The Art of True Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks

The three macronutrients of happiness

0:00There are three macronutrients to the happiest life. The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life, and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret of happiness. It's the secret to rehab. The satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle, and last but not least is meaning, the why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things, and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering.

0:49If you spend your life, which many people do today, trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering, they will paradoxically miss their own happiness.

Introducing Dr Arthur Brooks

0:59Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

1:08I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Arthur Brooks. Arthur Brooks is a professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School. Today, we discuss what makes people truly happy and what this thing we call happiness is really all about. What I love about Arthur Brooks and what you'll realize today is that he looks to experimental data, philosophy, his and others' experiences to arrive at specific questions that you can ask yourself

1:39to determine what matters most to you and what stands in the way of you actually getting those things. In fact, I must say, this episode with Arthur Brooks is one of my favorite ever on the Huberman Lab Podcast. He is brutally honest, he's open, he's generous with knowledge that can help you, the listener, and he's incredibly humble. Thanks to Arthur, the conversation you're about to hear is one that I'm confident you'll want to think about, act on, and come back to periodically. I can say for myself with certainty that it's the conversation I wish I had heard long ago.

2:10Arthur doesn't have all the answers, nor does he claim to, but I do think he has a sort of hard-earned compass and a set of maps that we can all apply to have a much better and indeed a great life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Arthur Brooks.

2:40Dr. Arthur Brooks, welcome. Thank you, Dr. Andrew Huberman. We're only going to call each other doctor once at the beginning of this podcast. I'm so happy you're here. Me too. Yeah, I consider you a friend. Yeah. Before we became friends, you were already my teacher. I was learning a ton from you. You have a ton of wisdom. And before you, like, step into your humble self and push aside, I just really want to highlight that because there are a lot of people influencing, educating, advising, coaching, et cetera.

3:10But you represent, like, really the confluence of ideas and practices and wisdom in ways that I and people can really understand and benefit from. So really looking forward to having you here. Thank you. So likewise, I mean, what you've done over the past, now, five and a half years with this podcast? Just about, yeah. You changed the whole way that educators can reach a lot of people. What we want is educators. Science in the public interest. We want to touch people's lives. We want to lift them up and bring them together using science, using ideas.

3:42And how? How? How do you do that? You show the way. Because what you did was you started this podcast within six months. It was a big deal. And what you showed was a whole generation of people, younger and older than you. I'm older than you, that this is something that people can do, that we can reach people. You made that possible. You made that possible for me. It was an incredible gift. Well, I'm honored and thank you. I realized today that perhaps the toughest part about this conversation is going to be to make sure that I keep you focused on you a little bit. You're so humble, but I appreciate the kind words and I consider us colleagues and friends.

First principles of happiness

4:17So you're known as the happiness guy. You know a lot about it, what it is and what it isn't. So let's start with first principles there that people can really wrap their head around and apply. What's the difference between unhappiness and happiness? Or is that even the right model? Yeah. Most people start with the wrong model of what happiness actually is. So you can't define unhappiness until you can define happiness. And happiness is not what most people think. Most people conceive of happiness as a feeling, as an emotion.

4:51And that's quite wrong in the same way that the smell of your turkey is not the same thing as your Thanksgiving dinner. The smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. And the feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. And when I first came into the field, I mean I've been a behavioral scientist for 30 years, but I started specializing in the science of human happiness exclusively. I wrote the first book of mine on this in 2008. But I decided in 2019, after I took a hiatus from academia to go run a big think tank in Washington, D.C., that I was going to specialize for the rest of my career in this thing that most people believe they wanted.

5:25I was going to really make it work. And there was, of course, happiness. People want to be happier. And the first thing that I realized is there wasn't a very good definition of happiness. It was just so crazy. The thing that everybody wants, they can't quite define it. I can't put words to it, but I know it when I feel it. This is what I would get when I would ask my classes. So what do you think you're studying? Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or doing the things that I enjoy. And I recognized that this would be completely inadequate in any other area of science. And so I went back to try to find the right metaphor, the right parallel field to define happiness.

5:59And I felt that the field of nutrition did it really well by taking food and breaking it into macronutrients and micronutrients. So I asked myself, okay, what are the macronutrients of happiness? What are the fundamental elemental building blocks of happiness? And to figure that out, you go and you look at the people who have the highest life satisfaction that's measured in robust and proper ways, good construct validity, good science behind it. And what you find is doing kind of a factor analysis is that there are three macronutrients to the happiest life.

6:30The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab, right? And so you have to understand, right? For sure. And satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle.

7:01And last but not least is meaning, the why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering. And so the first, or I should say the second misunderstanding about happiness is that it's incompatible with unhappiness. It's not.

7:32But if you spend your life, which many people do today, trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering, they will paradoxically miss their own happiness. So that's the first thing to understand.

Enjoyment versus pleasure

7:44Could you drill a little bit deeper into enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning? Yeah. And maybe just put some contour on each of those. Sure. And then go back to unhappiness and suffering and how it relates to all three. For sure. So enjoyment is very much related to pleasure, but pleasure is fundamentally a limbic phenomenon. I mean, if you touch in experiments, you've done these, you've seen these experiments forever, the ventral striatum or the ventral tegmental area, you can get this stimulation of these parts of the brain that will give you this sense of ebullience, this sense of immediate joy from anything from your girlfriend saying,

8:19Andrew, I love you, or a big bump of cocaine, not that you would, because the brain is so unbelievably thrifty, right? That's not part of happiness. That's a phenomenon from sort of the Pleistocene brain, from something, the middle Pleistocene, what, 250,000 years ago, saying, that's rewards you. Go get more of that is kind of what it comes down to. You don't want to have that as your goal in life. I mean, like the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it.

8:49My dad said, that's the end of America. He was kind of right. I think your dad and my dad either were friends. I don't think we have the same dad, but... Separated brothers. Yeah, my dad and... No disrespect to the hippies, but my dad had very clear thoughts about how the children of people with that mindset were at a disadvantage because of that message specifically. What will happen, of course, very quickly is that your pleasures, which are fundamentally animal, I mean, your dog, your beautiful new dog, friendly new dog that I just met, he has a limbic system not that different than yours, and he feels emotions that are not that different than yours, right?

9:27I mean, he has amygdala, you know, he has a dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, he has a ventral strain. I mean, he's got all these different parts, just kind of like we do, but he's not human because he's managed largely by these emotions, and we have this choice. We have this incredible prefrontal cortex, this human cortex that's enormous. Your dog's is wafer thin. Ours is like 30% of the weight of our brain, and what that supercomputer allows us to do is to choose between animal impulses and moral aspirations.

9:59We get to make that choice. That's a conscious executive choice. When we convert pleasure into enjoyment, it's because it takes on moral aspiration to it. We take our pleasures and we add people in memory, thereby kind of delivering them to an executive experience that we're managing, that we understand, that we're conscious of, that we can remember, and that's fundamentally social. It's quintessentially human, as a matter of fact. That's what it's all about. So, you know, I talk to my students who are graduate students who are 28 years old on average, and my kids who are 28, 26, and 23.

10:35You know, what does this mean? And for most people, what it means is if there's something that makes you feel good, because we all have our thing, whether it's highly glycemic carbohydrates or any kind of addictive behavior, and in point of fact, it can be dependence-provoking, which many things can when they wire into the dopamine system. You've talked about this ad nauseum so many times I've heard you talk about this. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. Probably it's probably more about pleasure and less about enjoyment.

11:06It's not a perfect rule. I like to walk in the woods by myself and say my prayers, but those things aren't addictive. And so that's how to think about it. You need to enjoy your life, and that means there are things that give you pleasure at a metaphysical or physical level, but they also have people in memory, and you're managing them, and they're not managing you. So that's kind of, in a nutshell, how I think about enjoyment. Now, many people are bad at that, especially strivers. Who listens to your podcast? People who are serious about their lives.

11:37There's nobody that's like, eh, whatever. Who's going to listen to your podcast? We're not a whatever podcast. You're a striver podcast. We should do a title card sometime, How to Whatever. Yeah, I know. That won't go very well. That'll be our April Fool's episode. I know. That's not one of those podcasts. Yes, guys like me on. And what strivers, one of the things they often struggle with if they're very, very, very competitive, if they're ambitious, if they're successful, is that they want to be special more than they want to be happy, and so they want to put points on the board.

12:08And if it's not putting points on the board, they're not going to do it, and these are the people that I have to work with to work on the macronutrient of enjoyment. Is there fear that were they to enjoy life more, be happier, I'm probably using these terms incorrectly. No, no, no, why not? That somehow they would lose their drive. Yeah. Because as you were describing enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and by the way, I love this description of enjoyment as, you know, we have animal impulses, but then there's this other end of the spectrum, which are moral aspirations.

12:38Wouldn't at least some component of a great life be to marry those two things so that your pursuit of these animal impulses actually raised you up morally? Absolutely. And that's the ultimate. I mean, we have so many examples now in the media of prominent politicians in particular, with all the elections going on, where their careers are tanked. I do believe they might have been trying to be good people on average, but temptation ruined that career anyway.

13:10Totally, totally. And so it's clear it exists in them and in everyone, right? But the fact that that can happen, it almost feels like a misuse of the animal impulse. Yeah. Is there a way to marry animal impulse to moral aspiration in a way that's seamless or does it always work? No, no. You have just defined enjoyment. Proper enjoyment is one where you're doing what you think is prudent and natural and good to do. It's something that you want to see yourself doing and at the same time is pleasurable.

13:43You know, that's why the best moments over the course of my 35-year marriage are highly pleasurable and extremely enjoyable. And it's the kind of thing where I could get, you know, found out by the press that I'm having another beautiful night with Esther. You know, that's good is what it comes down to. And the truth is we all struggle with these things because we are biological creatures. You know, I'm fundamentally a behavioral scientist, but psychology is biology. And one of the things I've had to retrain in so many of these areas, especially over the past 10 years, is because the biology has become so salient in our field.

14:21And one of the things that you find is that the trouble that people actually have is when animal impulse and moral aspiration go in different directions. And one of the great strategies for life is how to point them in the same direction. How to – and sometimes you have to choose. Sometimes you have to choose. And people feel like it's – I should – you know, if it feels good, it must be good for me. But that's – and so I'm going to do it. That's having the same life goals as protozoa or something, you know. Or if it feels bad, it must be bad for me. Yeah, for example. And there's probably a lot of things that people should – could benefit from doing that are going to feel, quote, unquote, painful in the process.

14:57I'm in the gym. I'm a gym rat. So are you. Do you like training? I like training. I really do like training. But it's a funny thing because leg day, I still want to throw up. I've been in the gym almost every day for 30 years. Wow. You're in great shape, by the way. I feel good. I mean, it's obvious to anyone watching, but you're – No, but I feel good, yeah. Is it okay to share? You're 62? Yeah, 60 years old. In great shape. Yeah. And it's – and, you know, I've got genetics that keep me really lean. So it's not like it's any flex that I can stay at, you know, 10% body fat or something like that.

15:29That's not – that's just – that's just nature. But the truth is I – I recognize that I need to keep the machine in good shape because the brain is part of the machine. And as we both know, hard exercise, picking up heavy things and running around is fundamental to affect management and also to the maintenance of the overall functioning of how the machine works. I don't want to fall prey to, you know, type 3 diabetes, which is what we're calling Alzheimer's these days. I don't want metabolic disorders that are avoidable.

16:01So I actually – I do that. Now, leg day sucks, man. I mean, I've been doing leg day every fourth day for 30 years. And I still don't like it. I would still skip leg day. Every day would be chest day because everybody likes chest day, right? Because it feels better. But the truth is that I do it because I actually know how the muscle protein synthesis works. I know that for hormone balance, leg day is the most important day for these really large muscle groups. And what am I doing? I'm making the decision to do something that foregoes my comfort, my pleasure, even a moment of my happiness for the moral aspiration that I actually have.

16:37And that leads to this important conclusion from the research in this area, which is that Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. This is – it's, you know, we all think it's like if I'm not happy, then something's not right. No, no, it might very well be not right. You know, there are all kinds of suffering that you actually need to grow as a person. You need negative emotions because negative emotions are an alarm system that show that your reptilian brain has registered signals.

17:07Sending these signals to your limbic system and setting off alarms and, you know, from sadness and anger and disgust and fear. That's unpleasant, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong. It means everything's right. How you react to it can be how you want to. In so doing, having a better life, notwithstanding the fact that it doesn't feel good. And that's a life of discipline. That's a life of the kind of behavior that you actually want. That's worth moral aspiration. Thank you.

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20:39to get up to 27% off. I've got this statement that you just mentioned, like ringing in my ears in the best way, which is that you're saying this moral aspiration piece has a lot to do with or reflects doing what you want to see yourself doing. I really like that because I think for many people,

21:02they want to see themselves doing things that others would approve of. Right. And from a young age, we're told what we should do and why, right? You need to like get dressed up for this event, or you need to, you know, sit a certain way, eat a certain way, be polite and these things, which are all important parts of our training as humans. Right. But there's something really special that happens when we, as you point out, when we see ourselves doing something, and it feels good and we, it's a positive self-reflection of the non-egotistical kind.

21:36Right. And I don't think we talk enough about this because there's so much out there now about how social media is all about comparisons. So people are showing other people, here's what I'm doing. Right. But there's a different version of that where somebody does something that they're proud of and puts it to the internet and they're seeing themselves do something that they're proud of doing and they get the feedback. And, you know, provided that their ego is in check and they don't let the positive comments go to their head or set them up for disappointment when they don't get as many of them the next time, or things that are wired into those reinforcement circuits.

22:10I think that's great. Yeah. They're seeing themselves exercising. By the way, it could be painting. It could be time with family. It could be being in volunteer and service. And we tend to look at that stuff and say, oh, you know, they're just doing the display. So my question is to really get the ideal match between this animal impulse and moral aspirations piece, that we see ourselves and experience ourselves doing what we want to see ourselves doing and that we not share it. Because I'm open to the idea that the sharing diminishes it somehow.

22:41It can. Yeah. It can. But fundamentally, I think it's actually quite important that you declare what your moral aspirations are. And part of the reason is because this gives you a commitment bias. So there's a lot of behavioral science about that. A lot of psychology that actually talks about commitments bias. When you say, here's the thing that I'm actually going to do. I'm going to finish my PhD. This is a big part of weddings. I attended a lot of weddings. It's kind of an amazing thing, this wedding ceremony. Yeah. It makes you path dependent toward your own aspirations. People stand up and give a bunch of really amazing promises in front of all their friends.

23:14And then they get a bunch of gifts. And I'm not cynical about this at all. Like from a reward pathway perspective, it's like you're rewarding the promises that they're making in addition to the union that they're in right then. A lot of the reward is like you're giving them things for their life going forward. Sadly, I have a number of friends who've been divorced and they, depending on how long ago the wedding was, they often feel quite sheepish about all the gifts. Like they got all these gifts for the promises they made. Now they've changed their mind. Right. Some cases broken those promises, but they've changed their mind, right?

23:45It's not till death do us part. Right. It's now until it got inconvenient enough that we're going to part ways. Right. And it's an incredible still occurring kind of ancient display of promising publicly, I'm not going to quit. Yeah, no, totally. This is my person through thick and thin, through sickness and in health, and all the things that you actually talk about. You're actually talking in the wedding promises. You're saying it's going to suck sometimes. That's what you're saying.

24:16I mean, it's like richer and poorer. And we're going to stick this thing out despite the fact that we're stating right up front that there's going to be times of poverty, there's going to be times of sickness, there's going to be trouble ahead. And that's basically saying that happiness has unhappiness in it. I'm defining happiness. How am I defining happiness? That I'm going to get 80, 90 years. And as I take my dying breath, I'm going to be looking. I'm like Don Quixote. And this is my Dulcinella. And I'm going to be looking into her eyes as I recite the Holy Scriptures and take my dying breath.

24:52That's basically what you're saying. And you're defining that as your bliss. I mean, if it weren't your bliss, you'd be like, why are you doing it? I want it. Because that's a good life. That's what you're stating. And you're laying out what actually happiness looks for. And you're saying it's going to be full of unhappiness. That's what you're saying. And that's the thing for people to understand, that that's what it comes down to. When you are laying out publicly your moral commitments, when you're actually saying this, what you're saying is you're recognizing that happiness and unhappiness are intertwined.

25:23And you want the full. You're basically saying, bring it on. It's like courage. It's a declaration of your independence from the world and your dependence on each other, which is a beautiful thing. It's what you do when you're publicly baptized as an adult. Anytime that you're taken into a new religion, there's always these commitments about these moral aspirations that you're making, recognizing, yeah, sometimes this is going to go contrary to my animal impulses. Absolutely. And, you know, this is one of the things that I love about sort of the modern internet culture.

25:54There's a lot to regret. There's a lot that you and I look at like, oh no, you know. But the other thing I really, really like is this facilitated this wholesale movement of aspiration for excellence. A lot of people, they want to be excellent. You know, it's like, I mean, so this isn't just the human podcast. It's not just entertainment, high-class entertainment. People want an edge. They want to know, you know, why are they so attracted to the protocols? Protocols toward what? Toward being better. They want to be more successful.

26:25They want to be better liked. They want things to go better for them. That's a human drive for excellence. And when people can finally make peace with the fact that your animal impulses will not

26:38will not always and frequently not lead you to excellence, then you can finally be free. Do you think that a lot of the friction out there politically, socially, is basically about drawing the line between what is animal impulse and what is moral aspiration? I mean, I don't want to take us too far down. No, tell me more. What do you mean? I mean, some of the animal impulses are obvious, right? Yeah. And they're all for the neurobiologists, we would say they're very like limbic hypothalamic, right?

27:09Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, some people would say, okay, like here's the quote unquote traditional model of marriage and morality. Yeah. And some people would say, actually, we want to kind of bend that a certain way where people could have quote unquote unconventional relationships or unconventional families. Or, I mean, I think everyone would agree that lying, cheating and stealing is bad. Right. Right. Right. But there's an attempt, I think, to draw a kind of jagged line between moral and immoral that, you know, certain things that are not of biblical, traditional morality are okay

27:47because as long as they're done consensually and in the name of love. Right. Right? And we're not talking about breaking laws here. No, no. Some people really push this to the extreme, but that's not what I'm talking about. I know, I know, but that's marginal, right? And I'm staying off specific issues, not to be like politically careful here, but just because I feel like a lot of it is like, where are we going to draw the line between limbic and higher order? Right. In fact, it gets, it actually gets inverted where people will say, no, that the more evolved way of thinking is past all that, where you can really get beyond this very, you know,

28:21black and white morality and really say, no, there's all sorts of versions of what love, family, marriage, commitment, child rearing could look like. Right. Pontius Pilate, what is truth? Right. Right. It's very postmodern. Yeah, it is very postmodern, but I think that it, I mean, I feel like this is that, like people are pulling back and forth on this line, just like in science, people are trying to say the scientists and doctors that are all, you know, traditional scientists and physicians, they have the knowledge. And then the general components of the general public are saying, actually, during the pandemic,

28:55you lied, you know, like a teenager telling their end, like, you need to admit you lied. And then they're like, I didn't lie, you know, and so they're just trying to pull back. We have the torch of truth. No, we have the torch of truth. And of course, there are elements of truth on both sides. Yeah, yeah. Right. But with this, in this case, it's sort of, I think at the extremes, we all understand murder is bad. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Lying, cheating, stealing, bad. Right. But then what constitutes a moral aspiration to one camp is actually a moral insult. Right. And vice versa. So John Height, you've had him on the show, right?

29:26Yes. Yeah. John Height's great. And John Height and I go way back. We go back to the early part of the 21st century. So, and John Height and they're just the same age. And we've had these sort of parallel careers writing about, about signs of human happiness. That guy's a visionary. He's probably the greatest social scientist of our generation. Wow. He's that great. I mean, he's unbelievable. He wrote a book about moral foundations. And he talked about the fact that there are two moral foundations that everybody has in common. And that's care and fairness.

29:57Care for others and fairness. Now, we define those things differently. I mean, what does care mean? Does care mean giving everybody, you know, taking care of them at the base level? Or does it mean everybody gets an apartment and free groceries? I mean, you figure out what that means. And that's a legitimate argument about, you know, what it means. Fairness is really, really different, especially between political polls, where one side is about redistributive fairness, and the other side is about meritocratic fairness. You know, what fairness actually means. But everybody wants a fair and caring society. And you believe that you should be fair as a parent.

30:28You should care for your kids. Then what he shows empirically with his work, which no doubt has a huge neurobiological basis, and I'm sure has a huge genetic basis as well, because these personality characteristics generally do are usually between in the identical twin studies. It's usually 40 to 80 percent genetic, all the aspects of personality, which is super interesting in and of itself, is that there's three elements of morality that are very different between the political polls. They are loyalty, purity, and authority.

30:59And so loyalty is like flag burning is bad, right? You know, I come from a very mostly progressive family, politically progressive family. And if I asked somebody, you know, from my family of origin, what do you think about flag burning? They'd be like, inadvisable, right? As opposed to morally evil. Right, soft answer. Yeah, when it comes, right? And the second is loyalty, you know, loyalty to tribe. And what you find is that people who are more on the politically conservative side, they have a different sense of loyalty, loyalty towards sports teams.

31:31So you find that when you, in these interesting studies that you go into a political conservative's office and you'll find like a, a sports poster where, and for a political liberal's office, you're very, very much less likely to find this is what you find. And then of course this, where it really has teeth is toward, you know, national identity, you know, where you're loyal toward national, it's like my country, right or wrong, which is one of the reasons you find such a strong political preponderance of one side in the military forces and the American military as opposed to the other. Not to say that one side's right or wrong, but that's just, you know, how it comes down.

32:05John Haidt would say that's, that's a difference in moral foundations. And the last that you were really touching on here is purity, is moral purity. And the moral purity is about in, for example, in sexual matters is very, very profound, you know? And so, you know, there's a, there's a, you know, I've seen a bumper sticker in San Francisco that says your body may be a temple, but mine is an amusement park, right? It's funny in its way, right? But what that is basically saying is- It's very, what I would call, because I'm from the Bay Area, sort of old, older San

32:38Francisco, like circa 70s to now. Now there's a, there's a kind of a growing conservative movement, somewhat tucked into the tech community, although you find a mix of both. You find a mix of both too, but it's kind of a libertine thing where libertarianism and libertinism diverge, which is a really interesting boundary too, is what you find. But that actually describes those differences are, you know, so, so, you know, each side will say the other side is immoral. No, they're differently moral. And you decide, you know, which you think is right.

33:09And if you tell me in a structured survey, what you think is right on those particular issues, I have a very high degree of certitude and guessing how you vote, actually. Now, some people are in these weird things. You can be in kind of a, you can be a political conservative, but a cultural liberal, right? Those aren't very many people, but you do find them. They tend to be the political libertarians, as a matter of fact. It's fascinating because ultimately here, we're talking about drawing boundaries between different brain areas. At least that's what the neurobiologist in me thinks.

33:40But I mean, obviously politics, laws, and behavior matters a lot. It really matters because ultimately people can say all sorts of things about what they believe, what they want to be, but we are ultimately judged on what we do. Right. And I think we probably judge ourselves on the basis of what we do, or ideally we would look at that. Let's talk a little bit about...

Understanding leisure and culture

34:04We've gone through one macronutrient. Right. One macronutrient. What exercises do you suggest to students to start to explore their own relationship between animal impulse and moral aspiration? Yeah. So one of the things that I talk about is how they understand leisure. So leisure is what you do and they're not compensating you for in the time that's actually free, how you understand leisure. So, and the greatest writer about this is Josef Pieper, the mid 20th century German philosopher.

34:40His most important book was Leisure, the Basis of Culture. That's his most inflecting. It's actually a long essay. It's very, very beautiful. He says, I can tell you everything you need to know about a culture by how they actually use leisure. Interesting. He doesn't want to know what you do for money. He wants to know how you use your time when nobody's paying you. That's because he says, that's what reflects who you actually are. Brilliant. Right. That's why I never liked the, oh, you can tell by the books on somebody's shelf. Yeah. Because books on somebody's shelf doesn't mean they actually read those books. No, no. Like firstly. Because they own those books. Right. Exactly. Right. Many people own my books who haven't read them.

35:12Okay. Well, I've spent some time with it. I still need to go pour through it again, but it's awesome. Can't wait to read protocols, by the way. Oh, thanks. If nothing else, protocols will cure insomnia. The thing is almost 600 pages long. Thank you.

35:27Your book's awesome. And I spend some time with it. I want to spend more time with it. In part, because it marries theory with practical steps and prompts. Not AI prompts, but the kind of prompts you really give oneself. So this thing about leisure is fascinating. Yeah. Leisure is really interesting. It's like that tells you what you need to know about a culture, but also about a person in a way. And so if you find somebody who's using the leisure time to meet animal appetites, that's one thing. If they're actually using it for personal betterment, for personal betterment, not career betterment,

35:59not for the compensation, it actually comes from the worldly rewards. There's four worldly rewards, money, power, pleasure, and honor. And if you're doing something such that it doesn't reward you in one of those areas, that actually comes from Aristotle and Aquinas, et cetera. Then you're actually doing what he would call proper leisure. You're doing proper leisure toward, you know, moral aspiration, which is ultimately the most rewarding thing. That's ultimately what will take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness. That's the theory. And it's actually been verified a lot in a lot of these ideas, the best questions that come from the philosophers.

36:35And then the structural mechanisms come from neuroscience. And then the testing of these ideas comes from the behavioral sciences, right, the experiments, et cetera. Then, of course, applying them to your life is a different kettle of fish. And so what he says is that there's kind of three areas that make proper leisure and ultimate enjoyment. Want me to tell you that? Please, yeah. Number one is deepening relationships on purpose, man. I mean, on purpose. And so leisure is this weekend I'm envisioning myself not touching my phone while I'm with my wife, right?

37:10Deepening my relationship, being fully present for my wife. And I'm going to go someplace not because I want to chill on the beach, but because I want to be on the beach with the love of my life. So deepening relationships on purpose with, you know, a real focus on that. The second is learning something you don't need to learn. And the third is actually developing yourself metaphysically. It's your spiritual, your religious life, or your philosophical life. It's to transcend what's going on here for no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence. Those are the three areas of proper leisure.

37:41And that's how he would say, I know that you're going from pleasure to enjoyment. That's how I know based on what you're doing, even though you don't have to. I love this. I'll tell you several of the reasons why I love it. One is people from time to time will say, what do you do for fun? It's a very difficult question for me to answer because people might be- Because your work is fun, by the way. My work is so much fun. I know. Like I'm reading this book about sunlight and how the dermatology world is revising their understanding about sun and skin cancer.

38:12And I'm loving that. I love my- I mean, I could list it off. But I just say those things to just get people to think about what they enjoy doing. But the word that, you know, keeps coming up in my mind because I have a hard time with the fun thing because yeah, I do other things that are purely recreational is this word enrichment. I mean, it sounds kind of, you know, you know, like somebody is trying to be an academic when they say like, like, what do you do for enrichment? It doesn't, it's not, it's not as natural a question these days as like, what do you do for fun?

38:44It's like, what do you do for your own enrichment? It, it, it, it reshapes the question a little bit because the implication is it's not just about immediate pleasure, which fun kind of falls into the group of pleasure. It's about personal excellence. Yeah. Like you come out of it, you come out of it better. Right. Not just for having experience the, the, whatever it was, the activity was, but like there's something carried forward into other things that you do and in a good way. And so the word enrichment, you know, feels good. It's the reason why, even though I was in the sciences as an undergraduate, I, you know,

39:14decided to take a course in Greek mythology and like loved it, love, love, loved it. That was leisure. And it turns out it was neuroscience too, right? You know, years later, like we talk about the, you know, the myth of the Cyclops is all about anger and it has everything to do with the lack of depth perception that when you have one eye versus two eyes, it turns out like the Greeks, like really understood stereopsis and depth perception there. I couldn't help myself in any case. That's interesting. So like this notion of enrichment and I love that in the example you gave of going to the beach with a friend or with a spouse or someone else you care about, it's not about your own

39:47experience of it. You said because, not just cause you want to be there, but because you're actually there, that's a, that's a physical grounds for creating something else. So it's not really about the beach. It's about what you leave the beach with. That's right. And it's not just memories of the beach. You actually both change as a consequence of being there, maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways, but you, you've enriched the relationship. And so the beach becomes incidental. When people talk about why don't you go out drinking? What I want to know is, is it about the drinking or is it the people you're drinking with?

40:19That's what it comes down to. Now I, I strongly recommend that people reconsider that decision. I mean, I've heard you two drinks a week is the safe level. I've got it, Andrew. I've got it. Yeah, more than that's probably not a good idea for most people. I'm a zero, you know, I'm a, I'm a non-drinker because it's the right, it's the right cadence for my life. But you know, people who do use alcohol responsibly, I'm not, I wish I were a person who could use alcohol responsibly. I'm not. Right. So, so I don't, and I don't use it at all. But you know, when people say I'm going to go out drinking, I mean, I, I don't know if that's

40:50pleasure or enjoyment. I don't know if that's animal impulse or moral aspiration. I need more information. I need to know the reason for that. When people are talking about getting a beach house, I'm going to get a beach house. I don't know whether or not that's animal impulse toll towards social comparison, toward actually a scoreboard effect. So I can actually feel like I mean something. That's all animal impulse. All it is, that's just like your troglodyte brain actually saying, you're not, you're not good enough unless you have a beach house, like old Bill over there at the office.

41:23Right. But on the other hand, if you tell me it's like, I got to create bait so that my kids and grandkids are here a lot. Okay. Now I'm listening. Now I'm actually paying attention. And so a lot of things that people will say, I need a little bit more information such that I can categorize it in the right way, whether or not we're on the right side, we're on the animal impulse side of the moral aspiration side, whether we're on the pleasure side or the enjoyment side, whether it's actually going to bring happiness. I'm pausing because I, I have so many questions about this, but I want to make sure we touch

41:53on the other macronutrients because otherwise I, I'm going to, I'm going to encourage you to give a tutorial on how to really maximize every single choice in not just my life, the listeners. Enjoyment protocols. Yeah. We should have leisure protocols. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the, we all know that like one of the major pillars is social connection and relationships, but the idea that leisure is, is part of that as a substrate for enriching those is obvious once we hear it, but it reframes everything. If I'm exercising with somebody, you know, it turns out to be a way you deepen the relationship,

42:28which actually has been my experience with a lot of male friends, frankly. Yeah, totally. One of the best ways to get to know somebody in my experience is to have an intellectual conversation with them, like really deep dive with them or to go do something difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rob, our producer, my producer and close, close friend, he's sitting to my left right now. I mean, one of the first things we ever did was like go for a run where he kicked my butt. And by the way, a Vanderbilt graduate. Yeah. Very pleased to see that. Vanderbilt graduate. Very pleased to see that. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I don't recommend people box, but years ago I boxed and I'd spar on Wednesday nights. Don't recommend it. Yes. I wore headgear. Yes. I probably took some damage. I don't recommend it.

43:03Um, but you feel so close to people that you actually tried to hurt and they tried to hurt you, but with rules. Yeah. And it's an, it's an amazing, it's very primitive. Yeah. And yet you, there's a bond there that it's obviously nonverbal. It's a lifelong bond. Yeah. You see that person the next time. Yeah. And it's like, especially if they played fair and they hurt you. Yeah. You're like, yeah. Yeah. Like we know one another. Yeah. I've seen you, you know, there's a respect level. I'm not suggesting people do this, but. You added people in memory to a strong experience, thus rendering it

43:37enjoyable and being part of happiness. Yeah. And in point of fact, it wasn't strictly pleasurable, but that wasn't exactly the point. No. Yeah. No, the point was to suffer together in some way. There's a great book by a guy named Sam Sheridan called A Fighter's Heart. He's actually a Harvard grad. Yeah. I think he was an art major there. His dad was a Navy SEALs. Very interesting guy. And he has this joke that, you know, you know, that sparring is like a, it's like a one night stand or something. You've like done something very intimate with someone you barely know. Yeah. And so it has both a feeling of connection, but it's also the illusion of connection. Yeah.

44:11So he hits it better than I did. Yeah. Don't run out and start sparring with your friends. Well, the military, why it has, it creates such, you know, bonds for life. I mean, my son's, my son is a sniper, scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps. And these are friends for life. I mean, these are guys who would literally give their lives for each other, who looked out for each other in very, very dangerous situations. And they were suffering together. Now, the word compassion in Latin means to suffer together. That's what it means to be compassionate with somebody, to suffer alongside that person. That's what it comes from. And it's, you know, it has this, the passion of Christ and the Christian religion is all about the suffering of Christ.

44:46That's what it comes to. And to have compassion towards somebody to suffer with that person through that. And when you even induce that suffering, as dumb as it is beating each other up, you know, doing, getting into the octagon and, you know, that is what you're doing is that this is, this is the experience of compassion, which gets us to our, a primordial need to move beyond the animal impulse into the moral space that actually makes us quintessentially human, that makes us fundamentally different than all the other beings. It makes us the dominant species. But by the way, it also renders us the most miserable of all these species as well, which is so interesting.

45:21There's some dark and terrible examples of this. And sometimes people will call it trauma bonding, like the sort of Sid and Nancy story. Like they like kill them, kill each other at the Chelsea Hotel and like a drug induced rage or, but then like, if you watch that great movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, right? Like walk the line, like their relationship between Johnny Cash and, and uh, June Carter, right? Was, um, June Carter Cash, I think was eventually her, her married name was, it was a contentious one. It was like, it was the, it was the feistiness. It was the fighting. Like

45:54they were forged in this challenge. She was divorced at a time when divorce wasn't, um, was really frowned upon and, and she was religious. And so there was, there was just a lot of contention. And then, then there's this peace that they achieve in being together. But you always sense that it's like, that there, that there's this recognition that, that, that there's fight in them and they've been through it. And that's part of like, we tend to, we used to kind of hold up relationships like that. Now we like to see everything look perfectly smooth. Yeah. Right. Um, but this gets back to

46:26like the marriage vows and this gets back to relationships of all kinds. It's the suffering. The suffering you suffer with. I'm going to suffer with my wife until I take my dying breath. It's because we have a relationship. And she's going to suffer with you. My God, yes. The with is there, the both of you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. To be clear. Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, it's no walk in the park being married to me. That's for sure. I mean, it's a pain for sure, but she will. I mean, this is like the bond that we've actually taken for life and the, and, and central to the, the, and we have great enjoyment. It's fantastic. But that enjoyment

46:57has everything to do with the fact that it's pleasurable. It's interesting. It's, it's fascinating. It's funny and it's also hard. And it's also, there's a lot of suffering and there's a lot of, it's daggers drawn. I mean, my wife is Spanish. So you have to understand that there's a high level of complexity and suffering, you know, there. And words per, word density per moment. Yeah, exactly. Right. And we have a 50, 50 Spanish and English marriage, which means that we can, you know, we can suffer in, you know, two languages. It's what it comes down to. But the truth is, you know, that's what, that's what people need to expect. You know, that's what people need to

47:29expect that it's like, okay, let's suffer together, baby. Come on, honey, let's just, let's just bring it on. And that's a beautiful thing. That's really what it means. And people talk so much about peace and ease as the goal. Yeah. I'm not, I'm hearing some of that, but I'm hearing a bunch of other things too here. I get it. And, and particularly true that, that men, they want peace at home. They do want peace at home. And, and, and I see that by the way, women want peace at home too, but you're not going to get

48:00peace all the time. You don't want peace all the time. You want a full life, fully lived. You want to be, it's like the, to be fully alive. What does that mean? That means the whole range of your emotions. You're using all the parts of your limbic system. We're wonderfully made, Andrew. And it's just like, I want the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to give me this sense of suffering and grief when I'm feeling social exclusion or the sense of loss. You know, I want the insula to be highly active when I have this sense of disgust or whatever it happens to be, or the amygdala to be active with fear and

48:30anger, et cetera. I want that. I want my brain to work the way it's actually supposed to. I mean, I want to suffer and I'm gonna, if I'm actually being fully alive and, and if I'm taking the chances and I'm doing the things that I actually need to do, because that is ingrained in the full experience of what human happiness is properly understood. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 just launched their newest formulation called AG1 Pro. And right now you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription. AG1 takes the clinically backed AG1 formula,

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50:07So we have the second chapter in the book that maybe we write together. Although you're the real writer, I confess I've yet to decide I'm a writer. You're good at what you do, man. Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. One chapter will be on leisure. You've told us that how one spends their leisure time is a critical window into self. And the other would be how to suffer more

50:33in pursuit of moral aspiration, but also how to experience pleasure in pursuit of moral aspiration. For sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we've gotten through enjoyment.

The role of satisfaction

50:45Yeah. Let's, let's talk about satisfaction. Yeah. Because, because it sounds similar, but it sounds like deeper, more pervasive, more like an, I don't define a satisfaction. Yeah. So, I mean, again, and the definition, everything is in the definitions. And one of the problems with happiness is that everybody can, they define it in different ways and et cetera. So I try to stay out of the linguistic wars. It's like consciousness. Yeah. No neuroscientist really wants to talk about consciousness anymore because it's like, it's so circular. For sure. Yeah. Absolutely. It's being awareness and being aware of the fact that you're

51:19aware because you're aware or something. I, what? You know? Many billions of dollars and euros in particular. That's a joke aimed at one Swiss scientist in particular. You've read Michael Poland's new book. I haven't read the new one, but I think the world of him. He's fantastic. And the new book is actually the book to read for people who are not either, you know, philosophers or neuroscientists or, or even psychologists for that matter on a world awaits is what it's called. I really, I've, I've never met him, but I love the book. I think it's absolutely fantastic. And at the end of the book, you know, a lot more and you still don't understand what consciousness is.

51:51You don't understand what it is. It's, it's a lot of things. It's many things. It's sentience and it's feelings and it's awareness of others and it's awareness of yourself. And we don't know where it is in the brain. And oh my goodness. But the truth is that that's one of the problems in, in the field that I have too, which is the, the, the definition of terms and satisfaction is one of these things. Satisfaction is, I define it as many people define it, is the joy that you get from an accomplishment after struggle, that satisfaction. So the satisfaction that you got from your PhD

52:27was proportionate to the suffering that actually went into getting your PhD and mine too. Right. And they were like, oh man, I'm not doing that again, but it was so awesome. And you know, I think about, but it was so awesome. Yeah. Those, those are the key words. I know. And it's like, I talked to, you know, my kids, my kids in the military there. I mean, being a Marine is no, you're not screwing around. And, you know, I saw what my kids went through and for, you know, the infantry training battalion and the scout sniper indoctrination, or my daughter is, you know, and she's an officer. She actually had got her first salute from her

52:58brother. He's 6'5 and she's 4'11. It was awesome. You know, actually it's your older brother has to salute you. It's so cool. Yeah, it's great. But you know, it's, it's, people talk when I say, you know, tell me the story of your success. I mean, the people will make jokes about it. You remember David Koch, one of the Koch brothers, you know, of, of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas. And he was a very, very funny guy. And he used to say, people say, how did you get so rich? And I say, well, it started when I was 12 years old and I found an apple and I was shining it up and I had paid a nickel for it. And somebody offered me a dime and I said, well, it's a hundred percent profit margin.

53:32So I went back and bought two apples and I doubled my money. And I started doing this every day and every week, doubling my money and doubling my money. And you can do the math week after week and year after year. And finally my father died, left me a hundred million dollars. That's good. And the reason that that's funny is because that flicks the parahippocampal gyrus and it makes you feel like that surprise, like in every joke, right? But the reason it's funny is because real satisfaction from your accomplishments comes from the struggle, not from the accolades. That's what it really comes to because you earned it and human beings are made to earn their success. This is the

54:07reason that they'll convince themselves that when somebody's giving them absolute, utter largesse, that they actually earned it in some way. If you want to get, to have your career destroyed as a politician, go to a bunch of senior citizens and tell them you're getting a lot back, more back from social security than you ever paid in. Your career is over because you basically just, you know, flicked their parahippocampal gyrus in a very unpleasant way. You kicked it, right? So cool. And I don't like it. And, and, and so, so the truth of the matter is that, that

54:39he was saying that because the, the answer that people are expecting is I suffered and I had three bankruptcies and, you know, I almost lost my marriage and I had to raid my kid's college fund. And I was afraid, you know, like Bernie Marcus talks about the Home Depot and they were down there at the last dollar. And it was, and it was a, it was grim is how he talked about it. And, and so that's really, really important. And that's one of the reasons that satisfaction, which is so important, you know, we got to make progress. Why arrival leads to frustration, but, but progress

55:12toward goals is what, is how we're wired. Purpose in life comes from goals and direction and progress toward purpose and goals. That's what purpose for our purpose in life actually comes from. And, and so the result of it is that we need to, to have this sense that we're, we're sacrificing for something, that we're doing something that, that's bigger than who we are and we're willing to give something up. That's really one of the great secrets. It's one of the reasons also that when people hit their goals, they get so depressed is because there's no more progress. You know,

55:43it's why Olympic athletes are so likely to fall into a clinical depression after they win their, their, you know, their gold medal. And my people are so, when they win a billion dollars, they're like, I guess I need another billion. I guess I need, you know, because I don't, I'm not feeling it, man, because we're, we're actually made for this progress, but the progress entails a struggle. And we, we judge your students, my students, there's no satisfaction that comes if they cheat on an exam. But if they work hard and get an A, that's very, very satisfying. And you teach your kids this, don't eat before dinner. It's not because of nutrition. It's because you want

56:16their synaptically plastic little brains to register the fact that, that if they come to dinner hungry, dinner's better. Definitely. And you're used to, you tell junior, you know, don't eat before dinner because it's unhealthy. But if you were being honest, you'd say, I want you to suffer. That's why you can't have a snack. A few years ago, I was out a lot on the internet saying, you know, dopamine that comes without effort before it is, is very pernicious. And I stand behind that. But some people like took the interpretation too far. It impart an attempt

56:47to malign me, which is fine. Like, you know, I'm out there, you know, yeah, sure. That comes with the territory, but it's sort of implied. I didn't have the language for it, but now I do, thanks to you. It's sort of implied that I don't believe in leisure. Right. I don't want to return us to the first macronutrient in a way that distracts us, but I think this is appropriate now. So of course, leisure is great, but I would say leisure is way better when you've been working hard. And, and so if you've been working hard towards something that has its own intrinsic reward, you, the work itself can become intrinsically rewarding or not. You know,

57:20a lot of things I did in graduate school that I absolutely loved the process. And there are some of them that like, the only word for it is it sucked. Right. It just, it sucked. All nighters, like two days recording experiments and like, just like breathing all that isofluorine in the room. And it was just, it was like, it sucked, but it, and it was awesome. But there are forms of leisure, like on those Fridays, when we finished those experiments, I would drive out to this, this, this orchard outside of Davis, where I did graduate school to winters. And I would just,

57:52this would be four phones. I would just listen to music in my car. And I just felt like, I felt like I'd been transported in time. That's right. And I felt connected to all the people who had worked a hard week and then were just listening to music in their car. And then eventually my girlfriend and I would drive out there. Now I could share that experience with her. And she was a scientist and working really, really hard too. Arguably even harder than I was, because the experiment she was doing took, took, took yet another level of, of persistence that really remarkable. So it's not

58:23that I'm saying that effort has to be there before dopamine is like, means you're a one track, like self-optimization junkie. Right. It's just an important pie slice in, in being like a good human being in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. So I like, so I kind of bristle at the idea that a concept like that could be construed as, as, um, anti-pleasure. But in a sense, it's really like, there's something about the human mind where we want, we hear one piece of this. We hear about

58:54one pie slice and we say, oh, so that means like leisure doesn't exist for this person. No, no. But what I love about your work and what you're telling us today is that it's really about the complete pie chart. It's not about any one moment. With our, with our brains, working with our biology, we are built to earn our rewards. We are built to earn our success. We have no concept of what anything is worth if we don't earn our success. And, and, you know, the, the, the reason that we want to do that, and we think that, you know, that a Snickers bar gives you pleasure. No, no, no, no, no. It's actually

59:26the neurochemicals that are giving you pleasure that are actually making you feel this pleasure. It just happens to the circuitously through the way that the brain works. Getting your PhD didn't give you pleasure per se. There was nothing about the piece of paper. It was actually the knowledge that you had done this thing. And so one of the greatest secrets to excellence and success in people's lives is the sense of earning it. And that means making peace with suffering, making peace with, with pain, making peace with struggle. It's what it comes down to. Now, that doesn't mean, and, and one of the biggest mistakes that strivers often make is that it's all

59:59struggle. I mean, you remember this, that the, that the not discredited, but complicated, uh, Walter Mischel marshmallow experiments at your fine institution and, and, and what they, you know, the followup, you know, the kids who ate the marshmallow within five minutes, they were, they had no impulse control and they went on to actually get worse grades and worse jobs, et cetera. And the 20% of the kids in the marshmallow experiment who were able to not eat the marshmallow and they got the second marshmallow, they did much better in life. And so the whole point was the deferral of gratification is a big signal of how well you're actually going to do. One of

1:00:32the biggest problems that strivers have, and I'm speaking to all the strivers watching us right now, is that they don't know what their marshmallow even is. And so they're just going to wait their whole lives. And that's not what you've been saying. That's not what you're talking about. To never, never, never, never drive out into the, out to winners, to never actually listen to the music, to never actually wait for the second marshmallow and enjoy that second marshmallow. That's a mistake too. That's actually a huge mistake. But the whole point is we're trying to find the golden mean between earning it and not earning it, that doing enough and struggling enough,

1:01:07and then actually taking the reward and then starting again. This actually feeds into a lot of the experiences that people have. A big part of my work is how to age well, about how to get happier as you age. Yeah, do tell. Yeah. I mean, it's super important. And part of the reason is because, man, I'm no spring chicken. And this is me search, right? For all of us, we're always doing me search instead of research. And so I want to know, how can I be happier at 60 than 50? And now I want to know how I can be happy years down the road at 70 instead of 60. I want to know how to retire. And so when I'm giving people

1:01:39advice, I'm doing public education about these things, it's because I've been trying to answer these questions for myself. Retirement is a classic case of screwing up the satisfaction part of happiness. It's like, I'm going to work and work and work and work. I'm going to be a miserable SOB. And then at 65, I'm going to stop completely and just goof around. That's the recipe for misery all the way through because it was no fun. It was all suffering without reward. And then it's all reward without suffering. That's neurophysiologically unsound, but it's also philosophically unsound. It doesn't actually make sense.

1:02:13So I help people retire constantly, but I also try to help them have the best life as they do to move through the course of their careers, do what they're actually naturally good at. That is both hard and rewarding, which changes over the course of your career. There's a lot of research on that, but it all gets into how can I maintain satisfaction? The mystery comes when we actually do get the thing that we actually want. And then we find that it leaves us cold. That seems like a real tyranny. Like mother nature had a trick up her sleeve, which kind of, she did. I mean, you actually

1:02:45people off, if I can get that watch, that car, that marriage, then I'll be happy forever. I mean, guys will say to women, you know, if you marry me, you'll make me happy forever. That's not right. You know, it doesn't matter what she says when you propose. It doesn't matter what she says on her wedding day. It's what you say to each other over the course of your entire marriage that actually will give you net, net the best possible life. That's why Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. He should have saying, I can't keep no satisfaction. And that that's a whole different, as we say in

1:03:19Seattle, a whole nother problem, mystery. Is that a Seattleism? I guess so. I don't know. It's like, there's so many articles out there and websites and blogs that are like, the six things that people say on their deathbed. Nobody says, I wish I worked more. I don't know. My dad, he's in his early eighties and he's still rocking and he loves his work. Right. And he loves his wife and he loves his kids and he loves his coffee and he loves his meditation and he loves life. He's a happy guy. And he would say like work has been, he's giving, he's still working, consuming ideas,

1:03:53giving lectures. He, I think he would say he was really glad he worked as much as he did, not more than that. But these lists to me are not useful, whether it's about work or whether it's about anything, because the lists to me are really about the question. When I look back on my life, I want to be able to say blank. Okay. I feel like that analysis peeled back to like, when I finished my college degree, I want to be able to say, all right, that can inform some choices

1:04:24going forward, make good friends, got enriched myself intellectually, et cetera, et cetera, didn't, you know, got healthier as opposed to less healthy. You could do that, but it's not, I feel like it's the wrong question. Yeah. Like it's the wrong thing. When I look back on my life, I went like, how about now and the decisions you can make today, this week, this month, this year, because that's how you end up in a place where, and let's face it, most likely those last moments, they could be very peaceful and beautiful, but you don't know. Right. So we imagine this kind of like before the curtains close moment that

1:04:55some people get, but I don't think most people get that. I've watched people die. It's not, it's usually not like that. It's, I feel like we tend to integrate our levels of satisfaction, pleasure, lack, the pain, et cetera, on a much shorter timescale. So is there a better set of questions and answers that we can come up with for living in the now so that we are steering right through the more of the time that we have between now and whenever it is that that curtain closes? Yeah, for sure. There's a lot actually on this. And it touches on a couple of different things.

1:05:28Now, to begin with, this really gets into the third macronutrient, which is meaning.

Meaning and worldly idols

1:05:32And what, what are we doing to understand the meaning of our lives? Ultimately, that knowledge is the most important macronutrient, the most philosophical, the most, I mean, it gets closest to the, you know, the, the problem, the hard problem of consciousness to use Chalmers, his, his, his formulation on this, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a lot that goes into it. To begin with, it's, you know, it's like, I, these are, David Brooks talks about no, no relation friend, but no relation. He talks about resume versus eulogy virtues. And, you know, you, you, it's true. You know,

1:06:02it's probably better if you don't imagine people at your funeral saying, he had 5 million miles on delta. I mean, it's probably not. That's some friends who are like really into their points on their cards. I know. It's a video game. It's an adult ish. Yeah. They're trying to count their scoreboard. Yeah. And part of the reason is because that's, that's a sense of satisfaction. You know, it's, it's, they're trying to get that. They, they want to make progress, progress toward a goal, goals and direction, making progress. We're progress oriented animals, which is why the scoreboard is so important. The trouble is that when, once you run

1:06:32up the scoreboard after a certain point, I mean, you die and stay dead and you realize that nobody actually cares. And so if all anybody talks about is this, is this score, this, this trivial scoreboard, which is frequent flyer miles or money in a bank account, right. Or, or any of these other worldly things, it's a problem. And that really leads to the first criterion for what actually is going to lead to regret and what isn't. And that, that's a deep philosophical thing that has, has a lot of roots in, in, in classical philosophy, but, but also a lot of behavioral science behind it as well.

1:07:07So Aristotle, the, these are the St. Thomas Aquinas in, in the 13th century, he, he asserted that we want to be happy. Okay. All right. Good. Fair. This is pretty good. Now his definition of happiness was beatitudo, which is the, to the luminescence of presence of God, right. To the relationship with God. Other people define it in different ways who are not traditionally religious, but I think everybody would agree. Yeah. We want to be happy. He said that to do that, I mean,

1:07:37you, you have a tendency to, to, to follow your animal impulses. So far, so good. Gets back to an early part of the conversation. And he said, your animal impulses tell you one fundamental lie. And that fundamental lie is that the, the following four things, when they beguile you and you get them, that you'll be actually happy and you'll be finally satisfied. You'll finally be there. Those four things are money, resources, power, which is influence of other people, pleasure,

1:08:07which also is comfort or security, right. Or honor, which means, you know, for you and me as academics, it's like, Hey, that's Andrew Huberman. He wrote that paper in the journal of, you know, seven dimensional, you know, disappearing manifolds or, you know, some academic journal nobody's ever heard of, but still academic procedure, admiration, whatever it happens to be. Those are beguiling idols that if you pursue those things as an end per se, there's nothing evil about them. They can be used for great good, but if you use them as an end per se, that's when you'll wind

1:08:40up in trouble. That's the problem that we actually get. So they say, nobody says, I wish I'd worked more. What they should say is nobody says, I wish I'd gotten a little bit more famous. I wish I had had, you know, a million more dollars in my 401k that I have no idea what's going to actually happen to it. That's really what they're saying. And so back up from that and to, for us to be happier, we need to assess whether or not we are serving these worldly idols. And that's incredibly good behavioral science because that is an almost perfect taxonomy of the things that we, that we

1:09:14actually chase. I have a game I play with my students at HBS. They don't know what their idol is. They don't know what it is. And again, I got nothing against money. I think money can be, does wonderful things, jobs, opportunity, growth, taxes, philanthropy. There's nothing wrong with power, influence other people wielded in a virtuous way. Pleasure. I mean, pleasure leads to babies. So great. Fame, you can refract your fame. I mean, there are lots and lots of people, I promise you, Andrew, there are lots of people pursuing their PhDs right now because of your fame,

1:09:46which is a beautiful and a good thing for humanity. The problem is it'll hurt you if one of these things is your primary objective, is your primary goal, and you endow it with mythical power. So I play a game with them. What's my idol? They don't know. They don't know what their idol is. You want to play? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a little scared, but let's do it. Let's do it. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories,

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1:10:52without consuming excess calories. I love all the David Bronze Bar flavors, including cookie dough, caramel chocolate, double chocolate, peanut butter chocolate. They all actually taste like candy bars. Again, they're amazing. But again, they have no sugar, and they have 20 grams of protein with just 150 calories. If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Right now, David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. The way to know what your idol is, and again, what Aquinas suggests, and what modern social science

1:11:24absolutely verifies, is that, again, nothing wrong with these things. But if you pursue this, this winds up being the source of your later bitterness and regret. The reason is because when you pursue these things, you're doing it at cost. And the cost is almost always love. Love is the secret of happiness. To love and be loved is what we want. And when you pursue something that's not real, that's not alive, then you're sacrificing opportunities to love and be loved, if you pursue it as a goal, per se. But when you know what your idol is, you'll still make mistakes. You're still

1:11:55going to mess up. You're still going to be miserable a lot. But you will sometimes avoid the error, which is incredibly powerful. So the way to play this game is to eliminate, because you always do elimination when you're trying to do these things. It's much more robust. It's actually better. Eliminate the idol that you don't have, one by one by one. It's going to get harder as we go along. It's going to start off really, really easy. I can even make predictions about you, about what you would eliminate. But eliminate them until you've got the last one. And that's the one that's most

1:12:26likely to beguile you and lead you down the wrong road. So money, resources, power, pleasure, fame, or adoration of other people. You're going to get rid of one. And this doesn't mean you don't have it. It just means you're the population average. Get rid of one of those. Yeah. If you got rid of money, for example, you say, I don't care about it. That just means you're the most average American economically, which by world standards is unbelievable. Historical standards is fabulously wealthy. So you said it was money? Uh-huh. Power. Power.

1:12:57Pleasure. And pleasure can also be comfort or security, right? Or and honor, which is prestige or fame or adoration or whatever it happens to be, or respect. And power can be benevolent too, right? Totally. These all can be great because the most virtuous, happy people have these things. Yeah. They have a lot of these things. Yeah. I don't care about, I don't care much about the notion of like honor and accolades. In fact, just as a very brief anecdote, it was right about, I'd been tenured for maybe three, four years. Yeah.

1:13:28And I was struggling financially as a professor, despite what people might think about Stanford. And I was happy to, you know. I was one of those two. And so I had a conversation with my then chair, or was it vice chair? And he said, well, you know, at some point, you know, you'll be chair. And then of the department, because it's rotating chair. I'm still in this department, by the way. We'll see if I still am at the end of this conversation. What the heck? And he said, you know, it comes with a pay increase. And I was like, really? And I thought about, I'd seen what happened to chairs of departments couldn't focus as much on science. It's a totally, it's a punishment disguised

1:14:00as an honor. Yeah. It's a punishment to any real scientist, but they may, but they cloak it and they say, no, this is service to the department. Yeah. And that's true. Right. And a good chair is valuable. Some people are exceptional at it. I have a close friend of mine from childhood. He's a chair, but the chair needs certain attributes that are important. And I, and so the response out of my mouth was, how do I make sure I never become chair? Well, so I think now it's very unlikely I'll be chair of the department. I'm not around enough, but like, how do I make

1:14:32absolutely sure that I'm like, not like, like do anything else, anything to not be chair by virtue of the fact that my dad's a scientist and I grew up seeing a lot of scientists and hearing about a lot of luminaries of science. I heard, I heard this story about Richard Feynman, the great Richard Feynman, where I apparently, I don't know if this is true or not, but he was elected into the National Academy of Sciences. Yeah. And I think at the inaugural dinner, he said like to someone like, well, what happens now? And they go, oh, you elect other people in. And he goes, wait, so this is like a club where like we pin medals on each other. And he goes, I quit. If it's not true, it's awesome.

1:15:04If it's true, it's awesome. Yeah, it's funny. And I knew that true or not, what the story illustrates is that like those honors mean nothing. In fact, the most important thing about a Nobel prize, I believe, is that it allows the winner in addition to the value of the discovery, but it allows the winner to be a great fundraiser for other people at the university. That's it. Yeah. And so, and the discovery, obviously. But anyway, so honor doesn't really, like I'm not interested in medals or things.

1:15:34I got a PhD because I needed one to get to do a pen stock. But you go super famous as a public intellectual. Is that important? Does that motivate you? Because that's, you know, that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it? I will go on record saying that fame increases your opportunities exponentially and limits your freedoms exponentially. No, it's not important to me. It's a byproduct of the pursuit of other things. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Strongly introverted, despite how much I talk. Got it. No, no, I get it.

1:16:04I need a lot of time. No, I get it. I need a lot. You should see me when I'm alone. I talk even more. No, I'm kidding. You're probably exhausted after a podcast. Yeah. I love my team and, but I interact with very few people on purpose. No, I am very, I need time to think and I love people, but I'm very, very introverted. I got it. Yeah. I got it. Okay. Go. So I believe you. And so you'd go to the normal, the most normal. You'd be as famous as your mailman. Oh, that'd be awesome. Okay. I have the best, like the people that clean up my neighborhood.

1:16:35I live in a pretty grungy neighborhood. My place, I do my best to keep really nice. These people are like my heroes. I'm always bringing them a Tina and like, and they're out there, like they're literally scraping up shit from animals, people. Like I love these people. And they're so like the ones I know, I'm so happy. They're so happy. And I'm like, man, maybe someday I just like throw on one of those orange vests and just like disappear into like, you know, I won't name a town, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't name the town or pretty soon they'll find you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Good, good, good. Now we got rid of the easy

1:17:08one in a way. Yeah. Money, power, pleasure. What's next? That means it's going to be a little harder because all these things are, you know, have their rewards. Yeah. So which one do you get rid of next? Pleasure. Pleasure. And then, because you're pretty austere. I mean, you're pretty, you're, I mean, look, your book's called Protocols. Yeah. Yeah. I inherited my, my mom's, um, people, I was, I, this kind of like, um, observer comes on where like people are going to think I'm like scripting this. Like my mom has a save the world piece of

1:17:39her. That's very real and very alive in me. But the thing we also share, like a desire to, to save change, positive change. But the thing that comes alive in me that I definitely got from her, it's like, if an emotion like gets to me, if it comes up, it's big. Like, I like the people I love, I love so big that sometimes I think the top of my head is going to explode. Like, or that I think like my heart's going to explode and, and it's, and it's not comfortable. Yeah. It's, uh, um, it's, uh, I've gotten better at tolerating

1:18:09that. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me emotional. Cause I do think that like grief is proportional to love. And, but so I don't walk out of my podcast studio where I work with my best friends, not all of them, but all of them are my best friends. It's not, but I have best friends elsewhere too, but I walk out and I don't think, Oh God, like one of them might die on the road tonight. I just think that I'm the luckiest human being on the planet to work with these people doing it. So, but it fills me so much sometimes it's a lot. It's a lot to, to tolerate. So pleasure is not something that I like, I don't need more intense experiences.

1:18:42Right. I'm having intense experiences from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. And you, and you're, and you're not a drinker. You're not a substance user. I'm not a drinker. I've never been a drug guy. Yeah. So let me say something nice about your mom. Okay. So the fact that you kicked out honor right from the very beginning, you know what honor addicts all have in common? They think that love is earned. That's what they all have in common. They usually have this common childhood where they're really, really good at something. I know you were a good student and you were a good skateboarder and you were good at stuff. Wait, wait, to be fair, before the internet comes for me, I was not

1:19:13a very good skateboarder, which drove me toward academics because I kept getting hurt. I loved the sport and I was a, I was a good student, but I was not, I've always had to work hard. Yeah. It's very easy for, for, for a lot of young people, particularly the young people of, of those who are of intellectuals and, and excellent people to learn from their parents that they get attention and affection when they do something unusual. And the result is that their little brains register the idea that love is earned and love isn't earned. Love is a free gift, freely given. Love is a grace. And if you go through life, particularly in the most plastic part of your, of your, you know, your psychological formation, thinking

1:19:49that love is earned, you'll surround yourself with people who will make you make you earn their love. You'll marry somebody who, who will make you earn her love and friends who kiss up to you and say, you got to earn my love. And the result is you'll go from person to person to person. You'll be a real honor addict. And, and what, what people have in common is that they have a big public life, which happened to you, that you'll crave the adoration of strangers. You'll actually crave it because that's the addiction is trying to earn the love even of strangers. And that's a big problem. So who actually made you whole? Probably your mom, probably your parents, because

1:20:26they loved you unconditionally and they probably still do. That's good parenting. Yeah. That's, yeah, they definitely did. And they, and they, uh, love, love us unconditionally and they definitely do. And, um, yeah, I, I get a zero, zero dopamine hit from people saying, oh, you're so-and-so can I get, get a picture? It doesn't bother me. Right. What does fill me is when I get an email that somebody is like, I'm going to go study neuroscience or I did this thing and it really, you know, I learned from so-and-so on your podcast and, and it's, and it's enriched my life. That feels really good. Yeah. Cause then I feel like, okay, great. Like I, at least I know

1:20:59I'm not wasting my time. Yeah. You know, money and money and power and money just means resources. It's the ability to do stuff. It doesn't mean that it makes you more whole as a person, but it, and, and often this can, the answer can come from a sense of identity. So often a money idol will come from people who grew up rich because that's what it means to be a normal person. They, or they grew up poor because they know how bad it is when you don't have it. So there's all kinds of circumstances that can provoke this. And, and, and power is just like, I, I want to be in charge. I really, really want to be in charge, which is not, it's not, it's not a vice. It's not a, you know,

1:21:35but, but it's really what drives you. So which one do you get rid of next? Money. Money, which is you, you become the most, you become economically just like your postman. Yeah. I, I'd be fine. Who probably has it. I'm saying that now from a position of financial security. So it like, no, no. Look, they're in the comments. Somebody's going to say, you know, easy to say. Huberman and Brooks are, yeah. Like completely full of it because they're, you know, right. I got it. But I believe you. Yeah. But to those people, you have been in both situations. Definitely. So my chairman in San Diego, before I moved my lab to Stanford, he had the,

1:22:05I went to him for a salary increase. So in that department, you could set your own salary as long as it wasn't higher than his. And I had a lot of grants. Get him a raise. What do you want to earn? What do you want to earn? And I told him and he said, no, there was no parody in that department. In our, in my department at Stanford, there is. You, you, you can't make more than someone more senior than you. I said, parody is important in certain departments, not in others. And I had a lot of grants. I'd like a raise of $20,000 this year, which on the, that was a significant fraction of what I was making. And, um, and he said, just remember, he like did the whole like pivot and

1:22:40look thing like that, like you're not allowed to do anymore. Like, like male chairman pivots towards you, like, like sitting with his knees open. And he like, you did the, like, you can never get away with this. And he said, just remember, you're going to make a lot less money than you deserve. He was talking about then. And he's like, and then in the later part of your career, he was talking about himself, you're going to make a lot more money than you deserve. Because you're going to have tenure. He's actually a really good guy. And he was absolutely right. There's Bill Mobley. He's still alive. And, and, um, he's actually a meditator. He's friends with the Dalai Lama. So hi, Bill. He was absolutely right. I didn't know how that was going to happen

1:23:11or anything. I didn't know what was going to happen, but it turned out that that's true. So if I were to average my income back across two and a half decades of, yeah, I, I was perfectly happy to live in a lab and save up a little bit of money to be able to go snowboarding once a month in graduate school. Like why pay rent? They have showers in the building. They're called monkey cage washers, you know, like the, like the, you can't turn the heat on, you know, it's like they have a bathroom with a sink. Like if people thought I was crazy. Right. But then, then I didn't have to commute, you know, now granted I wasn't married with kids

1:23:42or anything. So I've lived both ways. I wouldn't say I've ever been poor. I won't, I want to be honest. It was austere. Money's not like, it's great. It's not that fun. I mean, it's not that much. Can you imagine like having a boat? No, that'd be a pain in the ass. Save me from the boat. No, no, no. I had to go on a long boat thing with my grandfather. It was like, it was torturous. I want to go out on the boat for a day. I like seeing boats on the ocean. I like scuba diving. I'm not, no, I, it would be nice when we're talking extremes here, but no money is not a big motivator for, it's nice to have, but I'll tell you, I'm sort of answering what I think will be

1:24:16the next question. The best thing about having money is that I can use it to do things for other people. And that falls to me under this thing that you're calling power, but benevolent power. But also gives you freedom and freedom is nice. Freedom is nice. And being able to make, I'm not just making this up to make life easier by way of money or by way of connections. Like we were talking earlier about, I know a lot of people who either have or know people with serious medical issues and I can connect them to the, like to the one of three people that might actually be able

1:24:49to help them when no one else can. Like I've got story after story about it. I don't take credit. I just happen to know the best people in these little sub domains and it doesn't always work out that way. But a lot of times they're like, wow. And so I'm not the physician. I'm just the concierge. But the fact that I have this job allows me to do that. And the degree allows me to do that. Money doesn't allow me to do that. It's just my network is insane. And the ability to use it for, to help other people. Like, and part of that is having people like you on this podcast,

1:25:23right? Like Rob and I sometimes talk, like, I was like, I can't believe it. Like we had like Faith A. Lee on here. It's a colleague of mine at Stanford. You can't get an hour with her at Stanford, but she came here and talked for three hours about AI. Like, and I can share that with the world. That, or share what you're teaching to the world. That we're not just having this conversation on a walk and we can share it with the world. That to me is like power. Now, power, which is the ability to, to be in charge, to be the maestro, to which is to say,

1:25:54I'm, I'm going to be in charge. I'm not going to be subject to the authority of another person. Oh, that is tricky. Which is, which it is tricky to be sure. Now you're not a vice filled person. I mean, you're a person who's actually, you're, you don't have big problems in these, in this regard. But what Aquinas suggested is that when you've eliminated the others, that what you've found is something that might make you stumble and that might distract you from the things that really matter. The, the, the ways that you can actually have love in your life. And what the funny thing about it is that if I said, okay, just tell me your idol from the very beginning, you might not

1:26:27have eliminated it to that particular point. Yeah. Because I think that it's really an interesting exercise. Obviously I'm doing this with you now, but I hope people are doing this in parallel because that's what it's all about. It's not about me and the examples. Yeah. No, it's, it's where we want people to know their idols. Definitely. Is that the words carry their loaded words, money, power, honor sounds actually cool until you really dissect it. And then you realize it's just as, you know, nuanced as the others. That's the ancient, that's how Aquinas would have understood honoris, right? Which is not

1:26:59virtuous inherently. Right. So the words are, are, can be a little misleading. I will say where I've tended to stumble on the backdrop of all this before people, you know, it's not about avoiding the comments. In fact, please comment. Yeah, totally. And we love them all. And like and suggest, like and share. I'm just kidding. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. Is, you know, but a big part of it also is, you know, that of course I'm susceptible to like the lure of pleasure, the lure of, I mean, like I'm human, right? We're all wired for it, right? The place where I've stumbled consistently is when over-resourced in a particular

1:27:36place, I, I don't always think about what the full arc of requirement is when trying to, I believe in a benevolent way, share resources. Right. So it's much easier to, to like connect somebody to somebody. And then if it's not going well to be like, well, that's their problem now, as opposed to really continuing to, to like make, make sure that happens. Right. So sometimes the, the big learning for me has been whenever over-resourced in any area,

1:28:07whether it's money, energy, generosity, whatever, that I need to be careful because the misperception is that because there's more than enough of it for me, I can just share whatever's left, right. But there's a hidden cost and it's the cost of making sure that all of that goes smoothly. That's, and that's a cost that's hard to quantify. Yeah. And the most painful thing in my life nowadays is actually pulling back to places where I, I live, my team knows this. It's like if I meet someone on the street and they are like, they would tell me something

1:28:40and then they want to tell me about like, they have a question because they have an uncle who has a stroke and like, I know a really great person for certain kinds of stroke. I'll take their, I'll give them my phone number. Yeah. I've given up, you know, like I'll do this whole thing. But then later it's very hard to find the time to make sure that if they're not getting feedback that I can do the call where I connect the two. And so there's this, the hardest part for me is I can't do it. And I got this from my mom. She sees a homeless person on the street. And when we were kids, we discovered she was putting homeless people up in hotels. Like, and we'd have people living in our

1:29:15garage and like, she can't help herself. Now she's better about it. But it comes from a good place. She wants to fix stuff. She wants to fix stuff. People's suffering is very, very hard. And by the way, our vices are our virtues. When I'm weak, then I'm strong, said St. Paul the Apostle. But also when I'm strong, then I'm weak. Our strengths and weaknesses are opposite sides of the same coin. The weakness that you have, the idol that you have is also the opposite side of the greatest virtue that you possess. So that's one of the reasons that we shouldn't beat ourselves up

1:29:47about this. But we need to know what it actually is because that's what will actually lead you stray a lot of the time. Now it's, it's completely different for me. I would kick out power first, control first. The second thing I'd get rid of is pleasure. I'm a protocols guy too. I'm very austere, right? I'm every day in the gym and you know, I know I eat a very strict diet and okay. The third thing I would get rid of is money, resources. It's not, I mean, and again, like let's watch the comments light up. I got it. But what does that leave? That leaves honor. And the truth is I want

1:30:22people to love me. I want people to love me. I want this. It's so, look, dude, I'm 62 years old and I still want that. It feels good. What do you get that? It's not even feeling good. It's like, I'm not a human being. I'm a human doing. I'm trying to earn everybody's love. It's so dumb. And I recognize it now that's power right. There is power because I know when I'm doing it and, and, and I'm held accountable for it because my wife does not have this, absolutely have this.

1:30:55And she'll say, you're doing that stupid thing again. You know, why would you marginalize the people that you actually love for the adoration of strangers for Pete's sake? Why would you go do that thing that, that, you know, people really want you to do? You want it because you want people to appreciate you is what it comes down to. And I say, you're right is the whole point. And the whole point is also that this is what I do for a living. This is what I study and I'm weak and I'm frail in this particular right. And when I resist that idol, when I fight against that idol, then I choose the better path and I choose the space of moral aspiration. And that space of moral aspiration is

1:31:27to love and be loved. That's what the space of moral aspiration, that's where it actually takes me to love and be loved, not by the strangers and not the prestige of the crowd, not the, the, the, the honor that comes from rising in the hierarchy. We're a tropical kin based species, hierarchically arranged. This, the animal impulse comes from rising in our band of 30 to 50 hundred gatherers at, you know, 250,000 years ago. I mean, this is all biologically wired, but when I understand that, then I can actually do what the, what the, the, the, the, you know, that Dante in, in the

1:32:02Inferno, um, he, he talks, it's arranged around the seven deadly sins, but he also talks about the seven, um, the heavenly virtues, you know, and so, so pride, humility, right? Envy, admiration is what it comes to, you know, this, that the heavenly virtue of this is, is the, of, of the four are what you really want, what you truly deeply want in your soul. To love and be loved means that you're spending your time on your faith, the love of the divine, your family, the people that are biologically or

1:32:39by adoption related to you, your friends, the people that you actually choose and serving the whole world through the way that you earn your daily bread, which is to earn your success through your work, faith, family, friends, and work. And then only when you know that, that idol, you can pivot to the thing that, that your soul actually wants, the thing that you're actually hunger for. And that's where real satisfaction comes in. That's where you gain the satisfaction that you always wanted. Can I ask you a question about the adoration piece and applause and that kind of thing? So embarrassed. No, well, I'm embarrassed. You know, I mean, it's like that it is, it,

1:33:13it's a vulnerable place to like reveal because the word is, is, is, are tough, like power, like, you know, like, you know, like Huberman admits that he is driven by, no, it's like, I want to, power, I want to help people. No, you want to, you want to have control over what you can control. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. And, but so when, let's say you, you give a lecture to, to a group that you respect them as an audience, whoever happens with them, like you respect your audience, which is so important, you know, like, and. They love their audience. And, and they, yeah. And, and, and, and you, you get the feedback that you really like,

1:33:47you've knocked it out of the park. Yeah. You knocked it out of the park. When you go back to your room at night, are you the sort of person that thinks about that and how great it feels? Or are you thinking about this one thing that you said that you wish you had done differently? Are you the, like the one, the one thing that I wish I hadn't said kind of person, or are you the, or are you like basking in it? No, I'm not basking in it. I mean, I'm actually self-critical. I'm thinking about what it could be differently because it wears off and it's evanescent. It's like a summer rain, you know, the adoration of strangers feels good in

1:34:18the moment. I mean, in, in neurochemically, it, it wears off very quickly, of course, because what you're getting is, you know, when, when you look at people who are deeply addicted to success, it looks very much in, in, in, under brain scans to people who are actually getting highly glycemic carbohydrate treats, or even a hit of cocaine, you know, you win in some little game and, and, and, you know, and we're obviously, we were talking about dopamine here is you actually see it's the same thing, but that doesn't last. That's not supposed to last. That's supposed to wear away. And the first thing that somebody wants, who's an addict is another hit, whether it's a line of

1:34:52cocaine or another round of applause. So by the time I'm back in the hotel, I'm like, yeah, I can do that different. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Actually what it comes down to, but by the way, we got to know what the solution is to this. And the solution to this is not to say, okay, I'm a horrible human being, but it's actually to pivot to choosing the path of the man that I want to be. You know, I, I, I don't give into the animal impulse to stay under the covers past 430. The man that I want to be is down in the gym by 445. 445 AM. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

1:35:27I mean, the, the man that I want to be, um, when I'm either thinking about something I did wrong and I'm beating myself up or, you know, wishing there was another round of applause as somebody who's deep in prayer. That's the man that I want to be because I do know that, that my metaphysical fitness depends on this. And that's a choice that I can actually make. I have a question about, um, who we, I don't want to say idolize, but among humans, can you name people alive or dead that,

1:36:02um, sort of embody or collectively sort of embody who you aspire to be like, or do you not put humans in that category? Because one thing that I realized in this discussion around power, and I'm not trying to soften anything around that is I've always had this list of people who's got careers and art and music and stuff I really admire. And in looking over that list, I try and like sometimes see like the through lines. Right. And I can tell you that almost all of them brought together unique things based on their past, their circumstances, et cetera, to, to like change the game. Yeah. Like to me,

1:36:37that's kind of the ultimate. Yeah. I know. It's like. In our business. Yeah. People think differently. The paradigm change. Yeah. It's like to change the game. Yeah. Like, um, and it, for me, this is a very important, like time space dilation where I can look back on the history of science and the couple of neurobiologists who were there at the beginning, like Ramoni Cajal, you'd say he changed the game because he kind of like made the game. Right. He created the game basically slicing up brains and understanding function. But like, but a few people came along, even in my career, in the time of my active lab career. And I was like, they really changed the game. And then I asked myself, why did,

1:37:15how and why did they change the game? And you realize that every technique is fleeting because it gets replaced almost always. Right. And so you start to realize that, oh, like it was always this unique kind of like artist, scientist, poet intersection. And I realized like, oh, that that's like, that's the thing. Right. There's people that are like outside the box because they found a unique confluence of things. Right. Striving for that. Yeah. Way more important to me than quote unquote power. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like to be able to say like, I did it not my way, not their

1:37:45way, but I did it my way, period. Right. Like a unique expression that could only have been me coming out of me. And I don't. And so I'm not in competition with, with some, with some structure, with other people. That to me is above the four idols that you described. No, I get it. I completely do. Because it's like, like, that's like winning. That's what you admire. And that's the, that's what I really admire. That's kind of like an ideal type. That's what it actually means to be successful. That's what it means to be a success. And that's what excellence means to you. That's

1:38:20the, that's the personification of excellence is actually that kind of intellectual entrepreneurship. Yeah. It's almost like it moves from the, cause you said like to lead. Yeah. I actually am not concerned with leading. I also didn't want to be a chairman. Right. Like I don't want to run the businesses, my podcast. I let someone else do that. He's way better at it than I could ever be. It's what I'm interested in is being outside of that, but still ethically completely free. Yeah. Like, yeah, I can't lead cause I can't show anyone how to be me cause they're them. Yeah. I can show

1:38:51them how to, I can get some ideas about how they can be them, but that's like an internal process for them. So that to me is like the ultimate. When I think about Ramon E. Cajal is a good example, who, by the way, the greatest neurobiologist of all time ever by, by huge, huge margin also was like really into weightlifting. He was an artist. Like he was an incredible, like he drew images of the brain and inferred from that function from dead tissue. Amazing, amazing human being. Like he's an N of one. Yeah. But it was the confluence of his interest in physical exercise and neuroanatomy

1:39:23and art that made him Ramon E. Cajal. No one else can do that. Yeah. Right. Like, so I don't want to be like him. No, I got it. Because he did it the best. Like, why would you want to be like him? Boring. You want to be excellent like him, but as Andrew Huberman. Exactly. To me, the unique expression and like, you know, we'll, I think we'll eventually get to notions of like, not notions, we'll talk a little bit about God and faith. Cause that's actually where you and I connected in person for the first time was talking at Stanford about science and faith. Very openly. Very openly. But that to me feels,

1:39:53I could be misinterpreting the message, but I feel like that's what God wants for all of us, whether it's end in the different domains of, of life. Yeah. And of course, adhering to ethics, like there are rules, there are structures we have to obey within that, but our unique expression, I feel like that's why we're here. Yeah. Yeah. I tell myself. No, like I completely agree with you. And, you know, so people often ask, so who, who's your hero? I don't know. I don't know. My dad, you know, um, you're like Jesus. You say Jesus. Yeah, I know. It's like,

1:40:26I mean, it's like, who's a hero, but it's like, no, I mean, Jesus is the master, but the hero, it's like the hero. No, it's not like some sort of hero's journey, some Jungian, you know, archetype that we're talking about here. I, I struggle with that as well, but I do see people that I deeply admire precisely for this, for this reason. So somebody, I really admire the guy in my field, the social science scientist par excellence is James Q. Wilson, you know, James Q. Wilson,

1:40:57James Q. Wilson, who won the congressional medal of honor at, you know, which is pretty hard to do as a social scientist for, you know, for so long. No, he died in 2012 and, and he was the greatest political scientist of the 20th century. And, and somebody I knew, he said, sat in on my dissertation defense, which went very poorly. I mean, it was rough, man. I had two Nobel prize winners in economics and James Q. Wilson. I was super nervous. And it was, it was, it was, it was not a great dissertation. It got signatures. So that's the scoreboard effect on that. That's all I can say.

1:41:28He passed. But he said to me after that, you know, he had written monumental books. He had done works. He had written a great book called The Moral Sense. That was the first time that a social scientist had actually used the tools of, of empirical social science survey-based data to understand the, the moral sensibilities, the complex moral sensibilities that they actually possessed and just quantifying it. And I read that. I said, I just want to do that. I want to do that. I don't want to be James Q. Wilson though. I want to be Arthur Brooks, you know, and doing it my own, in my own way. And he said, you know, at my dissertation defense, he said, you know, nice try.

1:42:02You're going to be fine. When you need something, give me a call. And so some years later, I was an assistant professor at Syracuse at the time. And I was, I wrote my first commercial book, my first trade book, and it was about charitable giving. And it was, it was, it actually changed my life because the president read it for some odd reason and talked about it. And then suddenly I was, my career was changed forever as a result of that, for better and for worse. But when I was working on it, I wrote to James Q. Wilson and I said, would you read this manuscript? And he said,

1:42:32sure. I sent it to him. And he said, you know, I was going to write a book on this, but you've written, I don't have to. I'll write the foreword. Awesome. Unbelievable. Yeah. Unbelievable. Later, he recruited me to be the president of the American Enterprise Institute because he was on the board of that. And he was on the board until he passed away. And then I spoke at his funeral. I had the honor of speaking at his funeral at the, at the Memorial Chapel at Harvard where his funeral was held. And it was just this guy, he was a one of a kind. And I want to be a

1:43:04social scientist too, but not just like him, not even studying the same things that he does, but to have this, this intense curiosity and using the tools of science completely in the public interest. That's what I want to do. And so that's what inspires me. So he's my hero, I guess, but it's the admiration that I have because he was fully alive. He was fully alive in the way that I think that it was his destiny to be in all of us. And everybody watching us, like everybody watching us and listening to us has got their thing. That's what our destiny is to actually find that thing

1:43:35and be truly excellent and use it to serve, become as excellent as you can possibly be in, in being a drywall hanger and to, you know, and, and being a cook at a restaurant and being a college professor, God forbid being a politician in the public interest, in the private interest and, and, and showing people that this is an expression of your love. You see in this way, it's godly in this way, you know, in the book of Genesis, it's, you know, God created heaven and earth. That was his gig. That was his job. And it was an expression of his love. This is what you and I can do. This is what

1:44:08you do. This is, by the way, you're popular because you're good at your job for sure, but because you want the best for everybody, because this podcast is an expression of Andrew Huberman's love. That's why it's successful. And everybody can be successful in their way, can be, you know, have their own Huberman podcast, not in podcasting necessarily, by actually having it be an expression of your love, love for humanity through the way that you're earning your daily bread. That's the quintessential expression of excellence in my view. Does that accord with yours?

1:44:41Very much so. And I, you know, I, it occurs to me like, you know, um, and maybe I'm a little bit bothered by this word power and I'm striving, and I'm striving for it to not be misconstrued, but if I, no, no, no, no, I just, I mean, but, but I'm, I'm embracing it today. Um, but what to me, the ultimate win I realized, um, a few moments ago is like what I'm really trying to do in this podcast thing is I love learning. And when I find something that I think can be of use to people,

1:45:13uh, I teach it because what's most satisfying to me is if people change their behavior and it leads them to a better place mentally, physically, or both. Right. And then they also understand why it did that. Right. And then they pass it along like, and, and there's no need for attribution in that. Right. There's no need for attribution. And I hope that like, I have a few friends who are actors, a few friends who are musicians, and I have to imagine that they love acting and playing music and those sorts of people provide incredible enrichment to my life. I love music. I love

1:45:46film and as a consumer, but I've heard them say things like, yeah, you know, like you can transport somebody, you can inspire them. And I think ultimately that's what it's about is like, I think that we do at our best. I think we all want to find the thing that we love to do, put it out there. And I think we have this sense that it, that it could possibly ripple through time without attribution. To me, that's like the ultimate power. Right. Totally. I want to create happiness teachers. I want people to go be teachers because that's leverage. I want a better world. I

1:46:20want to lift people up with these ideas. I can't do it by myself. Well, the only reason we have like the microphones and the cameras are here, right. It's to ripple it out further. Totally. These are literally, you know, they literally amplify things. Right. So, but yeah, the, the best way to amplify, amplify through space is the internet. Right. The best way to amplify through time might be the internet, but the way to really reinforce that whole thing is to teach people things, I believe, in a way that they understand the process underneath so that a little bit of it. Right. So that they can,

1:46:52and they pass both things along. Right. This is why I think like, cause nowadays, like I could go on any website and just go, what are the 10 top things that people on their deathbed say are keys to happiness and I can get a list. Yeah. But people choose to listen to the, the mechanics of it. Yeah. Because there's something about the human brain. Yeah. I'm certain that when we understand a bit about the mechanics that gives rise to that thing, that's our buy-in. Yeah. That's the per, that's the cost of admission. That's right. And then it becomes worth something. That's the effort that comes before the. Yeah. Well, you know what they say in medical schools, they say at the Stanford

1:47:24Medical School, to become a surgeon, you need to watch one, do one, teach one, watch one, do one, teach one. And, and, you know, the truth is that there, that the process of learning and, you know, there's a ton of research on how people learn and the way that people learn best is that they have to learn how something works. Then they have to actually practice it. Then they actually have to teach it. So my dad was a math professor. He was a brilliant biostatistician. I one time watched him as a math professor, giving an advanced calculus lecture and 90 minutes, no notes. It was like watching Yasha Heifetz. And I was old enough that I had admiration for him. I was in my twenties is before he died. He died

1:47:58young, but I was still in my twenties and he was still going. And, and I said, dad, I was like, that was a virtuoso performance. How'd you do it? He said, I've done it hundreds of times. And, and he said, the process is simple. You learn actually what's happening. You look at the proof, you admire the science, and then you actually do a ton of problems. And then finally you explain it over and over and over and over again. And the same thing is true for golf. And the same thing is true for speaking Spanish. And the same thing is true for, for understanding how to live a better life. You need to know the science. The reason that I'm so fascinated with the science,

1:48:29I want to talk about it in my podcast every week. It's like, it's so cool when you understand the science, then you're more likely to change your habits and then you're more likely to spread it and share it with other people. In which case you will be a virtuoso in it and you'll actually keep the cycle unbroken. That's magic. That's like, it's a, it's a complete miracle that that's actually how we do it. And, and we have this moment, this miraculous moment where you and I can actually talk about serious science. We're not, I mean, this is not a doctoral seminar at Stanford or

1:49:00Harvard to be sure, but we're, we're talking about the real thing. And people will watch this like, yeah, that's like, you know, they're, they're learning some things and they're going to go to someone going to go to PubMed and we're going to have show notes and, and the whole thing. And, and then we talk about it. Here's how you use it. Okay. So don't, when you go to the beach, make sure that you're going to a beach with friends and here's your product and your book is called Protocols for a Reason with several hundred pages of footnotes, right? Now go share it. You know how many times people have told me, Hey, you know what about coffee? You should wait for 90 minutes because you know, the caffeine molecule, the caffeine molecule blocks the A2

1:49:33adenosine receptors and, and you won't get the crash at two in the afternoon. I'm like, yeah, I know where you got that. I know where you got that. You got that from Andrew and, and without attribution, because they don't know they got it from you. But the whole point is the world's better. The world is better. That's how we can bless the world with what we actually do. And that's so great. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios,

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1:50:38So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase.

1:51:10Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. So we got through enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We got through enjoyment, satisfaction, not meaning.

Quantification and addiction

1:51:21Well, we have not gotten all the way through meaning. Yeah, we haven't gotten through meaning. But we, so tell us more about meaning. So we got the idols. Yeah, yeah, we got the idols. So those are the things to be aware of and kind of- That will block your satisfaction, that they promise satisfaction, they don't deliver. They won't deliver the satisfaction that you seek, but your brain tells you that they will. That will put you on what we, in my community, call the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic simply means feelings or in your vernacular is activity of the limbic system. And the treadmill means that the limbic system resets because emotions are not there to give you a nice day.

1:51:54They give you a set of signals about threats and opportunities so you can react. And they reset immediately. You always think they're going to last forever. So you have an incentive to either avoid or approach things. This is the, you don't see it much anymore, but there used to be a bumper sticker out there that said that the person who dies with the most toys wins. Yeah, right. It's that one, which reminds me about quantification. Can I share this with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please do. It's not my original idea, but Anna Lemke, Dr. Anna Lemke at Stanford. I've had her on my podcast and yeah, she's fantastic.

1:52:26Yeah, she's amazing. She told me that there's something interesting, one particularly interesting lens on any behavior is whether the person tends to quantify that behavior very carefully and kind of covet the thing. She said addicts will like constantly check back and see how many like pills they have, how many bags they have, how many people who are obsessed, perhaps even addicted to making money will constantly check how much they have. Check their portfolio every single day. And it's cloaked as feeling, as the need to feel safe, but it has nothing to do with that.

1:53:01It's the limbic system is very, very good at charting profits and losses in whatever context, like making lists, quantification. He said, so we have to be very, this is not a call to not track your sleep or something or your HRV. But by the way, it can be a problem. It can be a problem. I check it once a week. Fitness trackers. I check my sleep once a week against a subjective quick line in my notebook. Or your HRV or. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, it's something that we don't hear often enough, even in the neurobiology crowd, that the limbic system loves to quantify.

1:53:38And if we get to the extreme of quantification in a given area, of life, of behavior, of obsession, it very likely, not always, but very likely reflects that that healthy behavior has become either an obsession or a full-blown addiction, which I find really interesting. That's so interesting. Very interesting. What are we actually, what is the limbic system actually trying to do with that kind of control that's expressed through quantification? Never experience the drop. It's like a way of, it's not getting more of. Right. It's avoiding less of.

1:54:08It's getting more of. It's, it's, it's, it's right. You're, you're working against losses by telling yourself you have this. It's based on loss aversion. It's loss aversion. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It's based on loss aversion. Yeah. And I said, it's funny. She said, I said, what do you mean? She said, oh yeah, like people who are like addicted to like certain kinds of barbiturates or painkillers or whatever, will like line them up and like look at them and count them. There's a very pathologic instance of this, which is very tragic too, because they often die sadly. But one of the hallmark traits of like true anorexia is that the, these reward circuits become such that the aversion of food becomes rewarding, which is, you know, deadly in its ultimate form.

1:54:48And people with true anorexia can look at an article of food and they have a calculator that can tell you within a very small margin, how many calories, how much fat, how much protein they know they can, they're like visual computers when it comes to food. And food aversion, avoiding that stuff becomes their, it's like a, the addiction, the pleasure pathways get all inverted and they off, it's the most deadly of the psychiatric disorders. That's an extreme pathological case. But she said, heroin addicts who you would think can't get their life together can tell you exactly how much heroin they have and how much they think they're going to get, how much things, they're often very good at math.

1:55:28You know, they understand, you know, and so quantification is kind of a hallmark feature of the, of these rewards, these reinforcement circuitries. I thought perhaps that's an interesting point. That's very interesting. That I don't think we discuss enough. Yeah. So when I think about whether something is a, an addiction, a compulsion, unhealthy or healthy pursuit, like how tightly am I quantifying every little bit of it? And thinking about what I've done, like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. How many articles are on my Vita, you know, whatever, you know, because we quantify our success and whether we look at the, you know, you're not trying to pat yourself on the back.

1:56:00You're trying to make sure that you're not falling behind. Right. I remember this. Followers on, you know, I do think the social media platforms have, have intentionally brought this in. Yes. It's not like the number of likes can be reinforcing somewhat. Number of followers. But the number of followers, people are monitoring their increases and decreases and they, they kind of covet them. Yes, absolutely. And, and the rate of change of your followers, for example. And the media will say like so-and-so lost that's number of followers or whatever, like it's like a thing. So I think there's something there around quantification. Wait till your book comes out. Wait till you experience the New York Times bestseller list for the first time.

1:56:33Oh, it's incredible. It's incredible. You know Ryan Holiday, right? Have you ever had him on your show? Yeah, I have not had him on the show, but I'm aware of his books. He's great. He's great. And, and, you know, he, he, one time he said to me, it's like, I was sure that I was finally going to feel like completely alive. And I, if I, someday he said, I'm going to, I'm going to visualize that I'm going to have a number one New York Times bestseller. And he said, and finally it happened. And one week later I got knocked off the list by Trump's kid.

1:56:59Barron? Oh no. No, I don't know. I mean, one of his thoughts, but you know, it's like, I don't know. And, and, and his whole point is that it's so absurd because it's completely arbitrary. Right. The metric is arbitrary. Right. But what you're trying to do is you're trying to quantify your sense of self. Am I enough yet? Am I good enough yet? Am I enough yet? And so on the one hand, you're actually talking about the addiction. But one of the things that I see again and again and again and again is that people are trying to prove to themselves that they actually are enough. And, and they don't feel like they are. And the way that they earn it is actually by looking at the scoreboard.

1:57:32This is what a lot of wealthy people do. It's what a lot of academics do. It's like, how many, what's this, what's this H index? You know, like how high is the H index? And oh yeah, so-and-so is such a big shot. H index is like 36. Joke. And nobody even knows what that means. Might 1% of the people watching us, but you and I know what that means. Yeah. Because it's about impact, right? Ultimately people, or they tell themselves it's that. But putting a numerical score on something. I mean, the brain has circuits that are pretty much hardwired for counting.

1:58:03Yeah. I mean, my dog isn't as smart as my assistant's dog. He has a herding dog. They can count. They know how many people- A border collie or something. He has a little miniature- They look at you like that. So you look at him, he's like, stop judging me. His dog is tracking how many in the group are here and how many are missing. That's what makes them really good at their job. And that's where they get rewarded by making sure they're all in the- Yeah. And here's the interesting part about this, Andrew. That function, that quantification function, the essentializing function of how much,

1:58:34that's what we're really good at using the left hemisphere of our brains. That's that whole theory of hemispheric lateralization that McGilchrist brought back. When I was a kid, there was right brain, left brain people. Right brain people are artsy and left brain people are analytical. That's not right. But the how to and what side requires hardcore quantification. And that's fundamentally a left brain function. The right side, that's complicated. Those are complicated problems. Solvable but complicated problems if you've got the data. The right side of the brain deals fundamentally more with complex questions,

1:59:04which don't have quantifiable answers. All they have is understanding. All they have is intuition. That's the why side of your brain, not the how to and what side. And that's where meaning resides, which is the last macronutrient of this. The right side of our brain, the love side, the meaning side, the God side, the complex side. All the problems that are most important to you but you'll never solve. I mean, my car is left hemisphere. My marriage is right hemisphere. I will never solve my marriage.

1:59:34Never. I mean, before we stepped in here, my wife texted me. Good luck. I love you. She does. I'm going to call her later. She might be pissed off at me. I don't know. I don't know. I've been married 35 years, Andrew. I don't know. I mean, she's Spanish, so it's really complex. But you get my point, right? I do. But this is the thing, and this is the problem that we face. You need an integrated brain. You get two hemispheres for a reason and a corpus callosum to connect between the two hemispheres.

2:00:06You get that because you've got the, I'm going to go to work. I'm going to earn money. How to and what? Why? Because I love my family. Because I want to create value. Because I want to do something important in the world. Right hemisphere, left hemisphere, right hemisphere. And when that's cut off and when you're stuck in the left hemisphere, for example, looking at your phone 205 times a day and taking, you know, an endless algorithm of useless information that's fed to you, then meaning will be absent because you can only assess it on the complex side.

2:00:37And that's the biggest problem we face. You want to know the biggest crisis we face? In happiness, it's meaning. And that's why. So how can somebody take steps to enrich the amount and the type of, the array of meaning in their life?

Enriching meaning in life

2:00:54You and I have done both a lot of work in the world of addiction, personally and professionally. And addiction is unbelievably interesting. It's endlessly fascinating how the human brain is captured. And one of the things that you find is when people finally are not in the grip of addiction, there's three things that have to happen. Number one is they get pissed. That's what all addicts do. They get pissed and they rebel. And they're like, no, no more. You've ever seen, you know, you've seen people in 12-step programs and they're like, they might laugh about the crazy things that happened to them.

2:01:30But they finally, they're just like, no, no more. I'm not going to put up with this anymore. You've got to get pissed and rebel. The second thing that they do is that actually they understand something about the mechanism of becoming de-addicted. And that's different in different ways. You're addicted to gambling. You're addicted to pornography. If you're addicted to alcohol, you're addicted to drugs. There's different mechanisms for becoming de-addicted. And, of course, that's very complicated and very, very hard. And it requires science and, you know, and clinical practice, et cetera, et cetera. But the last part is actually the most difficult, which is living in a new way, living with you.

2:02:03You know, it's like one of the things that alcoholics always do, they always do this, is they move. They always move. And they're like, dude, if I move, it's like all these losers that are around me. And I'm not going to see any of those people. And I'm not going to be living upstairs from a liquor store. And for God's sake, moving is going to do the trick. I'm going to change my circumstances. And, of course, it never works because the first thing that jumps out of your suitcase is you with your alcoholic brain. That's the problem. And so you have to learn to live with you is the hard thing that actually comes from this.

2:02:37We are deeply, deeply, deeply addicted. We're deeply technologically addicted. We're hooked into this thing. We all know this. You've talked about it ad infinitum. So have I. John Height, who's been on your show, has talked about the affliction that we actually have. That's what we have to do. My work is fundamentally about how to rage against a machine to get pissed off enough. And even more than that, it's fundamentally about how to live with you, how to live differently. Because when you live with you, then you're in the right hemisphere of your brain. And you have to have right hemispheric experiences, which, by the way, my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, he was in the right hemisphere all day long.

2:03:15He spent all day looking at a mule's butt. And he never came home and said to my great-grandmother, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today. No. And he also never said, you know, my life is so boring. And part of the reason was because his brain wasn't broken. His brain was working the way it was actually supposed to. But that's not ordinary today. And so what we need to do, number one, is we need to break the cycle. And then we need to live in an old-fashioned way. That's what it comes down to. That's how we find the meaning in our lives.

2:03:45And breaking the cycle, by the way, I mean, we all know the research. You've had it on your show. I've taken huge amounts of knowledge from you on this. You can break the cycle of technological addiction in your life simply by doing first hour of the day, last hour of the day, and mealtimes. Simply doing that. And there's tons of research that shows that the neurocognitive programming that happens in your first hour of wake, the relationship programming and the sleep architecture that you're wiring in the last hour of your day, and then the neuropeptides that you'll actually elicit by eating with other people without devices.

2:04:17Your relationship to technology will change. But you've got to break the cycle. And there's tons of resources out there. How do you live in a different way? Well, how do people illuminate the right hemisphere of their brains? Sometimes they ask un-Google-able questions, right? Like, why am I alive? For what would I give my life? You know, the deep philosophical questions. And that's what philosophy and spirituality and religion bring to you, is the deep questions that are fundamentally un-Google-able. And that's one of the reasons that the hemispheric lateralization literature shows that when you're in these spaces, that your right hemisphere is fundamentally illuminated.

2:04:55You can train a gorilla to answer all kinds of questions, but not ask interesting fundamental questions. That's humanity. That's God-like, is to ask questions. It's to fall in love as a right hemispheric experience. It's deep, deep mystery. It's like, that's the reason it's so scary. I don't know. I can't solve this problem. Somebody answer this question for me. No, man. You've got to live it. You've got to live it for the end of your days. That's why finding your calling, why you and I, we have so much meaning through our work, because we're living our calling.

2:05:30This is what we're meant to do. That's why a calling is what you're meant to do. It has the word meaning in it. That's why worshiping God, living in the luminescent divine, that's why trying to become a sannyasi, as the Indians would say, is so critically important. That's why beauty, moral beauty, artistic beauty, natural beauty, these are right hemispheric experiences. And that's why suffering is so important, because suffering helps you understand the meaning of your life, per se. Suffering is where everybody's like, when did you know who you really, really were?

2:06:01How did you know what you were made of? They'll tell you something bad. Oh, that week at the beach in Ibiza. No. When my mom died, I loved her. When somebody left me at the altar, when I got fired, when I lost my business, God forbid, when I lost a child, people look back and they're saying, that was the moment. That was when I knew. Why? Because that's when we were truly integrated. That's when we became integrated human beings. That's what it means to be fully alive, to find meaning. And ultimately, that is the path to happiness.

2:06:34And let that sink in for people. That's the real wisdom. And I'm going to stop you, because I know you're super humble, and you're going to pass it off onto someone else or something else. But you really have a gift, and it comes through. Thank you, Andrew. That means a lot coming from you. Yeah, you really do, because a lot of different ways people can say important things, but sometimes things just land, and they just need to sit for a sec. So I have some questions that were prompted in your book, but I want to make sure that we return to this notion of faith.

Faith and the metaphysical path

2:07:07It's not something we talk a lot about on this podcast. I've talked about it as a guest on other podcasts. But you and I had a conversation about that, and I think probably by the time that this episode airs, that conversation at Stanford will also be public. Yes. And I recommend people watch it, because that was really moving for me, to have that conversation with you. Yeah, same. To talk about your journey, and, you know, the, I mean, it's really easy to get into the physical fitness of life, but the metaphysical fitness of life is a different experience.

2:07:39The real, like, eye-opener, the first one for me was, oh, like, striving for perfection, it might be, perfection in quotes, might be the goal, but, like, no one attains that. No human attains that. So be careful to not ask humans for answers that are not possible to come from human beings. And that's where that eventually moved to a real faith, a belief in God, a prayer practice that is, at least for me, it's the most consistent feature of my life for the last, you know, almost three years.

2:08:14And it's been interesting to be in a relationship where we, like, on to church together and to pray together or to just pray with somebody, right? And when we parted ways at Stanford after the Veritas meeting, it was so interesting, because we said goodbye, we did the usual, like, hug, like, see you soon, brother, look me up. And you said, I'll pray for you. And you said, and if you don't mind, pray for me, too. And I've been doing that. And it's, it's, now, some people might hear this and be like, oh, boy, here we go. Here we go, right, yeah. A couple of scientists talking about, but one just, like, entertains the possibility that maybe humans don't have all the answers.

2:08:48Yeah. And that's, like, a great vista to, like, skeptically look out. Yeah. That's kind of how I think it felt, like, a couple of years ago. It's kind of like, yeah. And then, you know, over time, I've migrated very far forward. But I think that the whole thing of being, like, faith, I realize, isn't this thing that one necessarily, especially like me, if you didn't grow up with a lot of it in your family, you know, just, like, run and fall, like, new best friend. I know. You know, it takes some, it doesn't have to happen that way.

2:09:20But I think people see that. And if it does, it can be very brittle, by the way. And people see baptisms and they assume, okay, like, into the water and you just, like, embrace, right? Born again. Right. Born again. Right. It's this, like, thick black line that you step over type thing. And one thing that I've learned from observing you and from conversations with you is that, like, it's allowed to be gradual. Yeah. It's okay to be skeptical, to move forward, to move back, to explore, to wonder.

2:09:50Like, because that's all the stuff of having a human brain. Yeah. And God probably wants that for us. Yeah. And so I've been very, very moved by your teachings on Veritas that day because for those that haven't seen it yet and weren't there, it was very clear that there was, like, a seasoned pro in there. Arthur grew up with a lot of structured religion and prayer practice in his home and I did not. And coming to this rather late. So I was, like, the newbie and it was so much, it was so liberating for me to be on a stage where in a room full of people where I was certain I was in the bottom 1% of knowledgeable about the topic.

2:10:25And that was what I could talk about, not knowing, right? It was so beautiful, the humility that you actually brought to that to say, I don't know. I don't know, man. I'm just fumbling around here. I'm just doing my best. What I have written on my heart is that there is something here and I want more. And this is somebody who's... That's it. By the way, this is, according to the, you know, the great sages, this is not proof of God, but it's evidence of something. Evidence of the existence of water is thirst. Evidence of the existence of sex is sexual desire.

2:10:57We want... And there are no anthropologically any evidence of societies that are systematically secular. On the contrary, all human societies that we've been able to ascertain have a sense of the divine, have a sense of the things that we actually cannot see. And we have an innate desire for it. Not every single person watching us and not everybody in the exact same way. This is something that's characteristic of humanity. Otherwise, it would be absolutely evolved out of us. And by the way, that's evidence that the divine exists, is that we want the divine.

2:11:28It's like the desire. It's like the thirst. It's evidence of... And appetite is evidence of the existence of its object. That's a classic philosophical argument. And again, that's not evidence that God exists. That's not proof that God exists. Because you can't prove it. Faith is belief in something that is fundamentally based on a non-testable hypothesis, which is super hard for you and me. Because testable hypotheses, that's where the action is. That's how we got hired at these fancy universities, is testing testable hypotheses.

2:12:01And yet the essence of living on the edge of the adventure of life as a scientist is to be in the realm of non-testable hypotheses of things that you deeply know in your heart exist. That's hardcore. That's what I want. That's the bite out of life that I want to take. But in keeping with this analogy earlier about anorexia, and I'm not trying to insult anyone here. I'm also speaking about, you know, many, many people who I deeply respect who will say, I don't have that craving.

2:12:32They don't have that wish. They don't have that thirst. Right. And I can imagine there are probably two responses to that. One is that something has been deftly slid in front of them to give them the illusion that they're getting that thing, but it's not that thing, right? That they've made other aspects of life their, I don't want to say their God, but it's sort of filled in that hunger or thirst. Maybe the terror of death, all that Ernest Becker stuff, and yeah. Yeah. Or at the other extreme, it could be a sort of spiritual anorexia, right? Like the circuits have, like, let's give them some credit.

2:13:04Maybe the circuits have actually modified to the point where the reward is in not wanting to satisfy the craving. Because the brain will do this too. This is what's so weird about these reinforced, I prefer the word, reinforcement to reward because it involves, it's more accurate because it's about closing a loop with desire and behavior, reset, desire, behavior. Yeah. That's the wanting, learning, liking cycle. It's based on reinforcement. Right. So the reinforcement, like dopamine and reinforcement always works.

2:13:35Dopamine and reward, it's complicated. I got it. Like you can stimulate dopamine through pain and no, and part of it is the offset of pain. It's rewarding. It's just one of the reasons that heroin addicts like the feel of the pinch of the needle going into the vein, right? That, that, that part, that is, but the pain is part of the reward per se, because it's actually reinforcing the behavioral pattern. Exactly your point. If there was such a thing as a, a mild spiritual anorexia, where people are actually getting pleasure from the fact that they are not interested in any of that.

2:14:08Right. And they got enough and they feel good not knowing. Right. You hear this. Sure. And I want to give, um, in fairness, I want to acknowledge those people exist. Right. And they're like good with the fact that they don't have a relationship, like a higher power relationship of belief in God. They don't have faith. They don't seem to have this thirst. And the lack of it almost sounds in some cases like it's rewarding to them. There's a pride that actually comes from being none, not an N-U-N, N-O-N-E. It's a designation. It's an identity.

2:14:39Actually, it's who I am as a person. I don't actually need that. And, and by the way, there are all very compelling explanations that are not consistent or necessarily consistent with the idea that there's an all-knowing, all-loving God. I mean, Stephen Cave at Cambridge has written a, has a really beautiful book called Immortality. Have you actually seen it? Have you read it? And, and he's a philosopher. And he talks about the fact that the human brain is able to, is able to cap, to capture the concept of physical death. You know you're going to die. And you're, you're completely comfortable in that knowledge.

2:15:11You might not like it. You might not want it now, but you know you're going to die. But your brain is incapable of, of understanding non-existence. So you know you're going to die, but you can't understand non-existence because that's, goes beyond our cognitive capacities. And so you've got to resolve it. One way to deal with it is to not deal with it, to never think about it. Stay drunk and high or stay busy and be a complete workaholic. Stay busy. Another way to deal with it is to create a resolution that says, I'm going to die, but I'm, I'm going to continue to exist.

2:15:41And so I can understand that. And that would be a social explanation for the concept of religion. Some neurobiologists, you know, back in the day in the 1990s and early 2000s were doing work on the God module in the brain. And they were using these, these, you know, those magnetic helmets that they were doing on this thing. And what they would do is they would just stimulate the same part of the brain that's, that's touched with people who have, you know, grand mal seizures. And so a lot of people who have epileptic seizures, events, that they'll have, it'll be a mystical experience.

2:16:11And, you know, if you're, for example, a Catholic nun and you have an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the protocol from the bishop is to check you for epilepsy first. Because it might just be that you had undiagnosed epilepsy and you had a seizure and it made you have a mystical experience, right? Okay, I get it. You know, and then these are ways to actually say that, you know, Andrew and Arthur are going off the reservation here. They're not being good scientists. There are plenty good philosophical and neuroscientific explanations for the experience of God per se. For me, that is uncompelling.

2:16:41And part of the reason that that's uncompelling for me is that I've been walking through across the earth for the last 62 years and I can't get it out of my mind. And I'm not worried about the problem of non-existence. It's not that it's been resolved, but this is not a preoccupation of mine. And quite frankly, there are lots and lots and lots of times that I don't feel a single, you know, a single molecule of emotional faith. On the contrary, but I have a strong sense of the existence of the creator, strong sense of the divine.

2:17:12Do I understand him? No. I have a very imperfect physics from full disclosure. I'm a Catholic and I go to mass every day. Why do I do that? I do that because, not because I feel it, not even because I believe, but because I'm serving this intuition through practice. And by the way, for everybody who's watching us, who's like, I don't know, maybe, but I don't feel it. So what? So what? You know, if I, if anybody who's married, they know that if you went according to your feelings, you will not stay married a month.

2:17:44You absolutely won't. You don't even go according to your belief in the, in the institution of marriage. You go, you stay married because you practice marriage. And the same thing is true with your relationship with anybody, including with God. Start with practice. Occasionally you'll believe, and very occasionally you'll feel it. That's the way the whole relationship actually works. Andrew, that's the protocol.

2:18:07I was happy to hear that the bishop has protocols. They do, but the protocol for individual faith is not feeling, belief, practice. It's practice, belief, feeling. Without any attempt to take away from the, the depth and, and, and impact of what you just described. I sat across this very table from Pavel Satsulin, who's one of like the most revered strength trainers in the world. Right. And, and he said like, and he, he said my, as you, occasionally he'd say my name, Andrew, and then like, tell me something that I, you know, and he, and he said, you don't weight lift.

2:18:44You don't work out. He's like, you practice strength training. And it, and I was like, I don't know, I sort of get it. I, okay, yeah, we can call it one thing or another. He's like, no, no, you, every time you do it, you're practicing to get better at it. And that changes the whole motivational structure is, is what he essentially was saying. And that changes your expectation of what you're going to get out of it. Right. It's, yes, you expect to get stronger, but it's this, this notion that you're always the student of yourself. You're always the student of this process and you never really expect to like conquer it because there's always more weight you could add.

2:19:18Yeah. Now this is a very mechanical, physical analogy to what you're describing, but there's an important, I think, elegance in what he said and what you said. And the similarity there, I think is synergistic, which is when something is a practice, we are not focused on the outcome as much as we are the process. Yeah. That's, you know, fairly straightforward. But then there's this almost like higher order thing that comes from that because it predicts with near certainty that you'll continue doing it. Whereas if you're trying to obtain the, like grab the ring, get the prize, get the ribbon, lift the weight, that has a ceiling to it.

2:19:55And so what you're really talking about in the real form of the word is ascension. Like through practice, there's like ascension. Like otherwise, like there's only, there's the top podium. Right. There's in science, there's a Nobel prize. Right. You know, like there are these awards, like, you know, but like those are things, again, that are human. Like we set those levels, but the laws of physics have an upper limit. Right. But what you're talking about doesn't have an upper limit. Like we can't say this person experienced God more than anybody else. Right. And that's the goal.

2:20:26Yeah. Like there's, there, there is no ceiling to this, this relationship. The way that the, that, that in Vedic wisdom, the way that this is understood, they have a very, very elegant way of, of understanding this. And by the way, the idea of practice, no joke. You, you practice your marriage. You practice in, in your job, you practice friendship and you practice your religion. For precisely the same reason that you practice lifting weights, as opposed to just lifting weights. You practice it because practice, you get better. The progress principle, we've already talked about that.

2:20:58But the way that Indians talk about that over the course of a life is this, and it's based on this empirical regularity. This is a weird thing. People tend to get more religious, they get older. And, you know, James Fowler, the sociologist wrote about this. He says, people, you know, they wander away and they're in their twenties. And I'm like, yeah, come on, man. I mean, an all knowing, all loving God. Well, explain kids getting sick and dying. And so they're like, no, explain suffering, right? Explain suffering. And you and I have talked about this before. You know, we were at Stanford. We talked about the problem of pain and the problem of suffering. But when they're in their forties, what, what Fowler notices is people get more religious for the following reason.

2:21:33When you're in the forties, that's when you're like, yeah, you know what? Nothing makes sense. Actually, nothing makes sense. You've done enough that you can say that. Yeah, you can actually, I'm not going to resolve everything. You want a closed form solution to life all the way through your 20s and 30s. You think that there's a kind of a calculus to it. And you realize that these are computational methods to everything that you're doing, which means you know there's no closed form solution. You've got to get a simulation going here to just to use. I'm an old operations research analyst.

2:22:03So, yeah, there's no closed form solution to anything you really care about, which is, you know, the result of it is everything's messy. And you're much more comfortable with the cognitive dissonance or the problem of pain. And the result of it is that you actually look for something that has these transcendent properties, notwithstanding the contradictions that you actually see around you. The way that the Indians talk about that interest is as follows. Life is in four quarters. This is called the theory of the ashramas, which is a Sanskrit word, you know, for quarters of life. And the ideal life is 100 years long, and each one of these is 25 years, but your results may vary, right?

2:22:38The first quarter is brahmacharya, which means the student phase. Learn, learn, learn, learn. The second is grihastha, which is the householder phase. Earn, build, earn, build, family, business. That's up to 50. That's up to 50. But at 50, you have a second adolescence that leads you into vana prastha, which is a word in Sanskrit that means it's from two words, vana and prastha, meaning retiring into the forest, retirement and forth. And it's a metaphor. You're back into the forest, right? And what you're doing is you're actually gradually moving away from, not from doing your job, you know, not from your relationships, but from the scoreboard, from the honors of the world.

2:23:18And what are you doing? You're getting into an elite training for the last quarter, which is sannyasa, which that is the, to sit in the luminescence of the divine, of the godhead of Brahman in Hinduism is the whole idea. But that requires super elite training. You're not going to get to 75 and experience time because time for people who are very religious or very spiritual, time is completely different than the success addict. It's like time's running out. Got to do more, more, more, more, like hedonic treadmill.

2:23:48For people who are very, very spiritual, time becomes less forward moving and more sort of lateral. It kind of spreads out like the delta of a river where it slows down and you can't tell where the ocean begins and the river finishes. That's your life. That's what it means to sit in the luminescence of God. And when death comes, it's simply, it's a process. It's gradual. It's not binary at all, notwithstanding the fact that we can actually sit where the electricity of the brain stops. It is a deeply, deeply spiritual and comfortable thing.

2:24:20But that requires the elite training of Vanaprastha. Not after 50 necessarily because most people listening to us, if they're enlightened, it might be they're 29 or they're 36. But the elite training of, and the elite training is actually not, you know, memorizing the whole Bible. It's asking the deep questions. Who am I? Who is God? Who created this? What is love? Am I loved? Can I love? These are the deep metaphysical questions that actually lead us to the ultimate source of that love and the imperfect physics that is organized religion.

2:24:54How are you as a 62-year-old exploring this third phase? You described you go to mass every day. Yeah. Is that sometimes online or always in person? Always in person. So, and the great thing is, you know, the Catholic Church is like Starbucks. It's like, it's a very uniform available product with high quality. Mm-hmm. And, and so, you know, I go with my wife at 6.30 in the morning every, when I'm home. And I'm home usually four days a week. I'm on the road 48 weeks a year, but usually about three days a week that I'm out, sometimes four days a week.

2:25:27And, you know, I've got an app, click, next mass. It's great because it's literally the same product every place in the world, 450,000 times a day. It's, I'm very lucky in this way. So you're up at- It's like finding a gym. So you're up at 4.30 in the morning and you're in the gym working out- For an hour. Six, seven days a week? Seven days a week. Seven days a week. Seven days a week. But it's a four-day cycle. I'm obviously not doing the same thing, right? I have unbelievable stress injuries. Yeah. Push-pull legs, yoga. Push-pull legs, zone two and yoga. Super impressive diligence.

2:25:59And then you're in mass. Mm-hmm. And then you move about your day. Yeah. Do you have a prayer practice at the end of your day? I do. I pray the rosary over the course of the day. Generally speaking, I pray the divine office with my wife, which is an ancient monastic set of prayers that monks have been saying since St. Benedict in the 6th century. And that punctuates the day. My wife and I, we do it on FaceTime or on the phone, no matter where I am, almost any place in the world, as a matter of fact, before the end of the day. Sometimes if I'm in India, which I try to go every year, while I'm going to sleep, she's saying the divine office for nighttime prayers at lunchtime.

2:26:34But we do that. And we do that together because that's a deep, deep right brain melding. One flesh for a married couple should be the union of the right hemispheres, where you have a deep, intuitive understanding of life itself that you can't quite explain, but you both understand. That's the satisfaction of a marriage. So this right brain connection, you know, Dr. Alan Shore, right? Yeah. He's been a guest on this podcast and I loved his book. And I mean, he really emphasized the importance of this right brain connection between especially mother and child, but also father and child.

2:27:10Right. Husband and wife, close friends. Yeah, that, you know, that the joining, you know, synchronizing the rise in like elation and then, and also the troughs, right? And, and, and then the calm piece of no need for excitement like that as really the, the core, he was mostly talking about the psychology and neurobiology of, of what real connection is about. And so, and so beautiful to hear you talk about that in the context of, of a romantic relationship. For sure. And that's, you know, the nice thing about that, I mean, we talk about faith, family, friends, and work, for example, the apex of family and friendship is the spousal relationship.

2:27:49That's the apex because that's somebody that you've adopted as your kin. And it's the neurobiology of falling in love is so interesting, right? Starting with attraction and sex hormones, but then, but when the catecholamines get involved for, for, you know, intense desire and, and, and anticipation of reward and the ebullience that comes from the, you know, the norepinephrine release that actually comes and wondering, does that text from her? It's one word, who cares, right? And then the serotonin drop, the deep serotonin drop that actually happens when you start to ruminate on the other person, the sweet misery that comes from the rumination on the other person, which is, you know, pretty much indistinguishable neurobiologically from clinical depression, right?

2:28:31It's like, there's no serotonin in the synapse. And then last but not least is the, is the, these neuropeptides like oxytocin, vasopressin, but especially, you know, that, that, that, that bond you together and companion at love, which is what you actually want. You've adopted that person. That's your person. That's your kin. That's your best friend. That's your lover. That's the person who actually shares the right hemisphere of the deep meaning of your life. And, you know, one of the beautiful things about romantic love is it helps me understand how the philosophy and the theology and the neuroscience and the psychology, it's all one thing, man.

2:29:04It's all one thing. It all comes together in this beautiful way. That's why it's such a, a powerful thing that, that you and I want in our lives, you and I need in our lives. Anyone can really start to clearly understand how, while there are wonderful technologies and things available in the world that so much of what we're offered and fed and paying for with our time, especially our time, are ways to short circuit the, the building of these things. For sure. Whether it's with a romantic partner or a vocation or with our friends or.

2:29:37Workaholism, alcoholism, pornography, all these things. Yeah, I mean, I was saying pornography is sort of like, it like, it literally short circuits the circuit that is supposed to be this magnificent, immensely complicated, like cocktail of things that you would call like a really, truly amazing relationship. And it's just, it tapping into one thing, I am sort of living in the land of analogies today, but not unlike when, I had a guy on my, on this podcast, Chris McCurdy, who studies plant-based medicines, but not psychedelics.

2:30:08And he was talking about how, you know, the problem in this country is that we learn to isolate and synthesize the most potent of the plant molecules and they become very addictive. So whether they're painkillers or they're cocaine or they're kratom, but that in the whole plant form, these things actually had balance. Right. And so there's a really, I think, an appropriate perhaps analogy there that like, when we try and get one slice of this in high potency and not have to risk anything to get it, you lose the whole thing.

2:30:39When you shear something off from the whole experience, that's when it actually becomes addictive. That's when it becomes pathological. Naturally speaking, a lot of these processes, a lot of the things that we actually experience are supposed to be there. Look, I mean, we're so good at, at, at taking, at solving a little problem and creating a major crisis. You know, like, ah, man, that's like, I got a headache. I need something stronger. I need something stronger. I need something stronger. A hundred thousand people died of, you know, opiate overdoses or something last year. This is what actually happens. And then there are other things that we do as well.

2:31:10And by the way, you know, lest we look like we're, you know, holier than thou, workaholism is a classic case of this as well. It's just that that particular addiction sheared off from the natural, you know, humane and even divine process of creating value on this earth. When we become workaholics, the result is that people congratulate us for it. You know, can you imagine somebody who said, Andrew, you are unbelievably good at drinking vodka. You put away two 750 milliliter bottles of that last night and, and, and you were completely blacked out.

2:31:44But I was amazed at how adroit you are. You're talented. You're a great drinker. This was the college I went to, you know, and I'm, I wasn't a big drinker there, but people would try and impress each other with how much they could drink. By the time you're our age, however, if you're doing that, people are, you think that you're, you know, a pathetic drunk. But if you're our age, my age, and if I'm 62 years old, completely neglecting my family and doing only stuff to run up the scoreboard on money and power and fame or whatever, people are going to be like, dude, you're good at your job. You're awesome.

2:32:15You know, it's like, I, yeah, you know how many speeches I gave last year, you know, how many frequent flyer miles I got people going to be like, it's really, really impressive. But the whole point is that sheared off from the natural human experience. It's an addictive behavior. It's dangerous. It's pathological. It's bad for us. And it leads to misery. Yeah. I think what saved me was hearing the phrase, I don't know where I heard it was. Everyone loves a young drunk. Yeah. And I was like, oh yeah, like this, this rolled forward does not look good. How old were you? In college. You stopped really early. No, I drank, but I noticed early on, mostly because I was doing a lot of catch up with my academics and then got into physical fitness.

2:32:51And I drank basically until my early 40s, but less and less and less and less. Oh, you did. Okay. Yeah. And then finally it was just like, no more. You just got to stop. I'm done. I'm done. And I drank more and more and more and more of this stuff until my late 30s. Yeah. But I probably, it was very socially unacceptable and isolating to not drink. People would be like, academics would be like, you're boring. But I'd kick their butt the next day at the meeting when they're all kind of like worked. And then I'd see them and I, I'm not one of these people like things like, oh, aesthetics and muscle and leanness are all it. But I'd see people get tenure and I was like, you look like shit.

2:33:23You look like you aged 25 years and your kids are miserable. And all I hear are complaints about this. And I'm like, well, you're not taking care of yourself. So I don't want to be like that. Yeah. So I figured I'm not the smartest, but I can work hard. Right. And if I get more years, then eventually I can catch up or get ahead. Yeah. But it wasn't really competitive for me. I also just didn't like how it felt. I lucked out. But in any case, with the workaholism, as you're describing it, that is a very dangerous one. Yeah. That's usually a secondary affliction based on success addiction, the addiction to success, which comes down to that reward, that reinforcement.

2:33:58You get that little reward, the reinforcement of your goodness, the understanding of yourself. And so success addiction leads to workaholism. Success addiction, once again, is really downstream from earning love, from the belief that I can be enough if I do enough. The human doing phenomenon is that actually what we see. The beautiful thing about this is that, you know, I talk about the behavioral science principles. We've touched on the philosophy. We've talked about the theology. You've talked so much about the mechanisms on this show and in your writing and in your scholarship about the neurobiology behind it.

2:34:31And we're all wonderfully made. This all ties up in the same area. There's no, it's not like one thing leads in one direction and something else leads in another. On the contrary, you can get, there are many paths to these truths. The real pity is when we're not looking for the truth. The real pity is when we're distracting ourselves from what it actually means to be the people that we want to be, which leads us, you know, to the very beginning of this conversation. What if you were the person that you wanted to be? You know, that's, and the fact that we can actually do so by looking at this space of moral aspiration.

2:35:02I think that's a miracle. I think that's an incredible miracle.

Questions for self-assessment

2:35:06Before we wrap, I have two things. First, a question. Yeah. And then, and then a consideration. So I suppose both are questions because the consideration is for you. The first question is for somebody listening to this conversation today. I mean, earlier we were talking about exploring one's choices about and relationship to leisure and you touched on a number of other important points that, you know, people can return to because we've, we timestamped these, of course.

2:35:36But if there's a question or a small set of questions that anyone at any age can ask themselves that can help them redirect or, or just better orient in space and time and choice making, what are those? I mean, or do those, do those sorts of questions? Is there a self-assessment that actually does that? No, well, just, you know, like if we were going to, if we were, you know, shared this time on an airplane, I'm like, hey, thanks. And we didn't have cell phones. I'm like, anything else I should think about before we part ways? Like, you got any suggestions? Yeah. You know, or, or a book recommend, whatever.

2:36:07So much of what you've said today is fodder for more questions. Yeah. Which is, which means you've done, which is. Our work is so awesome. Yeah. So. Our work is like a self-licking ice cream cone. Nah, nah. Well, oh man, I haven't heard that analogy in a long time. That's how we used to describe some grants that we were about to deny. So let's not do that. So asking about how one spends leisure, understanding this relationship between pleasure and moral aspiration and seeking to, to fuse those. Right. Because that clearly is a powerfully great thing to do.

2:36:38Who wouldn't want to do more of that? Are there any other sort of probe questions that we might ask ourselves like once a day or once a week? Yeah. You know, while we're leaving the gym or mass or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. What is the, yeah. And, and there are certain things that, you know, inventories that I actually try to take, you know, to make sure that my, my, my, my hygiene is appropriate. Right. Holding yourself to high account is unbelievably important. Holding yourself to much higher account than anybody else would hold you. That's one of the reasons that the happiest people are the people who have a strong sense of propriety that they practice when no one sees them.

2:37:11You know, that's the essence of being honest with yourself. You know, it's one thing that you and I know so many famous people and, and, and typically they have a public persona and a private persona just because you have to separate those particular things. But the happiest of famous people, which is hard because fame is the only one of the worldly rewards you can only ever be happy in spite of, never because of, right? And yet people want it. That's the better answer to what I, I was asked earlier about like, yes, opens opportunities, limits freedoms, but you nailed it. Yeah. Those people, the people who are happy in spite of being famous are the same people when you're alone at dinner with them as they are in front of 10,000 people in an arena.

2:37:50They are. And I know people like that. I know people like Oprah Winfrey is like that. Oprah Winfrey is the same person at the dinner table as she is in a screaming arena full of people. And she's a well-integrated person and she's happy in spite of the fact that she's one of the probably five most famous people in the world. You know, it's extraordinary. I mean, I just co-authored a book with her, which was incredible learning experience about my own field by observing her life. Right. But there aren't very many people like that. So the way to do that is to subject yourself to, you know, the, the, the queries that you would use on somebody else.

2:38:21You know, what are the, what are the probing questions and, you know, and protocols that we have, it's usually based on, you know, asking people, you know, a set of questions. You know, I could walk through what's my idol? Am I serving my idols? There are a bunch of things like that. But fundamentally, for example, we all can fall into suffering about, you know, sort of the sense of emptiness, the ennui that comes from, you know, the modern world. We all feel depressed from time to time. There is a set of questions, why questions, that interrogates whether or not we actually are in touch with the most important macronutrient of our own happiness, which is the meaning of our lives.

2:38:59Here are the three questions, the three big whys that I ask myself continuously, that I, I, I probe and I have to answer honestly, because being honest with myself is the essence of getting into the moral space. Number one, why do I think things actually happen the way that they do? And am I acting according, accordance with that? And for, for, for a religious person like me, if I say, I think things happen the way they do because of the will of God, but I'm not acting that way, that's going to be a source of misery.

2:39:29Am I acting like I believe that the will of God exists and is true? Or am I acting like everything has to do with me, which means I'm freaking out about everything. I'm, I'm, I'm super stressed out about, you know, what's going to happen tomorrow that's completely out of my control. I'm anxious all the time. I'm worrying continuously. Worry is evidence of a lack of faith. And so, therefore, if I say I'm committing to my faith, it immediately extinguishes worry, right? You shouldn't feel guilty about it.

2:40:00You should act according to the person that you are. Number one, that's the coherence question. For philosophers, why do things happen the way they do? Am I acting that way? Second, why am I doing what I'm doing? That's the purpose question. You know, that's the purpose in life. That's purpose and meaning are not the same thing. Purpose is a subcategory of meaning. Why am I doing the things that I am actually doing? And then the next question beyond that is, is that in accord with my beliefs? Am I doing the things that I'm doing in accord with my beliefs?

2:40:30But why am I doing them? And by the way, for you and me, it might be because I'm chasing my idol, because I want more control, because I want more adoration of strangers, because I want more money, because I want to feel good. Is that in accord with my beliefs? And then the last part is, why does my life matter? And that's really to whom? Am I acting according to the people to whom my life actually matters? Am I acting that way? Am I marginalizing? And by the way, Andrew, I've screwed this up so many times. When I was a CEO running this big nonprofit organization, which was so important, right?

2:41:04I was at one point at the very end of it, I was interviewing a bunch of very famous and rich financial professionals for a book that I was starting to write that came out after I left and when I was already back in academia, called From Strength to Strength. It was a book about getting happier as you get older. And this woman is like a billionaire. I mean, unbelievable. Named firm. Famous. And she's telling me about her achievements. I'm like, congratulations. That's great. She says, I'm so unhappy. I said, well, talk to me, sister.

2:41:35What gives? She said, my husband and I were married, but we're roommates. You know, I have adult kids with a cordial relationship. I think my employees are, they do what I say, but I think they're afraid of me. I don't think my decision making is crisp anymore. I don't love it, but I don't know what else to do. She said, I go to the doctor and the doctor says, you need to stop drinking and get into the gym. But I keep drinking. I don't go to the gym. She said, when I grew up, I went to church when I was a little girl and I loved that. I always wanted that. And I don't go to church and I don't know why.

2:42:06And she says, professor, what am I supposed to do? I said, you don't need a Harvard professor. You just wrote your own prescription. Take a souvenir in your company and step back. Go away with your husband and get to know him. Go move closer to your kids. Get into AA. Go to the gym. Go back to church. Look, it's right there. She says, I know, I know, I know. I said, so why not? Why didn't you do that? And she was silent for a long time. And finally, she said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy.

2:42:38And that was like a knife to my heart. Because at that point in my life, me too. You know how many Little League games I didn't go to? Look, Little League games are boring. Let's be honest. But it's my kids. You know how many birthdays that I missed? Because I was trying to be special and successful and adored by people who don't care about me. And that specialness, that's an animal impulse that is hardwired into us. The moral aspiration is to choose happiness over that particular specialness.

2:43:10And that's the significance question. Why does my life matter? And to whom? And am I acting in accord and responsibly with my answer to that question? That's the interrogation. You do not disappoint, Professor Arthur Brooks. That's awesome. Those are great, great questions that I will be asking over and over. And that everyone should consider asking and trying to answer over and over for themselves.

2:43:42So I'm really moved.

Continuing the journey together

2:43:44Thank you.

Continuing the journey together

2:43:45Me too. You know, I've been doing this podcasting thing a while now. And every once in a while, someone sits down here and takes us someplace else. I knew you were that guy because we had shared the conversation before. But you've given me so much to think about. I'm going to be listening to this and taking notes for my own reasons. No, thank you. Thank you. What an honor it is. You've blessed me again and again and again and again with the scientific knowledge that you bring to it. But the soul you actually bring to the science. That's the magic formula that you actually bring to all your work. Well, thank you.

2:44:16I have a couple of people in my life who are about, I've always had a couple of people in my life who are about 10 years older. I really look up to you. I look up to you. I really do. I admire you. And it's a short list. Thank you. But it's a potent one. I won't tell you who else is on camera, who else is on there. But like it's an all-star team. I aspire to be more like you. And I say that with all the respect that you're a human and you have your struggles. But I think it's important for anyone at a given developmental stage to look at people who've migrated the path more or less that they're on but are ahead of them and get some useful information.

2:44:56So I appreciate that. So whether you like it or not, you're a mentor to me. Thank you, Edward. Thank you. That means a world to me. And we're all on the path. We're all on the path. We're all, we all have our life is, you know, that every religious tradition has pilgrimages, almost every religious tradition. If you go across India, you see mendicants that are actually walking toward a holy city. In the Christian faith, we have three big pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to Rome, and to Santiago de Compostela, which is the Camino de Santiago. And these pilgrimages are metaphorical for what we're actually trying to do with our lives, which is why they're such deeply mystical and spiritual experiences.

2:45:31I recommend that everybody go on a 500-mile walk across northern Spain from the French border to Santiago de Compostela. You didn't do it on your knees, did you? I did not do it on my knees, but I've done it just the last eight days two times because my wife won't do more than eight days, and I love my wife. But the point is you have that what you realize is that that's a metaphor for your life. We're walking through this life. We're all learning. Andrew's on a pilgrimage. Arthur is on a pilgrimage. Every single person watching us is on a pilgrimage. And that means progress, but that actually means the excellence that actually comes from making progress in little ways every single day and being open to metaphysical truths.

2:46:06So it moves me a lot that I could be some little stone church on the side of the road on your pilgrimage. You absolutely are. And in sharing this with other people, you are to them too. So I did say I had one more question slash consideration. So I'm so inspired and struck by what you shared that I think it would be worth considering perhaps, and don't feel obligated to answer here. Maybe we just leave it a cliffhanger and not answer on here, or if you want, you can.

2:46:39People would really benefit from hearing from you more in the context of structured sets of questions. I know you do this on your podcast. We've touched on some of that today. You have your books and so forth, but it'd be fun to explore the possibility of doing a self-exploration series with you at some point. And we could figure out the venue if it's on here or it's elsewhere. But if you'd be willing to consider ways we could explore things more fully, also selfishly so I can learn more from you.

2:47:09Likewise. My answer is yes. Awesome. Let's do it, man. All right. Let's do it. Let's get a band together. Fantastic. Yeah. I love it. God bless you. God bless you too, Andrew. Thank you for all the things that you're bringing to me and for all the people who are watching. I'm honored to be part of this. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Arthur Brooks. To learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books, please see the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple.

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2:48:14This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.

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