#280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more | Arthur Brooks Ph.D.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone.

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If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. Her returning guest this week is Arthur Brooks, who was originally on the podcast in October of 2022.

I wanted to have Arthur back again on the podcast to talk about his new book on happiness called Build the Life You Want. As some of you may recall, Arthur is a Harvard professor, a PhD social scientist, and a columnist at The Atlantic, and also the bestselling author of From Strength to Strength, one of the handful of books I keep in multiple copies at my house to share with anyone who comes over who doesn't have a copy.

Arthur's work specializes in using the highest levels of science and philosophy to provide people with actionable strategies to live their best lives. In this conversation with Arthur, we focus on the idea of happiness. And again, that sounds like a very vague concept. And if you're anything like I was a couple of years ago, you would sort of reject the idea that this was something that could be studied.

But here we speak about the difference between happiness, happy feelings, unhappiness, the evolution and heritability of happiness, and the different types of emotions we have. And I think that Arthur has a really helpful way to think about this. In fact, one of the most important things that I have noticed myself observing since reading this book and also talking with Arthur,

is that in the moment, my emotions may not necessarily reflect my overall state of happiness. And I shouldn't confuse in the moment feelings of uneasiness or even negatively valenced emotions with an overall picture of what Arthur calls macronutrients of happiness.

We speak a lot about the positive and negative affect schedule and a test that you can take to help understand your predisposition to types of happiness and to your compatibility with others. And as I said, we then focus on what Arthur calls the macronutrients of happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

And while all of these words are familiar, they in this context have a very specific set of parameters. And I think it's worth understanding them because it's what I keep coming back to as I examine my own life. And I suspect you'll find value in doing that as well.

We also talk about the importance of metacognition and transcendence in our happiness and the idea of me self versus I self. Finally, we end the conversation looking at what potential biomarkers or a dashboard of happiness might look like. And by biomarkers, I don't mean blood based biomarkers, but I use that term kind of loosely to refer to other questions that one might ask of themselves to get a sense of their overall health.

in terms of happiness just as we might look at our own blood-based biomarkers to look at a sense of our overall health.

The deeper I get into this world of longevity, the more and more convinced I am of the importance of a topic like happiness. As I wrote about in Outlive, there really is no clear reason to want to live longer if you are unhappy. And I think for that reason, I find myself especially drawn to this kind of work.

I consider myself to be constantly on a journey to understand this better in myself and, of course, to understand how I can help my patients with this. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Arthur Brooks.

Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin, although maybe it's only partially to see me. It's mostly to see you here and I love seeing you. There you go. It's the best. Doing this in person is great. Last time we did it by Zoom. This is better. Congrats on the book. Thanks. This is not your first, second, or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a, what's the world gonna think?

Oh yeah, no, no, it's like having a child. I mean, well, the child you live with for a super long time and they torture you decade after decade. But a book is something where as you bring it into the world, you go through, you remember Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist wrote that famous book about death and dying.

And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that research has been questioned since then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through bargaining and denial and rage. That's like, as you know, when a book is coming out, writing a book, denial and bargaining and rage. And finally, there's acceptance, but you're still nervous for sure. Yeah.

There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about with you on this topic. But let's begin with a question, which is, what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write about? And happy feelings. Are they the same thing? They're not. And this is a really important misconception. All of my students and most of us actually have. We live in the era of feelings. If you talk to my parents or God does my grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head. What are you talking about? I mean, talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera.

Feelings seem so counterproductive and in point of fact, our grandparents were right. Feelings are not happiness anymore than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And that's incredibly good news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect.

There are many better technical definitions of happiness, but they produce a lot of feelings. They're associated with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain, a 40 million year evolutionary process that developed the limbic system to create emotions. That signals information is what it comes from. If you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of happiness, you're going to be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts.

how I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast, if my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's going to determine my happiness. You wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing your own happiness. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings. It's hard to differentiate, though, having read this stuff several times.

You have to remind yourself when you're in the throes of what I just refer to as negatively valenced feelings that this is not a statement of my overall state of happiness. Yeah, for sure. And then what's the relationship between unhappiness and happiness? Are they polar images? How do they coexist? Well, for the longest time, if you even go back to the ancient philosophers, there was the idea that happiness and unhappiness exist on the spectrum. So unhappiness would be the lack of happiness. We know a lot better now, given the explosion of neuroscience and the way that emotions are produced.

that in fact you can be happy and unhappy or have happy and unhappy feelings in parallel. So for example, the average person spends about 40% of their time with predominantly positive feelings. It sits in a neutral idol of positivity. Most people do not everybody. About 16 or 17% of the time the average person has predominantly negative feelings. Something is going on. That's more intense.

And part of the reason is because negative emotions get your attention and they're supposed to. Evolution favors negative emotions. Positive emotions, nice to have. Negative emotions, pay attention because that could cost you your life. What are some of those, if you think about this evolutionarily and not even going back to millions of years ago, but just going back hundreds of thousands of years back to the origin of our species as homo sapiens, what do we think are some of the most powerful negative emotions that would drive action?

There's basically six fundamental emotions or basic emotions. These are the building blocks of all emotional life that are produced by the limbic system of the brain, four negative and two positive. The four negative emotions are sadness, anger, fear and disgust. All four of those have a very strong evolutionary basis.

Fear and anger, of course, have to do with threat. They involve the amygdala of the brain. You know, when a car is about to run you over and you're a pedestrian in a crosswalk, that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded in the occipital lobe of your brain as an enormous predator.

That signals to your amygdala to send the signal through the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys to spit out stress hormones. That happens in 74 milliseconds. By that time, you're sweating, your heart is pumping, you've jumped out of the way and you've flipped off the driver, a combination of fear and anger.

in response to the enormous predator. Three seconds later, your prefrontal cortex catches up and you say, I shouldn't have flipped him off. That's not my values or whatever it happens to be. So that's your limbic system keeping you alive. That's fear and anger. Then of course, there's disgust, which involves the insular cortex of the brain, also part of the limbic system. That's when you pull something out of the back of your fridge you forgot about a few weeks ago and you hold it and you're like,

Ugh. That signals don't eat it. And so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic negative emotion of disgust to you. Now, it can be misattributed to people. That's what demagogic politicians always do. That's what the media does to us. It tries to reprogram the insular cortex, the insula of the limbic system of the brain so that when somebody disagrees with you politically, you look at them like a cockroach.

That's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done for time immemorial so that people will undertake barbaric acts against people in their own countries, lisas of war, etc. And then last but not least is sadness. Sadness is also evolved. Sadness is what you feel largely in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain and other part of the limbic system. That's mental pain. Usually when you're either socially excluded or you're separated from a loved one.

Now, that's something that's evolved because you don't want to be separated from your tribe. You don't want to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. But what happens, for example, in grief, grief is un-remediated sadness. And the reason is because your brain is saying, make this separation go away and you can't because of other person is permanently gone.

AKA dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be. And so the grief is just this pulsating activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain saying, I must be reunited with that person, but I can't be. And it takes a lot of time in many cases for the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to stop registering that sadness by pain.

The sadness we feel when a person dies, which would be the ultimate form of separation, is a more extreme version of say a social isolation that you might feel like what a kid feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away. Yeah. And there's interesting studies that actually look at how that registers in the brain. So the brain is so thrifty.

As we all know, the neuroscience of this is super interesting. So when you stub your toe, there's actually two processes going. There's sensory pain and affective pain. Sensory pain means you can feel it in the nerve endings and it's very unpleasant. Affective pain is I hate this and you feel both in physical pain. The affective component involves the same part of the brain.

the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex when you have something that emotionally bothers you, when you're being excluded. We know that because there's these interesting studies in an FIMRI machine. They're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated. They're being subjected to being rejected by somebody else, and they can see the part of the brain that's actually illuminated. I guess there is a way to do it, but is there a benefit to the reverse? I love going into cold plunges, so I do it almost every day.

And it's insanely uncomfortable. There's not a day that I step into that 42 degree ice bath with jets shooting water around me that I'm like, this doesn't hurt.

But it doesn't come with the, I hate this because I'm choosing to do it and I think there's value in it. Does the brain treat that differently? How would we think of that as an emotion? What it is is a controlled, aversive emotion under your own power. And so for example, if you go to a haunted house on Halloween and get scared,

and get scared, you're controlling the fear. If you're on a really radical amusement park ride, it's the same sort of thing. It's what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little bit of stress hormones and the experience of the aversive emotion. But since it's under your own control, you actually use it in a way that you enjoy. And so people who do extreme sports, this is the same kind of thing that they do. They like to feel a little bit in danger, one of my kids.

is somebody who likes this. He really likes this a lot. He likes to expose himself to things that actually hurt as long as he's under control. Any evidence that other species do this? No. This is a uniquely human phenomenon. Yeah. For example, there's also no evidence that you can train any other species to appreciate spicy food, to ingest capsaicin. No other species can be trained to like the feeling of spicy food that hurts your mouth. Only humans can do that.

And so this is a really higher order phenomenon where we have aversive emotions. Other animals have aversive emotions, but we actually can dominate them through a process called metacognition where we experience the emotions, not just in the limbic system of the brain, but in the prefrontal cortex. This is where it really gets interesting. This is the human difference is where this comes around. So the dog wants the cookie eats the cookie. Dogs are limbic creatures. Little kids are limbic.

When your kids were little, when my kids were little, they'd be screaming over something as a piece of rice on their chair, whatever thing that bumps them out, you're like, use your words. What you're telling them to do is to experience the emotion in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where they can decide how to react. They can think about what their own emotions are. And when you're doing that, then you can get in the cold plunge and say, it hurts so good.

And that's what metacognition brings to you. And also you can say something like, I'm really sad about this. What am I learning? That's how you can be a far more evolved human being by becoming more and more metacognitive using the techniques for doing so, which is a lot about what I'm writing about these days.

Okay, so what about the two positive? The two positive, and this is actually pretty much all the neuroscientists agree on the four negative, not all the neuroscientists agree on the two positive. Some people believe that surprise is a positive basic emotion, and so there's a lot of different schools of this, but two that pretty much everybody agrees on are joy and interest.

And this is useful for us to think about joy is obvious is ordinarily when you're reunited with somebody that you love or something good happens pursuant to struggle. The joy you get after you work really hard for something and you get it. That's a basic positive emotion and that's a reward.

Evolved rewards of your work hard to find some berries on a bush and you get your caloric needs met for the day you want to make sure that you get an emotional reward for that that's actually stimulating a part of the brain called a ventral straight and which is your reward system and boom that feels good want to do it again do it again do it again interest is different.

Interest is you get intense pleasure. People are listening to the drive, which I do. Why? Because I learned something from it. Why do I care? I mean, it's not like it's going to dramatically change my salary trajectory or my professional success if I'd listen or don't listen to your show.

I want to learn because learning is intensely pleasurable. That's really a fascinating phenomenon because that's how people evolve and make progress. And it makes sense that that would be an evolutionary phenomenon. We would favor learning so that people can get ahead and feed themselves and find new sources of food and find new mates and all the things that they do. And the way that that's adapted to the current environment is they listen to your show. So it seems to me that both of those could be found in creatures other than us.

Certainly, Joy, I guess learning would be a testable hypothesis, presumably with a maze or something like that. Whether the learning is positively valenced, you can teach a worm to learn. A worm will learn. You can teach a worm things. We just don't know whether it's a positively valenced experience because they don't have the kind of brain that will give you emotions as we understand them.

I wonder if optogenetics would provide insight into that one day when you could get sort of cellular level resolution of different parts of the brain. I don't know if you're familiar with Carl Deseroth's work. Yeah, for sure. You've had him on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's psychiatrist. Yeah, that would be an interesting line of inquiry, I suppose.

Yeah, for sure. And we know that dogs, for example, have rudimentary emotions. They can mimic human emotions really, really well. But it's almost certainly limbic phenomena that look metacognitive more than anything else. And one of the things that we do is we selectively breed dogs so that their emotional state more clearly mimics our own. We like that. They make better companions. They do something you're not supposed to do, and they look guilty. They don't feel guilty. That's certainly an illusion.

We have a new puppy. I can really relate to this. Yeah. Yeah. And there are certain ways that they are quite similar to us. For example, they have, there's a lot of research that suggests that they have serotonin balance issues. And if you give a dog a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it will actually have some of the same effects it can have on people. You can give your dog Prozac and your dog will be less depressed or at least have fewer depressive symptoms in some cases. So there are ways that they are similar to us for sure.

When you think about the arc of evolution, a purely Darwinian approach to our existence would be evolutionary fitness. Where does happiness fit into that? Now, that's a question that I've dealt with or thought about for a long, long time. And a lot of people sort of assume that evolution would favor happiness. And the reason is basically this. Evolution gives me a bunch of desires.

It gives me desires for calories and interesting things and sexual partners and all those things that evolution wires into me. And there are certain things that I want. And one of the things that I want is those things, but also I want to be a happy person. So therefore, evolution must favor happiness. That's wrong. There's no indication that Mother Nature cares about your happiness. She cares really about two things, survival and gene propagation. That's what Mother Nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes.

You're being happy? Does that help that? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't. We find that dark triad personalities, malignant narcissists, they tend to be way unhappier than normal, and they're extremely sexually attractive to the opposite sex. What's up with that? People are finding terrible mates that make them miserable, and they have extremely high levels of success in mating markets.

And that militates against the idea that happiness would be evolved. And so I've become persuaded that happiness is sort of the divine path versus the animal path. And it's many times you need to stand up to mother nature's imperatives so that you can be happy. I give a lot of examples in my own research of actually how that's the case.

Let's talk about a bit of them because in part where I want to be able to go with this is the heritability of happiness, which we know about. Let's talk about both of those things. What can we learn about the genetics of happiness and talk maybe a little bit about your research as well? The baseline levels of mood balance, which is not the same thing as happiness. It's the extent to which you feel positive and negative emotions or the course of the day varies a lot between individuals.

There's sort of four personality patterns with respect to positive and negative emotions over the course of your day. And they have to do with the intensity and the frequency of negative and positive emotions. They're four equal sized groups. Yeah, let's talk about them. And I haven't taken the test yet, but I'm positive. I know which one I know it. You are too. So there are people who have extremely intense positive emotions and extremely intense negative emotions.

Now, it doesn't have to be extreme. In my case, it is. It has to be above average to be in a quadrant called the mad scientist quadrant. That's a quarter of the population. They're above average positive intensity in mood and above average negative. There are some, and this is the one that everybody wants to be, is above average positive and below average negative and intensity. These are the cheerleaders.

There's a quarter of the population that's above average negative and below average positive. Those are the poets. And that's a really interesting, from a neuroscientific perspective, these people, that's a quarter of the population as well. And then there's the low low. People are low affect people. People who have low intensity positive, low intensity negative. It doesn't mean they're not unhappy or happy. It means the intensity of their feelings puts them in that bottom quadrant. And those are the judges. Those are the unflappable people with enormously good judgment who don't get freaked out about anything.

And this is roughly a quarter. It's actually by construction a quarter because it's above and below average across the population. So it has to be in those quarters. I have a thing on my website where people can take the test and just go take the test. We don't keep the data just so that people can know who they are because you need to know who you are to manage yourself. And a large part of who you are is genetic based on what we know about the basis of happiness. So when we talk about the heritability of happiness, is it with respect to exactly that phenomenon as opposed to

the definition of happiness that we'll get to that you write about? Not exactly because we haven't looked at identical twin studies with respect to those four quadrants. The four quadrant testing is the positive affect, negative affect series, the panace series, which is very well scientifically validated. But we haven't actually compared the identical twin data on nature versus nurture and personality with those data. What the identical twin studies do is they look at the extent to which your mood balance, your self,

evaluated general happiness scores are related to your parents and grandparents and the heritability. And so what happened in those studies is that they will take identical twins that were separated at birth, adopted to separate families. This was not a social science experiment cooked up like guys like me at Harvard. It happened naturally. And then they reunited as adults and given personality tests.

And they find that between 44 and 52% of your baseline self-evaluated well-being is evolved. Your mother literally made you unhappy. Yeah, so for context, for folks listening, obesity is probably 60% heritable, you know, height. Much higher. Much higher. One of the highest, probably 80, 90% heritable.

Alcoholism, 50%. Yeah. Autism, probably 80%, depression, probably 60%, 70%. I guess my takeaway from that is your genes are not your destiny when it comes to happiness. They play a role and furthermore, you need to know your genetic proclivity because then you can manage it. I talk to a lot of people who

Both parents drink too much in all four grandparents. They're not doomed to alcoholism because once you know your tendency, you manage your habits. That's where life really gets interesting. This is the reason we need to manage our health so that we know where we are, what our tendencies are. There's some people who, they have such incredibly good health, they need to go to the gym half as much as I do, order as much as I do. They can eat all kinds more junk than I can.

But once I know what my tendencies are, then I know where to compensate on the basis of my habits, and that's where knowledge about what you've inherited is true power. So I'm going to guess I'm a mad scientist. I think you are as well, correct? I'm the maddest of the mad. I'm at the 95th percentile in positive and the 90th percentile in negative. I can't wait to take the test to see where I am on percentile. I wouldn't be surprised if I exceed you, by the way. I feel like I'm insane. And it's hard to be married to you, right? Yeah, my wife would say it's impossible. Yeah, my wife reminds me as recently as yesterday that it's not a walk in the park being married to me.

What do we know about compatibility of those types in friendships and partnerships? Yeah. So this is the interesting thing. One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of young people make, the average age of my students is 28. I teach graduate students. And they've been told that to find a good romantic partnership, you have to find maximum compatibility. And that's wrong. You need a minimum baseline of compatibility on top of which you need complementarity.

So back in the day, the matchmaker in your village would find somebody, same religion, they live in the same place. They're both sort of a match on physical attractiveness. Now let's find one completing the other. This is one of the reasons that introverts and extroverts make very good marriage partners. Typically two extroverts can be a real problem as daggers drawn.

They're competing with each other all the time. Two introverts, typically, there's not enough conversation. There's not enough human connection. They'll be isolated too much. They'll drift apart. That's what we find. When it comes to these personality profiles with respect to affect, you need to find somebody who completes you, but you have to appreciate differences.

So mad scientists do really well with judges because judges mellow them out. Two mad scientists, it's like, it's craziness. It's a hurricane all the time because what will happen is you'll get into a vortex of getting more and more spun up and then going all the way back down again. You can be an accelerant to each other and that can be really a big problem. So look for somebody different than you. Now, the problem of dating is that the platforms that people use. I mean, you don't meet somebody in a restaurant anymore.

young people aren't going to church very much. So where do you meet online? You're like a stock or a serial killer if you're not meeting people online. And they curate their profiles to find somebody who's like a sibling.

which is, as my adult kids remind me, not hot. What's hot is complementarity, is the adventure of somebody different than you, somebody that you're discovering something. You love somebody because of their differences, not despite their differences. And you can find a lot of that and it's especially productive when we come to these personality profiles.

So what do you do with your knowledge base? So as a mad scientist, what are the tools you use from that to manage yourself, which is kind of a recurring theme here. We keep coming back to it and I want to come back to it more formally to talk about metacognition, but just briefly, maybe what are the most important things that you think about as a mad scientist to regulate your own emotions and to presumably keep the balance more on the positive versus negative valence.

For the longest time, I mean, the reason I've done this research, Peter, is because I need it. This is me search. That's really what it is. And I know you do too. I mean, you do this work because you want to live a long time and have a high quality of life in our community of health and wellness and fitness and longevity and

We're all doing the best we can for our own lives and then sharing with other people. And this is absolutely the case with me. If you're a mad scientist and you don't self manage, you're going to be all over the place. You're going to be a big mess. You're going to have difficult relationships. A lot of the time you're going to be miserable and it's avoidable. It's actually unconstructive, not to self manage, but self management is not.

one weird trick, as they like to say on the internet. There's no hacks. It's really all about mental habits. It starts with the knowledge of the science. It goes into specific practices, and then a lot of it has to do with teaching other people, as you know, the best way for you to live better is to teach other people how to live better. If you want to be healthy, start a health podcast or something, and make sure you've got good science on your side.

So when it comes to mad science, the mad scientist profile that's hard to manage otherwise, the mistake people get into is they try to stay on the positive side. That's a logical thing to do. My polar disorder, we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds because they like the manic and they don't like the depression, but they can't time it.

And so you actually have to stabilize your mood so that you're not seeking the highs and trying to avoid the lows. And by the way, I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder. I'm just saying that they tend to have mania. They tend to have this kind of a hyper manic as, you know, John Gardner talks about the hyper manic edge. And that's what most mad scientists have a little bit of. That's why they tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs.

like you, but they fall prey to a lot of mood issues that are pretty avoidable. At the pro level of self management in a mad scientist category is to not seek the highs because the highs don't help you that much. What you actually need to be as a full person, not writing the wave of your emotions, you need to manage your emotions and never let them manage you. And that gets into the whole topic you're talking about, which is metacognition. That is to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex as opposed to living

according to your limbic system. Never be managed by your limbic system. Your limbic system is nothing more than the factory for your emotions. That's really what it's doing. And if you're basically taking raw factory materials and trying to live according to them as opposed to assembling them, making them into a set of experiences, learning from them, growing from them, you're not fully alive.

You're subject to something. You're subject to a crazy machine all the time. And so that's a lot of what I write about is actually, how do you experience emotions more fully in the prefrontal cortex of your brain? What are the techniques for doing so? And when you're doing that, what is the repertoire of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state?

Are there any folks where, for example, the poet, where you actually push them to be more in that limbic system, or is it the same for everyone? Because the poet, of course, is the one who's disproportionately down, right? These are the great artists.

So poets, there's interesting research that parallel to this that doesn't use the same panist test, but it's pretty provocative nonetheless. The people who have a tendency toward depression, not bipolar, but depression, they tend to be more creative. They're ruminators, and they also tend to be romantics. And you know, this follows a pattern. You've met people like this that have this pattern of romantic, creative, depressive, poetic people.

Really interesting neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially active for these people. It's called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. And this is the part of the brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something, which depressive people do. They think about the thing and think about the thing.

This is also what's going on when you're in love with somebody. You can't stop thinking. You're ruminating on another person. This is the same thing that's going on when you're working on a business plan or writing a symphony or actually writing a poem. So that's what they're really good at, but also what they're really bad at. They can't stop thinking about things, which is good for them and really bad for them. Their strength is their weakness. And Peter, this is the same thing across all the profiles.

Your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength. Learn to manage it, wire to the strengths, remediate the weaknesses, and complete yourself. So I encourage everybody to be more metacognitive, everybody, so that you're a poet. You can be really, really poetic, but it won't ruin your life.

Do we think that, and this is tangential and maybe not relevant, but do we think that the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen, the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen as a species always come from extremes in these categories? It's almost certainly not true.

It's sort of a caricature of what we think to be true. Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases. You see somebody who's unbelievably good at something and who's weird, you focus on their weirdness. There are tons of people who are extremely accomplished and not that weird. You don't have to be weird. I mean, it's the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, I guess to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be the kind of person that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about.

If Walter Isaacson is writing your biography, get help. There are tons of people, very successful entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, just people who excel, who have decent relationships and who are able to self-moderate and who don't abuse drugs and alcohol.

Now, a lot of them do, and part of the reason is because they have certain personality characteristics that go relatively unremediated, and we have people who are highly limbic. They tend to be successful in spite of their messy mental hygiene, not because of their messy mental hygiene. It's even better if you've got some of these characteristics, and you're really creative, and really hardworking, and really driven, and you manage it. That's even better.

Yeah. Okay. So let's now talk about these three components of happiness. You wrote about this in strength to strength, but let's go over them again and talk about what each one means. Happiness is not a feeling. We've established that. Feelings are evidence of happiness. When we look at the happiest people and the way that we do that typically, there's some indirect ways to figure that out. You know, I could ask your wife,

how happy is Peter and you're not there. And I would get some really probably very accurate information. There are some tests that are not very good, but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under fMRI. But they're really the best way to do it. The most cost effective and efficient way to do that is for you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this. Imagine all the people you know where the happiest person you've ever met, I mean, really happy is 10.

And the most miserable SOB you've ever met is a one.

All things considered at this period of your life, not this moment, this period of your life, all things considered, thinking of those people, what's your number? And that turns out to be incredibly accurate. You got to have a large sample because some people answer it in a wonky way. And it has to be anonymous because if you answer this in front of Jill, you'll probably lie. They don't tell the truth in front of their spouses necessarily in front of their friends because they give answers that people want to hear. But if it's really honest and you're by yourself, I'll get extremely effective

data from that. Based on these data, you find that the happiest people, they have three macronutrients in balance and abundance. By the way, before we get to those, are those responses normally distributed?

Yeah, they are normally distributed, but the mean is not five. Yeah, the mean is more like seven and a half. So there's a bias toward the top part of the scale. The reason for the skew is because you feel like it would be better if it were five. If it were a five, it would be saying that a three is within one standard deviation. There's nothing wrong with being a three. Nobody wants to be a three. Numbers have cultural valence, right? They really do. And so people will kind of

Yeah, it's like being normal, happy. That's like seven, eight. And what you find is that most people over the course of their adult lives, early 20s to early 50s, they're between seven and nine. Most people are from seven and nine. Most of the people that I talk to that I work with, especially the executives that I work with one on one who are threes, they're depressed. They're actually suffering from clinical issues. They're behind the line of scrimmage. There's nobody who's like, yeah, I'm pretty normal. I'm like, probably the 40th percentile.

And that probably makes me a three and a half, 40th percentile is probably a five is the way that that works. They would like to be better and they feel like they're not as good as they should be despite the fact that in the scale that looks like the middle of the scale is not the middle of the scale. So what do you find? The people who are in the upper end, the eights and nines and like my wife nine and a half, I don't get it, but there you go.

They tend to be really healthy, and healthy means they have balance and abundance across what I often refer to as the happiness is macronutrients. It's very easy in your audience because everybody knows it's protein carbohydrates and fat, and the best diets are those that have all of them in balance and abundance.

and you have to get your macros and you're not going to have 100% protein. That sounds good for somebody for a week until they become miserable. So the three macronutrients are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. And none of those, by the way, is straightforward. Any more than protein carbohydrates and fat is straightforward. It's like, I'll be fine. I'm going to eat a chicken and a stick of butter and a hoho. And then I'm going to eat that exclusively for the rest of my life. And it meets my macros, so I should be fine. No, no, no, it doesn't work that way.

you actually have to understand that, understand what each one of those things are, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and you have to have strategies to understand why they're so hard to attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more skillful at attaining each one.

So let's start with enjoyment. Enjoyment seems sort of straightforward. I want to enjoy my life. Get a lot of pleasure. That's wrong. Pleasure is limbic. Enjoyment involves the prefrontal cortex. Enjoyment is a much more complex phenomenon than pleasure. Pleasure is a signal for the limbic system that says this thing that you're doing will help you survive usually through caloric needs or pass on your genes through something like sex.

So that's what pleasure is really all about. It's nothing more. It's just like any positive emotion. It sends a signal saying do more of this. That's not the secret of happiness. That's incredibly evanescent. It's extremely temporary. And if you pursue pleasure, what you'll be doing is you'll be engaging systems in your brain, the dopamine system, for example, which is the anticipation of reward, the reward being pleasure. You'll hit the lever, get the cookie, hit the lever, get the cookie. It will never last and you'll become an addict.

Pleasure-seeking. I mean, the hippie phenomenon, the hippie motto of it feels good to do it is life-ruining advice. It's just the dumbest thing ever. If it feels good to do it, you'd never go into the ice bath. I mean, you wouldn't stay married if it feels good to do it all the time. It's just terrible advice. So what do you need for enjoyment? The answer is the source of pleasure, adding two things, people and memory.

That's where you're engaging your prefrontal cortex. So, anizer bush never runs ads for beer of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12 pack. They never do that, right? A lot of people use the product that way. Why don't they show that? Because that's the pursuit of pleasure and that's dangerous. That's bad for you.

Use of methamphetamine is bad for you. What we're incredibly good at using science today is to take things that give a little bit of pleasure evolutionarily and supercharge them. Natural endorphins that you get that will block pain under normal circumstances, we can supercharge them in a lab and make fentanyl and 100,000 people died last year.

That pursuit of that pleasure is utterly ruinous. We look at a random series of events, and when it's random, we get payoffs a little bit. We'll seek those events, and that gives us a little bit of pleasure. We turn that into slot machines in Vegas, and then you're sitting there 4M by yourself. Really, really bad for you. That's the problem. Seeking pleasure alone, not making memory, will make you miserable.

Usually if something gets you a pleasure and you're doing it alone, you're usually doing it wrong. Pornography is a problem. It uses the sexual function in a way that leads to addiction and huge problems in people's lives. It's contraindicated. It's not good for especially young people to use that, but that's the same thing as fentanyl in this way. Okay.

So what do you do? You make sure you're with people, especially the people you love and you're making memories. That's why an has your bushes ads have two dudes or 10 dudes or a family. Crack and open a bud and drink in it and laughing because in the ad they want you to associate the beer with happiness, which is enjoyment is the central factor, not the pleasure that the little bit of alcohol will bring you. And that's what we need to do. That's the strategy.

We're working on a, then maybe by the time this podcast come out, it'll be out, but we're working on a very, very in-depth newsletter on basically the conflicting data on alcohol, specifically around wine. Why is it that at a biochemical level, and certainly looking at the Mendelian randomizations, alcohol is toxic at any dose, and it's a monotonically increasing function. So there's no amount of alcohol that is healthy.

Yet the epidemiology is pretty significantly in favor of modest drinking over abstinence. And once you even strip out all of the obvious confounders that would lead to that, you're left with the phenomenon you describe, which is if you dig into the data really deeply, it's the Mediterranean drinking pattern that seems to be associated with some benefits at low doses. People in memory, not the alcohol per se.

The food and the wine and the people combo that seems to be beneficial, not the vodka and red bull in the dorm issue. Even though it's the same molecule, it's a very different experience. Process sugar is the same thing. You find that people who eat candy one to three times a month on average live a year longer than people who abstain completely from candy. Candy's terrible for you. It rots your teeth, at least a metabolic syndrome.

Eating candy one to three times a day is very different than eating it one to three times a month. And so the whole point is you do something that you enjoy, something that gives you a little bit of pleasure, which something really sweet does because of our evolution, something that gives you a little bit of euphoria, like alcohol, makes you feel good.

But you do it with people and you make a memory, unless all your friends are drunks, which is bad. You can get into a unhealthy community that you're doing it in a pretty moderate way. And then it's life enhancing despite the fact that it's a poison. And you can use a little bit of poison in a productive way, but it has to be about enjoyment never about pleasure per se. Such an interesting distinction. Man, I'm 59. It took me this long.

This is information that I wish I had been able to use when I was in my 20s. It would have saved me a lot of grief. It really would have because all the time that I wasted with drinking, with just unproductive activity and the way that I missed opportunities to love and be loved and to have a happier life. This is really, really news that people can use.

And this is probably one of the stronger arguments against evolution being in favor of happiness. It's clear that evolution is in favor of pleasure. Pleasure might be one of the most potent fuels that drives the engine of evolution, at least when it comes to reproduction.

but certainly other aspects of evolution as well. You're exactly right. But enjoyment is a higher order process and I guess would not necessarily have the same evolutionary drive. Although I suppose being with people obviously also has a strong evolutionary bent. If for no other reason, then we couldn't have survived alone even through the industrialization of agriculture.

No, absolutely right. The problem is the maladaptation that comes with technological progress is that you can strip off the component of enjoyment that is pleasure and then supercharge it in the lab. That's the problem. The internet makes it possible to do that. Chemistry makes it easy to do that. There are all kinds of ways that we strip out that component of enjoyment. So it's no longer part of the evolved societies that would have been more traditional. So do you think that that's a decent litmus test, Arthur, where the person who's listening to this who

loves to smoke, says, guys, I enjoy smoking, like I really enjoy it. And you would push back on that and say, no, you find pleasure in smoking, and you find just as much pleasure if you're sitting by yourself doing it, puffing away, getting the physiologic high of the tobacco, but you're not forming new memories. You're not sharing in this with someone else. That's right. My wife smokes two times a year.

when she's with her sister in Barcelona. She loves her sister. Her sister smokes only after meals, only with people, maybe once or twice a day, which is, by the way, too much conflicting evidence on that, but it's suffice it to say that any amount of tobacco in any amount of smoking your lungs is not good for you. My wife smokes twice a year because she's with her sister. My wife's not a smoker.

I used to be a smoker. I don't touch it. I don't dare touch it. Not even twice a year is the way that that works out because for me, I got the monkey on my back immediately. And I don't want that thing to come back because I so thoroughly stripped the pleasure from tobacco off from the enjoyment of communally smoking that I can't handle it anymore. Part of that is my mad scientist. Part of that is get back to what we talked about earlier in the conversation. Okay. So what is satisfaction then?

Again, people are like, enjoyment's complicated, and it's all complicated. That's why the knowledge is so critically important. I mean, that's why happiness is a serious business. Satisfaction is the joy after struggle. That's what satisfaction really is. You struggled for it, you worked for it, you got it, it feels awesome.

With my students cheat to get an A on my exam, there's no satisfaction. But if they worked really hard, you might say, chomp, stupid, Brooks probably gave the same exam last year, go find Latchur's exam. But if they actually struggle for it and they study for it, they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A, because that's how we're wired. We're wired after you struggle for something a lot.

Again, this comes back to the evolutionary psychology, even biology, is that you go looking hard for something and you get it, you want that to be reinforced as a good thing to do. That's why Mother Nature really wants that to happen, and that's why we have that evolutionary imperative. Okay, so that's great, but here's this little twist that Mother Nature throws into it. If you knew that that satisfaction, that joy wasn't going to last, you'd think twice before going through the struggle.

You'd think twice about the cost benefit analysis. Like if you said to yourself, I mean, I like that watch. It's a nice watch. I don't know what kind of watch that is. That's a sea master or something, right? That's a GMT. It's a nice watch. But if you'd thought to yourself, it's a pretty expensive watch.

I'm going to really, really like it for a week. You'd think twice about it. Trivial example, but there's all kinds of things that we do, that relationship, that conquest, that business plan, that feeling the blanks. I'm not going to enjoy it for very long. Some other nature shields you from that truth.

You have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing. If you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after a long hike, that's incredibly satisfying. That gives you a bunch of joy. But if you sat there enjoying them for the next week, you'd be a saber to tigers dinner. You have to be ready for the next set of emotions. That's homeostasis. You go back to the baseline, physical baseline, emotional baseline. You always go back. But if you realize that, you won't make the effort in the first place. So mother nature,

tantalizes you with a joy that's going to come after the struggle and then veils the knowledge that you're not going to enjoy it forever. So people actually think, if I move to California, I'm going to be happy for the rest of my life because of the sunshine. I got the data. It's a few months. The taxes are forever. I mean, I see this constantly with people. My students, the reason they think they're going to be happier at 38th and 28th, which is generally not true. Generally, your happiness is lower at 38th than it is at 28th.

And lower at 48 than it was at 38. The reason they don't know that they get it exactly upside down is because they think that they're going to get things they want and they're going to be satisfied forever with them. When they get married, they'll be permanently happier. Have you been able to quantify the length of satisfaction, the duration of satisfaction when they get admitted to Harvard Business School?

There are some studies on that, and it shows that the satisfaction that they get is usually a few weeks. So before they even matriculate? Oh, yeah, for sure. So there's interesting studies that ask this question. When you get a bonus at your job, when do you enjoy it the most? When it hits your check or the day you find out, it's a question that answers itself. You go home because your boss says, you're the linchpin in this company. What great job you're doing. 40% bonus, boom, dollars.

You don't have the dollars, but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse. I earned it. It's great. Three weeks later, it shows up in your check and you're like, huh, yeah, good, good. I can do something with that. But that's not where the real satisfaction happens because of the homeostasis. Now, the fact that that surprises you, at least a deeply suboptimal behavior. If you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again, this satisfaction doesn't last. Natural conclusion is that you just needed more. It just wasn't enough.

So go get more and more and more. And this leads to this chase, what we call it in my business, the hedonic treadmill that a lot of people know that expression at this point, hedonic means feelings. The treadmill is you're running, running, running, running to keep, maintain and to get more of certain feelings. And you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress.

The homeostasis is that you catch up immediately. You get ahead by two inches and immediately starts running you backwards. Unless you keep running, running, running, running, then you're going to be going the wrong direction. And that's terrifying and terrible. So people not figuring out Mother Nature's cruel little hoax. They wind up on the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more, more, more, more have more. But why are we fooled by this? Because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled. I mean, we're born to be fools.

when it comes to this satisfaction problem. So this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully engaged. Clearly evolution favors pleasure over enjoyment, but evolution is all for satisfaction. All for satisfaction.

And all for fooling you into believing, this is the one that's going to be the eternal satisfaction. That is the animal path, absolutely. But there is a glitch in that matrix that we can exploit if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses. This is where every philosophical and religious tradition comes in, because most midlife is suffering, according to the first noble truth of Buddhism.

That doesn't mean life has to be suffering. It means life is naturally suffering. What the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices, you're going to suffer. And the word for suffering in that First Noble Truth of Buddhism is mistranslated. The word in Sanskrit is dukkha. And dukkha actually means dissatisfaction.

The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is unsatisfying because of the hedonic treadmill, because of homeostasis. And how do you get beyond that? Well, you recognize that the reason for your dissatisfaction is the second truth is attachment. And the third noble truth is that you need to detach. And the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path, which is entirely contrary to nature. The eightfold path is not natural. That's why it's hard. So here's the way to think about it just in sort of

drive listener terms. Mother Nature says satisfaction will come and stay if you have more, more, more, what's your life strategy, more, more money, more power, more pleasure, more admiration, more Instagram followers, more, more.

Actually, the right model, a model that better satisfies, that gives you more satisfaction that lasts, is halves divided by wants. All the things you have divided by all the things that you want, and this is basically kind of what the eightfold path of Buddhism comes into. This is a baby version, so I apologize to the Buddhists for listening to us, is that you don't need to have more strategy, you need to want less strategy.

The eightfold path is a want less strategy. We need to want less. We need to manage our wants in this life. And it's so doing, then holy mackerel. Then satisfaction hangs around, man. That's why the Dalai Lama always says, you shouldn't have what you want. You should want what you have.

really, which is another way of talking about this. And there's all kinds of techniques. There's visualizations. One of the things that I like for doing this is that because I have an arts background, my mother was a painter and I was a musician for many years professionally. And we have a tendency to think of our lives that we're building, especially the hustlers, the go-getters, the strivers who listen to you.

that your life is like a beautiful painting and you're the artist with a brush. And that canvas is your life and you're putting the brush strokes on the canvas. The problem is, by the time you're 45 and you're a striver, that canvas is full. Man, it's dense. I defy people to add another brush stroke.

You need to use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture, that you're chipping away, that you are in there, but there's too much stuff stuck to you. You need less, less, less, want less. Strip away the detritus, get out the chisel. The exercise I give my stick, because this has to be practical.

Here's the exercise I give my students. They will hear that the way for them to be successful is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list. The bucket list. On your birthday, you list all your ambitions and all your desires and your cravings. And you imagine yourself getting all these things. You visualize yourself getting these things. That's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a complete loser.

You need a reverse bucket list where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments and you cross them out. Not that you won't get them, but that now they're not limbic. Now they're in your prefrontal cortex. Now that you can actually manage those cravings in an entirely different way, and this absolutely works. I do this on my birthday every year now. So give me an example. This last year on my birthday, I thought, what are my attachments that are holding me down?

And I realized it was a lot of my political opinions. Tick not Han, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who started the Plum Village community of Western Buddhists. He said that the greatest source of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions. We're so attached for opinions. It's like we're hoarding our gold. And if you get between me and my opinions, you're stupid and evil. I'm going to cancel you or whatever dumb thing that we're doing today.

I thought to myself, my political opinions are too strong. I'm too attached to them. I wrote down about half of my political opinions. I still have them, but I crossed them out, which negated their importance, their moral importance in my life. I need fewer opinions because I need more friends. It's really what it comes down to. I'm way lighter. I'm way freer.

But tell me, is the act of acknowledging the opinions, the exercise, crossing them out, the exercise, and how does that translate? I mean, we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy that took place very recently, a terrorist attack, and it's a very dividing event politically.

It's hard for me to say, even though I'm not a political person, I don't talk about my political views publicly, I have very strong views. And as a result of that, I'm prone to be very judgmental of those who hold opposing views.

Especially the stronger my view, so there's certain views where I'm like all about nuance. Then there's some views where I'm like, nope, this is black and white. How would that exercise help in this situation? This gets back to metacognition. Metacognition, once again, is not being limbic, but rather experiencing emotions.

and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where you can make conscious executive decisions, is letting your CEO do it as opposed to the kids do it. And so what you do is when you have an opinion, a strong, volatile political opinion, which is not just terrorism is bad. It's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular situation is a moron. That's what goes on the list.

And what you do is you cross that out, not because you don't think that, but because you're willing to consider that. You're willing to let your CEO think about that as opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that, that it's no longer a limbic opinion, where you see something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion, where your insular cortex engages because you have a sense of disgust on the contrary. Do you think that that's a better strategy than my strategy, which is to tune all of that out?

is to basically say, I'm going to do something that feels cowardly, which is I'm not going to engage in any of this by reading any of it, by watching any of it, by participating. I'm going to focus on what I do best. I'm going to do my job and not become a spectator. There's a lot to that because you should specialize in what you can do well. You should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the things you can't. So these are two different phenomena.

You could argue my strategy is a dangerous strategy from a societal perspective, because then if everybody took that approach, nobody would do anything. Absolutely. You wouldn't have any collective action. Everybody would be ignorant for sure. But what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limbic system. When you block out information, this is basically, I don't like the news, so I'm going to cancel the newspaper. I'm no longer going to get the news from the newspaper.

You shouldn't be afraid of information, and that's all your limbic system is delivering to is information. You should learn how to use information. So ideally, you don't have to do that. But ideally, what you do is you metacognitively, you process the information, make decisions on how to use the information.

Sometimes that's not efficient. Sometimes that's some optimal because you don't have time to do it. I have found that I use a combination of the two techniques. I was a president of a think tank in Washington, DC for almost 11 years. And so I was mad. I was sadly in the know. I was so aware all the time of everything everybody was saying and doing. And I knew it was going on. And I knew if there was going to be a budget resolution, I could tell you it was going on with a farm bill, the whole deal.

Now I know a lot less. And the reason is I ration my access to news. I read a total of 15 to 30 minutes of news per day all at once. I need more bandwidth for my work. And I don't want it to intrude on my work, but I'm not afraid of my limbic system. I'm not afraid of what this information will actually do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when I do have this information, I can process it in executive ways, as opposed to childlike ways.

It's no longer ghosts in the machine. I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it. I can choose my reactions to my emotions. I can use substitute emotions. I can act as if I had different emotions and I can disregard my emotions, but all of that is on purpose. And those are the fruits of metacognition. All right. So the third macronutrient is sense of purpose. Meaning. Yeah. Meaning. And obviously it extends far beyond quote unquote work.

Yeah, for sure. So meaning is the most important because it's the protein. You'll die. Right. You can vary carbs and fat a lot. You can't mess with protein. You can't mess with protein. It's a basic building block and you're in big, big trouble when you become protein deprived because there's no other way to get it. It's not like your carbs are going to transform into proteins. And everybody knows when they don't have a sense of meaning because their life is empty.

They're the most miserable when they don't have a sense of meaning, but nobody knows exactly what it is. It's like I need this thing, but I know what it is. So philosophers and psychologists, by the way, define meaning is actually a combination of three things, coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is

things happen for a reason. That's the first part of meaning. I believe that things happen for a particular reason. That doesn't mean my way is the right way. And it might be randomness. My father was a PhD biostatistician, also very religious. And he used to say that the greatest miracle in the world was randomness, that God built the universe with randomness and regular distributions of events.

He thought that miracles were extreme tail events and random distributions and God loved randomness. In other words, there's lots and lots of different ways to understand the coherence part, why things are coherent. The second is purpose, which is direction. Your life has direction. There's a word called the rum line, R-H-U-M line. It's actually a much more common word in Spanish, a rumbo, and it's actually part of common parlance. Rumbo means

It means the end point toward which your voyage is tending. You're not going to get there, and you're going to vary from it, but you have to have a North Star. You have to have something navigating. You have to have something. Navigationally. And the last is significance. It would matter if I weren't alive. It would matter if I'm not here.

So these are the component parts. Now, these are worth thinking about in detail in our lives. But here's the way I have a kind of a diagnostic test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis. And the reason this is useful, it's a two question exam. And if somebody doesn't have real answers, everybody's got PC answers.

answers you give your mom or whatever. But if you don't have real answers to this, the good news is these are the two questions to go looking for answers to in your life. This is your vision quest is to find the answers to these by reading, by experiencing, by meditating, by spending time by yourself, by praying, by asking people's advice, by therapy, I don't know, do your thing. Question number one is why are you alive? Why are you alive?

You got to have an answer. It's not my answer, your answer, a real answer. Question number two is for what are you willing to die today?

Now, you flunk this quiz by saying, I don't know. That's how you flunk the quiz. But then the adventure actually begins after you flunk the quiz, because I'm going to figure that out. I'm going to go find those answers. I'm going to read. I'm going to consider. I'm going to do all the things that you do metacognitively to find the answer to these questions. Let's think about that for a second. There are probably a lot of people who cannot answer one, who can answer two.

or who can answer one but can't answer two. I'm alive because of some biological process, et cetera, et cetera. But number two is I don't know what I'm willing to die for. Let's clarify that. Are you asking one through the lens of biology?

Depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning. The way to answer the first question, why are you alive? A spiritual person or a religious person would have a divine response to the first question. An atheist would respond to the first question in terms of biology. And they would really understand that biological answer could give you a tremendous sense of meaning.

and a sense of place in the universe. Although it's interesting because as someone who leans far more towards the agnostic atheist side, I spend most of my time coming to grips with mortality, which is a very difficult thing to come to grips with. Which is the second question.

But I come to grips with that by addressing your third point or sense of purpose, which is my insignificance. So in other words, it's only through accepting my complete and utter insignificance that I can have some semblance of peace with my finitude and my

eventual and relatively quick demise. Yeah, this is one of the reasons that transcendence is one of the happiness practices, the practice of transcendence, whether it's secular or religious transcendence. It's really important because it makes you small. It makes you small. You stand in awe of a sunset. You stand in awe of seeing somebody

committing an unbelievably selfless act. It makes you actually feel smaller, which gives you peace through a sense of perspective. That's a very common phenomenon. One of the people who works in my area, Decker Keltner at UC Berkeley, he has a book called Awe that talks about the neurocognitive processes involved when you're experiencing awe and why it gives you such deep peace. And it's really all about what you're talking about. You got to get small, like Steve Martin used to say in the 70s, get small.

If you can find ways to get small, you're going to be a lot better off, for sure. But how do we reconcile that with the need to have significance through your sense of purpose? Well, the key is, at the same time, you realize that you matter, but at the same time it's okay that the universe will be just fine if you die. They seem like conflicting phenomena, but they're actually weirdly compatible.

I think that they're weirdly compatible. These ideas, this balance between the two, it matters that I exist here and things will be just fine. If I don't, you think about this when you get married for the first time, you say, you love me.

And if I'm gone, you'll be okay. It's this sense of peace. That balance between those two things turns out to be the trick. I've never been able to find that. I guess practice makes perfect. I haven't found it either, for sure. But the way to think about this and the way to find the answers to the questions is really interesting. And I've worked on this with my kids. I have adult kids. My kids are a little older than yours. My 23-year-old. He's a piece of work, man. Same as Carlos.

He likes you. He's human performance machine. He's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps, 204, 4% body fat, 6 foot 5. He's all about it. He needs the information that you're providing, obviously. So, you know, he didn't have the answers to that because many adolescents don't and young adults don't.

But he found the answers to that as he did something. It was truly difficult going through marine basic training and then infantry training battalion and then doing the end doc as he's an operator in the Marines now in the scout sniper platoon. Stuff's no joke. It's hard.

And you ask him the question now, why are you alive? He would simply say, because God made me to serve. That is both the how and the why of the first question. And the second question, for what are you willing to die? Very simple. For my faith, for my family, for my fellow Marines, for the United States of America, and for our allies.

These are very solid answers. These are not the right answers for somebody listening or you or me necessarily, but they are answers that he actually believes. And that's what gives him his sense of meaning is the content of those two answers and finding what we really do think about those things. What really is persuasive to us is a philosophical and for some, a theological journey really worth taking.

It's definitely something I've spent much more time thinking about in the past year than certainly any time before. People typically do around age 50 in ancient Vedic physics, the theory of the four quarters of life.

We think about, you know, your kid and adult and all that. Last time we talked, we were talking about from strength to strength. This is my last book. And according to this ancient Hindu thinking, you've got Brahmacharya, which is your student phase, the first quarter of your life. The second quarter of your life is called Grihastha, which is the householder phase where you're hustling and you're starting your family and your work. The third quarter, going in from the second to the third, is the second adolescence into something called Vanaprastha, which means these two Sanskrit words to retire into the forest.

And it's supposed to happen around age 50. And what happens is that certain things fade and other things become more salient to you. More transcendental things start to become more important to you. And part of this has to do with the change in your brain.

change in your strengths, the change in your crystallized intelligence. These are real phenomena that neuroscientists have identified as social psychologists as well. But as a spiritual matter, it means, what is my retirement into the forest? What does that actually mean? Certain things are more important to me than they used to be. These are important questions, not because I'm going to die, but because I just want to know.

What does this actually mean about? And a lot of people wind up coming back to the faith of their youth when this happens. A lot of people will develop a meditation practice. Some people will find that they will get deeply, deeply into fitness in ways they hadn't before and doing things that are super hard for them that challenge them as human beings.

Some people will change careers, do something they've always wanted to do, but something that has more artistic significance, they're more creative significance than it had before. But all of that is this Vana Prastha. And the whole point of that is to get to the fourth quarter, which is called Sanyasa. And that's enlightenment to sit at the feet of the guru and to bask in the glow of the master is kind of how the Hindus will talk about it. But you got to do the work to get there. You got to ask the questions and be on the quest. And that's your third quarter around age 50.

And do you think that each of these quarters, which I recall from our first discussion, don't necessarily reflect equal chunks of time on the calendar, but do you think that they require an emphasis on different elements of those three macronutrients of happiness? I do. This is mixing.

Neuroscience plus social psychology plus Vedic wisdom and this is like where no man has gone before. But I do and I've actually asked this to some teachers that I haven't, I go to India every year and I study with various gurus and spiritual teachers which is outside my tradition of my Catholic. But it makes me better Catholic and it makes me a better social scientist too quite frankly. And I have a teacher in Polikod which is in southern India.

a guy named Notre Venkataraman, the Tamil guy. And I was asking him about precisely these sets of questions. And he said that people pass through these phases depending on how adroit they are spiritually at different times and different periods of time. But you have to do all the learning from each one. You need to be a student. You need to develop your life. Then you need to retire into the forest and contemplate these questions such that you can get to the ultimate destination, which is this period of enlightenment in your life.

And in so doing, you need to develop these different parts of your life. You can't do this without the love that you share with other people, which is inherently enjoyable. You can't do this without achieving certain things and understanding that your life requires a certain amount of satisfaction. And that has achievement that has earned success involved in it. And of course, you can't do that without understanding what meaning is to you and what the meaning of your life really is.

So we've talked about metacognition. Let's talk about it a bit more. You've already very quickly rattled off the components of it or the techniques. Yeah, but let's go into it in a bit more detail. There were basically four techniques associated. Yeah, more or less. I mean, you can break them up into sub techniques, et cetera, et cetera. This is an artificial distinction between them. But again, what you're trying to do is get space. When your grandmother said, Peter, when you're angry, count to 10, everybody's grandmother did that.

The research suggests, by the way, count to 30 when you're angry. And while you're counting to 30, envision the consequences of what you're thinking of doing. And then you will be fully metacognitive. Then you will be processing the information in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. So that was really good advice from grandma, and we can put a finer point on it.

Other ways to do that, what you want is space between your limbic system and your primitive cortex. You want space so that your executive brain can experience emotions and deal with them appropriately. If you don't give it space, you'll be reactive and your limbic system will manage you. That's the problem that a lot of people have in life. It's like, sad to cry. I'm angry. I yell. I'm happy I laugh. Whatever happens to be, but that's no way to live.

than the kids are in charge of the family budget. Big problem. Big problem. Depends on the kids, obviously, but that can be a big problem. That kind of spontaneity comes at an enormous cost.

How do you put space in it? Therapy is a good way for some people. It's not my thing. Some people do. They learn about their emotions this way. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT is super useful for a lot of people. Meditation can do that because most meditation techniques that will require that you analyze yourself at a certain remove. Peter's feeling sad right now. How interesting that Peter is feeling sad. It's just information, just information, just analyzing information, being a scientist about yourself.

Prayer is really good for this. Why? Because you're bringing in a higher power to help you manage these things. And in so doing, you're experiencing them very consciously in the executive, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's where you want it to reside.

Some people do this through intensive exposure to nature, walking before dawn for an hour without devices. Some people will do this indirectly by studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and learning how to analyze them, whatever it happens to be. One way or the other, you don't want the living system in charge. And then when you get this distance,

So just be clear, you feel that this can be done without a mindfulness-based meditation practice, which is clearly the potent exercise that one uses to distance self from thought. Exactly right. For example, one of the most effective ways to do this that has nothing to do with meditation at all is journaling.

A lot of people suffer from anxiety. A lot of people listening to us suffer from anxiety. Anxiety is basically unfocused fear. That's what it is. It's a bombardment of stress hormones having to do with the fact that there's pervasive sense of doom that's undefined, undefined fear, unfocused fear. That's what anxiety, generalized anxiety is really all about. And so you can do a lot of things. You can take

pharmaceuticals, benzodiazepines that will mute the stress response, et cetera, et cetera. But the whole point of medical ignition and journaling when it comes to anxiety is that you force your prefrontal cortex to take over by writing down the five things you're most afraid of right now. It's like, I got him freaking out, man. I'm

If we can out my heart is fluttering, I've got the butterflies in my stomach. I can't sleep or I wake up too early. I don't know what's going on. It's like I'm feeling like I'm under threat. Okay. Get out the patent paper. Number one, what am I actually afraid of? Number two, what am I actually afraid of? And then what you've done is you've taken the sense of anxiety. It's not perfect.

But this, as a strategic technique, will work miracles in your life. If you consistently journal about your emotions, and then, by the way, throw it away afterward because you don't want everybody in your family to find it, because who knows? Maybe you're thinking forbidden thoughts or have forbidden fears. Anxiety is a maladapted kind of fear.

I'm doomed. It's not the way cavemen were supposed to feel fear. Fear is so that you can run away from a tiger. Fear is supposed to be extremely episodic. Our forebears in the place the scene, they were mostly hanging out all day. And then occasionally something bad would happen after run really fast in climate tree. That's what fear is for. Yeah, it seems like it was 99% boredom, 1% extreme panic.

Yeah, or he's 99% fellowship, 99% hanging out, 99% with your friends, 99% with your tribe, making jokes and popping a grub in your mouth from time to time. That's really what I was. Some anthropologists think that the quality of life has dramatically fallen in the modern era.

in what we have today, but it's also one of the components of modern life is generalizing anxiety where we're processing outside stimuli as minor threats. We get a little drip of cortisol into our system constantly, constantly, constantly, and it's really unfocused. So focus it, focus it, write down the five things and they suddenly will feel a lot less threatening and they'll be more bounded and they'll be determined in a way where you can actually deal with them and start getting some solutions as opposed to just feeling afraid.

So that's an example of non-mindful meditation, metacognition, as simple as a patent paper. What about this idea of journaling positive experiences as kind of a database? I like doing that, but what I like doing better is I like journaling negative experiences and learning from them.

Does that mean learning from them or finding meaning in them or know those the same thing? Here's the way to do it. That can really, really change life a lot. I asked my students to keep a failure and disappointment journal. When you're 28, there's one thing after another. It's like she broke up with me or she didn't return my text or

that professor gave me a C on an exam or the job market isn't turning out the way I wanted to, is something bugging you in a big way. Every time, write it down, write it down, just write it out, even if it's stupid, write it down, then leave two blank spaces, two blank lines under it, under each entry. The first one you come back to after 30 days, said an alarm in your phone, come back to it and you have to write, what did I learn about this thing in the last 30 days, about that thing?

After six months, you get another alarm that says, go back to it and say, tell me something good that happened as a result of that. Now, if we don't do that, we won't remember and we won't grow on the basis of this. But I'll give you an example. You're at work and your boss has time for your performance evaluation. You've been killing it. You've been killing it. You've been working hard, doing a good job. And your boss is like, you're a bee around here and you're crushed.

I'm B talent. Dude, really? And so you write it down in your journal. I thought it was an A plus. Turns out my boss thinks I'm a B minus. Your natural tendency is to say, I'm going to go out and drink with my friends and complain about my boss with my partner and then make the discomfort go away. I want it to go away. They could go away. That's wrong. Write it down. 30 days you come back and you say to yourself,

What did I learn? I learned I wasn't as good of fit as I thought for this job. That's number one. I also learned, by the way, that I thought I was going to be bummed out about this for the rest of my life and actually I was bummed out about it for like three days. Interesting. You learn from it because you write down the thing that you learned and now it's permanent because you've committed it to your executive center. Six months later, you come back and say, given the fact that I wasn't as good of fit as I thought, I went on a job market and

I found a job for which I am a better fit and I'm a lot happier. And then when you start doing this consistently, you'll start looking forward to writing down things in your failure journal. This is alchemy, practically. You've converted the negative into the positive. There's no good or bad emotions. There's only information. You've treated the emotional information the way you're supposed to. You're learning from the data.

And that's how you do it. That's what I like even a lot better than I saw fluffy clouds today. And I'm really grateful for that gratitude list. You're great. I got nothing against gratitude lists, but failure lists. That's powerful. That's actually even better for life. Let's talk about the difference between optimism and hope. You comment on this.

People use them interchangeably, and there's so much empathy and compassion. They're not the same. These things are never the same. One of the things I do in my class is I always have a distinction between two things that seem the same, and then see what the distinction will actually do for our lives if we understand them. And optimism and hope are, it's a classic case. Optimism is nothing more than a prediction.

Things will be okay. It'll be okay. Everything's gonna be all right. Maybe yes, maybe not. Hope is no matter what happens. Something can be done and I can do something about it. Hope is empowering. You can be a very pessimistic but very hopeful person.

You can be an optimist who's hopeless. I think things are going to be okay. Thank God, because of nothing I can do. Hope actually is tied to happiness. Optimism generally is not. Optimism is something. It's just kind of a sunny predictor. You might be an optimist because you're a happy person, but the optimism itself doesn't make you happier. What is the opposite of hope? Despair is hopelessness. There's nothing I can do. Nothing can be done and there's nothing I can do. That's almost never true.

And what is the root of that feeling or belief system? Despair usually is an extreme form of disempowerment. People get it from childhood trauma. I mean, there's some research that suggests that the way that people are brought up can make them inherently hopeless, but people actually can get into kind of a hopeless stance. And part of it is self definition.

For example, we have a real tendency in our culture to want people to live on the basis of victimhood and grievance. People will actually, their identity will be victim on the victim and their identity will be grievance against the people who have power over me. And I get it. I mean, there are people who have power over us and there's legitimate grievance and people are victims. But to identify as a victim is the recipe for hopelessness and despair. Why is that becoming more prevalent or does it just seem that way?

It goes in waves. What happens is, and we have an identity culture at this point, one of the things that you typically find is that especially manipulative leaders will tell people that they can be virtuous on the basis of victimhood, that victimhood is inherently virtuous. Literally in the social science literature, it was called virtuous victimhood.

And it's incredibly disempowering for the followers. It's incredibly manipulative and malignant on the part of leaders who are actually doing this. And we're in a period in our culture of polarization and hatred and contempt where there's just a lot of that going around. And it seems that both sides have agency in this, just different flavors of it.

Oh, totally. You look at the most manipulative leaders, and these manipulative leaders, they have the characteristic almost always of what we call the dark triad of personality, which is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. That happens in 7% of the population, according to Scott Barry Kaufman.

He was on the best work on the dark triad. That means trait psychopathy. It doesn't mean you're an axe murderer. It means you're way less remorseful about your negative actions and people in the population. If you're narcissistic, Machiavellianism and have trait psychopathy or dark triad, you're most likely going to want to disempower people, create a movement of people who are relatively disempowered because you want to manipulate people.

And do we see that more concentrated in politics? Yes, right now in particular. So what politics does this where we reward dark triads. And what we're doing is we're rewarding dark triads on both sides of the political spectrum right now. So it's a war of dark triads and their followers are being systematically disempowered into a climate of virtuous victimhood. That's what we actually see. What's the source of my virtue? The fact that I'm getting screwed is the source of my virtue.

Agree or disagree that that's a hell of a way to run a country. But for sure, this is why happiness is in decline. Where do we think we are on the long arc of happiness? I would probably be less optimistic that our ancestors were that happy. I think it would be hard for us to relate to what they went through depending on how far back we want to go.

I have the feeling that most people would much prefer to be alive today than to have been alive a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago. Of course, you choose it. So on the one hand, we all have this amazing good luck.

which is, as you said, there's 8 billion people on the planet, 100 billion have already died. In the last 250,000 years, 100 billion people have died. So how lucky are we that we were born right now? Or you could say it was should be a lot better if I were born 200 years from now, perhaps. Maybe. What is the sense of dread? I don't know. I've thought about this a little bit, but regardless, it is what it is. And yet,

There are probably objective data that would say, what's our happiness today relative to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Like if you go back to immediately following World War II, what has been the trajectory of happiness? We have imperfect data on that. We have really good data going back to the 1970s. That's really when the National Opinion Research Center started through the general social survey, which is University of Chicago data is the best data available. We can really trust it.

that started to ask people about their self-evaluation of their life. And you don't want to look at it between countries. The comparisons between countries are nonsense. Denmark is happier than Mexico. It's meaningless. How come? Well, because they define happiness differently, and they have different cultural languages. Different languages. Yeah, different languages. Literally, the Germanic language comes from the word for luck. In German, happiness is glück. Glück is luck, and glück is happy. And so that means lucky. In Middle English, the word for luck was hop.

from which we actually get happiness, whereas Felicity, the idea of Felicitisness in the Romus languages, has a completely different sense to it of what that means. Plus, for example, in Denmark, happiness is a lot about contentedness. There's a word in Danish huga, H-Y-G-G-E, which means the cozy conviviality in the presence of friends on a comfy couch. It's like a paragraph.

But it gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don't want that. I want adventure, which is why my grandparents left Denmark and came to the United States to start a farm. We're not going to do the across country. You can look at the same group of people over time. That's pretty legit. What you find is that it was from the 1970s through the 1980s, it was pretty constant and pretty decent in the United States, and then it started to fall. By the way, that's interesting. The 70s, you could argue, were a pretty depressing time in the United States.

And the 80s, maybe less so, but you're saying it was relatively constant. It was like here and there, you know, things ups and downs, et cetera. You go into a recession, it dips a little bit. You come out of the recession, it goes up morning in America, all good. But then around 1989, 1990s starts to fall and it starts to decline just a little bit. And there's two phenomena going on. There's weather and climate for happiness.

The climate is these little declines, one percentage point here and the percentage of people who say they're very happy, a little increase in the percentage of people saying they're not happy about their lives. Usually these are the three groups, not happy, not too happy, somewhat happy, very happy. They're just kind of closing in on each other a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Then there's storms, then there's weather.

And the weather would be the big ones were around 2008. What happened in the 90s? What led to the climate drift of the 90s? The climate drift of the 90s was the four habits of the happiest people all went into decline. Faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people, the attitudes we have toward our work, all changed.

Really in the 1990s in the 2000s and this was a secular decline in the number of people that were practicing faith secular decline in the formation of families having children getting married having families secular decline in the number of people who know you well there is more and more loneliness and fewer intimate friendships that people had.

It's a really good question Vivek Murthy our surgeon general has written a whole book on loneliness and there's a lot of speculation the UCLA data on loneliness you know people using those data are always asking what it is. Probably it has to do with the fact that people are more and more likely to move away from the families and technological changes have made it so that we don't have to be in person as much as we have been in the past.

Was that even true in the early 90s? Yeah, I mean, more and more. I mean, it was certainly true by the mid 1990s. Didn't have to pick up the phone anymore. I was writing a lot of emails in the middle of the 1990s, for sure. But every way that we get more efficient in the way that we communicate, there's less of the oxytocin interchange, which, of course, the neuropeptide of human bonding. It only comes from eye contact and touch.

That's how we get it. We're evolved to link to each other and experience intense pleasure when oxytocin is produced endogenously in the brain from eye contact and touch. And so if we're actually communicating with each other, not getting eye contact and touch, we're going to get less of it. And so that's what happened where people say, I have fewer people who know me well. There's more isolation in our communities that's been happening or it's been just drift, just drift.

And last but not least, people have fewer and fewer healthy ideas about their work. My work really serves other people and we see this over the decades. And why has that changed? Is that basically the change from a largely manufacturing sector to finance information technology? Like where has that changed?

I don't know the answer to that. I'm a real enthusiast for the free enterprise system and my friends who are not would blame the free enterprise system for making us into just these incredible efficiency machines and the way that we do our work. Work is just less humane and less human. Are we less tethered to a product? That's for sure. And we're less tethered to a workplace too. And this is one of the things at work. I mean, my dad worked for the same university for his whole career.

40 years teaching at the same university day in and day. I didn't like it. A lot of times complained about the Dean, all the things the college professors do, but he knew his colleagues and he had students to the house. You know, we had his students, you know, his math students to the house all the time and they'd be playing guitars and singing and my mom would be making a big pot of spaghetti and doing the whole thing. I didn't do that. And I've changed universities a bunch of times and why don't we do that? Our culture is actually telling us that we need to move when it's time to get a better deal.

I see, so we're not into laying down roots. We don't lay down roots professionally, and that's why we have less of a sense of bondedness in the workplace, a less of a sense that we have relationships that we're serving in the workplace, and it's not just efficiently producing a product. That's the best explanation that we can find that people have worse attitudes toward their work. They're less likely to have close friends. They are less likely to form and cultivate families, and they're less likely to practice faith. The climate changes.

Then we get these bad storms. How big an impact was 9-11 on the American psyche? Not that bad. On the contrary, it was momentarily a blip and then the esprit de corps that came about actually lifted happiness. And that's what often happens. No doubt that would have been World War II if we had data then. Big national threats that bring us together, raise our happiness. It's not reliable data.

The data notwithstanding that we have suggests that during wartime, clinical depression falls by 75%. I'd seen these data in the UK during World War II. Exactly. Again, you can't rely on that because this is not treatment and control experiments. Half the population got a war and the other half the population didn't get a war and all that.

longitudinal data and we're doing the best that we can, but it is almost certainly the case that a collective threat brings us together, and that does not hurt our happiness. What hurt our happiness was around 2008, and originally we all thought it was because of the financial crisis. That certainly didn't help. It was the advent of social media.

That was when everybody adopted social media. It was 2008. Social media has been catastrophic for American happiness, especially among young people, especially among young women. Jonathan Haidt at NYU, who I've worked with for a long time, Enjin Twangi, who teaches at San Diego State University. The case is closed. The data they've got on this, the studies they've collected on this show that this was just inflecting.

when different platforms, which lowered happiness in different ways. I mean, Twitter creates more hatred and contempt in our culture. Instagram, it creates social comparison, which is the thief of joy. TikTok, when you see ordinary people doing fun things, it makes you feel lonely. They're unhappiness machines.

Obviously, you can use them in a way that doesn't denigrate your happiness, but most people don't. That was 2008. Then political contempt and polarization in the 2016 era, one in six Americans stopped talking to a family member because of politics after the 2016 election. That's second storm. The third storm was a coronavirus when everybody went home and nobody came back. Remote work, death for happiness. It's very convenient. Seven percent of the population actually gets happier because they're introverts.

Those are the cats, the rest of us are dogs. And it's terrible that something pulled us apart like that. And then we didn't get back together. I go to my university and it's like tumbleweeds going down the hall. Still. Oh yeah, I go in at three o'clock in the afternoon to the place where my offices and the lights are off because of the motion sensor. People didn't go back to work.

And the result of that is we don't congregate. There's still fear in some places. It's not as bad as it was, but there are permanent changes. And that was the third storm. And today, ordinarily, you'll see twice as many people say they're very happy is not happy. That's flipped twice as many people today. So they're not happy is very happy. The signal is clear, a very clear reduction in happiness over 50 years. Yes. Yes. There's a secular decline with periodic storms, periodic down drafts and happiness.

So as individuals now thinking about some of those things, I just based on my own personal experience would agree that social media usually does not produce a feeling that is a positive one. It's usually a negative one. If we're going to put on our metacognitive hats and self-manage, if we think of ourselves as

capable to self-manage through difficulty, as opposed to saying, look, we're all going to move to India. We're going to take up amongst traditions. You said to our lessons or something, right? Again, most of us don't have that luxury, and we still want to coexist in this world. One of the steps we want to take to minimize the damage of these things, and at the same time, try to find this semblance of happiness. That's the reason I do my work, is precisely because greater happiness

you

Not perfect happiness. That's not the goal. It's not even desirable. People say, I want to be happy. Now, you know, pure happiness, that would mean the eradication of your negative feelings. You'd be dead. That'd be the eradication negative experiences you wouldn't learn and grow. Well, also, I would argue we would get back to the same problem with satisfaction, wouldn't we? For sure. I mean, it's impossible to begin with. The point is that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction and we want to get happier. Oprah Winfrey calls it happiness. That's the goal. It's a good neologism to actually get the point across.

To do that, you need information. That's why I teach you about the science of happiness because it's a super interesting body of knowledge. I write about it every week because it's fascinating. People like to learn about it. Do the work to change your habits and then you need to share with other people so it becomes permanent in your consciousness. That's really what it's all about. Everybody can do that.

I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness, aficionados and teachers. That's what I want. I want a movement of people who say, my hobby is learning about happiness. And in my job, I'm a happiness teacher, whatever your job is, whether you're managing a family or managing a company or just trying to manage yourself is what I talk about. And to do that, you have to know the facts on this. There's certain things you need to protect yourself from and there's certain things you need to do. You need a version and you need to approach.

There are certain things you need to approach. You need to take seriously your spiritual life. You need to take it seriously.

Let's talk about that for the non-religious person. Most people listening to us are not religious. And by the way, I think most people would look at someone like you and be a bit confused because on the one hand, you're a scientist, you're a serious intellectual guy. And yet you describe yourself as having a very strong religious faith. And yet you don't have a hard time talking about things that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of years ago. In other words, you don't have a difficult time reconciling science and faith.

No, not at all. And part of the reason for that is because faith and reason have to coexist in the same way that understanding a Picasso painting and understanding Picasso of a man are utterly reconcilable, but not the same thing. The painter and the painting are not in conflict with each other. They're both important things to understand. But there are many religious people who take a very literal view of, say, the Bible and would say, well, the earth is 6,000 years old or whatever. They need to study more science.

They're taking things too literally. They're taking things not just too literally. They're not understanding that there's an intellectual bifurcation between the concept of the creation, the myth of how that actually creation takes place, which is the literalness that you're talking about. And then the evidence, the awe-inspiring evidence of the creation itself. One of the reasons I'm religious is because of science. Every time I learn something new, I'm like, well, thank you.

What a wonderful gift. It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong. It doesn't freak me out that I might be wrong about the science. It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong about the religion. I don't think so, but you know, maybe that's okay. It's absolutely okay. So if a person listened to this says, my view has always been those who have a religious view are more fortunate.

And I especially think that in terms of dealing with death, I think it's much easier to process death if you believe that there is a life after death. There's meaning in a different dimension. Right. Whereas if you really only think about this through the lens of biochemistry, it's a blank screen. Well, that's because if you only think of it in terms of biochemistry, death is a what question, which is in a spiritual dimension, death becomes a why question.

and those are different interrogatives that have different philosophical and emotional content. Now there's this area in between of spirituality, which is not religion. If I were gonna lump myself into a category, it would probably be around the idea that

I find enormous pleasure in nature. That is the closest I suppose I get to religion. That's a transcendent experience. And that's really what we're talking about. It's why I live here. I live in the middle of nowhere. It's so beautiful. And it's why I have to be outside every single day.

Yep, I get it. And that's very common, by the way. A lot of people get transcendence from nature. So what does a person do who lives in a very busy urban center where they are surrounded by a wall of concrete all day, every day? Well, if that turns out to be destructive to your transcendence, is that a reason to move? Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. For some people, not everybody. I know some people don't want to leave Manhattan. And part of the reason is because they get their transcendent from other dimensions of life.

Maybe they are religious. Maybe they're traditional religious. Maybe they are serious meditators. Maybe they become completely awestruck from music or human genius. Again, it really gets back to transcending your littleness, transcending that, and that transcendent experience. What it does is it gives you the same benefit as a religious journey.

So basically what you're saying is, same happiness benefit. Yeah, we need to talk about something much broader than religion in a formal sense. And awe can be the religious belief. It could be an obsession or an appreciation of great music or art, or meditation can be the place where you tap transcendence. Yeah, absolutely. Now, it's also very convenient to not vent your own physics on this. And so the Catholic Church is really, really good for me.

And one of the things also is not what I feel. It's what I've decided to do. This is an important thing to understand about transcendence. You don't feel transcendence all the time. You decide to experience transcendence and put yourself in the circumstances to experience awe. I'm sure you go outside and there's a lot on your mind. You've got a very busy and hectic and stressful life and you don't feel it. You don't feel it every single day. Like I got a mask every day.

I don't feel it every day. I wake up an atheist alive. And why do you do that? I do that because what's part of the protocol for living the life that I want to live. I mean, I get up at 445 like you. I work out for an hour, body. I go to mass, soul.

then I work. That's when my creativity is highest. Now, of course, I'm also, you notice, I'm optimizing my dopamine. I'm sucking as much dopamine into my prefrontal cortex, which gives me creativity and focus for the three hours that I need to write. And that's a good motivation to do so. But I also want to optimize both body and soul at the very beginning of the day. So I'm centered on the things that really matter to me, notwithstanding how I feel. I wake up at 4.45 in the morning, I'm like,

back day. I don't want to do back day. I don't want to leg day. I don't want to do that, but I do it. I do it. It's the discipline of the will that in and of itself is so important. And then I go to mass. I don't want to do it a lot of days. I don't want to do it, but that's not the point. Do you think that there is a deficit of that as well of that idea? So for example, you alluded to marriage earlier and anybody who's listening to this, who's married, especially who's been married for many, many years, they'll acknowledge that so much of

The almost perverse joy of marriage is that you make a lot of sacrifices for another person and you find yourself putting someone else ahead of yourself. For me, that's a very hard thing to do. Like I'm just so hardwired to be such a selfish guy that it's really a wonderful practice to do something where I know like, I'm going to make my wife's coffee today because, you know, she would do the same for me.

Well, part of that is that you have discovered, and not enough people have, that love is not a feeling either. Happiness is not a feeling, but love isn't either. Love is a commitment. Martin Luther King, one time, he gave this very beautiful sermon on the most transgressive passage in the Christian Bible, which is Matthew 544, love your enemies. And he says, Jesus says, today I give you a new teaching. You have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

He says, Jesus doesn't say to like your enemies, because that's a sentimental thing. The like is to feel. To love is to decide. This is what's going on between you and your wife. The satisfaction, the disciplining of your own will comes from the decision to love her. That's the magic. That's the magic in marriage. That's the magic in friendship. That's the magic that you can have in relationship with your kids. Look, if it were all about your feelings, hell, I'd be divorced.

God knows my wife would bail on me. I'm just a pain being around me. She decides every day to love me. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle, Aristotle talked really compellingly about love and friendship. Aquinas, in 1265, writes the Sumithiologica, his magisterial contribution to philosophy. I mean, he introduced, he reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Everybody was a Platonist till Aquinas. And he defined love as to will the good of the other as other.

When you're making your wife that cup of coffee, notwithstanding your feelings, you're willing her good for her, not you. That discipline of the will to love another person like that, that decision to do so is completely transformative. That's transcendent to the day-to-day experience. The animal path is, well, I don't like to make coffee, I don't feel like it. The divine path is to love her, is to will her good as her. That's the human distinction. That's organized life.

So it really seems that that's almost a theme here of happiness, that happiness is much more about deliberate decision making, deliberate choices as opposed to reactive feelings, which that's obviously the extent to which we've discussed it.

I think I like this thing that Oprah said, not happiness, but happiness. Yeah. I like the most that she said was, let's write a book, but totally. She said, let's spread this idea to a bunch of other people. I've been listening to your show for a long time. This is the salient theme.

Take charge, man. Take charge. Don't leave your health up to what feels good right now. Take charge of it. I mean, you're the boss. The startup is you. You're the entrepreneur, the guy in charge of the enterprise. You're the CEO. Treat it as such.

The CEO doesn't do what feels good all the time. The CEO does what's right, notwithstanding her, his feelings. And that's the secret to happiness is treating your life like a startup. It's your philosophy of health and longevity is my philosophy of happiness because it's all one thing. You know, when you talk about better, happier years or health span, I'm talking about happy span.

That's what it comes down to. And you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment. You're not going to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this divine path that can give you this thing that you actually seek. Is it perfect? No. Can you learn and grow and have progress all throughout the journey? Absolutely. Absolutely.

So finally, how would you think about the biomarkers of happiness? If we think about my world, we have so many biomarkers. It's one of the things that makes our job relatively straightforward. We have blood-based biomarkers. We have biomarkers of performance, your VO2 max strength. We can look at body composition, all of these things.

If someone comes to you and you were the doctor in this sense, they want to obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness and then they want to be able to track their progress. Is that a silly idea here because it's so self-evident? No, it's not a silly idea at all. I thought about it so much and I've had dozens of entrepreneurs want to engineer the idea and app eyes it the class.

Harvard, you got to be able to turn it into some sort of a product. And the way that you would do that is by having relatively complicated but measurable phenomenon that you could look at and get better at. And that's our proxy marker for the underlying construct, which is happiness. Here's the problem with that. Here's the fundamental problem. It's a different species of challenge. We talked about this one time before. There's two types of problems in human life. There's complicated problems and complex problems.

And for those who didn't actually listen the last time that we did our show, you're sure together, the complicated problems are really, really tricky and take a lot of computational horsepower and learning. But once you solve them, you can replicate the solution with effortless ease forever. You can do the biomarkers.

Complex problems are incredibly easy to understand, but impossible to solve. Impossible to solve. There are too many permutations of what can actually happen. So you like Formula One racing. And so I'm going to set up this unbelievable. I'm going to take a bunch of Unix machines and I'm going to wire them together. And I'm going to be 250,000 lines of code. And I'm going to simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year. You're like, you're an idiot. Why? Because F1 is complex.

That's why it's interesting and you want to watch it. That's why it's so exciting to watch a Formula One race because it's complex. I know what winning looks like. You crossed the finish line before the other guys. It's the simplest thing in the world, but a million different things can happen. A quadrillion things can actually happen. That's the fun of it.

All of life's joys are complex problems. Most of the solutions that we get from technology and science are complicated solutions. The biggest problems that we have right now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love, and we're trying to do it with complicated solutions like Instagram. A complicated solution to a complex problem will always leave you cold and make you worse off.

Basically, I'm going to get rid of all the formula and races because it's dangerous. And I'm going to have nothing more than computer simulations of it. It's like, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I've actually ever heard. So that's the key thing for us to understand. And that's the reason I can't appize this. Happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon. And you can only get it by living it and working on it and making progress and failing. Just like your marriage. I just described your marriage. In that sense, at least I get feedback in my marriage because

When I screw up and I apologize, I see that my wife forgives me. When I make a mistake, I feel the lenience and the love. When I need the help, the help is there. So indirectly, I'm getting really good feedback. And conversely, if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize, like, we're two ships passing and we don't fight, but we don't have anything in common, if they were thoughtful enough, they'd recognize things are not well. So they'd have a barometer there.

Others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness, or do we rely on our own internal assessment? We wind up with our own internal assessment, but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric. How happy am I?

We have three so far today in the conversation, levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning we can know whether or not we have those things on the basis of the science that we've talked about and the ways that we can get better at and practice it. The techniques for getting more of those things are your family, friends, and satisfying work.

I break it down even further, by the way. I don't try to make it complicated. It's still complex. But I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own happiness that the micronutrients behind the macronutrients, dozens of dimensions. And I'm rating myself. I wait those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macronutrients. And then I have scores on those dimensions and I want to make progress every year. I do it on my birthday and half birthday. My half birthday is coming up in November, November 21st, my half birthday. And I'm going to fill out my spreadsheet and say,

I'm not on pace to get the progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May, when my birthday comes round again. What are the things I need to actually touch up? So what am I doing? I'm kind of doing a curve fit to the complex problem I'm trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated solution. I give all those dimensions to my students. And I say, look, do the reading, do the work. I've read 10,000 articles about this so you don't have to.

But I do try to break it down a little bit so I can have a multi-dimensional problem. One of the things that we know with complex problems is the more multi-dimensionally you make it, the more likely you are to get better solutions. The worst thing that you can do is like, how do I feel today? You're not going to make progress into those circumstances. What are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you?

It'll be the warmth of my marriage, the relationship with my kids, how well things are going with respect to the value I'm trying to create with my career, the stability that I have in my friendships, the degree to which I feel like I'm properly philanthropic, the interest I'm taking in my professional life.

the closeness that I have with certain intimates in my life, the extent to which I'm avoiding or finding conflict in my work relationships, all these things go into my spreadsheet. Because I know that they really matter across these three dimensions, the extent to which I'm enjoying my life of the course of each day.

I do these particular ratings and then I put them together with a weighted sum across them and I've messed with a weighted sum and I've messed with it and experimented with it until I said, yep, that seems about right. That seems about right with respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life. So you make it a multi-dimensional problem. That's a huge body of social science. I talked about imperfect linear models where you take big problems and make them into a bunch of little tiny problems and that curve fits to the complex thing you're trying to solve.

You evaluate that twice a year. Yeah. And therefore, you can't have it be dependent on the technical noise of the day or the week. You're trying to answer these questions through the lens of the last half of the year. Yeah. And if I'm having a big conflict with my wife on my birthday, I don't do it that day. Yeah, I don't do that way because I don't want the noise is what it comes down to. And if something really, really great happens to me,

The book is doing great. I don't answer it that day either, because I don't want my neurochemistry to be affecting it unduly. Although at this point in my life, I've been doing it for 25 years. I'm pretty cold and calculating. I think that would be a reasonable app to start with. Could be. Could be. And that's very different than the biomarkers for sure, because I don't actually know what you would look at. What are the biomarkers? I want to make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol. I want to make sure that my hormones are balanced. I want to make sure that my adrenal system is not

Oh, yeah, yeah, but when I was talking about it. Yeah, no, no, no, yeah. When I went biomarkers, I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers. I mean anything that is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for a dashboard of your happiness health. And in fact, I have that. It's imperfect. It's imperfect. Any plans to share that, to make that something that others can use besides your students, it sounds like they have access to this. I should do that. I actually should do that. That would be an interesting thing.

I'd be very interested in experimenting on that with maybe your clients, to what extent that that could be a useful tool. Just to see. Yeah, I think it would be very interesting.

I'll tell you the last thing I think that's very powerful and worth talking about. And I'm curious if you think that this is something valuable for everyone or just a subset of people is less self. Yeah. The what? Take away the mirrors. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I found that to be a very interesting discussion. Yeah. Because you even talked about that literally.

Some people will literally minimize the view of themselves in a mirror. And then, of course, you talk about broader versions of that, such as social media and things like that. Do you think everybody would benefit from this? William James talked about the eye self versus the me self. You must have both. When you're looking in the mirror, you're two people. You're the looker and the looky. And you need both because you need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you, but you need to have a reflection of yourself to understand who you are.

I need to see, but I need to be seen by me so I can understand my context. I can understand my place in the world. If you don't do that, you'll get run over by a car. If you don't have the eye self or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended them repeatedly because you don't understand the me self is the way that this works out. The problem is in our society, it's all me self, no eye self. Most people are not observing the world very much at all. They're being observed and they're observing themselves.

They're trying to be observed in their observing themselves. So social media is a classic case of this. Checking your notifications is nothing more than a me self obsession. What are they saying about me? What kind of impact am I having out of the people? I get it why we do it. We're evolved to one understand where we are in the hierarchy. Social comparison, even envy, are evolved phenomena because it helps keep us alive and make progress.

But it's misery when it takes over and when technology supercharges our ability to be in the me self state. There are moments when you can be really confused about the eye self and the me self. One time I was really thinking deeply about something and I was kind of obsessed. My daughter and I were in the car and I put gas in my car and I filled up the car with gas. Took off from the gas station. I'm just kind of lost in thought. And about a block later, I hear this weird thing, getting, getting, getting, getting, getting, getting, getting. It's like, what's going on? Somebody dragging a muffler.

And then I'm like looking for somebody's dragon to muffler around me. And then I noticed that cars are honking at me and pointing at me. And I'm like, what the hell? So I stopped the car. It turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car, out of the pump. And I was dragged and I pulled it out of the pump and I was dragging the gas pump down the road, right? And I had to go back to the gas station. I find out how happy they are when you do that, which is not. And how expensive it is when you have to replace part of a gas pump. It's pretty bad.

But the whole point was I was the i-self and the me-self all at once and it was this weird, disequilibrating experience. One of the ways to get much happier is to be more in the i-self and less in the me-self state, is to minimize the reflection, is to think a lot less of what other people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less. And there are different ways to do that.

In the book, I talked about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model. I mean, imagine that. I mean, you're living by your abs. What a way to live. If you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult, that means you're never eating anything you like ever and you're not getting enough enjoyment. Right. And he was miserable for 10 years. He didn't eat what he liked. He always had headaches. He didn't feel good. He didn't have normal relationships.

And so he decided he had to make a change in his life. It wasn't living. So he literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year so he couldn't see his own abs and his life completely changed. Just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors. When people are miserable in my classes, I say take off number one, take the notifications off your social media.

turn off the notifications, so you're not getting notifications. Don't look at your mentions. Under any circumstances, don't pay attention to that. And then actually literally start getting rid of some of your mirrors, your literal mirrors. And what you'll do is you'll get into more of a state of looking outward. And the more you look outward, the happier you'll be. The better off your life will be when you're walking around going, man, that's amazing. You know what's not amazing? Me.

Indeed, Arthur, what surprised you the most when you set out to write this? You're writing a book on a topic that you've studied for decades. You've been writing column after column after column weekly in the Atlantic. You've written other books that touch on similar themes, but I have to believe that there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before or vice versa.

Yeah, I mean, I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten clearer and my knowledge has gotten deeper. A lot of things that I would have thought I could come up with a lot of little examples. Here's the biggie. My paradigm has been shifted. I have been studying happiness for a long time. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008, but it was kind of like a book on astronomy. It was observing happiness.

from a distance. Who are the happy people? Who are the unhappy people? It never really occurred to me that with the science, I could change my own life. Then I'm not a fundamentally happy person. Mad scientists struggle. They just do because negative affect, it gets your attention so much more strongly than positive affect does. If you're high positive and high negative, you're going to feel on balance pretty negative a lot. So I always thought to myself, happiness is a really interesting thing, but it's not my lot.

It isn't my lot. I went through years and years and years like that. And when I came back and started the new happiness projects, writing my column in the books that I've written in the past couple of years, I said, all right, let's see if that's true. I can't move the stars as an astronomer, but maybe I can use the social science and the neuroscience in ways where I can, with the knowledge, change my habits and get happier. I kind of doubted it. I sort of thought I couldn't, and I did. I actually did. I changed my life.

I'm usually eight to nine weeks out on my call in the Atlantic because I'm trying the things that I'm suggesting. I'm a lab rat. I know you do this too. You're not going to suggest to some of your clients that you don't feel comfortable with, even as a human being. This is what I'm doing too. And I'm taking constant updates. I take the tests with my students on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction. My well-being is risen by 60% in the past four years, 60%. I mean, it was a pretty low base.

It was a bad denominator, but it's been dramatic and I didn't actually trust. I didn't actually believe, but it's actually true. And anybody can do this.

It's a great message, Arthur, because you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy. Because if you did, you'd feel like a hypocrite all day long, right? You'd feel like any moment you didn't have that warm, fuzzy, happy feeling, you'd be like, oh my God, how am I the guy that wrote the book on happiness? Yeah, and furthermore, I'd be faking it all the time. I'd be faking it. My wife would be

Aren't you supposed to be happy all the time? And somebody sees me kind of grouchy in the airport and be like, man, that's very disillusioning. Yeah. Well, it's funny. When people see me eat a donut, they're like, what? And I go, hey, read the book, man. I know. I didn't say don't eat a donut. I just said, don't eat 10 a day. Yeah.

Arthur, thanks so much for making time. I know your time is tight here in Austin, so I'm glad we had a chance to sit down today. Thank you, Peter. I have so much admiration for the work that you're doing. You're making my life better through the work that you do and for a lot of other people too, so thank you for that. Well, you're making mine better and, likewise, all the people that are listening and reading. Right on.

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