You are willing to die for your girlfriend? Yeah.

43:14And like when you die for your brothers and sisters? Yeah. Mom and dad, it's like Jerry's kind of, she's your mom with this podcast. They do, but I'm just being honest because I think, I think, I don't know why I said that, but I just, I don't know for sure. This is good. This is really important, right? This is worth thinking about, right now. The worst answer is, I don't know, or nothing. Those are the worst answers. That doesn't mean that's a problem on the contrary. It's a huge opportunity, huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions. because you don't have to go to, you know, get your PhD in philosophy.

43:48You don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with the guru, someplace in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions. That's it. That's the quest. That's the vision quest. So, and when you see somebody find these things, like a lot of young adults have their nowhere near you where you are in your journey. You're solid, Steve. I mean, this is good stuff. But I meet a lot of people like, why am I alive? Because of egg metasperm. Really? Yeah. And what are you willing to die for? Nothing really, or I don't know. A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don't have a why is what it comes down to.

44:24Repeat the questions again. Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die this very day? There's no wrong answers. I have so many young kids in particular messaging me on Instagram with the same question, which is, I think society, Instagram quotes, all of that stuff has told them that they need to find their purpose. And it seems that they're in hunt of their purpose, like it's some Easter egg. And you think about that phrase itself, find your purpose. It comes loaded with two assumptions, find, which means you've got to go search for it, and purpose, which is a singular word, means there's one of them somewhere.

44:59And the unhappiness that I sense, because they are unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they've been searching for, causes them to fail all kinds of inadequacy. What you say to that. Yeah, well part of it is because that's the what we call in business, the GoFinderRoc through ev leadership, where the CEO says to an employee, go give me a rock. Go give me a rock. Okay, so you go outside and you bring a rock back into the boss says, wrong rock. That's not helpful, right? That's go find your purpose. That's the go find a rock theory of leadership. It's like, what rock? Where do I look? The world is full of rocks.

45:41That's so you need to be a lot more specific. And figuring out deeply why you believe you're walking the earth, why you actually are alive. Besides just the mechanical explanation for what we understand in 10th grade biology, the real why, the deep why, you're alive. And think really, I mean, with push came to shove, I would die for this. I actually would die for this thing. That's when you understand what your deepest values are. That's when you can actually write your mission statement. That's what it comes down to. And that's how people actually find, as opposed to just platitudes on the internet, of go find your purpose as if, I mean, I spent a lot of time in Durham, Salah, in the Himalayan in Foothills is where the Dalai Lama lives in northern India.

46:25And when I'm in Durham, solid was a little village until the Dalai Lama went there about 1960 when he was exiled from China, when we kicked out of Tibet. And now it's not a metropolis, but there's tons of people there. And there's, I mean, a lot of Westerners there. There's seekers. I'm a seeker, man. Gosh, yeah. I'm a seeker. And so I'm gonna go to a place where I feel like there's a lot of positive spiritual energy You're saying don't get me wrong. I've studied meditation with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhist monks. I'm a much better Catholic on the basis of this. I feel like I'm a deeper Christian on the basis of this.

47:04But the idea of just going someplace and randomly looking, hoping that your purpose just hunts you down, is misguided. You have to have a much better, more specific sense of what you're looking for. And these things, coherence, significance and purpose as part of meaning or the way to do it, and those two questions are a good way at least to get started. There's going to be a huge group of people that I listened to this and thinking, you know what, I don't have anything that I would die for, and I don't really know why I'm alive. And that's just made me feel like. And it's actually good news. It's incredibly good news because that's the basis of your adventure is to find those things.

47:44Because in point of fact, there are things out there. You just don't know them yet and you haven't been looking for them. You've been, who knows what you've been looking for? Like maybe you've been looking for what I like, right? Why is that wrong? There's nothing wrong, but it's just not gonna find, it's not gonna be the secret of finding your meaning. You know what I enjoy is a different pillar of happiness. A lot of people will say, if I figure out what I enjoy, then I'll find my meaning. No, those are different, there's a different, you're over on that branch of the tree. You're trying to get over on this branch of the tree, different questions.

48:12So I'm that person, say I'm that person now, and I don't have answers to either. You tell me it's that's a great place to be because it means the start of my adventure. Yeah. What do I do? Put my shoes on and leave the house. What, what, what, so there's a lot of different protocols you can actually start depending on where where you're on your life. One of the things that I actually recommend is reading more, not reading garbage and dump stuff, and not even reading the news. I put people on a protocol of 15 minutes a day of of of real reading. Actually, there's a three -part plan. You want to hear the three -part plan?

48:41I'm actually start figuring out the answers to these questions. You don't have to answer the questions directly. But number one, is start thinking to yourself, what do I think is right and wrong? What are my moral principles? What are my moral non -negotiables? That's the moral basis of living as the foundation of actually figuring out the answers to your questions. So for me, that might be, I think, like free speech is important, for example. Treating people with dignity. A quality. Yeah. Right. And this is going to change over the course of your life too. So, you know, you're 28 years younger than me, when you're my age is going to be different.

49:16And saying to yourself, that's good. I want to change. I want to change. I want to change. And that means that one of your non -negotiables is moral flexibility. Perhaps. Really important that you're able to evolve. Right. The world doesn't want you to evolve. The world wants you to be rigid because you're a better soldier or in the culture war when you're not able to say, huh, what I thought actually probably isn't right, huh? Weird, right? Okay, so that's number one is the moral foundations and thinking about that. You know, I ask my students to take out a piece of paper and start writing things down that they think.

49:47Here are the things that I actually think are right and wrong. Here are the basis of the way that I wanna live. This is a very Jungian idea. Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe in acting according to it, living according to it. that the basis of unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals. In other words, I believe these things are right and wrong and I'm systematically violating. There was, it's so incredibly empowering when I talk to a young woman or man. And I say, for example, what do you think is a decent way to treat a number of the opposite sex when you're on a date?

50:23And they'll tell me and I say, are you acting according to that? And like, no, I said, that's why you're unhappy. according to Carl Jung, but also according to Common Sense. Once you know what that is and say, I'm gonna start acting and living according to my own principles, your life starts to change. Why is that? So say someone right now is, for example, cheating on their partner. But they know. And they're against cheating. They're against cheating. They know it's God's thing. Everybody's against cheating, by the way. Yeah, betraying as somebody you love. Everybody's against betraying somebody you love.

50:50Yeah, right. That's actually natural law, if you believe there's any natural law. Why is that making them unhappy? That's making them unhappy because that's doing violence to their own sense of propriety. You're hurting yourself. The most ancient wisdom traditions and religious traditions, when they talk about sin, Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and name the religion, there's a concept of sin. Sin in almost every religious tradition is not offending God. It's hurting yourself. It's self -destructive behavior. You're doing something not in accord with the way that you want to live.

51:27And in so doing, you're weakening yourself. You're making it harder for you to understand yourself as a good person. As a person of integrity, as an upright person, which we actually need. And again, there's a lot of go back to this whole psychology research on this. We need to see ourselves as good people. It goes back to your point as well about helplessness and agency. Because if I know that that is bad, but I can't seem to stop myself doing it, I'm telling myself that I'm low agency and I'm helpless. I'm a victim of my own sin. Yeah. I'm a victim of my own weakness. I'm a victim of my own impulses.

51:59And so this is one of the reasons that people will be like, I hate how I eat. What are they actually saying? They're not saying that I hate, you know, I mean, like I'm a sugar feed. I love, I just can't get enough of it. I don't drink alcohol, but I drink a ton of sugar. I eat lots of sugar. I shouldn't do it now. It doesn't offend my sense of propriety to be sure, right? But I could get to the point where I'm so unhealthy that I hate that about myself I'm actually hurting myself, but I'm being controlled by my impulses. This getting in line with your own views and making a plan and this is where the New Year's resolutions about taking off the weight actually makes sense because it's not about the ab veins.

52:40It's about being morally consistent with your own view of the person that you want to be is what this comes down. But you can't do it until you lay it out until you actually put it in black and white. Write down your moral philosophy. I don't care how dumb it is. Write down your moral philosophy and say make a plan to start living according to it. That's the base of the pyramid. Two other parts. The second part is a contemplative tradition. Is contemplation. You need more contemplation so that you can experience transcendence. That is a bunch of different ways to do this. This is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation.

53:15That's all that is. is basically is sitting still without your phone and focusing on being alive. So in a lot of ways to do it, there's informal ways to do it. My colleague Ellen Langer, if you had her on the show, a super interesting person. She actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about 30 years ago. She wrote a book called Mindfulness. She was the first woman 10 years in the psychology department at Harvard. She's phenomenal. And she's just absolutely first rate. And she says that mindfulness is best practice if you're sitting on the train by putting away your phone, putting your hands in your lap and looking out the window.

53:51Can they listen to this podcast while they do that? Because no, you should listen to the podcast, but not during those periods. Okay. And start with five minutes of a, of just simple contemplation of life. Now, there are other ways to do it. Prayer is a really good way to do it too. Religious traditions are excellent at doing it, but people in a distracted world don't do that at all. you need to be in your head, you need to stop distracting yourself and systematically stop distracting yourself because in your default mode network, you'll actually start to think about things that actually matter, including the things that are in the fundamental moral basis that you've started to formulate.

54:27You need contemplation. I was thinking about this last night. I don't know why I was thinking about this, but it's how weird I am. I was thinking about why I don't pray anymore because I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about 18. Are you still Christian? No. And every time we had dinner, for my whole childhood, the family sat around the table, one of us would pray. And we'd just basically give thanks for things we're, you know, grateful for. Right. And I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith, but I was thinking last night, it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer, which is just an exercise and gratitude to be thankful for the nature of my life.

55:03And that would serve... And I don't have to pray to something. I can just pray for gratitude. Well, you can contemplate. You can contemplate the source of your gratitude. So gratitude listing is really important way for you to focus on the, we're resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias. We have a tendency to pay attention to the negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival. You know, you pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner, not the best thing that happened to the dinner. For a reason. And I mean, we've evolved to the snap of the twig behind you, does not make you think, oh, Beth, that's my friend.

55:39So that's just how we're evolved. And the way to not let that become maladapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude, which are incredibly abundant. Now, the reason you stop praying is because you don't believe there's anybody on the other end of the line. Listening, yeah. Yeah, you think that you're, it's like the ghost phone in Japan, after the tsunami, the earthquake in tsunami, A guy set up a telephone booth that's not connected, where the phone is not connected. And 30 ,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talked to the dead relatives. That's the ghost phone.

56:12And that's not satisfying for you with respect to prayer because your kid version of religion was the reason you're doing that is because you're talking to God. You've got a direct transmission mechanism to God. And now you don't think that's actually the case. So you stop doing the contemplation. Right now, it's probably worth thinking, a adult version of your faith, as opposed to being put off by the, a lot of people are really put off by the kid version of their faith. It's like really? I mean, weird stuff. It doesn't make sense, but most likely, according to the data, you're gonna start becoming interested in your Christian faith again, as you get older.

56:49It doesn't mean you're going to have the same faith that you had on the contrary, you probably won't, but you'll start being on like, you know, There's certain things I miss about that. And life actually is messy. And there is suffering that's hard to explain, but there's lots of things in life that are hard to explain. And maybe there's something in there that I didn't understand before. So openness to that. I'm not saying for sure, but I'm saying just be open to it. And then the very top is wisdom. And that requires reading or the accumulation of knowledge. Not everybody's a big reader. And there's so many different ways to get good information in this point.

57:24podcast. podcast, for example, but the whole point is reading or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition. So, you know, read the stoic philosophers, read the Nicomachian ethics of Aristotle, read the Bhagavad Gita, read the Quran, read the Bible, read, read, read, read, and start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading, which you can go years saying, I wish I read it, you know, right? It's crazy. We'll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we can spend just 15 minutes a day reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the letters of Seneca and incredibly enriching, right? It's like, wow, boom!

58:06Starting at 15 minutes a day. So, do the work, what do I believe? Spend some time in contemplation and do the reading. Your life's about to change. That's the protocol. That's the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for actually finding, starting to find meaning in your life. But I've prescribed this to others and I've done it myself and this really works. It helps you find on the path to the answers to those questions. Build the life you want. It's a book. It's a book set in front of me here that has your name on it and who's this? Oprah Winfrey. I like to give young authors a leg up. How did you, so you co -wrote this book with Oprah?

58:47Yeah, yeah. How did you meet Oprah? She called me. She said, I don't know. She said, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, not Batman. I mean, it was Oprah Winfrey. It's the voice. She's iconic all over the world for sure. And it turns out that she was a regular reader of my column in the Atlantic on Thursday mornings, how to build a life, which is a different area of the science of happiness every week that I cover. and she read my last book, which is called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the second half of life. Right? So that was a book she read on the first day.

59:21It came out and then went on her Super Soul podcast and we were thickest thieves, just immediately. Because we have the same goals as lift people up and bring them together in the spirit of happiness and love. She does it differently because she's not an academic. She has an incredible platform. I've never seen a platform like she has where, you know, she says one thing and people are like, oh, that's a good thing to do. But she's always looking for, it's interesting because she has the money and power and fame and she uses them, she's cracked the code. She uses them in service of other people.

59:53And that's her whole goal from the very beginning. She's never said anything to disobey me of the idea that that's how she lives. And we started doing some things together and some podcasts together and she called up and she said, you know, if I had my show still, I'll say for 25 years she had this iconic show on television in the United States, called the Oprah Winfrey show, and millions and millions of people lost it every day. And went off the air in about 2014 or something. She says, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times, and then you'd have your show. She said, but I don't have the show anymore.

1:00:24So let's do kind of a version of that and let me host a book. And so we wrote the book together, all over the last winter, and the winter of 2022, 2023. I went away to, she lives in Montecito, California. I went and got a house in Cenn Clawman, E. California, and we structured the thing at her place, and we went back and forth on the, and it was just a blast. It was about how to manage yourself, and once you're able to manage your own feelings and emotions like a pro, then you'll no longer be distracted, and you can focus on the things that actually matter for your life, and that's how you build your life.

1:00:59And you called me a mad scientist, Alia. I'd have to take the test. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it. The most likely, yeah. Which appears in your book in the section about the unique, sort of unique mix of happiness and happiness, and you talk about this panace school system. What are these categories? And why did you call me a mad scientist? So the panace test is in the book, and it's actually on the website at authorworks .com, or anybody can take it for free. It's a personality test based on the intensity of your positive and negative affect, aka mood. Everybody's got more or less the same emotions.

1:01:40Everybody feels joy and interest and surprise and anger and sadness and disgust and fear, but we have them in different intensities depending on who we are. There's really four kinds of people with these different intensities. There's some people that have very high affect, high positive affect, they have high highs and high negative affect, low lows. These are mad scientists. It's a quarter of the population. Now by constructions, the quarter of the population, because it's above average on both. Then there are people who are high highs and low lows. I mean, I should say that they have intense positive emotion, but weak negative emotion, right?

1:02:21These are cheerleaders. Okay. So they have, they feel their positive affect very intensely and their negative affect very weekly. Oh, okay. So they're like always happy. They're not always happy, but they tend to, they tend to be in a better mood and see the brighter side of things. They tend to downgrade threats and think everything is going to be okay. Okay. That's a core of the population. And everybody wants to be that by the way, but that's not necessarily the best way to be. And they don't make attention to threats, they don't want bad news and they have a terrible time giving bad news, or giving people bad evaluations.

1:02:57So working for a CEO who's a cheerleader is great for a minute, but then it starts to become very frustrating because you hear him telling the incompetent idiot and the cubicle next to you that she's doing an unbelievably good job. Ah, okay, right. So you got to be realistic to be good, see? I mean, you're an entrepreneur, you know, perfectly. There's lots of threats out there. You got to take them seriously. Yeah, yeah. So then there are people who are high negative low positive. These are poets. These are people who generally speaking, there's a place in the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex.

1:03:27That's the part that makes you a ruminator. Ruminators are people who, this part of the brain is dedicated to making wrong problems and negative things and regret. I can't believe that I said that thing. I feel so stupid for saying that thing and what does she really think of me, et cetera, et cetera. It's also the part of the brain that you use when you're highly creative. Comedians? Yeah, for sure. for sure. I pal around with again, in Rain Wilson, who is in the American version of the office. He played Dwight. And Rain told me that comedians tend to be depressed. But the reason is because they find out that they're funny and they can substitute humor for sadness.

1:04:06It's a substitute emotion. It's called a metacognitive technique. We talk a lot about that in the book. So then, so at Pulitzer, they tend to be high ruminators, so high negative affect. they focus a lot of negative things because of this hyperdeveloped parlor brains. They also tend to be really creative because that's the same part of your brain that when you're working on a business plan or a symphony and they also tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person. That's kind of the poet profile, right? And then last but not least there's low -low people who are low -affect people.

1:04:38These are judges. These are people who they're happy and unhappy but they feel their moods less intensely than other people. And so they don't freak out, you know? These are really good surgeons. These are really good judges. They're very good secret service agents. You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh my god, you don't want your surgeon to be like that. And so there's a gift and a role for all four of these quadrants. Most great entrepreneurs are mad scientists. Because the reason that their entrepreneurs is because they want to feel things intensely because everything is intense and they do everything intensely.

1:05:17Right? You don't have that many people who are just like super chill. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's why, you know, just having a deep conversation with you, you, I can see that you have a lot of mad scientific characteristics to you. You feel things deeply. Is that fair? It is fair. Yeah. I mean, that's the one I resonate with the most. And I do describe myself as being a bit intense. My team know me. I think I think I come across as a bit intense. What's your girlfriend? I'm gonna say that she is a cheerleader. No, I'm married to a cheerleader. I really? Yeah. And what you find is that cheerleaders, they can have the best of times, but cheerleaders tend to be struggle with the mad scientist.

1:05:59Yeah. Right? It's like, everything's so great for you. Are you gloomy? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, why can't you look at the bright side of things? Like, why are you grouchy all the time? What's wrong with you, Steve? Like, there's a spelling mistake on our... I know. I'm not going to say that. It's like, why is that bony ring? Yeah. So that's a classic thing. Everybody can be with everybody else, but the compliments are really important. The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone.

1:06:29You should look for your compliment because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert if they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not hammer in tongs all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people, you know, satisfactory dating experiences, people have more and more and more choice, but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating.

1:06:57It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way. I like this music. I live here. I like these things. I want somebody with these preferences and they get somebody who's their sibling, which is as as my adult children were in my ears, not hot. Yeah. Yeah. Difference is hot. It's so true because I never would have said, I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read it and she just believes in it all. And it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted, but I absolutely love it.

1:07:31And that means that she's actually pulled me into her world. She's made me more spiritual. She's made me believe in things I never would have believed before. And she's completing me in that regard. It's really great. It's really great. You crack the code in that way. And finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a good relationship and not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important that a relationship killer is that wishing that your partner were more like you is just a form of egotism. Everyone tries to change that part of it, they didn't they?

1:08:02Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. And I think there's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't and and Husbands are frustrated because they thought they're wise would never change and they do

1:08:17There's truth in that Relationships and love how important is this as a subject for happiness? It's the number one area of interest of my students really my every student is 28 years old So they're MBA students or master students They've all gone through college, they've gone to work, and they've come back to the Harvard Business School. You have to have some business experience to get their business master's degree. And this is the number one thing they want to talk about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain.

1:08:45And at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates, or music classic theme. And the last line of the case study is I was the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, I don't know what happened. So we look at brain scans and say, this is what happened. And you can see it in the brain. Kind of. I mean, somebody who's really in love has brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine at an x -brain scan. I mean, your brain is, if you're at a certain point in the following of the process, your brain is captured.

1:09:21So I mean, at the beginning when people meet, there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen, which are sex hormones obviously. And when people see somebody who's really attractive, that's why they wanna look attractive, because that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that, you see a big increase in neurodrenelin, aka neuroepinephrine and dopamine level. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade that's going on when you're falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is really interesting.

1:09:57So serotonin we think about as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when they feel it's an imbalance. So people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptych inhibitors, meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin. And that's all really controversial still, I mean, because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, that they're more likely to be rheumative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination.

1:10:28It'll be more active when serotonin is low. And so serotonin will be low, so you start ruminating on the other person. That's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in. And then you get to the point of attachment, which involves oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attach to the other person very profoundly attached to the other person. as intensely pleasurable. So it's like, and the longer you let it go, the harder it is for your brain not to be really, really captured. You wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say, why did you buy methamphetamine?

1:11:03That's illegal. They'll be like, I'm an addict. I'm a junkie. It's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate. Are people that are in love in relationships happier statistically? No, on the contrary. Because being in love, especially in the early stages of being in love, is not associated with what we would associate with actual happiness. Because it has jealousy, tons of jealousy, which is the rumination part. When your serotonin levels are really low, it's hard for you to say, ah, it feels so great. You feel euphoric and you like it in its own way. But if you kept that, if you stayed in that stage, you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable.

1:11:40Because there's jealousy, there's surveillance behaviors are really common. And nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner, that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes that, but people tend to do that because a lot of your brain is basically saying, I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me, back to evolution. Is this somebody who's going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids? Is this somebody who's going to be, when I don't know it, carrying somebody else's baby, which is how men and women actually, they tend to express their sexual jealousy. And those two interesting is a guy at University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy.

1:12:18The most jealousy provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else. For women, it's an image of their intimate partner saying, I love you to somebody else. And the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily, women have to be worried that their partner is going to take care of somebody else's children. and men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children, which, according to some estimates, is 15 % of paternity, which is misattributed worldwide. Makes sense. That's a lot. Yeah, it makes sense. So, fortunately, my kids look like me.

1:12:55One is adopted. She doesn't look like me. This idea in chapter four of your book of focusing less on yourself leads to happiness. How can you prove that's the case? So there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects. And so one of the classic experiments, there's these guys at Northwestern, who's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam Wates. I don't know if you've had them on your show before. He's a really impressive and innovative social psychologist. He did an experiment where he took the undergraduate students, that he always used the undergraduate pool at your university because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks.

1:13:27And he put them into three groups. One had to do moral deeds. They did it random acts of kindness. One had to do moral thoughts. They'd sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people. and one had to do self -folk sort of self -care things. Go do something that really makes you feel good. And they looked at their happiness over, you know, a series of weeks with these interventions. And they found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts and moral thoughts were happier than self -care. That's what they found. In other words, and again, this is basically showing the same thing that, you know, I did research for years and years and years about happiness and share what you're doing.

1:14:03If you're lonely, the most important thing you could do is volunteer. just this. If you give money away statistically you're more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. The reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You're empowered when you're helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That's the bottom line is what it comes down to. All of these experiments find the same thing. If you put two groups randomly selected of people, one group is playing board games and and others helping sixth graders with their math. The ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward.

1:14:41I mean, this is just helping other people helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside Steve's head and it makes it so that life actually has a transcendent aspect to it. You get perspective, you get peace, and furthermore, you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you wanna be. Is happiness or negativity contagious? Yes, that's emotional contagion. There's a lot of literature on emotional contagion. It's a virus. It's a mind virus. Negativity is a virus. Negativity is a virus, but so is positivity that you can actually see. You find that when I go into companies, which I do a lot these days, I do a lot of happiness teaching inside executive teams and corporations.

1:15:20When I walk into a company, I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around. This is why the mood and emotional well -being and emotional self -management of CEOs is so critically important. because, you know, everyone's like, oh, the boss is having a hard time today. Though I think a boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast or whatever happens to be because they can see it and the result is, the virus tends to pass around. A this sucks attitude is horrible inside families and we see it and it will transmit from one person to one person to another person to another person. That's why it's hard to live with a high negative affect person.

1:15:56That's why because high negative affect people will spread a negativity virus. even if you live down the street. Well, it depends on how much contact you have with that person. And so, you know, that's why you want your kids to hang out with positive friends. That's why you'll see when you have your kids and when my kids were little, they would have that one friend who's like happy all the time you love that kid. You have the one kid who's just bummed out all the time. You're like, I don't want my kid to be around that because that infects the attitudes of your children. In the book, you say living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25 % like clear to become happier too.

1:16:31If you have contact with that person, obviously it's not going to transmit just through the air. It's not the coronavirus. But you have to have contact with the person. But the way that they measured that, that's called the Framing Ham Heart Study, which was out in this summer of Boston. But for many, many, many years, they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives to look at heart issues. But then they started measuring everything else. and they found, for example, that obesity is highly, is very easy to catch when your friends become obese, you become more obese, that when your friends get divorced, you're more likely to get divorced, that when your friends get happy, you're more likely to get happy is what we see.

1:17:10And the more proximity that they have to you, measure geographically, or in terms of the intimacy, the relationship, the stronger the transmission mechanism. I think a lot about that and how we take on other people's problems. Yeah. When we're friends and family, what do you say to that? And does it matter that we take on other people's problems? Sort of. I mean, there's a big distinction between empathy and compassion. So the best way to be a parent or partner or a friend is to be compassionate. And that's not the same thing as empathy. Our society over values empathy. Empathy is feeling somebody else's pain.

1:17:40That's taking on their problems. The worst parents of teenagers are empathetic or highly empathetic people. It's like, I feel your pain. Why? Because you're not actually helping. You got to do things that, you know, I may feel your pain, but I can't be, I can't be paralyzed by that. I'm a contrary. I gotta do hard things you're not gonna like, son. That's what being it. That's the reason that we always say, you're not his friend, you're his dad. And that's being, be compassionate, don't be empathetic. The same thing is true with the big level. I mean, I would argue that our welfare systems in our countries need to be more compassionate as opposed to simply empathetic.

1:18:15And that we could actually help people a lot more too. Being compassionate means being hard as steel. And doing the things that people actually need because you love them, not just because you're actually feeling their pain. So in our families, we need to say, what does this person that I love actually need, not with standing, the feelings that they're transmitting to me, and sometimes that means you got to care for your own happiness. Like they say in the plane, put on your own oxygen mask first. Take care of your own happiness so you're not getting this negativity virus all the time being paralyzed by somebody else's pain.

1:18:46You're talking to the health of enough. No. It's almost never, well, I mean, there are cases when somebody is just a schism, But I only recommend Petygillian family's schism when there's abuse. And, you know, somebody being unhappy is not abuse. Political differences really not abuse. Those are, that's like, one in six Americans in this country is not speaking to a family of them or because of political differences. That's insane. That's simply insane. That does not count as any good reason to do that unless there's actual abuse. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

1:19:21And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio, as over the last year we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors.

1:19:56Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to NetSuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine that's netsweet .com slash barlet. Who's happier? Introverts or extroverts? Yes. So extroverts is the classic finding. Tons of studies signifying that extroverts have more positive affect. They tend to have higher mood, but introverts have special gifts. They have closer relationships. They have deeper emotional connections to other people. And the result of that is that they have long -term friendship and marriage partners that sustain them in a way that extroverts don't.

1:20:41Extroverts often can get really lonely because they are your nextvert? It's such an interesting question. Because you might not be even like your mad scientist. I didn't think I am. Do you get when you're at a party, do you find that you get exhausted? I like to check he's known me many many years, five years, I'm an introvert. I just want to be a line. So when you're at a party, do you find that it sucks energy out of you? I don't go to the party. Certainly your baseline is introversion but you have extroverted characteristics because you're able to do good entrepreneurs know how to be extroverts when they need to be, which is important.

1:21:10You run a podcast. If you were a true introvert, it's like, I got to meet Arthur Brooks. What a pain. No, I like deep conversations. I don't think it's a small talk. You do have close friends? Oh, yeah, the same five guys. I've known five guys. You've known since college. Yeah, basically no others. Other than this, like here, who I consider friends, but the same five that I've known for 12, 12 years. They're real friends, not deal friends. No, they're real friends. Yeah. They were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself. Same time, guys. So that's interesting. But so extroverts, they tend to get more short -term happiness and introverts tend to have more long -term happiness.

1:21:41So what you find is that extroverts, they tend to get more enjoyment and introverts tend to get more meaning. Metacognition. You use this word earlier on when we talk about happiness. It sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness and some respects. What is metacognition? Explain this like a 10 -year -old. Yeah, okay. So metacognition simply means thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions. That's what metacognition is all about. So the motions are produced in the limbic system of the brain an ancient part of the brain. You react to them and decide what they mean in the prefrontal cortex, the C -suite of your head.

1:22:17That takes time. Those are not the same place. You need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain. which is the part of the front. The part of the front, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. So when your kids are little, when your kids are 10, and they're freaking out about something, you don't say, don't be so limbic, you say, use your words, what you're saying is being metacognitive. Allow yourself to explain this thing that you're feeling, and it's so doing you're using your prefrontal cortex as opposed to relying on the limbic tissue of your brain. So writes it down would be an example.

1:22:49Writing, if journally, is phenomenal, classic case. So you're anxious. Yeah. Anxiety is unfocused fear. That's what it is. Fear was adapted in the human species, so to be episodic and intense. The way that fear is supposed to work is that something happens, it alarms you, it illuminates the amygdala of your brain. That sends a signal from the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, which then signals the adrenal gland, sitting about the kidneys to spit out stress hormones. This happens in 74 milliseconds of the perception of a threat in the occipital lobe of your brain, where your visual cortex exists.

1:23:26Boom, this thing happens really, really quick. This has saved your life many, many times, thousands of times, because you're living in London and you can get run over at any given second. It's crazy. Well, actually, because I'm looking the wrong direction for oncoming traffic, that's my problem there. So that's how that works is the whole point. So fear is supposed to work that way. Very episodic, very occasional. The problem in modern life is that we have all of these vague threats that are happening that are kind of half -aluminated or amygdala, which is giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time, and that's unfocused and freaking us out.

1:24:01So the way to actually solve that problem in a cognitive, is say, okay, okay, I gotta focus it. I gotta be a paper. Number one, number one thing that I'm afraid of right now, that's actually giving me this anxiety, is giving me this discomfort, write it down. Why is it happening? What's the worst thing that can happen? And what would I do if that happened? And you're literally moving the experience from the amygdala, which is the emotional center to the prefrontal cortex, which is the logical, which is that's your C -suite. And that should kill the anxiety. It will greatly attenuate the anxiety.

1:24:36It will turn it into a logical kind of fear that's the right reaction to these threats. And it will change your life. So if you do that, if you're experiencing a lot of anxiety, you know, unfocused fear, focus it every day for 10 minutes, write it down. I have a very anxious person. I have a running list of the things that I'm afraid of. A running list. I have lots and lots of lists. I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critical. Important. I also have a failure list. What are you afraid of? I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of failing. I'm a total striver from the very beginning. Failing?

1:25:09What is what failure look like? I know. That's the thing. It's an unfocused fear. And so when I write it down and I focus it, I go, yeah, it's true. You know, that's the point. So it's that failure is a specter for strivers. It's a kind of a When you look at it, it goes away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but when you're not looking at it is there and part of the reason is because your self -image is one of somebody who's Successful so your self -objectifying is a successful person your success addicted meaning the ventral stratum of your brain gets tapped every time somebody says Steve you got another Seven million downloads or something that is not inherently meaningful in that particular way because the metric is actually what taps your and then again and again and again.

1:25:50And so then if that's going in the wrong direction, and you're not making progress, then that sort of feels somehow not successful, which means that things are going in the wrong direction, and that's just like this phantasm, right? It's like, okay, focus it, focus it, look at it, boof, right? It doesn't entirely disappear. It turns into what it really is, which is a mouse, not a lion. Arthur, your book is fantastic. I mean, we could talk for so long because there's so much more in it. there's some of the unbelievable stats that I was reading about around social media and this one stood about a study showing that teens who texted more often than their peers experienced more depression anxiety and poor relationships.

1:26:28The other things about laughter and that you can feel 35 % happier using some humor therapy. All of these things gratitude, all of these things that we haven't haven't covered, but they're all in this fantastic, fantastic book, which is so unbelievably accessible for someone that's as smart as you. Opera head, okay. Oh, okay, right. Yeah, go. Yeah. And I thank you for that because happiness is a complex thing and I think there's an industry out there that are trying to Simplify it and put it down to three steps to happiness or one this one secret to happiness We're trick don't you grace you know whatever?

1:27:01Yeah, but your approach provides the nuance and the complexity that the subject matter deserves and I think that offers us a path towards Being happier as you talk about in the book We have I wrote it I wrote for you. Oh Well, it actually reads like you wrote it for me. That's the kind of, but I imagine everyone that reads it's going to feel that way. I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book, ASAP. It's a really, really beautiful book as well. It's so beautiful. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1:27:32What are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control? What is your opinion on this? The things that we can't control are virtually all outside ourselves. We have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where there are many things that we can't control and focus on the things that we can. How do we deal with things that we can't control by refocusing our intention on the parts of our life that we actually can, thus giving us agency and giving us a sense of peace and perspective about the truly uncontrollable. After, thank you so much. So wonderful to meet you.

1:28:08You've energized me this morning. We started pretty early for me. This is super early. No, it's so interesting. I appreciate it so much. I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Steve. It's wonderful to be with you. I've admired you for such a long time. I get to meet you in person. It's been a joy. That means the world to me. Someone is profound and as smart as you to say that to me means a ton. So thank you so much, Arthur, for the bottom of my heart. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you, you too. Thank you. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done So I've linked that episode in the description below.

1:28:41I know you'll enjoy it

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