#110 How To Build Lasting Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks

0:00Hello, my friends. Today, my guest is Dr. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, social scientist, bestselling author, and one of the world's leading voices on the science of happiness, meaning, and human flourishing. Dr. Brooks has spent decades studying what makes life not just successful, but truly fulfilling. His work bridges psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and lived experience, offering a practical framework for understanding happiness in a way that's both deeply scientific, but also deeply human. So it was honestly an

0:32incredible privilege to sit down, not just to interview him, but to learn from him. This episode is an in-depth discussion on happiness, meaning, emotional well-being, and the habits that help us build richer, more connected lives. Dr. Brooks and I discuss why happiness is not simply a feeling, but a composite built from what he calls the three core macronutrients, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We discuss the crucial distinction between pleasure and

1:03enjoyment and why social connection, memory, and awareness transform fleeting pleasure into something deeper and more lasting. We also talk about why struggle is essential to satisfaction and how doing hard things, whether in work, relationships, or even just physical training can be a major source of fulfillment. We discuss how ambitious people often can fall into the striver's curse and the hedonic treadmill chasing achievement, status, validation, without finding

1:33lasting satisfaction. We also talk about how to avoid this trap. We discuss the four major false idols that can quietly distort our lives, including money, power, pleasure, and admiration, and how to recognize which one may be driving your behavior and what to do to change it. We discuss how a simple gratitude practice can counter resentment, reorient attention, and measurably increase happiness over time. We talk about why modern technology and constant phone use may be interfering with our attention

2:05and our ability to experience boredom, reflection, meaning, and even love. And we discuss some best practices to take breaks from our digital habits. Dr. Brooks's framework for different emotional profiles and why some people may need to focus less on becoming happier and more on becoming less unhappy and how this will have a great impact on our happiness. We also talk about practical ways to strengthen marriage, friendship, purpose, service, and love, and why these bonds become some of the most

2:36important predictors of happiness across the lifespan. We discuss how happiness and social connection is one of the best predictors of longevity and so much more. Before we dive into this podcast, a few quick announcements. The Found My Fitness podcast is community supported by listeners like you. No ads, no supplements, no sponsorships. This ensures the scientific integrity of the information I share remains uncompromised and free from external influence. If you value the unbiased, high-quality

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5:24foundmyfitness.com forward slash newsletter, N-E-W-S-L-E-T-T-E-R. Again, that's foundmyfitness.com forward slash newsletter. All right. And now on to this amazing, amazing episode with Dr. Arthur Brooks. Hi, everyone. I'm sitting here with Dr. Arthur Brooks, who is a professor at Harvard. He's a social scientist who studies the science of happiness. He's got a couple of New York time bestselling books from strength to strength, build the life you want. He's got a new one coming out

5:58that is called The Meaning of Life. The Meaning of Your Life. The Meaning of Your Life. Yeah, yeah. I am so, so, so excited to be sitting here having this conversation with Dr. Brooks. And I know all you all are going to love this episode. I mean, I was just telling Arthur, you know, just doing the background research that I do. I learned so much. I started applying, I started already applying things to my life. On date night, I was like just rattling off all this stuff to my husband. I mean, I'm so excited. Me too. To have this conversation. Thank you. I've been a longtime listener, first time

6:29participant in the show. I love your show. It's just great information based on science. It's right in my wheelhouse. And so many other millions of Americans. Thank you for what you're doing. Oh, thank you. Let's, let's jumpstart this show. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. And, you know, if you would have asked me this three weeks ago, what is happiness? Right. What would you have said? I would have said happiness is, well, I think I would have based it more on how you feel, feeling good. Something like, I can't put it into words, but I know when I feel it.

7:01Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know when I feel it. Or it's how I feel when I'm with my husband, when I'm with my son. It's, it's how I feel when I'm in the zone and doing what I love. That, that, that's happiness, right? Totally. And that's the, that's evidence of happiness. That's the smell of the turkey, not the turkey, you know, Thanksgiving dinner, you know, what's going on. You're going to mom's house and you open the door like, yeah, it's time for Thanksgiving dinner, but that's not the dinner. That's the evidence of the dinner. And that's how feelings of happiness work. They're evidence of the actual phenomenon. And if you want to get happier,

7:34you need to know what it is in the same way that you need to know what Thanksgiving dinner is. If you want to make one and eat one now, for a lot of people, that means the dishes or the ingredients, but for you and me, it means macros. It means protein, carbohydrates, and fat. That's Thanksgiving dinner. That's why people think we're unsentimental people, right? In the science community. But the truth of the matter is that's how happiness works as well. There's macronutrients to it. There's component parts, there's elements to it. And to get happier, you need to know what they are. You need the definition and you need to understand how the science works as well as change

8:06habits in your life along each one of the three macronutrient elements of human happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three skills. Those are the three elements. And you need them in balance and abundance, like your protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And that's where I'm going to start my class. We're recording on a Friday. Monday is my first lecture at the Harvard Business School to my MBA students. And we're going to start with enjoyment. Then we're going to talk about satisfaction. Then the biggie, biggie is meaning. That's what my new book is about.

8:36Well, let's start with enjoyment and, you know, chasing enjoyment. Are you chasing that momentary pleasure? What is enjoyment? So a lot of people who watch this show, they have a good foundation in science. And your background leads you to, I mean, you understand this stuff. You're the best at explaining this. So the understanding of enjoyment and distinguishing it from pleasure takes us back to this old neuroscience explanation of the human brain, the triune brain. Remember

9:07the old triune brain during Cosmos in the eighties and nineties with that show with Carl Sagan. He talked about the stars and space, but sometimes he would talk about the dark matter between our ears. And then he would talk about the mysteries of the human brain. He always relied on Paul McLean, the famous neuroscientist from the sixties and seventies, his concept of the triune brain. That is the organization of the human brain in three parts based on evolution. The oldest part of the brain is the reptilian brain, the brain stem, the cerebellum, the spinal, the spinal cord that, that, that set of structures has been around for 40 million years. We share it

9:42with snakes and lizards, et cetera. That does all of the, the stuff below your level of awareness and all the automatic things that's gathering data right now, Rhonda's reptilian brain. It's like the lights, the air temperature, you know, I'm talking to Arthur, but you're not, you're not thinking about those things, but you're getting the data. Those data are going to the second part of your brain, which is newer, which is the limbic system, also known as the paleo mammalian brain. That's between two and 40 million years old. It predates Homo sapiens, but we haven't, and we have in common

10:12with all the mammals. And that takes the, the data from the reptilian brain and it translates it into emotions. So this is a big mistake that my students and everybody makes is feelings. Like feel, I want good feelings. I don't want so many bad feelings. Wrong. There's no such thing as bad feelings. There's positive and negative emotions and all they are are signals. They're signals that your brain is ascertained either a threat or an opportunity that you should either avoid or approach. Negative emotions are supposed to be uncomfortable. They're supposed to be aversive

10:44so that you avoid things that might hurt you. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Those are the four negative emotions and they alert you to the four big threats out there. Things being abandoned by your kin, being eaten by a tiger, being poisoned by a bad chicken breast, whatever it happens to be. These elicit these negative emotions. Positive emotions do the reverse. Mates, calories. That's what, that's the reason you get these positive emotions. Then that emotional information goes to the new part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue behind your forehead.

11:17That's 30% of your brain by weight. The supercomputer. That's the C-suite. That's the executive center of your brain where you take the emotions and if you're doing it right and you're a self-managing individual and a grown up and mature, you say, ah, Rhonda's feeling a little bit anxious today, a little bit sad today. I wonder why that is. And you think about it and you act the way that you decide to act on the basis of that information. Okay. Now, enjoyment is a prefrontal cortex phenomenon. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Pleasure happens to you. Pleasure is happening automatically when you

11:52touch certain levers, you know, the, the ventral tegmental area, the ventral striatum part of the limbic system. And if you tap that over and over and over and over again, if your goal in life is to pursue pleasure, you're not going to arrive at happiness. You're going to wind up in, in, in rehab basically, because that's the secret to getting addicted to stuff. But if you add people and memory, it will be a prefrontal cortex experience where you manage your pleasures. They don't manage you and then become permanent. And that's part of happiness. So the bottom line, there's stuff that

12:24everybody has their thing, whether it's junk food or gambling or, you know, drinking beer, whatever it happens to be. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. It's what it comes down to. Solitary experiences of things, things that bring pleasure and could be addictive, which most things can be usually leads to pleasure, not to enjoyment. And that's the, that's the rule. What about the things that lead to pleasure that you're doing solitary or by yourself that require effort and a little bit of, um, you know, getting through hardship. So for example, like

12:59exercise going for a run, I, it brings me pleasure. I love doing it alone. Yeah. Going for a long run, but I'm also not just instantly achieving it. I have to like put in the work. Yeah. So that's generally, that's not addictive, not addictive in the same way. It's not actually stimulating the, the neurochemistry in the same way. It's also working in the second macroeconomic happiness, which is satisfaction, not enjoyment. There's enjoyment involved and there's even pleasure involved, but really when we talk about achieving great things, whether with your

13:30work or with your exercise or whatever you're trying to do to be excellent, satisfaction is really what you're seeking, which is achieving something with struggle. Only humans want to struggle. I mean, everybody watching this show, I mean, it's like they understand struggle, right? It's like, you know, it's like, how do you find your fitness? You find your fitness by going and looking for it and doing stuff. It's not like you're finding your fitness is like stumbling across a genie's lantern on the beach. That's not how, that's not your point in the show. Your point is learn about all this stuff and go do things, go do hard things. That struggle is super important.

14:06And so if you want to have satisfaction in your life, that second pillar, do hard things and struggle and learn how to struggle. And that's the point. And that satisfaction that you get from that, that gives your life a sense of sweetness to it. That's a weird thing. Only hoping with homo sapiens want to struggle. And, you know, you have little kids, so you know. How many kids do you have? Just one. Just one. How old? Eight. Eight. Okay, perfect. So junior, right? I mean, he's your son, right? Yeah. You're bringing him home from Little League. He plays sports?

14:36Yeah. Yeah, okay. Of course he plays sports. And you drive by the Dairy Queen, right? And here in Southern California. And he's like, 4.30 in the afternoon. He's like, mommy, let's stop for ice cream. And you're like, it's 4.30. And he says, so? And you say, it's almost dinner time. He's like, so? Because he's smart. And you say, you'll spoil your dinner. And he doesn't understand. So who cares? And then you lie to him because you're a scientist and you're all about fitness and health and diet. And you'll say, it's not healthy ice cream instead of a healthy dinner. Really what you want him to learn

15:08is that he's not going to appreciate his dinner. He's not going to enjoy his dinner if he's not hungry. You want him to his little prefrontal cortex to wire in this conclusion that good things come to those who wait, that I'm really going to enjoy my dinner only when I'm hungry. See, if you were honest, you'd say, I want you to suffer. It doesn't sound good, but it's literally true because then he'll learn that lesson. And that's what we're learning all the time, all the time, all the time. The most successful people. Now, there's a danger to this, which is that the strivers that are

15:40watching us, the successful people, all they learn to do is suffer. It's like the old marshmallow experiment where if you pass on the marshmallow, you get two marshmallows. They pass on all the marshmallows to get more marshmallows and never eat any marshmallows. That's a lot of our lives, actually. Well, I definitely want to get into your strivers curse and all that, but before I want to kind of jump back to the enjoyment because an interesting question that comes up is these unhappy things that cause unhappiness. I mean, this stuff happens in our lives, right? I don't know that

16:13some people think because those things happen to them that they can't be happy, but that's not necessarily true, right? I mean, in fact- Yeah, that's wrong. And back in the 60s, which I don't really remember and you weren't born, the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. I remember my dad hearing that. He's like, that's the end of America. He was kind of right. But that was a misguided way of understanding life because that was all about the pleasure lever. That's the reason that, you know, the drug culture, the hippie culture led to so much hardship is because it was unbridled pleasure as opposed to the pursuit of enjoyment, which is a

16:47more human, a more disciplined kind of thing. The problem today is exactly the opposite where we tell a lot of young people, if it feels bad, you got to make it stop. There's this eliminationist view. And so, for example, I mean, life has a lot of sadness and anxiety in it. We all face sadness and anxiety. If you go to campus counseling and you say, I'm sad and anxious, they'll say, that's a problem. We got to treat that. I understand liability. I hang out on a campus. But the truth of the matter is in my university, if you're studying at Harvard and you're not sad

17:19and anxious, you need therapy. It's a hard thing that you're doing. Look, if you don't have a lot of trouble, you're not digging in. You're not digging in life. And so, you need to understand that. Now, it can be obstructive. It can be dysregulated, of course. It can become a medical problem, to be sure. But the idea that you can't be happy because of unhappiness is completely wrong. On the contrary, you can't be happy unless you're unhappy. You need unhappiness because the road to it passes through a life that's fully alive. And the limbic system creates positive and negative

17:55emotionality in different structures for different reasons. You wouldn't want to get rid of a whole set of emotions and leave yourself in danger just because you want another set of emotions. You want the whole menu in front of you in this particular way. You just need to manage your negative and fire up the positive. And that's what the science helps you do. And so, when it comes to tacking this pleasure things or to get the enjoyment, we need to have

18:26it with a person, to have an experience with someone else, not doing it by ourselves. I mean, is there some practical tips people can do to kind of train themselves to engage in that kind of behavior? Yeah. Is to start looking at the... It's funny because the brain... Certain things don't give you pleasure. You give yourself pleasure. You understand your brain is a pleasure factory by getting really, really good at certain things. So, some people just don't like sweets. I don't understand it. I'm crazy about sweets. I just eat nothing but sweets. I mean, I just... I love sugar,

19:02right? And I understand that. My brain is incredibly good. My dopamine pathways are just highly skilled at giving me a sense of pleasure on the basis of that. Other people, it's like, I don't get it. You know, I do a lot of talks in Vegas for different things. I'm on the road all the time giving speeches. And I see people at four o'clock in the morning pulling the lever on the one-armed band. I'm like, dude, that is so boring and sad. All that means is I don't get any pleasure from that because my brain doesn't work that particular way. So, we all have that thing. Now, again, there are lots of things that you can do that are not addictive at all, like walking in the woods or

19:36saying your prayers. Great. Alone? Great. And solitude is beautiful. It's not isolation. Isolation and solitude are two different phenomena. And so, having solitude where there is something that you truly love, that's great by yourself. But the things that can be addictive, even internet use, even eating, they're best accompanied by other people. And that's how the brain was evolved. We still have the Pleistocene brain from 250,000 years ago. And almost all the time when people ask, why do we do fill in the blank weird thing? There's evolutionary biology and psychology that

20:09will explain it from the habituation to the Pleistocene. When Homo sapiens lived in small bands of 30 to 50 individuals that were kin-related and hierarchical, why are we envious that somebody has more than we do? Because we want to rise in a little 30 to 50 person hierarchy. Why are we so afraid of offending somebody? Because if you get kicked out of the tribe, you're going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. All of the things that we do in mating, in friendship, in envy, all of this stuff is kind of related to that. And this is a good example of it. We're habituated,

20:42for example, to eat around a campfire, looking at each other. And we get tremendous pleasure from that. We get oxytocin from that. We get dopamine from actually doing that. And it's very comforting to us. What about people that are, that now we do have these phones and we do have, there's a lot of pleasure that is particularly certain types of people. In fact, I'd say a lot of people nowadays get rewarded by scrolling social media or the news, you know, whatever it is that they love to do on

21:16their phones. And they're, if they are at a dinner or they're, you know, in some sort of setting with their friends or family, you oftentimes will see that they have their phones out and they're not really engaging as they normally would, perhaps if it was like 15 years ago, whatever. And we didn't have these, these phones there. Like, what are they missing out on? And what can they do to like realize what they're missing out on? Like it's, I, we all have, we all know these people. They're probably, could be us. And it could be us.

21:46Absolutely. Left to your devices. I mean, you live online. I mean, the show is online and, and you're like, I wonder how the episode of Arthur is doing. And your husband's like, honey, hello. Right. I mean, that's a normal thing that actually happens to us. There's a bunch of different reasons that, that we get addicted to devices and misuse our devices. And that's a lot of what I'm writing about in this new book is actually how it changes our brain. It literally changes the way that we use our brain in such a way that we can't actually ascertain the meaning of our lives. There's a use of the brain that helps you understand the meaning of your life.

22:19And you're not using your brain that way when you're using technology. It's a real problem that we're using our brains literally wrong. Okay. So when we get into the third macronutrient, we'll talk about that. We're definitely going to talk about that. Awesome. I want to hear about this. Okay. Let's talk about satisfaction too. But on the, on the, on the generally just on the, the side of, you know, how we use the device is wrong, how young people use the device is wrong. We're using it because it gives us a little reward, a dopamine reward, wondering if there's mail or notifications or whatever it happens to be.

22:49And that just, you know, the, the algorithms have been designed to actually stimulate the, the, the dopamine pathways in the human brain. So the, the locus coeruleus has a little spritz in there and we like, and, and it's weird because, you know, you know, there's nothing on text that you care about. You know, there's nothing on social media that somebody is doing that is of even minor importance. But you think about that when you're waiting at a stoplight and you pull out your phone, right? That's the number one reason. The second reason is distraction from other things you don't want to think about as a distraction machine, which is related to the third reason,

23:20which is boredom avoidance. We hate boredom, but boredom is unbelievably important for the human brain. We're, we're made to be bored. When, when we become bored, in other words, when we put people into the fMRI and you say, think about nothing, you can't do it. You immediately, your mind just starts wandering and the default mode network of the brain becomes active, which is important for you to understand the third macronutrient we'll talk about in a minute, which is meaning. And so therefore, when you're distracting yourself to not be bored, because boredom is uncomfortable,

23:50but mother nature doesn't care if you don't like it. Mother nature does all kinds of things that we don't like. We were just never able to avoid it. Now we are. So the same way that, you know, we need pain for lots and lots of things. We created analgesics that got, that escalated in power to the point we're able literally to get rid of all of the pain and a hundred thousand people died of drug overdoses last year as a result. We're, homo sapiens were incredibly ingenious at getting rid of little problems and creating massive problems. And that's what smartphones do today is to get rid of boredom because we don't like it. Dan Gilbert's experiments at Harvard on

24:25boredom. He shows that when people have to sit in a room and do nothing with nothing to do, except the option of pushing a button on a key fob to, to self-administer a painful electric shock, that 25% of women choose to shock themselves rather than being bored. And two thirds of the dudes shock themselves painfully rather than being bored for just 15 minutes. You had an experiment. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. Wow. I mean, he was a sick and twisted freak and got thrown out of the experiment, but you get my point that that we hate boredom. So this, we want the little dopamine bump. We want to distract ourselves from

25:01things we don't want to be thinking about right now because life is complicated and we don't want to be bored. And those three things together mean that you're missing your life because it's Christmas morning and you're going, so that's a problem. Exactly. Exactly. Big problem. And, and, and then, you know, thinking about like kids growing up with it, like they're not even, at least I have like a baseline. Like I remember. Yeah. You know, we remember the before times. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the satisfaction is, is the big one. That's, that's a big one. And it's weird because it actually leads to a, a problem we

25:36haven't even discussed, which is, which is you can't keep it. You want it. It's so sweet. And you know, this is, this is a Stryver show. It's transient. This is a Stryver show. I mean, this is like, this is not a slacker show. This is a Stryver show. There's lots of slacker shows. Yeah. This isn't one of them. You know, I found my fitness is not for, it's like, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to chill at the beach. No, this is for people watching. This are hardcore. The problem that they have is called the Stryver's curse. And the Stryver's curse is when you work for that thing and you work for that thing and you work for that thing.

26:07Cause mother nature is telling you, if you get it, Ron, if you get it, it's going to be so nice forever. You can enjoy it. And then you get it. You're like, huh? Most Olympic athletes who win a medal have a, have a, have a clinical depression in the wake of winning an Olympic medal. It's like so weird. And there's a reason for it. We're wired for progress. Progress brings tons and tons of, of, of just absolute enjoyment and satisfaction. It's wonderful to make progress. We're designed for progress. And so we incorrectly assert or, or, or believe that when we get to the goal

26:41toward our progress of the, you know, we get to Hispaniola with the ship that, and then we'll, we'll have that emullience, that joy forever, but that's not how the limbic system is supposed to work. That's a lie. And then when it's kind of, huh, it's okay. It's okay. We're like, life is meaningless. Life has no satisfaction. Life isn't good. And, and, and, and so you say, I guess a billion dollars wasn't enough. I guess I needed another billion dollars. I guess I needed another Academy Award. I guess I needed another person praising me and admiring me. I guess I need

27:19another person who says she loves me. I need a new mate, whatever it happens to be. And that's the hedonic treadmill more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. The goal, the goalpost keeps moving and you get this diminishing satisfaction. Yeah. That's why you need some metaphysics to solve that to sort that one out. I was going to say, how do you break out of that? How do you break out of that? Yeah. You break out of that by understanding that the brain, human brain, gives us options beyond our animal impulses. My dog, Chucho, is a good boy. He can't break out of that. He can't break out of that cycle, right? He doesn't even know he's in the cycle, as a matter of fact, right?

27:52And so it's all animal impulses. His prefrontal cortex is wafer thin. It's like a tiny, tiny little thing. Mine is 30% of my brain by weight. And it gives me the option of animal impulses, run, run, run, run, run, another billion, another metal, another, you know, three pounds lost on the scale or my moral aspirations. I can stand up to mother nature and say, no, no, no, I'm out. I'm out. And the way to do that is to, is to realize that satisfaction that lasts is not about having

28:23more. It's about wanting less. That's how it works. Your, your satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by what you want. Haves divided by wants. Don't always work the numerator because you'll work yourself to death. You'll become a workaholic, success addicted, self-objectifying creature of the world. You'll ruin your relationships and be frustrated. You need just as much to manage your wants because when you manage the denominator, when your wants go down, your satisfaction rises and

28:56stays high. Yeah. That's what we need. Okay. So you've spoken about these four sort of false, I don't know, idols. Idols, yeah. That, that people kind of substitute and think will bring them. Maybe they're, they are the wants. Yeah. They will bring them the happiness. Yeah. Um, I absolutely like have fought at least two of them for sure for me. Yeah. Um, but can you talk a little bit about these like, you know, four idols? The four idols. Yeah. And why, why, why do people think they will bring them happiness? Yeah, I know. I mean, all of the really interesting ideas in behavioral science

29:30and neuroscience, they all kind of come from the old philosophers, it turns out, right? I mean, there's nothing new under the sun. And Aristotle was talking about, you know, what beguiles humankind. And the greatest Aristotelian thinker of the more modern times, which is still not that modern was Thomas Aquinas. You know, Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologia in 1265, this magisterial text bringing Platonic and especially Aristotelian ideas to more modern audiences. And he was an unbelievably good behavioral scientist, also a great saint, you know,

30:02I'm a Catholic. And so I love Thomas Aquinas. He's the best. But what he talked about was the idols that, that distract us from what we truly want. And so, you know, as I'm a religious person, I, you know, and Aquinas said, but you want God. Even if you can't quite put your finger on it, you want God. You want the permanent truth, the real thing, the ultimate numinosity, the end of all things. That's what you want. You want it. But man, it's convenient. There's a lot of rules, man.

30:34There's a lot of one-sided conversations. You don't really know if it's out there. And so you look at things that seem to have kind of a divine nature. Those are the idols on earth that will, attract you. And he said, there's four. And this is unbelievably good science because it turns out that these are the buckets that people still fall into. He just knew, right? We have, we have surveys and data and experiments to find what he was talking about in 1265. So there goes my whole PhD. Anyway, they are money, resources, power, which is influence, not evil. It's just influence of other people.

31:08People do what you want. Pleasure, which we already talked about. And pleasure, by the way, it's not just feeling good. It's also comfort, like the comfy covers instead of going to the gym or security, which is checking your stock portfolio every day. Same thing. And a lot of people are like, ah, I don't care about pleasure. Let's see how rich I am today. That's the same thing. It's working the same circuits. And the last is honor. And that's an ancient way of saying fame, right? Fame, admiration, prestige, that it's like wanting to be liked and accepted by the right

31:40people. Yeah, bring it on. I mean, you and I are academics fundamentally. And so, you know, it's not just like any idiot. It's people who know, right? It's what it comes down to. But there's also the admiration of strangers, which has all sorts of neurochemical benefits that we get that go back to our Pleistocene brains, that we really want that. It makes you insane. So those are the big four, money, power, pleasure, and fame, fundamentally. Everybody is most beguiled by one. And when they know what their weakness is, they have pure strength. Because if you know your

32:11weakness, you can actually fight against it, avoid a bunch of errors, and understand what you most regret. That's why this is really important. So I have a game with my MBA students called What's My Idol? You want to play? Yeah. All right. Let's find out Ronda's idol. And you probably know? I have two, I think. Yeah. But we'll find out which one is bigger. Okay. All right. Okay. The way to do this, and as you know, in the way that we do our work is when you're trying to select something, it's better to eliminate. That gives you a truer understanding. Eliminating things that

32:41it's not always gives you more focus on what it is. So of the four, we're going to look at which one you'd get rid of first, which doesn't mean you don't have it. It just means you go to the population meme. So for example, if you say, I don't care about money, that doesn't mean you're poor. It just means you're the average American, which is pretty great by world standards, but it sucks to the striver. I was like, being the average is the worst, right? That's like torture if it's your idol. Okay. So that's how it works. So you got money, power, pleasure, fame. Which

33:12one do you get rid of first? Pleasure. And why?

33:16I think because I'm a striver. You're an austere type? Yeah. You're not, you're not, you're, you're, you're, you're up at dawn before dawn. I mean, I'm, I, I like to work. Yeah. I like to, yeah, I like to get that. I mean, I guess the satisfaction. Yeah. Now watch your distraction because your distraction can be a form of pleasure. Okay. If you're distracting yourself from things that are uncomfortable, that means you have a comfort idol. And so a lot of strivers actually do fall into it. I'm not saying

33:48that that's the case, but that's something that's actually kind of keep your eye on. And I believe it because you've been super successful doing all kinds of, I mean, you get your, your, your, your academic work is impeccable. Your show is successful. You're super fit, all that stuff. Your wife, your mom, you're doing it all. I believe it. I believe it. What are you sacrificing? Feeling good. Okay. Because it's not important to you. Good. Got it. What's next? Um, probably. Ooh, it's hard. It's that, that's a hard one because. Yeah. Because all of them are nice.

34:18Yeah. I mean. We all like all of them. There's a reason they're idols. Well, also I think maybe the fame is the path to influence and money. Yeah. Could be. Could be. But I'm talking intrinsic desire for each one of these things, as opposed to an instrumental desire for it. Okay. So, um, which of these things is your, your, your, your intrinsic thing that, that it feels like if you got there, you'd be really happy, even though you know it won't and you're smart.

34:49Yeah. But that thing that I like, no idea, which, which is the next one that you don't care about and you'd get rid of, you think, if you had to, because we have to, we're eliminating. Fame. Yeah. And fame means, you know, people admiring you and stopping you in the airport or, you know, the right academics going, I just, your work is so great because you're still publishing academic journal articles from time to time. I mean, you're doing that work. I mean, you're doing that, I mean, that serious stuff and you're doing it for a reason you want to, you want to, and. It's so hard. Influence and fame are like, you know, cause I also want to influence people.

35:19Yeah. Yeah. I really do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Positive way. But I believe it, that you're actually not egotistically driven. I believe it, that you're not egotistically driven. It's, it's, it's like you said, it's a pathway to get. Yeah. And I see that because I know your public profile and your public profile isn't like internet influencer par excellence where, you know, more clicks, more clicks, more clicks from strangers. And so I believe it. I actually believe it. And, and so that's good. But now it, now it gets difficult because what we're now, what we're talking about is money and, and, and influence money and influence other people. By the way, this is not bad.

35:53There's many beautiful, good things you can do with money. I'm a free enterprise guy. I mean, I believe in a free economy where people can, I just, I just love living in a free society where successful people can make a bunch of money and create jobs and opportunity and growth and philanthropy. I love it. I'm so happy to be in that kind of environment. I'm so grateful for it, but I also recognize that when it's an idol, it can, it can control you like anything else. So which one, if you had to get rid of one of them and only one was left, which one would you get rid of? Influencing others?

36:28Money. Money. Did you grow up with money? No. Did you grow up with no money? Just, just middle class? Yeah. Did you grow up poor? Yeah. Yeah. I grew up poor. Um, but I was, I was in the best private schools because I- Because you're smart. Got in. I got in. And you had good parents. And I had good parents. Yeah. Yeah. Intact family? I had financial, no, not, not- Your parents broke up? Not the whole time. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. But they stayed friends. We'd still had family vacations together. Yeah. Really? To keep the unit together.

36:59Mom and dad went on vacation together when they were divorced? Yeah. At least for a few years until my dad married my stepmom. Yeah. And you have a good relationship with her, too? Yeah. So you had good parents who cared about you. Were they educated people? My mom got her education a little bit later in life, but not, not really, no. My dad, my dad's like a blue collar worker. Yeah. And a hard worker. Hard, hard worker for sure. Like work, like a lot. Good man. Good man. Yeah. Good man. Imperfect because we all are. Yeah. Right. You know, it's like his marriage didn't work out, you know, like, you know.

37:32But that's life. Yeah. It's kind of how that works. So people have different backgrounds around that. And some people who have the money idol, they generally come from two different camps, real poverty or real wealth. And real poverty turns into a money idol because you're afraid of going back there. And real wealth becomes a money idol because that's how you understand yourself. And you don't want to become alienated from your sense of self. So the people who are least likely to have it are just kind of right in the middle, sort of indistinct. Like, eh, got it sometimes. But everybody's different. But what this really defines, of course, is what

38:06will, which is not, there's nothing bad about influence. On contrary, you use your influence to great good. Even you've influenced me and it's made me better. But if it runs you, if that influence becomes an intrinsic motivation for you, that's the thing that will lead you when you're not guarding against it, to change the way that you relate to the people you most care about in your life, your husband, your son, you'll cut corners. Not ethically. It'll just cut corners in the things that actually mean more to you than that. And that's what absolutely always

38:39leads to regret. It always leads to regret. You know, those are resume virtues. You'll work. You'll work because you want to get that influence. That's right. And those are resume virtues, not eulogy virtues. My friend David Brooks writes about this, that about resume versus eulogy virtues. You know, resume virtues are the things you would not want people to say at your funeral. He had 5 million miles on United. That's not what you wanted to say. And that's the danger is what it comes down to. That also tells me something probably

39:14about your childhood, which everybody's childhood is. I mean, I'm not, you know, of the trauma school like that, but we're path dependent for a lot of things. You're probably a super good student growing up, right? Great student. You're probably really good in sports. And you probably got a lot of attention from adults when you did things that were really amazing. I got a lot of attention. Yeah. I was like a superstar, jump rope teen, gator, in commercial. Like, yeah. You were in commercials. I was in commercials. Yeah. I was like, you know, I was getting, I was

39:46getting that fame. Yeah. Well, you were getting noticed for things that were, you know, for your ability, for your looks, whatever it happened to be, right? That wires a kid's brain to not to misunderstand love. Love is a grace. It's a free gift, freely given. It's not something you can earn. You can't, literally can't earn anybody's love. You can't even earn your own love. You can't earn God's love. You can't earn love. But when you're a little kid and you get attention and

40:17affection from grownups because of what you do, that will teach you. You will synaptically wire the idea that love can be earned. And then you grow up trying to earn people's love by doing amazing things that usually manifest in either power or fame. That generally speaking, it manifests in either the fame idol or the power idol. And by the way, me too. Me too. I was the best classical musician among all the kids growing up. I had really good grades and all that, but that's not, was my thing. I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player

40:47from when I was eight years old. All I wanted to do was to play the French horn. I was better than everybody at it. And, and I had this like from grownups all the time. And the result of it was that it was the same thing. And I grew up as just super success addicted, meaning that when you win, you get that bump, you're going to get winning, winning, winning, winning, succeeding, getting noticed, whatever it happens to be. Um, that's when I got my parents' attention. That's when I got my teacher's attention. And the result of it is that now I'm 61 years old

41:19and I'm still chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing. And it has everything to do with the fact that deep down, my great fear is if I stop, no one will love me. We're just little kids, right? Right. We're just little kids, but that's power. That's power. I mean, just that, that power has helped my marriage a lot. That's helped my relationship with my adult kids and now grandkids a lot. Actually, that's why it really, really matters to know what our idols are.

41:49Yeah. And let's say, you know, if you know what your idol is and then you can like think about that and actively try not to, I mean, like what sort of exercises like, you know, can you do to kind of like, is it the reverse bucket list, right? I mean, are you going to, are you going to put them, maybe you can talk about that. Yeah. Well, the reverse bucket list is just the obvious, the bucket list is an incredibly deleterious way to set up your life because it's basically to say, when I achieve these worldly things, then I will be happy. And this is what I'm going to do this year. And all it does is make you more attached. It's like, it's like anti-Buddhism is kind of how it winds up. And so I have a reverse

42:24bucket list, which is the name, my attachments and my ambitions and cravings and desires, which I'm not ashamed of. They're all, they're not, none of them are like shameful or gross, but I don't want to be managed by my desires. I want to manage my desires. And so I write them down and cross them out and say, easy come, easy go this year. I want to do this and this and this easy come, easy go. I am a human being. I am a child of God. I am a husband to my wife. I'm a grandfather. I'm all these things I really care about. And maybe those worldly things will happen and maybe they won't,

42:55and I'm going to be just fine. No, I'm going to be better than fine. That's how the reverse bucket list actually works. And it's, I'm free. I'm free for the first time. That's one of the exercises that helps you with your idols. The second is you got to have a buddy on this. You know, I recommend a spouse say, hold me to this. This is my weakness. You know, my weakness, right? And, and the problem is when your spouse actually is codependent in your idolatry. I mean, if you have, if you're a, if you're a fame idol and your, and your spouse, you know, gives you

43:27admiration only when you're getting the admiration of other people, that's a bad situation, but that's not the situation with my wife. On the contrary, you know, my, my, my idol is honor. Absolutely. Absolutely. All day long. It's so dumb. It's so ridiculous and laughable. And my wife's like, you're doing that thing. You're doing that thing. It's like, you want somebody to be, to think you're, think you're smart. You're just trying to do something for the approbation of strangers. Be here now, man. She understands me. And that kind of accountability is really, really important for being a full person. What about, you know, and this is all coming back to

44:01being able to obviously manage your mood as well, you know, and it's something that I've, I've read, you know, from you is this gratitude list where, and I, and I haven't really done it like written. I haven't, but I'm thinking about it now where it's like, you know, what are you thankful for and how, if you can think about what you're thankful for, maybe that helps temper that wanting of one of your idols or, or even the social comparison, you know, treadmill, which we can talk

44:34about. Yeah. The envy. The envy. And, you know, for me, it's like, you know, I know people that have just in youth, like young, young adults just got cancer and are dead. Yeah. You know, so health is a big one to be grateful for. Right. And I have others, obviously my family, my son, my husband, the love we have, like, oh my gosh, I'm so, I'm just blessed in so many ways, you know, and I have so much to be grateful for. And I don't think about it enough. I'm constantly thinking

45:04about what I don't have and how I want to get it, you know, and it's toxic. Yeah. But that's why we're successful as a species is because of ingratitude. It's because we don't have enough. That's why we strive when you think about it. And again, we will talk about how to be more grateful, but let's recognize that this is a perfect example of how evolutionary biology has made us successful as a species and miserable because mother nature doesn't care. So we are made to be resentful, ungrateful, suspicious, hostile creatures that, you know, there's literally more space in

45:38the brain, more tissue developed, uh, devoted in the limbic system to negative emotions than to positive emotions. Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions keep you alive. You know, that snap of the twig behind you while you're walking across the savannah, you know, your brain does not immediately say, Oh, but that's a good friend here to say, hello, you take off running. And then it's like, Oh, it was just my friend. Ha ha ha ha ha. We are made to be resentful to get more, more, more, more, because that actually allows us to advance as a species and pass on our

46:09genes. And the result of that is that left to our devices, we're unbelievably ungrateful all the time. And just the ingratitude, I mean, the grinding ingratitude. It's like, I, I literally said the other, I found myself saying the other day, you know, first class in United Airlines has really gone downhill. It's so absurd. Right. And that's me. I mean, I'm just, uh, and this is what I teach. This is my stuff. And I still do that. That's our tendency, which means you have to

46:39override it. And the way they override it is by being conscious of it. Once again, you can do animal impulses, you can do moral aspirations. You choose, but you got to do the work. I mean, you can sit on the couch and eat Haagen-Dazs and binge Netflix, or you can get up and do leg day. I mean, you choose moral aspiration is leg day is what, and so everybody watching found my fitness, they understand that. Right. But the same thing is true for every part of your life. There's a leg day analog analog to everything that goes on in our lives and gratitude, the gratitude

47:10listing procedure, any of the exercises that I recommend about gratitude. That's what it is. It's getting up off the couch of resentment and going into the gym of blessings, which is hard to do and it's not natural. So the way I ask my students to do it is to override their tendencies by writing a list of the five things you're most grateful for Sunday afternoon. And, and I don't care how stupid it is. I mean, right now, you know, I'm kind of grateful for Ronda. The Seahawks are doing really well. I grew up in Seattle. I love that. I just, I'm not a big, but you know, I can't change

47:44my heart. I want the Seahawks to win the Superbowl. And I was really grateful last weekend. And I saw that. That's so awesome. That's great. So stupid. I got it, but I'm going to put it on my gratitude list and I'm grateful for, and big things too. I'm grateful for my faith. I'm grateful for my family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Five things. Now each day during the week, take just a couple of minutes and focus on each one of these things before you go to bed, before you go to bed. And I have a whole nighttime protocol of things that we can actually do for better happiness, hygiene, as well as better

48:18sleep and, you know, proper functioning of the pineal gland and all the stuff that we talk about in our business. And then every Sunday update it on average, the average person after 10 weeks will be 12% happier. That's just overriding your tendencies is what it comes down to. It's so beautiful that we don't, we're not, we're not, you know, subjugated to our animal impulses. I just love that about life. This is, I mean, this is great for adults. How do you teach that to children? Well, the way to do that is to actually model it. Is the model everything, all that matters is what

48:50you do. It really doesn't matter what you say. So, so people ask me all the time, traditionally religious people say, like, you know, in the world today, everybody's wandering away from the faith. What do I do to keep my kids in the faith? And I say, it doesn't matter what you say. Don't harangue your kids. There's this old saying, don't talk to your kids about God, talk to God about your kids, right? But the way to keep, and this is a very well empirically verified truth about religious faith, but it makes the broader point. Have them see you practice

49:24the faith because that's what they will model. That's what they see. This is the wiring is established. If you don't want your kids to scream square words out of the window of the car in traffic in Southern California, don't do that. If you don't want your kids to be drunks, don't be a drunk for God's sake. And if you want to raise them in the faith, then practice the faith assiduously, seriously, with your heart, with your whole heart. And they, the data say they absolutely will. I mean, not a hundred percent, but that's the only thing that really raises the odds materially. So if you want your kids to be more grateful,

49:57be more grateful. If you want your kids to be less ungrateful about the beautiful life that they have, be less ungrateful. Don't see them have you grousing and complaining and just being kind of grumpy all the time. And one of the ways that you do that is by talking to them at dinner about the things that you're grateful for. Don't bug them about what they're grateful for. You know what I'm grateful for today? I'm so grateful that we have this time together. You know, I'm so great. Look at the sunset. I mean, in Southern California, like we live here in December, January, and it's, it's actually really easy to be grateful

50:29for the sunset out here when you're not here all the time. Cause you don't habituate to it. That's how you do it. Um, I love this. And then I think also maybe bringing them, pulling them into the, the Sunday, you know, writing down and just like, maybe they don't have to do, you don't have to force them to do it, but they can see you do it. Yeah. And you know, again, put it on the fridge, yours on the fridge. Yeah. We just, we're actually, my husband just ordered this like really nice digital board for like, you know, schedules and like phrases and things you want to put on. And so that's a great idea. Things to, things to really, to remember for sure. And they see mom is practicing. She

51:02does that thing. Mom does that thing. Right. And, and, and mom is happier after she, after she does that thing. I want to, you brought up something about like, you know, how humans are wired to kind of be ungrateful to be like, I mean, competitive to, you know, we've got this, like, this is, this is the survival. This is how we're surviving and, and, and getting better. Um, how does that relate to like people's emotional baselines and like understanding? Cause obviously, you know, there are, there's more of the anxious phenotype. There's more of the positive, like my, my, my late mentor, Bruce Ames, I mean, he was rose colored glasses. Everything was

51:37positive. And he was like, Oh, just like unbelievably annoying. I'm just like, I, how are you like this, you know, but also very successful. Yeah. So how does like understanding your emotional baseline come into helping you manage your emotions? Yeah. That's such a smart question because we don't all have the same, obviously the same emotional baseline and we beat ourselves up if we're naturally grumpy people. But it turns out that there's a lot of research on the, the natural functioning of the limbic system and how it, how it affects our personalities. There's a great test called a positive affect,

52:08negative affect sequence, panis, and people can take it online or they can actually go to my website. Cause I have a thing called the happiness scale and it will look at your natural affect profile. There's four affect profiles that will, that will divide up positive and negative intensity of emotion that we naturally fall into. And, and all of us fall into one of these quadrants as it turns out. And the reason is because it's the, the functioning of the limbic system is different between different people. It's not because you had a crummy childhood. It, it, most of it is genetic. Most of the stuff is between 40 and 80% genetic

52:42on. And we know this from identical twins separated at birth, you know, those identical twin studies they did at university of Minnesota, all those all for all those years. And then, you know, we want to be in charge of everything. We're not right. So much is, is genetic, but you got to know it so you can manage your genetics with good habits. So this research, it talks about positive emotionality and negative emotionality, positive and negative affect, which is just, you know, the fancy way of talking about this intensity of emotions that we have. You can be above average on both below average on both or above average on one and below average

53:17on the other. Those are the four quadrants. If you're above average on positive and negative, that's the mad scientist profile. That means you feel things super deeply. It's everything is great or terrible. And, and, you know, it's, you know, most CEOs and entrepreneurs are the mad scientist profile. You might be one you're either this or the next one. Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to figure out. I need to take the test. So you've got high positive emotionality, but I don't know about your high negative emotionality. Cause I haven't seen you on your, you know, on a, like when

53:48you first wake up in the morning or, or how you, you know, I can judge things. I can want it to be. Yeah. You can, you're obviously a very meticulous about detail, but I don't know about the intensity of your negative emotions as you do so. So that's what I'd have to see. We can take the test and we can actually find this out. That's a great profile for leadership. That's a great profile for, you know, just being completely alive in the world, but it can be unbearable to your partner. You know, it's not that easy to be married to a, um, a mad scientist. I, you know, my wife reminded me of that this very morning. Matter of fact, it's like, you're, you're just exhausting me.

54:22What people want is high positive and low negative, which doesn't mean you don't have any bad feelings. It just means the intensity of negative emotions is lower. That's the cheerleader profile. That might be you. I don't know. And then, and then, so that's Bruce. Bruce Ames. Yeah. So the cheerleader profile is one who is quite a bullion, but takes in stride the negative with real philosophy takes the negative, right? Things are, they tend to be pretty optimistic and very hopeful, which are different. I mean, hope is a virtue. Optimism is a prediction and,

54:57and they don't always make the best CEOs because they, they're not very good at receiving or giving negative feedback. And so your worst boss was probably, was probably a cheerleader and they come into your office and they say, Rhonda, you're the linchpin of this whole company. And you're like, it's great. And you're calling your husband. I've realized you haven't, you know, had a job like that. Neither am I. And then, and then you hear them saying the same thing to the, to the lazy moron in the next office. It's like, wait a second. I thought I was special. And that's bad

55:30leadership. The other two are low, low. These are low affect people, which means that they, they're, they're, that's the judge profile. A lot of surgeons, you and I have known a lot of surgeons. Surgeons are like this, right? Uh, fighter pilots are like this. These are people who are low affects, like whatever, bring it on. You don't want somebody to cut you open and go, Oh my God, that's not what you want. You want somebody who's like, I can take that out. Can do it. Done it 50 times. I can do it at 51st. And the judge is somebody who's not emotionally super high affect

56:03when they actually see things, seeing strong things. And the worst one for people, but good for society is high negative, low positive. That's the poet. These are people who feel very strongly negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, especially sadness. And they feel positive emotions at a very low simmer. These people tend to be very, uh, creative. And part of that is this interesting research on the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that's involved in rumination.

56:33So people who have clinical depression, high activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. And when there's more serotonin in the synapse, you find that, that what it does is it lowers the activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. A lot of the stuff is so black box that it's contested in neuroscience like everything else. But it's interesting because that's the same thing that you find with people who are creative. A lot of VLPFC activity with low serotonin in the synapse is the same thing when people are falling in love. When they fall in love, there's a big dip in serotonin. It looks like clinical depression as a matter of fact. And the reason is you want lots

57:07of activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex because they're bonding to each other. They're doing stupid things like sending 50 texts in an hour that are humiliating and ridiculous because their brain is working like a deeply clinically depressed person as they bond to the other person. That's why poets are depressive, creative, and romantic. It's all the same thing. And that's why we need them, but they suffer. They suffer more depression. They suffer more anxiety than the rest of us. But that means that we need to love them more because we need them in our society.

57:39Okay. So understanding your emotional baseline, how does that help you manage your mood? Because when you know your emotional baseline, you know that this is your natural proclivity and you can actually take steps. So for me, as a mad scientist, my problem, generally speaking, is not insufficient happiness. It's excessive unhappiness. So all of my protocols, my science-based protocols for self-management are dedicated to managing my high negative affect levels. That's especially acute from when I wake up in the morning until noon.

58:13That's especially the case. This is me as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have to take the test. And then after that, when your day wears on, then you're like, okay, I can dig it. It's actually better. And that's actually neurochemically very common is what we actually find. And so the result of that is that when you know your affect profile, you know which levers to push. Managing happiness and managing unhappiness are not the same thing. So I'll give you an example. When I talk to somebody and I say, you go to the gym, you can't tell just by looking. And

58:43they're like, yeah, you know, yeah, but I'm inconsistent. Anybody who tells me that does not have high negative affect. The reason is because going to the gym is one of the best ways to manage negative affect. Right. And people who don't have high negative affect, they go to the gym and it's like, I don't feel better. I got slightly better biceps, but I don't feel better. You go to the gym because you feel better, but you don't know. So people will say, oh, it makes me so happy to work out. No, it doesn't. It makes you less unhappy to work out. That's what it is. And it's a healthy way to do it. The unhealthy ways to manage your negative affect are drugs and alcohol

59:17and workaholism or scrolling social media, distracting yourself. The healthy ways to do it are developing your spiritual life and or working out, picking up heavy things and running around. Yeah. That's an important thing to understand. So almost everybody who's like a super gym rat like you and me. Yeah. High negative affect. So that's great exercise. And that's what I was going to get to. I mean, that's one of the best, you know, ways to to manage the unhappiness. You're right. Like I the reason I exercise is for

59:49my brain. Like I have to do it for my mood to like, oh, yeah, just making sure that I'm not seeing more negative. Do you work out first thing in the morning? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a classic thing for high negative affect people because the first is the first thing you do. Yeah. What time? Um, usually like it depends, uh, eight, eight 30 because you have a little, because I have to do the school, like all that. I wake up and have to get him ready and all that. What about 10 years ago? Were you awake? Were you still working out? I would go before I would work

1:00:21out before I went into the lab. Okay. Yeah. And I started doing the sauna before I went into lab because it's the only way I could deal with going into the lab. Yeah. I got it. I got it. No, I get it. So you were probably waking up at four 30 in those days and working out from five to six or something. No. Cause I was going to the lab at 10. Oh, I get it. It depends on the lab. Your results may differ. Yeah, it really does. But you're, you, you do. Yeah. And, and I have very, very strong protocols that are science-based and dedicated to lowering negative affect and increasing productivity and creativity. So yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

1:00:55And there it's all designed to actually do. So what I ingest, when I ingest it, what I actually do. So I, I get up real early and there's a lot of research on how the brain works. There's an inch ancient Vedic, um, science literature on, on something called the Brahma Muhurta. I spent a lot of time in India. I go to India every year and I studied with a lot of both scientists and, um, and, and spiritual teachers in the, in, I'm a Catholic, but I do that anyway, cause it's really, really good stuff. And they've always talked about the Brahma Muhurta, which in Sanskrit means

1:01:26the creator's time. It's an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. A Muhurta is 48 minutes long as in, in ancient Vedic physics. That's arbitrary from a scientific point of view, but there is a lot of research that shows that if you get up before dawn and you're conscious and awake while the sun is rising and has strong neurochemical, I mean, you know, I've seen the literature on this. You're more productive, you're more effective, you're more creative, you're more focused and you're happier is the way that that works. And, and Huberman talks about this stuff a lot too,

1:01:56about, you know, the sunrise, the sunrise. So that's what I practice. And four 30 is my time. I usually work out from four 45 to five 45 every morning. And I'm, I'm a seven day a week guy, which means that I have to be really careful to not screw up my joints. And, and, and I want to be working out when I'm in my eighties, which is a long time, you know, a couple of decades from now. And that means I have to really structure this thing in a very, very good way to do that. And a lot of it is zone two cardio, sometimes zone three hit training, et cetera, but it's also a lot of

1:02:26resistance training too. And also I'm able to stay healthy and not touch my hormones, which is really good. It's a nice side effect of that, but that manages my negative affect from the very first moment. The second thing that I do is, is that's, that's the physical fitness. The second is my metaphysical fitness, which is the second technique for managing negative affect. But it's also really personally important to me. I go to mass every day. I go to church every day because I'm a Catholic. It's the most important thing in my life. Now I also work, I've studied Vipassana meditation and Stoic philosophy.

1:02:58Everybody's got to find their thing, something that they actually practice, which is a form of transcendence, to transcend yourself, to actually be focused on things greater than yourself every single day. So I go to mass from six 30 to seven every day. And when I'm at home, it's with my wife. And when I'm on the road, it's by myself because the great thing about the Catholic church is like Starbucks. It's a very high quality uniform product. It's pretty easy to find, right? So for me, that's great. That really works. Then, and I haven't ingested anything except, you know, electrolytes and

1:03:32with some creatine monohydrate, 10 grams, because I don't, I don't want the, just, you know, that second five grams is really good for your brain. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. That research is unbelievably strong at this point. I've heard you talk about it and it's just really great. So I'm not ingesting anything until I get back. And then I actually self-administer psychostimulant. That's when I actually use my caffeine and I like caffeine and I've been drinking it since I grew up in Seattle. And so I'm a, you know, I drink a lot of dark roast Starbucks, you know, the more they burn it, the better I like it. And I'll drink 350 milligrams of caffeine

1:04:05and I'll get that in a, in a bolus right after I get back and before I eat anything. But that's two and a half hours after I've gotten up at this point, because of all that stuff about adenosine clearing and et cetera, et cetera, that's contested, but it works for me. I don't get the crash in the afternoon. And then only then I eat and I get about 60 grams of protein in my first meal of the day, which is really good. Greek yogurt has a lot of tryptophan in it. And that will actually hold you. And when I do that, when I get to work, I get three and a half hours of

1:04:35concentrated creative work, which you don't get. Otherwise you're not going to get, I can't write for three and a half hours unless I set my day up in a particular way. And I'm not unbearable to live with because my negative affect has been managed. That's my five part protocol. Oh, love it. And I'm going to, I want to get into some of like a lot of different aspects of that, like the transcendence as well. But I think, um, we need to talk about the third macronutrient, which is meaning, meaning purpose, the meaning of life. Yeah. That's the biggie,

1:05:08you know? And that sounds like, you know, what even is that? That's a New Yorker cartoon, you know, guy sitting at the mouth of a cave in the Himalayas, which I've done. And, and it is big until you actually realize that there's a big literature on, uh, in, in the, in the world of social psychology that, that breaks down how people experience meaning and thus what it is. Meaning the meaning of life is the answer to three questions. So if you want to look for the meaning of life, look for the answer to three questions. This is just a decomposition technique. Big problems

1:05:40are just a bunch of little problems. Here are the three questions. Why do things happen the way they do in life? That's coherence. You need an answer to that. And your answer doesn't have to be my answer. I mean, my answer is profoundly religious and also super scientific because I'm a, I'm a, I was going to say I'm a Christian scientist. That's a thing. That's not what I mean. I'm a scientific Christian, you know, whatever. Yeah. Um, some people answer that in different ways. You know, when people are going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, that's a, that's a cry for coherence because they don't have a sense of meaning and they're not happy. That's what it says.

1:06:14So if you have a relative who's going berserk on conspiracies, don't yell at them and, you know, throw data at them, provide a better way to find coherence as an act of love because that's the need that they're trying to meet. The second question is why I'm doing what I'm doing. I mean, am I going in circles? A lot of people don't know. It's like, I get up and I go to work and I turn on the zoom screen. I just like, and it's like a boat that's kind of just going around and around. And you're not getting any place. Remember we're made for progress. We're not made to arrive at a

1:06:45goal. We're made to make progress toward a goal. Arrivals tricky. You know, like we talked about before the Olympic athletes or 30% of people, depending on the study you're looking at that go on a super strong diet, they get to their goal and develop an eating disorder because they want more progress. And the goal for hitting your goal weight or the reward for hitting your goal weight is never getting to eat what you like again for the rest of your life. It's so depressing. So it's like, no, I want the scale to keep going down. And then they develop, you know, these eating disorders,

1:07:18these bad things, because we're made toward progress. That's purpose. Why am I doing what I'm doing? That's the sense of purpose. That's goals. That's direction. And the last is significance, which is why does my life matter? And to whom? And that's the love problem that, you know, the significance is the love problem. And so what you need is an explanation for the universe. You need goals and direction and you need love. And those things together are the ingredients. Those are the macros of meaning is how it, and that's this new book about actually, how do you find

1:07:52that? And I guess more importantly, why we're not, because that's the crisis of our time. The crisis of our time is not an enjoyment problem, although the strivers watching us probably have an enjoyment crisis. That's the big problem for strivers. They don't enjoy their lives, right? They got tons of satisfaction, but meaning is the crisis for adults under 30 that we see today. The number one predictor of clinical depression and generalized anxiety today is saying my life feels meaningless. My life feels

1:08:22like a simulation. My life feels empty. That's why I wrote this new book is because I wanted to figure out what's going wrong. Where do you have to go to find meaning and how do you have to live differently? And that's what it comes down to. So people can ask themselves these questions and that's a start. It's a start. What else? Well, you got to get rid of the barrier to it. And the big barrier to it is, this is where the science really kicks in. So there's this whole body of neuroscience that's very hot right now on hemispheric lateralization. That's the work of Ian McGilchrist at Oxford, who's really,

1:08:57for my money, this is the most visionary guy working on both the psychiatry side and the neuroscience side. And hemispheric lateralization is an old idea that just says the two sides of the brain do different things. And when I was a kid in the seventies, we all was like, yeah, mom's an artsy right brain person. And dad is a, is an analytic left brain guy. Cause my dad was a PhD biostatistician and my mother was a painter. And so that's the two sides. My, my parents together made a whole brain is kind of how it worked. That's out of style because you don't just have an analysis side and

1:09:29art side. What you have, however, because it's come back with this guy's work is a why side and a how side, right? And the why side of your brain asks the big questions of life and the left side of your brain figures out actually what to do because of the why you got to have, you got to have coherence purpose and significance. And then you go out and do the things that actually matter. So if you're saying, you know, if you're saying like, why do things happen in the world? Because this is what God wants and God loves me. This is part of significance. And I want to serve his

1:10:02creation. If that's, if you're a traditional religious person, then you're going to go live in a particular way. And how do you figure out how to live? Left hemisphere of the brain, all the technical problems and tasks, left hemisphere stuff. There's a problem. Our culture today, especially for people under 30 who don't remember the before times like you and me, it's all left brain. It's a technologized, engineered world. The tip of the spear is life online, life in the matrix. That's all left hemisphere. That's the reason that, that, that life feels bereft of meaning

1:10:33because not only can you not find it, you're not even asking the questions. You're not using your brain the way it was supposed to. You're never bored. You're never having a bowl session late at night in the dorm asking, you know, why things, well, you know, what, you know, is there a God? Those are big meaning questions. There's no mystery. You only ask questions that chat GPT can answer. If, if AI can answer your question, it's not a meaning question. It's not a right brain question. It's a left brain question. Ask it a meaning question. Like, and by the way,

1:11:05here's the test. If there's a meaning crisis, two question test, why am I alive? For what would I die? Right. And chat GPT will give you nonsense. It'll kiss up to you saying, oh, it's a, such a smart question, Rhonda. You know, that's it. You're asking the questions that Plato and Aristotle, it's like, oh, I'm like Plato and Aristotle. It gives you nothing. It gives you nothing. And the reason is because you can't answer it. You can only live with it. I'll ask you a meaning question right now. Why do you love your husband? He makes me feel loved. Um, and like always,

1:11:42no matter what, no matter what, no matter who I am, um, safe. Um, and he, I look up to him. He's the most honest person that I've ever met. And, and it's, it's nice to have that person that you admire. And I want to be like that. It's by the way, I can tell you right now, you have a successful marriage and you will. Yeah. The reason is because in the human species, females in a successful pair

1:12:13bond mate, mating relationship require adoration and males require admiration. And that's biological. He would fight a tiger for you. You just told me that you feel safe. You feel loved. He would fight a tiger with his hands for you and only you. And, and, and you admire him because in metaphorically or really, he brings the biggest gazelles into the cave that anybody could ever bring in. And he's

1:12:44so big and strong and he takes care of the family. And that's kind of what we want. These are the, these are the elements of, because we're just, we, we all need respect. You know, we all need to be loved, but these are differences in the pair bond mate, in the pair bond mating between females and males. And you just told me right now, you just told me you're going to have, you're going to be married to him for the rest of your life. That's what you told me. No, no. I mean, it's like, he'll be gazing into your eyes as he takes his dying breath. That's what it's going to be. Because you got the formula, you crack the code is what it comes down, which is beautiful. I mean, it's going to change. There'll be challenges, but that's beautiful. But the whole point is when I

1:13:17asked you that, you didn't have a crisp answer. And the reason is because the language centers in your brain are in the left hemisphere. And I asked you a right hemisphere question. So any one of those particular things, I feel valued. Well, your third grade teacher made you feel valued. I felt safe. Well, your dad made you feel safe. Any one of those things could be applied to another person because language defies meaning. Meaning is felt, it's lived. I mean, I've been married 34 years

1:13:51and I can't solve my marriage like an analytical problem. I can only live my marriage, which is why I love it. I don't know if we're going to have a big argument tonight. My wife's from Spain. So probably, right. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, that's why it's beautiful. That's why it's good. And if you're spending all of your time online in the matrix, which by the way, that movie was about an artificial intelligence, which subjugated humanity and kept them pacified to use their human energy. That's the reality. Now, if you're in the matrix all day long, you're sitting on the left

1:14:24side of your brain and you're not even considering questions of meaning in your life is going to be bereft of the things that really matter. That's why you're depressed. If you were to give advice to different age groups on finding the meaning of life. So a young adult, younger than 30, middle age. I mean, that's where I am. And then older adults. Young middle age you are. Where, like, would that advice change? Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does. It really does. Because it, the habits actually depend on, on where you are in your, in your life, the relationships that you actually have. So I,

1:14:57you know, I, I wrote the meaning of your life fundamentally for my 28 year old graduate students is because they're really struggling with it an awful lot. They don't remember the before times and they actually aren't living in an old fashioned way at all. So my kids grew up with the stuff as mother's milk and they're super old fashioned. I mean, my kids look at me and they think I'm some sort of like freaked out hippie or something. They're like two of my kids are, my three kids are military. Two of my three kids got married in their early twenties and nine months after their wedding started having children. I mean, it, it's a, you know, all three of my kids

1:15:29are traditionally religious. They like read newspapers. It's like living with a bunch of old people, which is, they live in my house. I mean, one of the families where we have an intergenerational household at their request, cause they want to live like the old days. So they take this stuff really seriously when we talk about it, but that's very unusual. That's very transgressive. As a matter of fact, most young people today are not doing living according to the old ways that people naturally lived in when they had their brain working hemispherically in a balanced way. If you're online all the time, there's a bunch of things that I can actually

1:16:02predict about life. Number one, you're not asking the big questions. You're asking the trivial questions, the technical questions. Number one, actually before that, you're spending too much time online. You're spending too much time looking at screens up to 12 hours a day. You're in the matrix, but then the things that you're missing are these big questions. The second thing is I almost always find real struggle with romantic love. The whole thing you talked about, the beautiful thing you talked about about your husband, they'll be like, what's she talking about? I want it, but I don't know what it is. And I've certainly never had it, right? And the reason is because you can't get there

1:16:36until you are making an antenna to the divine between the right hemisphere of your brain and the right hemisphere of his brain. That's how it works. You communicate with him hemispherically on the right. You understand each other at a deep level of emotional, no, spiritual connection. You can't do it if it's just like swipe right, zip, zip, zip, knowing each other on social media, spending all day looking at screens because your brains won't fuse. That's what one flesh means is right brains.

1:17:08So get, well, getting rid of the screens or cutting down them. It helps a lot, a lot. And there's a lot of science behind this. So this is, there's a lot of science behind this. It doesn't mean throwing your phone in the ocean. What it means is you need proper protocols in your life. You need discipline in your life. The best way to do it is no phone in the first hour of the day, no phone in the last hour of the day and no phone during meals. Just that. Then a bunch of phone-free zones, classroom, bedroom. You should never have your phone in the bedroom. I mean, everybody knows that, but people use it as the alarm clock, et cetera, et cetera.

1:17:40I can use my phone as an alarm clock now, but not look at it because I'm so trained in that particular way. And then tech fasts is really important. I recommend three to five days a year where you actually don't have it. And just that, and you'll change your relationship to the devices and your brain will be working differently. If you want to go super hardcore, change your screen to black and white. That'll change how you relate to it. The neurochemistry actually will change in the way that you use it. Start communicating on purpose differently

1:18:10with your friends. Start actually using the phone as opposed to, as opposed to texting more, et cetera. There's a bunch of things. Like an old school phone. Yeah. Like an old school phone basically. Yeah. Exactly. Like crazy. Right. It's like, yeah, you can actually have a real time conversation, but within just 10 numbers, like how new technology. Yeah, I know. Call them now. I know because culture has changed. Yeah. Culture has accommodated itself to the left brain world of the way that we use technology. But this book has the whole set of protocols on actually how to get clean for sure. And then on top of that answer, asking those questions. Right. Answer, ask the questions and then falling in love. Then there's

1:18:43the whole thing about actually, how do you find calling in life? How do you find holy vocation in life? And that's really about how you find service. You know, what you're doing to actually serve other people as opposed to, you know, how I can serve myself. And that's an ancient idea that actually accentuates the activity in the left and the right side of the brain as opposed to the left side of the brain. You're egotistical on the left more than you are on the right, actually, because you seek transcendence, which is another important thing, is looking for spiritual reality as people understand it, is looking for ways that they actually serve and love, including people

1:19:15they don't even know. That's right brain all day long. That'll just like, that'll wire you. I prescribe volunteer work to people for that particular reason, to love and be loved in ways beyond just the, you know, the technological world that we live in. I recommend beauty. There's three kinds of beauty that people need to self-administer. It's not like beauty of somebody that might become your maid. That's different. That exercises different parts of the brain. It's three kinds of beauty. Artistic beauty, natural beauty, moral beauty. Those are very right brain experiences. And it's so interesting

1:19:49in the literature today that shows that young people just have less beauty in their lives. All across the board. All across the board. I mean, there's a pretty interesting work that talks about how, for example, natural beauty, the average child under 12 spends four to seven minutes a day in nature. Huge problem. Four to seven hours a day behind the screen, four to seven minutes in nature, that's upside down, obviously. And so natural beauty, boy, it has a big neurocognitive impact. Artistic beauty is just missing when you're looking at things on the screen all the day,

1:20:21because you actually don't get any three dimensionality to things, but you actually can't get any depth to anything in any other way as well. You find that music today, and this is pretty interesting. I don't want to be just like an old fogey and say, in my day, music was more beautiful. But music is objectively less melodic than it's been in the past, which actually affects us neurophysiologically, is the tunefulness, the beauty that we actually see. And then moral beauty, there's just less moral beauty that we see. And when you witness an act of moral beauty on the part

1:20:51of somebody else, it's so interesting. So the British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, you've ever heard that name? No. He wrote a book called Something Beautiful for God, where he kind of discovered for the whole world, Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And he heard about this Albanian nun who's like four foot 10, living on the streets of Calcutta and just serving the poorest of the poor, serving the poorest of the poor. So he goes to me, he's a complete hardened atheist. And he meets her and he becomes Catholic.

1:21:21And he says, this story, it wasn't because of the theology, it was because of the moral beauty that he saw in Mother Teresa and her sisters and what they were doing. I mean, it's scooping people up. It's like, and he made it into a book and as people would read it, and they're just weeping as they read the book, or they would see it and he made it into a documentary in the BBC and people would just buy the millions. And it's like, I don't know. I don't know. When you see somebody serving somebody else, when you see beauty, when you allow somebody to serve you in just pure love

1:21:53and pure charity, it gives you what the psychologist Rhett Diesner calls moral elevation. And it has, it's biology, man. I mean, we're wired for this. We're wired for the altruism that actually comes from doing beautiful things and experiencing that kind of moral beauty. And this is really important. And the last, the hardest one of all, you want to open up your right brain, you got to suffer. And you have to understand suffering. And so I have a whole chapter in this book about how to suffer. It's called Never Waste Your Suffering. And that's really countercultural

1:22:27today. Okay. This is so much to unpack here. I mean, going, you know, going to the, into the service part too, like serving others. And I mean, it seems like that I've heard you talk about