Arthur C. Brooks: Are We Happy Yet?

29:55Which is not the promise of happiness. No, but the pursuit. You know what I mean? The pursuit. So I want to know from you as somebody who studied it, how do you define happiness? So first, what is it not? It's not a feeling. The biggest mistake that we make is misunderstanding emotions. Most people think that happiness is a feeling. But happiness is a feeling kind of like your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of your turkey. It's not. The smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner. And the feeling of happiness is evidence of actual happiness. Happiness has, like your Thanksgiving dinner, has three macronutrients, three constituent parts that you need to get really good at understanding and changing your habits around.

30:35Number one is enjoyment, which is not the same thing as pleasure. If you're pursuing pleasure, you're not going to find happiness. You're going to find rehab. And it's very different, understanding the difference between pleasure and enjoyment. Second is satisfaction, which is the joy that you get from an accomplishment after struggle. And the accomplishment is not more important than the struggle for satisfaction. And the third is meaning. That's what I'm doing most of my work on for now years. Meaning, the meaning of life. You know, what is the why of your existence? You need to become an elite athlete in enjoying your life, taking satisfaction in your accomplishments and your achievements, and understanding the why of your existence.

31:12Those are your three big jobs. Enjoying them. You want to be a happier person. That's what it comes to. And then a lot of the time, you'll get the feeling of happiness. Not all the time, but that's not what you can rely on. So happiness is the byproduct of the actions that you are taking. Yeah. So the feeling of happiness is a byproduct. The feeling, right. The happiness itself is the amount of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning that you're experiencing in your life. Yeah. That's kind of like the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat that you eat is the amount of food and calories that you're getting.

31:39That's what it comes down to. That's how to think about it. And each one of those things is really important. Some people, the good news is nobody's great across all of these things. I have tests that I give my students to find out where, in which macronutrient they need work. I know a lot of people who take tons of satisfaction in what they do because they have a lot of achievements and they've worked hard and they've struggled. Yeah. But they don't know why they're doing it. They have a low sense of meaning. And I know a lot of really big executives, hedge fund managers and private equity people, people make a ton of dough.

32:09People that everyone are sort of aspiring to. And they don't enjoy their lives at all because they don't know how to enjoy. And what are they lacking in those instances? So somebody comes into your world who says, Professor Brooks, man, I'm nailing it. I'm satisfied in this realm. You know, I'm doing it. Man, I just don't feel good. What do you find they're missing? Or why is it so difficult to experience that happiness if they're missing meaning? So if they're missing meaning, then there will be no reason for what they're doing. So meaning really has three, meaning is the most, is the heaviest, most philosophical part of it all, but it's the most important of these macronutrients.

32:44It's the protein. It's basically the protein of your happiness. Okay. Yeah. So meaning is really a combination of being able to answer three questions. Why do things happen the way they do in life? That's coherence. And some people answer that with religion. And some people answer that with science. I'm both religious and a scientist for both. Some people, here's a funny thing. You know people who follow a lot of conspiracy theories. That's very common today. Going down the rabbit hole, are you a conspiracy theorist? Generally speaking - I love your Batman voice. The best one I've heard yet. The what?

33:14We had Mamdani trying. It was okay. You rate the sword more? Yeah, yeah. No, Mamdani still wins it for me. The Batman voice? you're a conspiracy theorist it's not bad it's actually not bad I'm actually I'm auditioning to be the next Batman I realize it's called Bald Batman no you read the that's why I know but Bruce Wayne he has a beautiful head of hair this is true I know but not now it's a new day it's a new day so you're saying So, okay, so... Conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists are looking for coherence. They're looking for an answer to the question, why do things happen the way that they do?

33:56So when I meet somebody who's really down the rabbit hole of weird conspiracy theories, that is a dead giveaway that what they're looking for is coherence because they want meaning, because they want to get happier. That's where I'm going to actually work with that person. I'm going to work with that person in alternative ways. I'm not going to say you're an idiot. I'm not going to say that's not true. I'm not going to say, you know, go read the paper, for God's sake. I'm going to say, let's work on different ways to understand why things happen the way that they do. I'm going to try to reconnect them with the faith of their youth.

34:24I'm going to try to get them really interested in science. Different nutritious ways to actually understand why things happen the way they do. So it's not erasing their curiosity nor their need to find coherence, but it's finding a healthier balance of those ingredients. It's a redirection. Okay. It's a redirection towards something that will truly bring you a sense of coherence while not alienating you from the people at your next table. So that's number one. It's just one element. But while you're still on that though, let's talk on that one element. Does that apply to everything? So can you meet somebody who, for instance, is so religious that they're not having a good time in life?

34:55Or can you meet somebody who is so science-based that they're not having a good time in life? Or does it only apply to like conspiracy? Well, conspiracy theories tends to be kind of antisocial. And so if something that your sense of coherence is pulling you away from your love relationships, then that's going to be militating against another one of the elements of meaning, which is significance. Significance is that your life matters to someone. Your life has to matter to someone. So here's the significant other part. It has to be your spouse, your kids, your parents, your friends, God. Oh, wow.

35:26You need to be significant. And when you're doing something with your sense of coherence, like conspiracy theories that's ruining your relationships, then coherence goes up, but significance goes down, and you're defeating the purpose. Those are different elements that have to be in balance. You become an expert in that subject, but alone in it. and if my mom said this a lot nice I gotta make your mom because already your mom has made two appearances yes my mom used to say if you love being right you'll be right alone it makes so much sense you'll be certainly unmarried

35:59it's a good way to stay a bachelor you cut it too deep I've been married 34 years I'm wrong a lot but I guess that's the foundation of all relationship right is is significant in fact all society funny enough even if you just keep expanding on it it becomes the like how much do you care about being right being right i mean that's the whole basis of our you know culture of contempt that's a whole basis of the fact that we can't get along politically that we have ideological wars cancel culture all of it is this grievance about having to be right all the time as opposed to huh i wonder i wonder somebody actually is saying something interesting to me inquiry is not about being right inquiry is about learning.

36:41But the system isn't designed to reward that. Activism is about being right. Yes. And so when you get the wrong balance of inquiry and activism, it turns the ship over. Yeah. And that's why I'm saying the system is important though. Because what you just said about like our childhoods, something forms you, something shapes you. And oftentimes it's how the people around you responded to an action that you took. Right. Right. So now because of your suspenders, they respond to you a certain way. Because of the way you sing, you responded to, because of the way I tripped, they responded to me a certain way.

37:09because of the way you felt. People respond to you a certain way. You respond. When we're living in a world where the systems themselves are rewarding people for one versus the other, you don't get rewarded for compassion online. Let's be honest. You don't. It's an entirely different scale of reward that you get. You get rewarded, but you don't get the same scale of reward, the same intensity of reward. Yes. Which is really, really important. You get a slow burn of what you're actually able to have. You have a different kind of impact. You have to become, I guess, comfortable with the idea that you're not going to get the same intensity of reaction.

37:47And part of the reason for that, by the way, is the limbic system of the brain has more tissue dedicated to negative emotion than to positive emotion. Why is that? Because in the evolutionary environment, in the place to scene, you needed negative emotions more than you needed positive emotions. Negative emotions are an alarm. Yeah, to avoid danger. So fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, those are the four negative emotions. You're good, man. He's a professor He's a professor I love the idea that Eugene would be in your class Like yo this guy Yo Hey my man I think you're going to ace this class This guy This guy in the front By the way I love your fly Keep it down Keep it down

38:31You're a horrible friend Now he's yours Arthur Perfect I got students who are big fans of yours like I was there that day I felt threatened I felt unsafe actually let's by the way I'm going to hold that we're going down this is good this is like a nesting doll this is exactly what it is this is like a matryoshka Russian let's go let's go yes but no no we'll hold that and we'll let's so keep let's move so the negative emotions so the negative emotions exist because those are alarm systems for the things that can kill you You know, you have sadness so that you will not be rejected by your kin. In the Pleistocene, human homo sapiens lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals.

39:16Okay. Kin-based hierarchical bands of individuals. And the Pleistocene, starting 250 ,000 years ago, was when we got the modern brain. Our brains are the same. And so all the weird stuff that we do today is because it was suitable to being in hierarchical kin-based bands of 30 to 50 individuals. It explains almost everything. It explains how genders work together. It explains why we have envy, why we try to climb in hierarchies, why we want to be famous. All that stuff is actually explained by this, the Pleistocene brain is what it comes down to. But also that Pleistocene brain had a lot more space for the negative emotions.

39:52Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions keep you alive. and so if you hear a little snap of a twig behind you your first reaction is not i bet that's my friend trevor who's come to say hi you know like you run and ask questions later and and you know you you want to make sure that you're not going to be abandoned you want to make sure you're not going to get killed you want to make sure you don't ingest poison that's what disgust is for there's a beautiful little place in the limbic system called the and the the insular cortex and that little thing is your disgust mechanism and that's all that kept you from ingesting poison before there was like vaccines and antibiotics.

40:28It was just a signifier that this thing could kill you. Yeah, that's why something that smells dead, something that smells rotten, that's why it disgusts you. And that's why your dog, who's very disgusting by the way, that's why he licks the floor because he is actually not going to be exposed to the same kind of pathogens because of the constituent parts of his saliva that can neutralize some of the germs that you can't. That's why he's like, that's not disgusting. And yet you think that's disgusting and you tell your kids not to lick the floor. Anyway, I digress. The whole point is thank God for negative emotions.

40:58They've kept you alive again and again and again and again. But now you want to be in a place where your negative emotions are in control? Well, you want to manage them so they don't manage you because we're not in the place to sing. And that's why we have this great big prefrontal cortex, all this tissue behind the forehead, 30 % of your brain by weight. That gives you consciousness, right? Your dog doesn't have consciousness. your dog doesn't know it's alive your dog doesn't know it's going to die your dog doesn't have future ideas or past ideas your dog's just here now it's why your dog's happier than you can tell time oh whoa whoa whoa whoa because your dog it's why your dog is happier because your dog's mindful your dog is like you're thinking about well i gotta do this thing i hope i guess i hope my flight's on time tomorrow and you know it's like i got this thing it's oh man i haven't had a falling out with somebody to really care about and what's going to happen next year and what if the economy tanks and your golden retriever is like i'm sitting here with trevor you are remembering your dog is enjoying your dog is here now here now you're not you're in the future so does that also mean that your dog can experience a lot more stress and pain because the now can last forever for it well like let's say your dog is experiencing an adverse experience right is that thing lasting forever in its mind well the limbic system for the dog is pretty the The homo sapiens and canines, they actually evolved in parallel.

42:20Okay. So they have very, very similar emotions. So when you think, when your dog looks at you with love, do you have a dog? No, I had one. Yeah. And your dog looked at you with love, right? Yeah, absolutely. Your dog was feeling love. Your dog actually gets oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide in the brain, the bonding hormone, the sense of love that you get when you look at your kids and your friends and your beloved. Your dog looks at you and you stroke the dog and give your dog eye contact. It's a 56 % bump in oxytocin, just like you. Wow. Your cat, 12%. I knew it, assholes. I always say this.

42:52Your dog loves you. Your cat tolerates you. We shouldn't even say your cat. You should say the cat. The cat can do without you. Hey, let's say the cat you live with. Please, let's stop perpetuating this myth. It is not your cat. It is a cat that lives at your house. Eating your food. Those things do not, that is not your cat. There are a few cats that are exceptions. I know some cat owners are like, my cat's nice. That's your cat. It's an outlier. Most cats, they're not your friends. Cats are takers. Huh? my man yeah anyway we digress again so that's about you know negative emotion is really really interesting and useful is the whole point about that where were we at we're talking about meaning meaning was the thing which i did so we did coherence and significance yes but there's one more yeah the most important one purpose purpose so everybody thinks meaning and purpose are the same they're not they're not the same purpose is a subcomponent of meaning that's your goals and direction and sense of what you're doing with your life it's the answer to the question why am i doing what I'm doing?

43:45And if you don't know the answer to the question, why am I doing what I'm doing? You're not going to have meaning. You're not going to be happy. That's why if you have kids, one of the most important ways to actually motivate them to do things with more joy is to give them a sense of purpose, which is goals and direction for a better future. Give me an example of that at like different age levels for a parent, for instance. So let's say it's a five-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 25-year-old. So a five-year-old is, the way that you motivate a five-year-old is that you say, if you're a good little boy, Santa Claus is going to bring you some nice presents.

44:19Okay. You're motivating them to behave in a particular way happily because that's their kind of little kid purpose. Got it. Is getting the Christmas morning and getting a bunch of stuff under the tree. You get a little bit older, it's like get good grades in school, you're going to get to go to a good university and you're going to have a better life. When you get a little bit older in life, it's going to be, if you actually behave in a particular way, you're going to meet the love of your life. And that's really going to complete you. So it's always reward-based. It's always reward. Are we just like reward?

44:46It's kind of goal-based. It's kind of getting to a particular goal and making progress toward the goal. So how we're really wired, which is really interesting. Yeah. We think that what we really want is the reward. What we really want is progress toward the reward. and if we think that we're going to be in bliss when we get to the reward we're going to we suffer from a syndrome called arrival fallacy it's a funny thing it's very common to olympic athletes who win the gold suffer a clinical depression in the two two months after they win the gold because they've been suffering suffering and suffering and they think that all this progress which was awesome is actually going to lead to permanent bliss when they win the gold and it's just another day they go back to their hotel they're like you know looking at the wall Around their neck.

45:28Yeah, with the thing around their neck. And it's just another day. And they're looking at the rest of their lives when they're no longer winning Olympic gold medals. And it's very, very depressing. So this is a funny thing about dieting is another example of this. All diets will make you lose weight. I mean, except for the all candy corn diet or something, right? I mean, it's like any sensible diet. You can cut fat, you can cut carbs, you can cut, right? You'll lose weight. And it's awesome, right? If you're trying to lose weight because the scale goes down. It's a reward every single day in progress toward the goal.

45:54But what's the reward when you actually hit your target weight. And that's never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Damn. That's why diets don't work. They got about an 80 % failure rate and 30 % of people who go on strong diets and hit their goal developing eating disorder because they want to keep making progress. Because progress is everything in life. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break. Picture this. You're about to take off for a long flight, and suddenly you realize the Wi-Fi is out. Ladies and gentlemen, the Wi-Fi is not working.

46:31You've already seen most of the in-flight movies, and the book you brought feels more like homework than pleasure. This, my friends, is when you'll love having YouTube premium. Downloading videos before a flight is a must. You can be sitting 30 ,000 feet in the air halfway through a fascinating interview, a travel documentary, or a cooking series you've somehow become emotionally invested in. No Wi-Fi, no problem. You also get ad-free viewing and background play. So if you need to shut off your screen to rest your eyes or devote your attention to eating those little Biscoff cookies without getting crumbs everywhere, you can still keep listening to your content.

47:11And honestly, a long flight might be my favorite time to have YouTube Premium because suddenly you have something you almost never have on the ground, hours to yourself. So before a flight, You can almost build your own entertainment system. Maybe there's an interview you've been saving because it's two hours long. A documentary somebody told you about, a live performance you never got around to watching. Something completely random you've always wanted to understand. That's the fun of it. You get on the plane with this little world you've chosen for yourself, and for the next few hours, you can go wherever your curiosity takes you.

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49:34I think about conversations I have with my younger brother are always fascinating to me because of how he sees the world. He's one of the smartest people I know. and I always tell him at his age, he's way smarter than I ever was, maybe even now, you know? But we had this conversation about video games. And I said to him, there's a video online that I really loved. And it was some kid who made this video said, how you play video games is how you live your life, right? And I was so intrigued by this because he did this whole breakdown. He said, some people play video games to finish the video game.

50:08They get in, they try and finish the story as quickly as possible, get to the end, save the princess, you know, end the story thank you very much and he said some people play video games and then get bored and quit everyone has different methods but he said but you can learn a lot about yourself because playing a video game especially in today's games like a simulation of how you are and I realized for myself and I realized for what a good game is great games are the ones that make you feel like you're trying to finish the game but constantly trick you into doing things along the way the side quests that make you feel like you're actually trying to get to the end, but you get so swept up in these mini moments along the way that you enjoy the game itself.

50:52Because it's the progress. But those are the great games. It's the journey. Yeah, they do it for you, but I've realized. And they do say it like that, it's progress. Yes. You get progress points. They literally write progress. But I've noticed in the games where they don't do that for you, if you're not careful, you can, and I'd love you to speak to this beyond gaming, but it's like, if they don't do it for you, there's some games where you can literally just go straight to the end as quickly as possible and be done and i find you can be very depressed as you say you get there and you're like oh i don't know about this i don't like this game this was it you know and it was too hard by the way because you didn't like level up the way you should have or this the inverse where is you spend so much time in the side quests that you don't move towards progress because nothing's pushing you nothing's propelling you not you know what i mean right and then what happens is you quit the game right so you play like 40 of the game you do everything around getting to the end but then you don't get to the end because the game didn't it's i forget what they call it but essentially some games will dole it out in the right amount you're moving forward now you're moving sideways sideways moving forward sideways some go do whatever you want and it's interesting how that flips and i wondered how how that applies to life in what you're saying to almost everything is like this people who who truly are all about enjoying the journey they enjoy their lives because they understand that life is all about making progress toward particular moral goals.

52:11People who are all about actually getting to the end. So what's the best predictor of having a crummy marriage is having a destination wedding. Why? Because your wedding isn't a destination. Your wedding is just like the beginning of a journey. Destination wedding, destination. My destination is actually - You're beginning something with the end. Locking that person down forever. No, there's no destination in your wedding. elope justice of the peace i'm catholic don't do that we're catholics we don't do that yeah priest go to a priest go to a priest go to a priest there you go i wanted it in zulu oh yeah no zulu because you know my grandparents didn't lose it this man is 10 months zulu you don't forget that it's like it's an epigenetic expression that you know is gonna come out.

53:02So this is really important, right? You gotta see your wedding day as a step in progress toward the eternal bliss that actually comes from a relationship, your soulmate with whom you can actually experience the divine and on whose face you'll be gazing as you take your dying breath. That's marriage. That's poetry. Marriage isn't wedding day. So then do you think the worst thing we've done, and I'm not trying to incept you because this is what I think, but I'll tell you what I think and you tell me if you agree. I've often thought one of the worst things that happened to society was a series of movies, whether it was kids movies or adult movies, rom-coms, but that were happily ever after.

53:49They ended at the moment where the people met. And I always wondered what that did to people's brains growing up in a world where they went like, oh, if you meet the person you love, That's the end And then it's like This is it That's right What is that Pac-Man did that to us as well I never finished Pac-Man Remember There was They Meet And then Ms. Pac-Man Yeah but I've never Seen the end of Pac-Man Yeah I saw Junior Pac-Man I saw Junior Pac-Man So I know what they did But I don't know But there's Junior Pac-Man Yeah Junior Pac-Man Junior Pac-Man There was Junior Pac-Man Junior Pac-Man Yeah Junior Pac-Man Like baby Yeah like a tiny little Pac-Man Had a little bow And then So was it a girl Pac-Man There was a boy and a girl Assistant No there was Ms.

54:27Pac-Man But then there was also Pac-Man. Junior Pac-Man. Yeah, no, no. The whole family. Yeah, Pac-Man had... I like these family values in video games like this. Yeah, no, Pac-Man did it, bro. I was like, okay. Yeah, Mario and Luigi did it well. They were brothers, bro. I think you're mixing up the story. They were family members. Oh, yeah, they were. My kids are, you know, they'd be like, what are these guys? Pac-Man? Okay, Elden Ring. Fine, we'll bring in Elden Ring. Super Mario? Call of Duty. We'll go with... We got every game covered here. You tell us the generation and we've got you. We've got you.

54:56we got you it doesn't matter what it is but but help help us on like yeah this is a problem happily ever after actually gives you distorted understanding what brings happiness in life it's the journey it's the journey is that it's it's walking into the future together with your beloved it's actually the the the process of actually lewis and clark looking for and going down the missouri rivers they're going toward the pacific ocean it's not the pacific ocean you just have to have there's a there's a really great word in spanish that's a metaphoric word It's a sailing word. It's called rumbo. Rumbo.

55:27Rumbo. El rumbo. El rumbo. El rumbo. El rumbo is that the word in English is rum line. R-H-U-M line. Boring. And it's a sail. But it's not a metaphor that we use typically. That is the destination that's a Euclidean straight line from here to there. It's like the piece of yarn with a pin on the end of it. Right? Flying like, what do they call it? Straight as the crow flies? As the crow flies. As the crow flies. As the crow flies. Exactly right. And that's an important concept because you say, I want my life to have el rumbo. Yo quiero que mi vida tenga un rumbo. That's what you would say in Spanish, right?

56:03And what that means basically is I want to have a destination. I want to have something that is the arrival so that I can make progress. The point is not that you're going to be on this line the whole time. The point is that you have to have it, but because you can't make the journey without it. Otherwise, you're going to be like a, you know, so depressing about cruises. There's a cruise ship. I don't want that. I don't want to get in a boat and just go in circles. Okay. Because that doesn't feel like you're making progress. Now you're a Roomba. Very different. Nice. Not going in one straight line.

56:37That's like the vacuum cleaner, right? Yes. That little, have you seen how that thing moves? You don't want your life like that. Didn't they just go bankrupt? Didn't the company go bankrupt? I wouldn't be shocked because, I mean, have you seen that thing? These kind of reviews. No wonder. Of course. It's a metaphor of unhappiness. So what do you want? So that's interesting. You want to be in a place where, I mean, this requires a total rewiring of the brain. Like how I, I even think about myself. I don't know how you'd think about it for years, but I think a lot of people would relate to this idea of going, wait, wait, wait, wait.

57:06But Professor Brooks, I've been told, get the job and then life works. No, get the grades. Get the grades. And then I'm going to get the job. The grades is the job. And then get the house. Get the job. Then you get the house. You're going to be happy. Get the person you live in the house with. you get the marriage you get the marriage it's like guys even say like if you marry me you'll make me happy for the rest of my life that's what they say and i got look i got date on that no it doesn't matter what you say on your wedding day it matters what you say every day after that so what should you say to somebody not if you marry me then let's go on a journey together help complete me because together we'll wire our batteries together we'll create an antenna to god Yeah, teach me something.

57:49That's beautiful. Let's walk through life together. Yeah. I want to walk through life together. Damn, that's different. Yeah, it's a completely different perspective, but it actually makes perfect sense, and people kind of know that that's the case. And if you don't do that, by the way, there's an easy neurobiology on why this happens. We think that if we get that thing, that burst of positive emotion, and there's this funny little part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. When you tap it, it gives you this sense of euphoria. And so you can get it from, you know, your girlfriend says, I love you.

58:22Or you can get it from a huge bump of cocaine. We have very thrifty brains. It's the same part of it. What a broad spectrum. Yeah, totally. And it gives you the sense of immediate ebullience, joy, right? And we think we get that thing that we really want, that the ventral tegmental area is going to get tapped over and over and over again. But let me tell you, if you do something that taps your ventral tegmental area continuously, you're going to wind up in rehab. You're in drugs. Yep. You're an addict. I mean, that's exactly. So is that because we weren't designed to have the ventral tegmental tapped that many times?

58:54We're not designed to feel emotion continuously. Yeah. Remember, emotions are an alarm that there's something good for you or something bad for you that you should approach or avoid. The reptilian part of your brain in the back of your head is sensing stuff, sensing stuff, sensing stuff. That sends data to the limbic system, which is between 2 and 40 million years old. It predates Homo sapiens. And that's what creates emotions. Emotions are reactions, a universal language to you that there's something out there that there's a threat or an opportunity. And the opportunities give you positive emotion.

59:26And the threats out there give you negative emotion. And they clear really quickly so you're ready for the next thing. So should we be in nothing states? No, no, no, no. We should actually say understand our emotions, not chase them as if we're going to keep them forever. For example, if you're looking for continuous positive emotion on the basis of what you have or experience, you get on what we call the hedonic treadmill. Ah, yes. You've heard about this. Hedonic adaptation. Yeah, hedonic adaptation, which is basically, I get the person that I love, I get the money, I get the millionth Instagram follow, whatever my thing is.

59:59You just keep shifting your, yeah. And you're just running, running, running, running, running. and that treadmill starts speeding up until it's going with terrifying speed. And then you're afraid to step off it because you're in a face plant if you try to step off a speeding treadmill. Yeah. And that's no way to live. And you're hedonically adapting, which is called homeostasis, where the brain is adapting emotionally back to the baseline state. So you're ready for the next set of circumstances. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received in my life came from my best friend's dad when we were still in school.

1:00:26And they had grown to do well for themselves. They didn't, you know, he didn't grow up doing well. And so he had a nice car. They had a very decent house, but it wasn't like super wealthy. It wasn't a mansion or anything. But I remember speaking to him once and I said, I asked him, I was like, yo, Babanzele, can I ask you a question? How much money do I need to earn to be like happy and to be set and to be good? What did he tell you? And he said to me, he said, yes, Trevor. He said, can I tell you something? He said, I know some people, and this was, I mean, now 20 years ago. He said, I know some people who earn, and he said like, he said, I know some people who earn 5 ,000 Rand a month, $500, let's say, or 250, whatever.

1:01:04And he's like, and I know some people who earn 50 ,000 Rand a month. I was like, 50 ,000 Rand a month? That's impossible. No one can earn that kind of money. And he's like, no. I said, let me tell you now. He said, I know more of my friends who earn the five, 10 ,000 rand a month who are happy than I do the ones who earn the 50 ,000. He said, because with them, they spend that money and more every month, then get depressed that they only have it. And then they try and move it to 60. Then they spend 60. Then they move it to 70. Then they spend 70. Then he said, I've watched them move up that ladder.

1:01:36And he said, I'm like 16 years old. And he said to me, I know it seems like a myth, but there is no number. he said i've seen everyone in my life he said they just there is no number and i was like i i just i can't believe anyone wouldn't be happy with 50 000 a month my brain is like that's not possible the same thing is true with power and the same thing is true with pleasure and the same thing is true with fame fame is the worst by the way fame is the only one of life's rewards that you can only ever be happy in spite of never because of but you want to be famous everybody wants to be famous because fame is rising in the hierarchy of your band of 30 to 50 individuals where more people are thinking about you than you're thinking about because you'll get more you're more likely to survive get your caloric needs met and get lots of mates the trouble is that we can't accommodate that tendency to a world in which we can actually be famous in front of millions of people that will make you literally insane okay it will make you literally insane unless you're very self-governing unless you're really self-managing and you know tons of people in show business yeah that are pretty nuts they're pretty nuts because they're on this treadmill of more and more and more and i can't have enough it's like drinking seawater the more that i drink this the thirstier i get dehydrated they get exactly right it's it's it's also it also does this thing to you where you know when you think about like the fame of it all and how powerful it is i've often thought one of the most genius things that tiktok did that i don't think any other social media platform ever did but I watched it on TikTok TikTok allows everyone to go viral if you look at old social media there was sort of like the hierarchy that existed in old media moved into it so on Instagram it was still like oh the most video the most watch is the Kardashian there's this actor and this is you know what I mean it was very difficult to just be random random right and have no no no TikTok go to people's accounts watch how there's one video almost everyone has that is an outlier That's a blip in their world.

1:03:34And then watch how their usage and posting exponentially jumps off the list. This is Vegas. It works the brain in the same way. Las Vegas? Yeah. So the way to get rich is to work really hard and get a good education and be responsible and show up and create value and create some more value. And then dot, dot, dot, 30 or 40 years later, you got a bunch of money. Or go to a casino and get a hit. and so the result is I want the easy way right roulette that's TikTok that's how the algorithm works I'm gonna get a hit I'm gonna hit fast because the brain the videos get more and more extreme your mind they give you one and I've watched people never been on TikTok I've watched people like so crazy this is the random thing thank God for me my friend signed up to TikTok for me when it first came out I was like I can't keep up anymore and he was like no no no I'll just do it for you because you don't want to lose your account.

1:04:31It's going to be the biggest thing. He was right. And because he was on it for me, he was just using it and he lived in like West Virginia and all the content was to him. And so till this day, our algorithm, the algorithm is not like completely correct and it didn't hook me. So I get to enjoy TikTok as a pop, but I've never - As a bystander. I've literally never been on TikTok for more than six minutes, seven minutes. I deleted them because of that. Ah, yeah, because they hooked you. So I had to put as many - Which one? Which one got you the most? Any of them could - Twitter? Twitter could get me like all day, every day.

1:05:06Really? Twitter? Woo-wee! No, no, no. News, news from here. Information, information. Did you know this about that? Very political. Any information, it's got you. And then Instagram. Ah, got you, got you, got you. It doesn't matter what. Got you, got you, got you, got you. So you took the apps off your phone? Yeah, I deleted them. And then now what I do is I log in on a browser, which is painful. Right. It doesn't render correctly. Yeah, yeah. The images are off. Sometimes it doesn't load. Just that block. You're trying to actually increase the transaction cost. Yeah, that's all I do, genuinely.

1:05:33Because I don't believe, I've tried many times to go like, I can handle this. I even put a block on my phone, like 10 minutes, 20 minutes. I was like, I got this. And then my phone would be like, you've reached your limit. And I'd be like, shut up, phone. And I'll just go back in. One good way to do this, by the way, is put your phone on black and white. Because it'll actually make your brain work differently as you interact with social media. Like when you change the color scale, gray scale on the phone. Gray scale on the phone. That actually works. You'll be significantly less addicted. That actually, wait, how does that work?

1:06:01So it's basically like drinking 3-2 beer. I don't know what that means. That means 3.2 % alcohol. Oh, okay, got it. And you'll be like bloated and peeing and you'll be like, I'm going to stop drinking beer. It just doesn't have enough alcohol in it too. Oh, to keep you buzzing. Yeah, yeah. To keep you buzzing, you have to do something that's way beyond your level of boredom. and so my oldest son for example has i mean my two i have three kids 27 25 and 22 my 25 and 22 year old they're in they're in in the military yeah so no i mean they're not they're not active on social media they can't be my oldest son he figured out that it wasn't going to be good for his life so he put army no marines i'm saying i got two marines what was not going to be good for his life social media or the military no oh no no no my oldest son who isn't in the military he put grayscale on his phone for social media yeah a long time ago and he's never been addicted he's never been addicted what is that doing to the brain explain that so there's a your brain interacts with visually with social media and the stimuli with social media in a lot of ways so anything that you get addicted to is is involving dopamine you know dopamine is the is the neuromodulator of liking learning wanting craving and we have it because we need to learn we need to be more effective as a species so when something comes along you get a little reward from it it's like and the next time you think about it you get a minor reward which will send you in search of doing that thing again but if it's just like it was the day before it's not going to be as much and you want to get a little bit more spritz of dopamine from the locus coeruleus it goes in your brain so you got to get more of it fuel injection is how this works right yeah and the stimulus the more visually stimulating something actually is more beautiful the more animated it is the more that it looks kind of like real life yeah the more dopamine you get is what it comes down to so my son my oldest son very wise he just gets less dopamine from this thing and since he's getting less dopamine from it it's less rewarding and so he does it less he's drinking were you always happy i'm not happy at all oh that's why i study happiness oh well there we go folks now we're getting to the crux of it yeah no no i'm much happier than i used to be because i study it because knowledge is power.

1:08:11What were you like before? Well, I mean... Like, where do we meet you now in life and where were you before? So I left, I did a lot of different things in my career. I was a professional classical musician. I was an academic. I ran a company for a long time. I was a CEO for a long time. And I left and came back to academia because I wasn't happy. And I realized I needed to go back to my roots as a behavioral scientist because I needed to sort some stuff out. What were you... help me understand what made you realize you weren't happy what were you not happy about um so how did you know you were unhappy what were you experiencing um from day to day my life felt gray and i didn't feel like i was making progress toward any metaphysical goals i felt like my relationships were suffering i had a lot of sort of anhedonia which another way of saying that i didn't really feel very much pleasure and that nothing nothing delighted me you know nothing delighted me and my wife who's been with me for decades yeah 34 years you said yeah and she said uh you why don't you use your phd for something useful hilarious that's a good part and i said like what she said study yourself you know heal thyself and and so and so i actually i went on i'm on a pilgrimage i retired i mean i just stepped away quit my job how old were you at I'm 55.

1:09:29Okay. And I had been running this think tank, this big nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. for almost 11 years. Great job. Great job. But I was, and it had nothing to do with the job, but I was just empty, man. I was spent. Part of it was that I was, you know, I didn't sleep very well and I was working all the time and I worked 80 hours a week. I missed a lot of my childhood and I was unhappy. And so I did a pilgrimage, which I recommend to everybody, by the way. When you don't know what to do, go for a really long walk. I did that. Did you? which one you walked for a year no no no he just he just disappeared from where we all knew him stopped social media stopped work went and lived by the beach was just gone from everyone's lives I recommend best decision I've ever made yeah so I walked the Camino de Santiago which is across northern Spain oh you did like the actual pilgrimage like walk walk pilgrimage yeah that's what Catholics have been doing for 1 ,100 years how long is this walk it depends on how long you do I wanted to do the whole 33 days which is 800k yeah and my wife's like no So we did what she was willing to put up with, which was the last 160 kilometers.

1:10:33Oh, that's a lot to put up with. A lot of blisters, you know? And you walk yourself into a vulnerable state. You walk yourself into weakness. You got to be weak if you're going to find the truth. I mean, that's why St. Paul said, when I'm weak, then I'm strong. You can't connect with anybody. We started this whole conversation talking about embarrassment, shame, suffering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only then. I mean, it's like, here's the thing. you guys told these stories and this is when the audience is like i'm like eugene and trevor because that's how people actually connect with you and that's how you connect with yourself is by beating yourself down then when the aperture is open to actually find the truth and uh and so i had a complete by the end of the by the end of the walk i had a completely new life mission which is i was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together and bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas do you have a memory of what your thoughts were in the first few miles versus the last few miles the first few miles were you know uh my feet hurt um this is boring it's too hot what am i doing maybe this was a mistake and only when i walked myself into a kind of a submission to it when i beat myself into a kind of a submission which is what a pilgrimage is all about and life is a pilgrimage it's also a metaphor you know you enter into santiago de compostela which is this city in northern spain where you end up at the cathedral which is medieval cathedral where where saint james the brother of saint john is where his remains are and uh and and that's where you're supposed to get this sort of sacred knowledge but that's a metaphor for heaven because that's what life is supposed to be for many for anybody in in abrahamic religions for sure and and many of the karmic religions as well is the whole idea of being reunited with the Godhead.

1:12:21Being reunited with the divine. See, here's the thing. For a lot of religious people, evidence of the divine is that you crave the divine and can't get it on earth. That's evidence of heaven is that you really believe that there's heaven, but you can't get it on earth and the harder you try, the further away you get from it. And the day you see it, you won't be able to tell anyone about it. It'll be just for you because you can't die and go to heaven and come back again and say it was nice. And that's the metaphor of this. of this i'm walking to the cathedral i'm walking to the cathedral i'm walking to the cathedral and when you actually put people have been saying for a thousand years that they're they're blessed with sacred knowledge and so what what were some of your thoughts towards the end of it now as you it was becoming clearer it was becoming clear it's like the clouds were lifting a little bit and and and was your wife on the walk with you yeah we walked did her life change because it doesn't sound like she was on the same quote-unquote journey that you were she seems like she was a little bit more clear she's an adroit she's an adept she's a spiritual adept okay so yeah for sure for sure and and she didn't have the same issues i mean my wife like so so the way that you measure happiness with self-evaluated happiness is called cantral ladder one to ten or zero to ten where zero is the unhappiest person you've ever met the worst sob the person who's just miserable yeah and ten is this annoyingly happy person you know right joseph opio and and and your number is all things considered at this point in your life where you've more like not right now because you slept poorly last night or you got a fight with your girlfriend it's more or less in your life what your number is that's incredibly stable and accurate it turns out and my wife's a nine and i was always like a three and a half wow yeah yeah yeah that's right and i was doing you know all my work i was doing all kinds of cool kind of interesting things and trying to create value and succeeding in my career and the whole thing and my wife said why did you become a behavioral scientist why and i said well i want to i guess make life better for other people start with you start with yourself because you're not going to lift other people up unless you actually start to get your mind around this and so that was that that was it i did a pilgrimage and and then i i i left my old work and i i this is what i do now i could look we get to talk about this in front of millions of people yeah but why i'm fascinated by how you came to that conclusion i'll tell you why I've met many men who have been CEOs and have run companies and have been in powerful positions.

1:14:43And oftentimes when they hit that brick wall, oftentimes when their world turns gray, they don't turn to something that's more spiritually fulfilling. They just search to more. They turn to more. They go, maybe I should merge my company. Maybe I need to buy a bigger company. Maybe I need to find. So I want to know what it was that you bumped into. And maybe it was just your wife telling you, but like, what was it that made you go, oh, no, this hedonic treadmill is not taking me anywhere? So it was a realization that I guess I can explain best with a metaphor, which is that I used to go to Taiwan a lot for work for when I was running this think tank.

1:15:23Is the food as good as they say? Food's great. Okay. Yeah, food's great. I mean, the people are awesome. every single person, you get like a taxi driver gives you the business card and it says CEO. Because everyone is a CEO. I love it. Oh, it's really entrepreneurial. It's phenomenal. But every time I would go, politicians and leaders and CEOs would tell me every time I was in Taiwan, before you leave, you got to go see the National Palace Museum, which is the world's greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world. It was spirited across the Taiwan Straits during the revolution.

1:15:51And it would take you weeks to see the entire collection. You can't see the whole thing. And I never had time. And I know perfectly, I've been in a lot of museums in my life, that if you've only got an hour, then you're going to... The only thing you're going to remember is the snack bar. Yeah. The gift shop. Just breeze through it. Like exit through the gift shop. Right. So finally, I knew this was never going to happen unless I took matters into my own hands. And I hired a guide. I had two hours and I hired a guide and said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to teach me in depth about 10 things in this museum.

1:16:2310 things. I promise I'm going someplace with this. No, no. What do you mean? I'm with you. 10 things. And I want to know the history and the providence and the philosophy. And I want to know the artist and this is stuff from 8 ,000 years ago until the present. And it was phenomenal. So I'm standing in front of this two ton block of jade that had been carved into a Chinese village. And I said, even if I had never left the United States, just looking at this, I would say, this looks Chinese, right? Why does this look Chinese? And he said, that's because of the philosophy of art in china oh tell me more and he said he said he answered my question with a question it's very eastern he said when you as a westerner think of a work of art yet to be started what image pops into your head and i said an empty canvas yeah right yeah painting he said that's because you think of things as starting from nothing and through your own initiative coming into existence.

1:17:18He said, okay. He said, I think about a work of art not being started as an uncut boulder of jade where the sculpture is inside it and I have to take everything away until I find it. And he said, now here's the important part. He said, that's also the difference in philosophy between East and West about life, about success. He says, you Westerners, you think that if you're going to have enough, add more, add more, add more, add more, add more, then it's going to be perfect. But by the time you're 45 years old, if you're remotely successful, more brushstrokes means a denser, darker canvas, and it's not getting better.

1:17:52It's getting uglier. But you think more paint, more paint. You're sloshing paint on. You're getting a boat at 75 or whatever, and you're not getting happier. He said, we understand that the job on your last day is to chip away the last piece of jade when it's perfect. And that means that we chip away. we take away we're subtracting he said that's the difference and i thought ah that's what i was thinking about on that camino that's what i was thinking about that camino what do i need to chip away i've been adding brush strokes and adding brush strokes and my canvas is not getting more beautiful i need a different metaphor it's about sharing and giving so what do i need to do i need chip away so i started chipping away started chipping away it's about giving and not taking yeah it is you know thinking and and now i don't have a bucket list on my birthday i have a reverse bucket list on my birthday like what am i going to stop doing this year what are the relationships that don't serve me what are the possessions that are telling you're getting you're taking things out of the bucket totally throwing it's a reverse bucket list like you know my last birthday you know actually my my on my 60th birthday which is in 2024 right it was in the middle of an election year and i'm like what do i need to ship away and you know what it was is my political opinions i needed more political opinions because i need a fewer political opinions because i need more friends right and i was adjudicating friendships on the basis of my political opinions a lot of people are like no no and so i wrote down my strongest eight political opinions and i crossed them out not because i think they're wrong they might be wrong i for sure i believe things that are wrong but i'm not going to know which until i'm hanging out with people who disagree with me as friends it changed my life yeah that's that's something we spoke to uh robert putnam about on the show still one of my favorite human my colleague at the kennedy school no really yeah oh man bob putnam is just like he's wonderful he's one of my favorite human beings because of how he synthesized what's lacking in humanity today and it's that we think that good politics creates good relationships in society and he was like no the good relationships in society is what creates good politics.

1:20:00And so we live in a world now where we go, we don't agree, so we don't spend time. And if I get my politics good enough and I get my worldview good enough, we will all come together. And it's like, no, no, no. If we all find ways to come together, not around the politics, the politics starts to build itself in the most meaningful, beautiful ways, which is counter to how people think. And it's beautiful that you said it that way. If relationships are downstream from politics, you're going to be miserable. Yeah. if politics is downstream from relationships. And it's funny because I've actually seen and participated in these studies where when you bring people who are really diametrically opposed politically together, like Bernie Sanders voters and Donald Trump voters, it's actually, they have kind of a lot in common.

1:20:41But anyway, and you say, okay, you're gonna talk about politics. It's like daggers drawn, right? Yelling. But if you tell them, you're gonna talk about politics, but first you gotta talk to each other about your kids. You gotta tell each other about your kids. and they're laughing, and they're sharing stories about the people that they love the most. And if they both have teenagers, it's like you have a common enemy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they talk about politics, and it's like they don't hate each other. Why? Because there's no way to get to hate if you start with love. And that's the point.

1:21:11That's Bob Putnam's point. I think we've placed such a, I think from the conversation that we're having now and realizing what you're saying, we've placed such little value on community and the people that we have around us, right? and we don't have a giving spirit when it comes to opinions and what the likes of other people are. For example, I hate pickleball. But there's these two friends of mine that I can't shake off that love pickleball. But I've realized... Relationship ender. Yes. Is that you? Are you the pickleball guy? I wasn't going to name names and out people. One of them is at this table and it's not me.

1:21:49I'm a process for elimination. But I realized that the first time I watched them playing pickleball, I was like, oh, this is boring. This sucks. The second time I went, I was like, they look so happy doing this. And the third time, I saw them growing within the game that they were playing from the first time that I'd seen them, which is three games ago, you know? And I thought to myself, if I'm able to take myself away from what I think is entertaining and watch others who I care about being entertained, that makes me happy. It was almost like being there and I started enjoying the snacks there.

1:22:21I enjoyed the little walkabouts there. I enjoyed the people that worked there and overhearing conversations. Then I realized it wasn't just about seeing them happy. It was once I realized that they were happy, I could go out and find my own happiness. And I end up with happy friends in the car. What you did was you stopped doing this and you started doing this. So there's the, you're two people. Eugene is two people. There's me self, Eugene, looking at yourself. And there's I self. And then there's our father. there's suspenders I don't expect that from you sorry low blow and there's Iself Eugene which is looking out looking outward and it's funny because you know the most popular class on most college campuses you know what it is astronomy 101 why?

1:23:12exactly why finally I ask a student why do you because they're like English majors, communications majors they're not astronomers, they're not physicists this. And you say, why do you love this so much? And this girl says, well, you know, I don't know. But on Thursday morning, I got my astronomy class at nine o 'clock and I go in, I'm super stressed out because, because I had a big argument with my mom and I think I'm going to break up with my boyfriend because I got a B, which Harvard is like the end of the world. And, and, and she says, and I sit in that class for an hour and a half and I come out and I'm a speck on a speck on a speck.

1:23:43That's the I self. And we can actually, that's the I self. It's looking outward, looking outward looking outward that's the reason that zooming out and out standing in awe watching people who are enjoying themselves serving other people worshiping god being in nature listening to the works of johan sebastian about whatever your thing is that's the eye self looking in the mirror notifications on social media pure torture i had been there three times to tell you the truth arthur three times and i didn't realize that they had ginger ale when I was the happiest yesterday about what they were doing and what we were going to do afterwards which was going to go eat steak at Peter Luger's which was in my bucket list forever I discovered in that fridge that they had ginger ale do you love ginger ale?

1:24:28love ginger ale do you really? but you couldn't have seen it before because you were focused on how much you didn't like pickleball yeah yeah yeah yeah and yesterday I saw it yeah yeah and you looked out and saw something beautiful which is people that you loved doing something that they truly enjoyed and love is the basis of happiness and enjoyment is a macronutrient of happiness. And when you witness that, it changed your life. It changed your perspective. It wasn't about pickleball. It could have been anything. So how do we find this balance? Pickleball, by the way, was invented in my city where I grew up.

1:24:58You grew up in Washington? I grew up in Seattle, Washington. Yeah, wow, look at that. Yeah, I grew up in Seattle, Washington. And when I was a kid, which was like 70s and 80s, people were playing pickleball. It was like a local thing. Now everybody's playing pickleball. Yeah, no, it's fast as quick. Was it found upon then or was it always a thing of cool people playing it? It was, I don't know who played it. It was old age. From what I know, it was old age homes. Old age homes invented it as a low risk sport. Yeah, exactly right. Actually, you wouldn't wipe out your knees or something. Yep. No one said anything about your wrist.

1:25:27I used to go to the only Starbucks in those days. I used to walk to the only Starbucks. Oh, because that's the capital of it. That was the first Starbucks. I grew up on Queen Anne Hill and I would go over the top of Queen Anne Hill and down to the Pike Place Market. This is back when it was, so this is when it was like Boeing town basically, when you were growing up there. This is when Boeing ran the town. Weyerhaeuser and Boeing. I don't know what Weyerhaeuser is. Weyerhaeuser is logging. I did not know that. It's an extractive industry. And so sort of low education, high skill was Weyerhaeuser.

1:25:58High education, high skill was Boeing when I grew up. My dad taught at a local college there. So the technicians up there, lumberjacks are down there. My dad had a PhD in biostat. Yeah. And your mom taught? My mother was an artist. Was an artist of like a minor acclaim in the Pacific Northwest. What a beautiful combination. Yeah. The arts and the sciences. Yeah, no, it really is. They're wonderful people. It's like wonderful people. You just saying that this is just my anecdotal amateur, no science-based research, nothing brain. I feel like I have noticed a decrease over the years in people, and maybe this is socioeconomic, whatever it is, but I've noticed a decrease just from my perspective a disclaimer disclaimer in the amount of people who are with somebody who's like from a completely different discipline to them do you know what I mean I feel like a previous generation was like my dad was a scientist my mom was an artist uh my dad was a this my mom was a that my dad was and then like these days people like we're accountants we're lawyers I know that's called homogamy homogamy is a really is a very is a it's a phenomenon that's growing in prevalence oh so this is happening oh totally totally completely And by the way, it's socioeconomic too, which is a real problem.

1:27:10Yeah, that's what I feel like. I mean, you're sorting. It's assorted of mating where people are meeting. It's like they go to college and they marry people from other fancy colleges that do the same thing that they do. Right. That's just, I mean, great, fall in love with whoever you want, right? Yeah, but meet more people that you can't fall in love with. But there's another problem in here. There's another, like a neurochemical problem. Okay. Here's the wrinkle in this. And this is exacerbated, by the way, by dating apps. Dating apps allow you to curate the relationships, curate the people that you meet on the basis of your compatibility.

1:27:45So you say, I want somebody who votes like I do, somebody who likes the same kind of music that I do, and somebody who thinks that Austin, Texas is really awesome, and somebody who likes to eat sriracha. I don't know, whatever. You want to date yourself. And that's not hot. It turns out that what's most hot is a baseline of compatibility and tons of complementarity. And you don't find it. You don't find it on most apps. Some apps are getting much better about this because they're trying to not maximize time in app. They're trying to maximize time in person, which is really important. But there's this whole literature on this.

1:28:18There's these physiology experiments. Have you ever heard about the T-shirt sniffing? Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorite experiments of all time. Yeah, yeah. Oh, what happened to my T-shirt? Did you? It is one of my favorite experiments. experiments of all time. So Trevor and I will tell you about the t-shirts. Yes, please. You go, you go. Because you know, I'm sure you won't mess up the details. I think I know all of them, but you can go. It's a mid-90s thing. So, and what the researchers did was they used, they have an experiment with undergraduates because they'll do anything for 20 bucks.

1:28:50And they had guys who would wear these t-shirts around for 48 hours. But no deodorant and no cologne. Nothing. They would do the thing. They'd play sports or walk around, just go to class, whatever. Then they took their t-shirts off and they put them in shoeboxes and drilled holes in the shoeboxes. and they gave them to random women who didn't know the guys necessarily. There was no identifying marks on the boxes. And they would sniff the t-shirts through the holes. And then they had to rate them on the hotness of the guy. And it turns out that the hotness was inversely correlated to the similarity genetically of the men and the women.

1:29:20No. Wait, is that what it was? So the more different somebody is from you genetically, the hotter you find their smell. Because the olfactory bulb in the brain picks up what's called the major histocompatibility complex which is a measurement of how much genetic uh or how much um um how resistant you're going to be to diseases you want people somebody really different than you that you have kids with you're getting the best kids get a better repertoire of defenses right and that's how you sense it one of the ways that you sense it that's why you should never pick your that you should you should never pick your own perfume women should never pick their own perfume because if women pick their own perfume they like something right that smells like that smells attractive to them which is like their boyfriend and their boyfriend smells it and says that smells like my sister not hot always let your beloved pick your boy pick your perfume because you you're trying to smell good for them not for yourself but what you're doing is you're trying to smell good for them so you pick something that smells delicious to you and something that smells delicious to you, you've already, you've already picked that person on the basis of your olfactory bulb because that person is right for you.

1:30:30That a huge amount of attraction comes from smell. Like I met my wife and I'm like, I don't know. It's like, it's like cantaloupe on an August afternoon. It's just like, I can't get enough of it. I'm in 34 years and I can't get enough of my wife's smell. Can't get enough of it. That's beautiful. Because it doesn't smell like me. Yeah, it is the right Is it true, and correct me If I'm misremembering this in the study I also remembered that they Showed the people pictures of the guys Yeah So they give you the box, you sniff And then you go rate from 1 to 10 But then they would also give them a picture of guys And go rate them from 1 to 10 And the numbers that they chose were almost exactly Like, so the guys they gave a 7 Was the picture they gave a 7 The guys they gave a 3 was the picture they gave a 3 And people were like, how is this So love is blind is great as long as there's like holes in the wall that you can sniff through.

1:31:23Because it's basically you're going to get a lot of the same information. So now going back to sort of what you were saying earlier about us finding this balance. You know, you talk about your wife, you talk about your relationship, you know, it applies to kids, families, societies, et cetera. Are we in danger of living? You know, when you talk about East versus West, are we in danger of living in a world where we are so encouraged to pursue individualism that we then end up losing happiness? Like, is there an extreme that you can go to where it's like your rights, your freedom of everything, your house, your car, your swimming pool, your, you know what I mean?

1:32:03Like, does that limit your happiness in a way that we don't really understand? For sure. Absolutely for sure. And this is the balance that we're trying to get. This is like the dark side of the enlightenment in its way. I mean, the enlightenment's phenomenal. It's great. You know, we've gone from might makes right to trying to persuade each other, rule of law, markets, individuality, democracy, all this good stuff that we count on. But the other truth about this is this individuality, it makes us into islands. And that's something that we have to, it's something that we have to be aware of and be taken care of in our own lives.

1:32:38I have this super ultra, my favorite philosopher is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Okay. Have you ever read Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson? I don't know that I have. It's just like the sturdy lad who always does it on his own, who farms it, who mines it, and who always lands on his feet like a cat. That's the stuff that I want. I mean, I bailed out of my hometown when I was a kid, never came back. It's me, man. It's me against the world. That's not the secret of happiness. It just isn't. and I have to be really, really aware of that all the time. I have to be clear on the fact that my impulse is toward individuation, toward radical individualism.

1:33:18I get it. I'm an American by birth. You guys are Americans by choice. No, we're not. We're South Africans. All the way, baby. Yeah. I will notice that we're in New York. We're in New York. New York doesn't count. Trevor and I just said that New York's not part of America New York said New York's not part of America that one you can't get me on New York will protect me they'll be like yeah what you gonna do about it but this is important because like a lot of people watching us are really really individualistic but the point is that you can't actually find love by becoming more and more isolated and that means that there's so many things that we have a tendency to do that we actually have to self-govern, that we actually have to manage.

1:34:06You have to walk back from... I mean, look, there's many tendencies that everybody knows about. I want to, you know, go get drunk because it's awesome. Yeah. But I'm not going to do that because it's not the right thing to do. But that's like an obvious one. That's sort of obvious, not obvious to everybody. I mean, that's the pursuit of pleasure is really deleterious as it turns out. People do all kinds of things and they think if I get... It goes back to what we were talking about. If I get enough money, there's going to be a number. I'm going to meet my number. I'm going to scratch the itch so hard that finally I'm not going to itch anymore.

1:34:35That's true for money. It's also true for individuality. We need people. We're social animals, right? What does it do to our brains when we, because I think I've heard you speak about this or I've read something about this, but I'm intrigued by what it does to our actual brains when we need people and we actually express that need. Why does that make us happier? I don't understand that. So effectively we're emotionally completed And there's a lot of, we could talk about this neurobiologically, but it makes sense that we actually don't feel ourselves when we're all by ourselves. Yeah. That we really are.

1:35:13And we're made to live in kinship. We're made to live in kin groups. And that makes perfect sense because if you truly were an individual, you'd be walking a savannah and getting hunted down in minutes. So you need to actually feel complete when you're around your people. that that's and that's a an evolutionary imperative is to be around your people because you know the the members of the species that didn't have that they're gonna die off they're gonna die off you know that's just the way it is and that's one of the reasons that there's very very very few people i've met a hermit i met a hermit in himalayas and he hadn't lived with anybody for 27 years he saw people very infrequently he he granted me uh and what does every day he wakes up six o 'clock in the morning and he you know makes himself a little breakfast by himself and then he reads a bunch of you know texts in tibetan and and you know and then and he sees nobody and he he you know he'll say he'll talk to the monkeys a lot of monkeys and and he says he's blissfully happy blissfully happy that's very unusual that's an aberration that's not that's not the norm as it turns out now some people are more introverted and some people are more extroverted but introverts need people too we need people we don't feel like ourselves.

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1:38:29There's something Eugene will often bring up that I think is important to get into, and it's how we talk about these ideas whilst also acknowledging the positions that people are in their lives. you know so I would love to know when you're teaching people about happiness is there a way to break it down according to how people are living their lives and this is what I mean you know sometimes people go hey money's not everything but it's often the people who have money who are saying it and I'm literally borrowing this from you you know it's like oh but you have the money it's a lot easier for someone to say it when they have the money right and it's a lot easier it's a lot easier for somebody to say like hey man don't let work be your life and it's like yeah but I have to work for my life and this this has to be my life so how do you how do you think of happiness in in those ways is they is there a you know is there like a shifting wheel that clicks is it you know is there a way to think of it differently or does it just apply to everyone the same regardless of what's happening to them so everybody needs enjoyment satisfaction and meaning so the macronutrients for sure but there are habits that everybody actually that the happiest people are are dedicated to and and those basic habits fall in the categories of faith or life philosophy friendship uh family and meaningful work those are the four big buckets the happiest people are doing what our grandmothers did fine enough yeah kind of no they really nailed that everything you said there's like these are grandmothers and what's actually pushing us away from this by the way is the misuse and overuse of technology that's one of the reasons that the big the the big problem the crisis that we're having in happiness today for particularly for people under 35 is that they don't know meaning the number one predictor of depression and anxiety is saying my life feels meaningless.

1:40:09And the reason for this is because the misuse and overuse of technology have changed the way that people use their brains and pushed them away from the old ways. So the old ways, you know, it's like, I guarantee you that, you know, Grandpa Noah never came home to Grandma and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. And then Grandma said, you have a mule? I was picturing, you know, I was picturing the same thing. I was like... mule no but i was like you're not wrong though but the reason is because you know i don't want to go live like grandpa noah and neither do you yeah i don't want to live like my grandfather smoke a pack of winstons a day i don't want to do that but i do want my brain to work the way it's supposed to work oh and the truth of the matter is that we've hemispherically lateralized our brain we've moved activity to the left hemisphere of the brain which is all about what and how and efficiency and grinding and achievement and reels and apps and tech.

1:41:08And the right side of the brain, when you're bored and when you're in love and when you're suffering and when you see beauty, that right side of the brain gives you mystery and meaning and all the stuff that you actually can't quite articulate. So this is the big difference that I actually see. The unhappiest people that I meet today are all living on the left. And the people who are happiest are doing a bunch of old, weird things that are weird now that would have been ordinary life before that are helping them to be on the right side of their brains. You know, also what you're explaining helps me rationalize my hate for conversations about AI.

1:41:48Because when I hear people who despise the thought of AI coming more and more into our lives, it makes me understand that they are more and more addicted to this technology that they feel like AI is going to take. AI won't replace you making breakfast or taking a walk with your loved one or with your child or writing a book. It has no interest in that. But if you have made technology the cornerstone of your happiness and of your purpose and what keeps you busy and what keeps you entertained, of course, you're going to worry when someone or something comes and threatens that, right? Of course. No, no, for sure.

1:42:19And you know, the way for people to understand this for AI, can AI make me happy? What will you love? Your cat? I know you won't. Or a mechanical cat? and and it's it's a question that answers itself mechanical cat can be really really really amazing but you're always going to know it's actually not alive yeah so what does alive mean i don't know it's uh i can simulate it i guess no no no you know what alive means you know it so that's why ai by the way can bring you greater happiness if you're solving how to and what technical problems freeing up your time and going being with the people you love but it will lower your happiness if you're using it for right brain functions by making it your therapist and your lover and your friend.

1:43:02I mean, it might fool you for a minute, but it won't fool your brain. You can't simulate meaning. It can give you high resolution of what Central Park looks like, or you can be in Central Park. Yeah, and that's a point. That's an important point. You can't, so when I was a relative, much younger man, 25 years ago now, was the most popular movie of the year was The Matrix. Oh, man. That's a great movie. It's still my most popular movie. It's a great movie. still my most popular movie it's 26 years ago now depending on when we air this it's going to be 27 years ago 26 years ago? it was 1999 wow I don't feel like The Matrix is that wow sorry dude yeah damn I know not in a bad way I'm just like imagine how I feel anyway so so and in The Matrix the plot of the movie obviously is that there's this super intelligent machine life like fake life in a machine that has to it's a super intelligence and it has to power itself on human endeavor and it does so by putting people in pods and simulating a real life that's really really pleasant and distracting and and kind of narcotic and and that's like crazy science fiction we're in the matrix we're in the matrix i mean it's like i'll get up you know i check my phone and then i go to work which is on a zoom screen and all my friends are kind of on social media and then i'm going to date and a lot of my accomplishment is going to come from gaming it's the matrix which is getting you stuck in the left side of your brain and the one thing you'll never get from that is meaning isn't it weird that we go i'm bored swipe i am hungry i want to get from a to b and i want some company yeah but we're doing all of it is here and the great irony of this is that your grandfather he his day-to-day existence was pretty damn boring.

1:44:52It was, he did a lot of stuff. His job was pretty boring. He worked in the railway, so he was pretty bored, yeah. But he never, at the end of his life, he wouldn't have said, my life has been very boring because his life wasn't boring. But here's the thing. If you live like modern people do today, not using your brain the way it's supposed to, you're never actually bored moment to moment, but your life is unbelievably boring. I always say it's the elimination of friction that we take for granted. As you increase convenience, the cost of convenience is one that we haven't fully understood yet in life.

1:45:28And it's actually interesting to see. I know I've spoken about this before, but go and look at the tech entrepreneurs who make technology in India, all over Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, you name it. Look at the tech that they make. They make tech that solves a problem that was otherwise unsolvable. you know what i mean so they'll make an app that enables farmers to know when to plant their crops so that they have the highest yield and they don't lose you know 40 of their crops or whatever and then you look at the western world the u.s in particular most of the apps they don't solve a problem you can just find a closest pizza at 10 p.m do you know what i mean and and i think of meaningful no and i think of i think of what you're talking about now what it's robbed us of is the walk to go find the pizza place the conversation remember asking somebody for directions yeah how crazy those moments were or asking someone where you're trying to get somewhere and that might spark something and then because you're in a place then someone else talks to you and then a thing happens and where did you bump into each other all of the most wonderful things or many of the most wonderful things that will happen to you in your life are inconvenience yeah yeah that's that's why they happen pilgrimage is induced inconvenience oh i love that induced inconvenience totally i mean you're putting a bunch of friction in your life like i'm gonna walk even though i could fly i could drive i could take a train i'm gonna walk hundreds of miles i'm gonna walk and it's gonna hurt i'm gonna do that take time why because i want to i want to get access to the special information that comes to me when i'm not actually arriving So let me ask you this.

1:47:13As somebody who's written multiple books about this, I'm always intrigued by the things that scholars keep learning about a subject that you would think they would have otherwise conquered. You know what I mean? Now I want to know what you are newly discovering or what's newly exciting you in the field of happiness that you haven't previously delved into. Yeah. So my background is behavioral science. Okay. and behavioral economics, psychology, et cetera. I had to retrain learning a lot of neuroscience because the vanguard is this realization that psychology is biology. That if you don't understand the brain, you don't understand the mind.

1:47:53And I'm not a radical physicalist. I'm a religious person. I'm a traditionally religious person. So I'm not a radical physicalist. It's all here and nowhere else. No, I don't actually believe that. But the truth is I'm not going to understand what's going on with my emotions unless I understand what's going on with my limbic system. And that's the vanguard. That's super fun and exciting. It's unbelievable. For my writing, I'm reading 10 to 20 neuroscience articles a week. So I've had to really retrain it. I'm not an expert. I have a PhD in neuroscience. I mean, I talk to neuroscientists and it's like, oh man, this is so far above me.

1:48:26I listen to Huberman. He truly is a great neuroscientist. And I don't hold a candle to that. But the more that I'm learning, the more excited that I actually get. And that's a learning pilgrimage that I get to be on for the rest of my life. It's just so exciting. Discovering new parts of... You're pumping that limbic now. How the thing, one thing connects to the other thing, connects to the other thing. So it's the same thing I could ask you though. So you've been at the top of your profession. What are you doing to stay fresh and to learn? What is thrilling your heart these days that you're learning?

1:48:59So now I'm trying to be a professional at living. Tell me more. sort of going back to what we spoke about earlier um i realized i'm very good at working yeah i've worked my entire life that i've been that i've been allowed to work you know so i've worked my entire life i'm very good at working i'm very good at adapting to that work understanding it and getting to a level of proficiency that allows me to earn a living in that work what i've never been particularly good at is living ah you know so recently i went to my first wedding ever that at the age of 41 years old i went to a wedding i wasn't yours right no it wasn't i accepted an invitation i attended and for the first time i was like oh this is what a wedding is i see and we sit like this and then those people oh wow this is you get what i'm saying yes i've never done that and i've never done it because i think for the most part it's been work work comes most people don't know when their weddings are before i know my schedule right so by the time you know you're waiting i'm like i'm already working that day you know and now this one was a combination of me saying i will make the space but i luckily the person told me why why why the the preoccupation with work yeah so why the preoccupation with work no it was because you love your work i think it was a combination of two things one um survivability so the first one was just like earn a living right yeah there was no like yeah choice and i always tell people people like why did you become a comedian i'm like because it's the only job they weren't interviewing for you know what i mean i didn't need to come with qualifications otherwise i would have done other things no dates yeah really um the other thing was that i enjoyed it and i started developing and i still work on a master of a super high achievement orientation yeah yeah so i go like this is great because you are your number one macronutrient is satisfaction is achievement that you get after struggle achievement oh it's the best satisfaction It's the best.

1:50:51And you're like a virtuoso at satisfaction. So what I love is I'm a big fan of luck theory. Yeah. All right. And when I discovered this, it changed my whole life. So there was a French philosopher who wrote a whole book about luck. Yeah. And the principles of luck. And he said, we always just talk about luck as if it's this one flat idea. So lucky, unlucky, terrible, good things, not bad for you, lucky. And he wrote this whole book and he broke luck down into these four quadrants. and he said we need to understand what luck is to understand how we welcome or dissuade luck from coming into our lives so he said it's not luck yeah so he said the first thing is dumb luck right it's the luck where something just it is because it is where you were born your grandparent dumb luck if they learned Zulu now you're South African that's dumb luck totally different experience exactly Washington now we're doing this whole show in Zulu there you go totally hey hey hey I'm a psychologist by sharing emotions.

1:51:50And I'm not going to get it like the same thing. I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. How do you flick in Zulu? What do you even say? How do you flick? I don't know what flick is in Zulu. I don't think there's a word for it yet. Yeah, we got to come with a flick. You got to flick your... Yeah, but anyway. No, so there's your dumb luck. We almost lost the whole show there. You cannot control it. Oh, it's Luz Nidal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are number one. There's a spike. There's a spike in the brain. What's happening? So dumb luck, things that you cannot control.

1:52:29This, you cannot blame anyone. You cannot thank. It's just happening. Yes. That's you. Country you're born in, people you're born to, etc. Family, yeah. Then the next one is luck of motion. Right. Luck of motion is literally what it sounds like. Once you start moving, luck can happen to you. You can't stub your toe without getting out of bed. But you also can't bump into somebody in the street without walking into the street. Do you get what I'm saying? And that's luck. Oh, I'm so lucky. You know who I bumped into. Oh my God, luck of... That's luck of motion, right? And then the third one is luck of awareness.

1:52:58This one is an interesting one to me because it's the ability to see and notice the ginger ale at the pickleball place. I'm so lucky there's ginger ale here. No, you were aware that there was ginger ale and so you became lucky. So there are two people walking down the street There's$100 on the ground The one person is aware that there's$100 The other one isn't One person says I'm so lucky I found$100 The other person says I'm unlucky I've never picked up I've never found money You weren't aware that there was money And that applies to everything It applies to love It applies to opportunities and work It's someone who sees a sign that says help wanted They're just aware They see a place opening and they go Hey are you guys going to look for work Do you need people here You haven't even advertised, but I've noticed that you're starting a new store.

1:53:44You know, that's awareness. And then the last one, which I find most interesting is the luck of uniqueness. Specialization. When you choose to delve into something and really, really, really get into it, it doesn't matter what it is. A sport, a hobby, a profession. It doesn't matter what it is. It presents unique opportunities to you that will make you feel lucky, but they aren't necessarily just lucky. So by you being a professor who specializes in happiness, you are more likely to be lucky to bump into Oprah Winfrey. I'm so lucky. Oprah liked me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a lot harder to meet Oprah when you're not in this world.

1:54:23Do you get what I'm saying? No, for sure. It's a lot easier to meet LeBron James if you specialize in basketball. It's just a lot easier. I'm not saying it'll happen, but it's easier. So this stuff is great. And there's the best psychologist on this, a British guy named Richard Wiseman. Richard Oh I mean If your name is Wiseman I mean you've got to Now you can't What are you going to do You can't be stupid Yeah that's like Old wisey over here And then his His cousin Henry idiot Yeah It's just like Oh man Didn't do as well That's a good one So So And the fact that You think about this An awful lot So I think about Because you've got this Heavy achievement orientation Yes but what To wrap it up In terms of the life thing What I realized was I was like Oh Trevor You think to yourself You're like Oh man I I wish, you know, I had more wedding stories.

1:55:09I wish I, and I was like, oh, instead of wishing for them, why not try and work on the luck that makes these things happen? Right. So create more space in your diary. And this is your project now. Yeah, this is my, this is, he knows, this is my actual project. And he's been a great friend in this. I'll go, Eugene, what are you doing? Nothing, great. Pick something for us to do. And then we just drive and we go have lunch or we don't or we walk or we don't or we but we but i i now create the space that i didn't hoping that maybe something can come into that space that couldn't otherwise if i hadn't filled it with work does that make sense yeah it does so yeah so this is really important so um remember there's three parts of happiness yeah and so based on this and you know we've met before yeah but we didn't like grow up together no and we haven't played pickleball together no we have not i'm trying to hurt you i would say of the three of the three macro nutrients of happiness you're a 10 on satisfaction probably yes you're probably a six on meaning oh you think is that low no it's not low you think six is high i think so the six is pretty moderate it's pretty pretty normal all right and i think you're a three on enjoyment.

1:56:31I think that you never learned how to enjoy your life. And so if I were working with you on this, that's, you say, I want to be better at living. I want to be better at living. The problem is that when I'm doing these things, be better at living. I'm not putting points on the board. I'm not making progress in my life. That's what all strivers think. Yeah. Right. And so the way to deal with this is to understand how enjoyment works. So you and I were working together. We were talking about this every week, right? That's okay. We got to have an an enjoyment plan. We're gonna have a strategic plan for enjoyment because we need to reframe it kind of like you do with getting good at this whole thing.

1:57:04It's so funny you say this, because I never, remember, I never learned it. I was talking to my mom about this the other day and I said to her, because my mom is like the ultimate worker. Yeah. And I said, mom, have you noticed that you work yourself to death, then you rest, but you don't rest. Right. You're just exhausted. And she was like, yeah, how else could I be? And I was like, well, I think you and I both could practice enjoying before we were exhausted. And she was like, you do it and let me know how it goes. And if it's good, I'll join you. And so I'm on that journey. And she's not against this.

1:57:31She's just like, hey, kid. She's like, look, man, the life I lived, I didn't have sort of the luxuries you had. So work hard and I'm open to it. But so carry on. So you work on learning to enjoy. Yeah, so let me make a suggestion. Yeah. All right. There's a great book that was written by a German philosopher in the middle of the 20th century named Josef Pieper. And Pieper, he wrote this book called Leisure, the Basis of Culture. You're like, okay. So he's going to write a whole book about chilling on the beach. No, no, no. Chilling on the beach isn't leisure. That's asedia, which means kind of a laziness.

1:58:05And there's nothing wrong with chilling on the beach from time to time, but that's not actual leisure. Leisure, you have to be excellent at. You have to be excellent at leisure. I'm already in. Leisure is something you're truly good at. This guy here might be an expert, but carry on. Okay. That they don't pay you for. But you're just really, really good at. And so he talks about it in categories of spiritual depth, going deeper and deeper and deeper in your spiritual life. It's developing your relationships with your closest friends, developing relationships at a real level where you go out to dinner.

1:58:35It's like, go deeper, go home. Go deeper, go home. And it's like, here's the first question. Trevor, what are you most afraid of? That's the first question. Because we're going to learn about each other here. That's leisure. That's actual leisure. It's about getting an aesthetic sense. it's about going deep into the works of so it's not how's things been no no that's nonsense who cares it's like i don't care about the weather i don't care how the jets did on sunday no no no no i want to know what you're afraid of i want to know you that's leisure and that's what you that that will create enormous strivers can enjoy their lives only when they understand the truth about leisure and when they're like if you don't you're gonna be like yeah so so i guess on my vacation i gotta go someplace and sit on a beach bored no you don't want to do that i know you don't want to do that that sounds horrible to you right yeah it's always been horrible it's like sound of that has always been like and it's like and and the problem is that a lot of strivers yeah who have families they're like total killjoys because their kid you know their you know their spouse is like let's go to the beach let's take the kids to the beach you're like i don't sweetheart i can't tell you why but i hate it i can't tell you why but i hate it and that's because you and your heart know that real leisure is something that that has incredible value that creates value for you and value for the universe but it doesn't pay you so what yeah that's not the point yeah but the enjoyment now do eugene do eugene what's what would you say eugene's numbers are so higher on enjoyment higher on enjoyment I don't know about the satisfaction numbers because we actually haven't.

2:00:19I don't know as much about your career. I don't know about it. Yeah. So tell me. So I started off doing comedy, but comedy introduced me to television, to doing a bit of radio. And now it's led me to this path. And we've had guests here that asked me, so do you miss comedy? I'm like, I can't miss comedy because I'm happy here. Like I'm enjoying this. This was part of my visualization. Six, seven years ago, I wrote this all down in a book. I said I want to do something And I want to do it here And I want to earn in this currency Wrote it all down So when I'm here now When someone asks me Don't you miss the other thing I'm like It doesn't It doesn't come into my world You know when other comics ask me Now that you're in New York Are you going to go do a club I'm like I'm not even thinking about it I'm thinking about eating pig's feet And hanging out with my friends It's high on enjoyment So I'm like No no no I don't think that far And we've also had this conversation I'm like no no This for me Is the World Cup of it all For now This is what's happening, and I'm enjoying this.

2:01:13So tell me, what's the mission statement of your life? I do not want to regret not doing things. For a while, I forgot the philosophy that my mom taught me, that no matter who says what and how uncomfortable it is, you didn't break anywhere. You must just keep going. Her other philosophy was you can always start over, you know, try again and try again and try again. And there was a time where besides the sabbatical that I took, I just paused. I stopped doing things that made me happy. And I started doing things that made other people happy. And when I was in really, really a bad place, I'd lost my son.

2:01:47Things were just horrible emotionally. Those people that I tried to satisfy were nowhere to be found. In fact, I would find out when I came out of it that they were the first people that would call me unreliable. They would call me, I don't show up for places. I don't show up for work. And they didn't even bother knowing what was wrong in the first place. So that alone freed me and gave me the independence to just ride bikes by myself, go to shooting by myself. So I learned to do these hobbies and little side quests, as my daughter calls them, you know, by myself. So you have low, what we call negative affect.

2:02:18Negative affect is intensity of negative emotions. And half the population is above average and half the population is below average, right? So you're low in negative affect, which is one of the reasons that you can, terrible things can happen to you and you feel crummy about it, but it doesn't ruin your life. It doesn't ruin your life. Suspenders and a desk again. Huge amount of resilience. because of this, which is really great. I would say that you've got what we call the temperament of the cheerleader. High intensity positive emotions and low intensity negative emotions. It doesn't mean you don't feel these particular things, but that's just the functioning of the limbic system.

2:02:52I know it's going to work out. You, on the other hand, are high, high. High positive emotion, high negative emotion. You feel things really strongly. Oh, yeah. You feel things strongly. That's the mad scientist profile. Mad scientist profile. The mad scientist profile is like, everything is like... I love this. Texter's laboratory. So you're the cheerleader. I love Texter. And you're the mad scientist, right? Okay, so there's two other profiles, which is low intensity positive and high intensity negative. That's the poet. That seems rough. That's rough. That's rough. That's the poet. But those people, yeah, those are the poets.

2:03:24And then there's low, low. Low amplitude emotionality. Those are the judges. Those are the judges. They're not freaking out. Impartial. They're not freaking out. And it's quarters of the population, but you find people in different lines of work that tend to crowd into one of these, into these quadrants. So you find that CEOs and entrepreneurs, they tend to be mad scientists, right? Because they're just taking a bite out of life. You just told me you're taking a huge bite out of life all the time. That's like, time's ticking, dude, let's do this, right? And sometimes it sucks and you understand that and you feel that deeply and you got bad days, but you're going to keep going, going, going, going, going.

2:04:02And you, on the other hand, you're actually able to stop. You're actually able to stop doing things. Why? Because you're a cheerleader and the amplitude of your negative emotionality is not going to impel you to be constantly in motion doing something. You're actually, and that is the happiest, that is the happiest profile. It doesn't mean crummy things aren't going to happen to you or they do and you don't care. That's not it at all. What it means is that you're highly, highly, highly resilient. You're a highly resilient person. And now what does this mean? This means that you can bring I mean, this is, you're perfect.

2:04:35You're perfect here. It's interesting, comics who are cheerleaders, there's kind of two kinds of comedians. They're comedians who have really high intensity and negative emotion. And what they get is they do a lot of emotional substitution where they figured out when they were little kids. I pal around with Rainn Wilson a lot. Yeah. And he had a really, really rough childhood. He grew up five miles away from me in Seattle. And we're about the same age. We didn't know each other as kids, but we bonded over this, right? watching the same shows on TV and fifth grade. And what they do when they have a rough childhood, he really struggled, is that they figure out that they're smart and funny.

2:05:10And when they make a joke, everybody else laughs and then life feels better. That's the first kind of comic. They're really good at, with a straight face, making everybody else laugh. Then the other kind make everybody laugh because they use emotional contagion. That's you. So you do this. You use emotional contagion. you laugh all the time which makes me laugh and makes me happy and there's a kind of comic that does that yeah yeah this is great and there's two kinds of comics like this but you have figured out you've you've you've you've unlocked this success as somebody who's going to bring happiness to everybody else around you by sharing your happiness and you've even done it by laughing and being a comic who laughs a lot.

2:05:58It's an amazing thing. It's crazy. This is crazy. It's a reading. It's an amazing thing. Before you go, what's your quadrant? I'm a mad scientist. Oh, mad scientist. I was like, I was there. Mad scientist. I was there. Mad scientist. United. Texas Laboratory. And what this means, by the way, that for you, you don't need to worry so much about raising your happiness. You need to manage your unhappiness. You need to manage your unhappiness more than raising your happiness. Can I tell you? this is so crazy maybe it's maybe i'm i wrote down i remember in one of my journals i said especially for me i said i just need to worry about what i do not like i believe this for most people because i go we do not know what we want we only remember what we enjoyed and then we want to replicate it but i was like for myself for me me me i went just find the knots and just minus them minus them minus because those things because i i did not know how much fun i would get have getting to know you right i did not know how much you would influence me when i first met you so i'm always open to those things where i'm like wow you never know what'll happen but the knots hey yeah yeah yeah yeah totally hey yeah yeah yeah yeah can you try that's the zulu thing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah see you're in now i got it you're in you are much closer than your grandparents instantly you were flawless there the holy spirit just worked through me it worked straight through you my friend yeah yeah so but this is important because you know what there's all kinds of people who have really high negative affect there's all kinds of destructive ways to manage your negative affect oh okay drugs and alcohol classic way to manage your limbic system which is overactive on the negative side okay that's why people do that you know there's sort of two reasons that people become you know addicted to alcohol for example it's boredom and anxiety oh man but for high achievers it's always anxiety because they're highly anxious people which means they have a really active amygdala and that's the only way they can like instantly calm it down connection between your amygdala and your prefrontal cortex so you're actually really stressed out but you don't know who which is why two drinks you're like okay i'm all right and so they're self-treating for that's a very destructive way to deal with negative affect another is workaholism just just just like this i know how to do this this i know how to do and they ruin their marriage because they're trying to get away from their negative affect by staying at the office for the 14th hour before the first hour with their kids i'm guilty i'm guilty that's the problem when i was running the company how do how do we work on these things as people like how do you you find better ways to manage your negative affect yeah so how do but how do people even begin how do you even know that you are doing it and then how do you begin to work on it you got to know yourself you actually have to do the work as they say which doesn't necessarily mean going you know getting tangled up in the therapy industrial complex that's good for some people but it's not it's not necessary for everybody the reason i teach this stuff is because i want people to think about their lives i want them to understand because your laboratory it's time to go experiment in all these different ways you've been telling me about experiments that you're doing already like i'm going to get better at living what you're telling me is that you're a living lab and why because you're treating these different things to be a more effective happier person that can lift other people up more effectively which is a beautiful thing and so what are two great ways to treat negative affect get deep more deeply into your spiritual life more deeply in your spiritual life hugely effective you see that finger and we recommend catholicism

2:09:20i'm gonna learn it and the second is is really is is really simple it's run around and pick up heavy things ah that's simple it's that simple run around and pick up everything it's like exercise exercise and so i you know i'm a mad scientist i have to treat my negative affect i start every day i get up i do an hour in the gym and i go to mass that's every day every day take care of the physical take care of the spiritual because and and it's just self-defense you know it's not like i'm some great guru sitting in a cave in the himalayas it's just i have super astronomically high negative affect.

2:09:57I'm at the 90th percentile in negative affect. And I don't want it to interfere with my life. And that's what I figured out by studying this stuff when I left that job. And that's what I've been doing for the past seven years. And that's what I want to bring to everybody. And you are. Use this information. You are and you have and you continue to. We've got to do this again. Thank you. This is so much fun. Thank you. I loved it. Did I not promise you this as well? I was not going to say this, but on our way here, he was like, you're going to absolutely love this guy. Do you? Man, you're a wizard.

2:10:28I love you too, Eugene. Love you too, man. No, man. Professor Brooks, thank you so much. This has really been great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Fire, guys. Thank you. Man, you were the conversation we needed. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening.

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