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I take the same test year by year and I am 60% happier than I was 5 years ago because I finally cracked the code okay
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so Arthur BR the world-renowned social scientist har Professor best-selling author who teaches people how to live a
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better happier life I've studied the science of happiness and I found that most of what Society tells us is wrong
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and we will go into all of this for example they found that happiness is about 50% genetic introverts tend to
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have more long-term Happiness and happiness is a mind virus it will transmit from one person to another
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person to another person really yeah they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives measuring everything for
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many years and they found obesity is contagious when your friends get divorced you're more likely to get
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divorced but also when your friends get happy you're more likely to get happy
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the problem is with happiness has been in Decline since about 1990 one of the reasons is that we need struggle and
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suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek but we know that for example 95% of D fail is the most
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unsuccessful industry in the world because the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat then
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I'm actually going to have a more wonderful life that's actually not true
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you actually get more satisfaction from the progress okay so if not a weight number or a financial number what's a
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better more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success to being happier there are goals that actually do
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lead to the happiest life and the more you have the better off you are the four goals that really matter
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are quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that
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[Music] deal Arthur Steve what do you do I am dedicated to lifting people up and
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bringing them together using the science and ideas around human happiness where did you teach I teach at Harvard
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University are you a professor of Happiness yeah I'm a professor of leadership technically at the Harvard
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Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School but my area is leadership and happiness so I've studied the the
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science of Happiness which is a huge growing field multi-dimensional field across Social Psychology and
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Neuroscience behavioral economics Philosophy for a long time and what I try to do is I bring it to Future
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Leaders in politics and policy and especially business and help them understand themselves as happiness
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teachers so they can be happier and they can be more successful and bring more happiness to the people they lead what
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is the state of Happiness can you qu can we quantify that where we are in terms of are we getting happier as a people or
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more unhappy as a people we can we can't so the United Nations and a lot of other
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places try to see the happiest country you've seen those data a lot the happiest countri it's always Denmark
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it's always the Nordic countries um you can't do that and that's like the way
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that that happens is they go to 100 countries and they they survey a thousand people in each of countries and
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say how do you evaluate your life that's like asking people in every country how
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much you like the music in your country and on the basis of the highest rankings
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internally you say who has the best music that doesn't really make sense it's you know it's bad methodology you
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can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience
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so I on inside countries inside communities over time I'm I'm willing to
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look at that and that shows that in most of the oecd countries including the United States and UK our countries um
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happiness has been in Decline since about 1990 since about 1990 yeah is that when
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you were born yeah 92 it's not you it's us what is um I always think when people
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commit their lives largely to a topic that that must have very personal roots with that individual sure what are your
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personal roots with the subject of Happiness it's hard for me it's hard for
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me I'm not a naturally happy person I'm way below average in happiness and at
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least 50% of that is genetic by the way so there's a lot of research looking at
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identical twins there's a whole database of identical twins born between the mid
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1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at Birth then reunited as adults this was not an experiment
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that was cooked up by some you know diabolical Harvard you know social scientists like me it was it happened
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naturally just over the of events and when they were reunited they were given personality tests you can see some of
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these meetings where they were reunited on on YouTube and they're they're
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wonderful they're joyful and funny you find that you have an identical twin you
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didn't know about and say finding all these commonalities but of course there's always a bunch of social
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scientists you know with with clipboards you know Annoying them like me you know
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taking data and so the personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your
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personality genetic and the rest is environmental and experiential and circumstantial but 80% up to 80% that's
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a lot and that means your openness to experience your conscientiousness as a person your extroversion agreeableness
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neuroticism and and happiness is about 50% genetic your mother literally made you unhappy
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Steve I'm or happy your results May Vary was your household a happy place it was a complicated place but it
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wasn't terrible because my parents were good parents and they loved each other
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and they loved us but my relationship by the time I was a young adult was cordial because they were busy with
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their issues and you know this is one of the things that I talk about with a lot
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of people nobody has a perfect childhood and a lot of people are troubled by their childhood and they feel doomed to
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repeat the circumstances of their childhoods but they're not you can rewrite your own past history by looking
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back at what happened and deciding to change certain variables in the way that you're going to live your adult life so
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Steve you're going to get married and you're going to have children and then
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you need to look at your own childhood and say what are the things that I want to be the same and what are the things
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that I want to be different I'm designing my life right now on not just on the basis of the things that went
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right but on the basis of the things that went wrong you know I wasn't close
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to my parents they never lived close to me my children who are now growing up never had a an intense experience of a
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relationship with any of their grandparents they're one side lived in Barcelona the other side lived in
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Seattle we were you know in New York and Washington DC and and and and so now no
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you know I'm I'm going to live near my kids and I'm a grandfather now um all
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three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime whether they want to or not I see my grandson as much
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as I can next week I turn down a whole bunch of work because I I get to babysit my my grandson is there any research
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that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival whether it's with when they're
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suffering with you know illnesses or I often think about this sort of stereotype that when someone retires
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yeah or when they stop working or when their partner dies in old age so they might be both of them might be 90 years
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old when one of the partners dies it seems that the the remaining the surviving partner has months left
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sometimes that's mostly true the when is not true here's this is depressing how
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you know that statistic which is that if the husband dies the wife is going to be
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fine really yeah widows are way happier than widowers I told that to my wife and
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she's like huh um widowers do really poorly generally men do very poorly part of the
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reason is because these data are disputed but more or less they're they're directionally
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correct 60% of 60-year old men say their best friend is their wife 30% of their wives say their best friend is their
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husband women have more relationships they have close or deeper love relationships with non-related kin and
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with the adult children typically than than the than the husband does the husband's most intense companion
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relationship typically is with the wife and that's why that's an asymmetric stat
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and that's what the data say but yeah for sure I mean back to the main point
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hope is super critical on illness on everything I mean hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes and
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we know that when people lose hope they give up and when they give up they don't
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take care of themselves they don't do what they need to do they don't exercise
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like they should they don't they're not as active they're not talking to other
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people their minds are not stimulated they don't eat right they might use substances and ways that they shouldn't
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and all of those things compound and so just at the physiological level you'd
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see that you'd be You' have degradation when there is no hope and when you're 90
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you can't afford it actually I'm 59 I can't afford it either and neither can
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you at 31 we all need hope this is he huge to the extent that you can actually bring hope to People by showing them
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they can do something as an agent in their own future that's just giving them
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a longer better more successful life that that's that's what I want to do
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with my work you know because I've seen so much I mean since I've actually
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dedicated myself to this I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being and I don't game the numbers
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I mean I have there there's macronutrients to your happiness you have to take the different elements it's
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not a single measur thing and there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up
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to it and I follow this um very carefully month by month by month semester by semester year by year and I
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take the same tests as my students do every year and I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work
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because of the work that you've done on yourself or because of your work as a
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both because here's the deal if you want to be happier you need to understand the
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science you need to apply it to your life you need to share it with others because you won't remember it and hold
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yourself accountable unless you're teaching it that's why I teach people to
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be happiness teachers interesting yeah yeah so so my guess is how long you been doing the podcast two years we launched
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on YouTube three years ago yeah it's uh it's probably having a big effect on
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your life huge because you're talking about these ideas and my guess is that
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you're in your private life you're talking about the ideas that you learned
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with other people and every time you share these ideas you imprint them not just sort of they're not just limic
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fantasms they become you use them with the executive centers of your brain the more that you learn the more you talk
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about what you learn the better off you get you're only talking about things
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that Empower people and lift them up and make their lives better these are the topics of what you do right because you
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want people to be happier and more successful that's the point of the show right and that's how you're getting
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happier and more successful is there research that shows this point of agency correlates to
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happiness and survival yes like longevity and so agency essentially means that the belief that you have
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control over your life and your future in essence yeah and that you're there
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are things that you can do so that you're not helpless helplessness is the problem this this gets back to the work
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of Marty Seligman in the in the late 60s and 19 early 1970s he's the father of
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positive psychology he created the whole field of positive psychology he's a
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great mentor and hero to me he's done so much for me and and intellectually and
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in my career and as as a friend just as a person and when he was doing his early
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work he was doing animal stuff studies and work on human beings to take away their agency so he would do things like
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people would be you know putting nickels into a slot machine and they would figure out along the way that it didn't
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matter if they pulled the handle or not that they were getting the same outcomes
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that he took away just little tiny bits of agency he had dogs in boxes where the
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they would shock the floors of the boxes this is hard to get through internal review boards now but they would because
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it seems cruel it wasn't big shocks but the whole point was that the dogs would
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you know step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them but when they couldn't do that anymore they would just
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like lie down and whimper on the shocking floor they would give up this is called learned helplessness people
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will learn their helplessness when they realize that when they when or they figure out or they conclude or they're
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told by politicians and media and activists and everybody else that there's nothing that they can do and
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they're a victim when you take on the identity a victim you learn your helplessness and that will degrade your
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quality of life make you less successful less happy and a lot of studies say that
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you'll you won't even live as long this point of agency is so interesting I um I had someone on the
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show at the very beginning of the show and he said that he basically crowdsources his book guy called Mo gat
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you might know the guy says he crowdsources his book and he gets 500 people to reread to read his book before
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it comes out and he goes when we got down to the part in my book about personal responsibility he goes 8% of
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people drop off the Google Document because they don't want to read it uhuh yeah no that's a spinach this this and
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and it's interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday
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morning in the Atlantic 12 or 1300 words on the signs of happiness and about once
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every two or three months I have a spinach column which says you want to be happy be humble you want to be happy
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change your mind you want to be happy don't tell somebody if they disagree with you that they're stupid and evil
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listen listen more than you talk you know just what your grandmother told you right about how to be a successful
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person but it's all about Humanity about humility but these are hard things in a
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society where all of our biases are I'm right you're wrong I don't want to
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listen la la la la la if it goes against my my whatever ideological biases that I
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happen to have and I'll write a spinach column and those are the ones that get
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way less way fewer readers do you know what's interesting I was as you were speaking I was thinking that nobody
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thinks they're a victim they can spot victimhood in other people very successfully but there's no one
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listening to this right now that would say I am a victim so how does one know if
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they are a victim well I mean a lot of people will say I am a victim of these institutional biases a lot of people
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will a lot of people really will say that I mean they will say that I'm a victim of capitalism or I'm a victim of
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powerful people I'm a victim of of conspiracies that are happen the the Deep State whatever happens to be a lot
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of people really will talk about it in that particular way and that's sort of
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the problem now of course all victims of something but we all have tons of power
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and the really interesting thing in life is to show people the levels of power that they have the levers of power that
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they have that don't start with trying to change the outside world that start
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with the inside of their heads that's what I'm dedicated to doing is showing
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people that the hope that they should have comes from the The Leverage they have over their circumstances which
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starts with what they thought they had the least control over their emotions their happiness their well-being the
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love that they experience because the commitments that they make if you really want to have power start with managing
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yourself not trying to manage the outside world is happiness a choice happiness is unattainable because it's a
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direction not a destination is being happier a choice yes being happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment
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that you are going to make in your life and in your relationships in the way that you manage yourself absolutely do
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you think there is a starting point to being happier yeah it actually starts with a
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starts with U recognizing that most of what Society tells us about happiness is wrong what's wrong it's not a feeling
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happiness is not a feeling on my first day of class I have you know two sections of 90 MBA students at the
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Harvard Business School and they they're taking this happiness science of Happiness seminar I've got 400 in the
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waiting list there's an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about right
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it's the happiness class it's super fun I love it I love my students they're
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terrific and the I cold call them on the first day by saying you know what's
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happiness I pick one two 3 10 what's happiness and they will say it's the
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feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love or it's how I feel when I'm
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doing what I enjoy feelings feelings feelings feelings I say wrong the biggest barrier to actually getting
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happier is believing that happiness is a feeling it's not it's happiness is
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evidence or feelings are evidence of Happiness like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner that's how to
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understand feelings now feelings are really really important your affect your mood is critically important but
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happiness is something a lot more tangible you start getting happier the beginning of Happiness of be of getting
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happier because true happiness is not the goal because you have to have negative emotions negative emotions keep
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you alive negative experiences make you learn and grow so you don't want pure
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happiness the Side of Heaven H dangerous you'd be dead quickly without a lot of
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unhappiness but getting happier starts with this understanding that really what it is is the pursuit of three things
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enjoyment satisfaction and meaning those are the three macronutrients so you and
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I are nutrition nerds right and what we all know and I've heard people say on
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your show is that most people get insufficient protein and when you come to America Everybody Eats way too many
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highly glycemic carbohydrates right happiness is the same thing we get the macronutrient profile wrong we need more
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enjoyment satisfaction and meaning we know we have to know how to get them in in efficient and healthy ways and we
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need them in Balance can you define enjoyment satisfaction and meaning for me what yeah see this is the problem
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because a lot of people think they know what these things are but they aren't
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but this is the adventure because once you kind of get into the details of this then you've got real strategies for
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getting happier the definition provides strategy so let's start with enjoyment
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okay most people think it's the same as pleasure but that's wrong pleasure is a
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limic phenomenon now of course you know this because you've had you've had
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plenty of guests who talked about the lmic system of the brain that's the console of tissue deep inside the brain
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that's been evolving over the past 40 million years it takes signals from the
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brain stem and other parts rudimentary structures in the brain it takes those signals about what's going on in the
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outside in the lyic system it translates them into information all your emotions
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are is information there's no such thing as good and bad feelings bad feelings
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good feel no they're all good they might be maladapted but but the point is positive and negative emotions keep you
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alive you need especially the negative emotions I talk about negative emotions all the time because they survival is
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critical and so anger and sadness and fear and disgust which are the big four negative emotions these have kept you
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alive thousands and thousands and thousands of times really important that information there then is relayed onto
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the neocortex of the brain specifically the prefrontal cortex the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead where
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you can figure out what are these emotions what do they mean and how am I going to react according to them now a
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lot of times these signals are all goofed up and and we're very reactive which means that we're not letting our
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prefrontal cortex catch up with our lyic system and that's a lot of the work that
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I do but back to enjoyment enjoyment is not the same as pleasure because pleasure is limic it's nothing more than
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a signal where the ventral straight and the reward center of your brain is getting tapped in the lyic system saying
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that thing is going to be good for survival and passing on your genes that's why feels good go do it sex and
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sugar sex and sugar sex and sugar and a lot and gambling Which social media has a lot in common with slot machines and
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all these little things that get back to your primordial evolutionary past I know
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you love The evolutionary biology and psychology because this gives us so much information about who we are today look
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at the place to see and see yourself kind of and and all of these things that give us pleasure it's because they they
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went back to survival and propagation of the species so importantly all those pleasure-filled things if you pursue
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them you're just sitting in your lyic system and modern technology and Society
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will engorge these things into incredibly unhealthy practices so you get you know we have natural endorphins
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that make us feel good and and help us when we actually get hurt so that we can get back to our cave and of course we've
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chemically altered them into fentel which feels great until you die fenel is not a big thing in the UK but it's a
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huge thing here it's huge I mean we have a 100,000 drug overdose deaths every
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year in the United States mostly because of fentanyl it's unbelievable but that
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that we have other versions of that you know we can have stochastic experiences you know things that that that happen
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occasionally and give us a reward when we when something happens um not in predictably but
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unpredictably um and so we make slot machines and they give us all this that you know tap into that that brain
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chemistry or we want to propagate the species and so we turn it into pornography which is unbelievably
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powerful and dangerous for the brain because it captures the brain and destroys relationships along the way
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it's just feny in its way but all of these things are just pleasure pleasure
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anything that can be addictive which pleasure-filled things typically can if you if you do them compulsively over and
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over and over again it will make you less happy but here's know when people ask me so does that mean I should never
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drink alcohol I should never gamble no no no no you need to add two things to turn them into enjoyment you need to add
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people in memory because if you add people in memory to something then you're moving the experience into your
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prefrontal cortex that's when it's fully human that's when it's not an animal
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experience it's a human experience and that is a very important part of your
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happiness and so the big question is if something's addictive if you're doing it
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alone you're probably doing it wrong what about sex that's pornography and
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masturbation is alone and that's not good for you is the whole point that's I mean again reasonable
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people disagree and some people be like what's this guy talking about but the
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whole point is that that the data on pornography or that it captures the brain and ultimately it doesn't on
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average lead to happier lives because it truncates the reproductive experience at
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the level of pleasure and doesn't take it all the way to enjoyment interesting yeah have you have
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you studied porn much as a subject sort of everybody in my field whes up there it's not something that I focus that
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much on cuz you know it's focusing on the research on pornography makes you look a little creepy at P
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59 it's not a good look it's like so so so what do you study it's like
00:23:06
yeah interesting so people in memory turn pleasure into enjoyment to enjoyment that's right so alcohol add
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people in memory you know the anheiser bush Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of you know a dude alone
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in his apartment pounding a 12-pack that's how a lot of people use the product but that's everybody knows
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that's an irresponsible dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism what
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they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends you know clink and bottles together having a great time
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that is pleasure alcohol plus people plus memory equals enjoyment and that leads to happiness because they want to
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join their brand to happiness not just to Pure Pleasure and certainly not to addiction same with like Coca-Cola all
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the Coca-Cola ads are like the world cup with your friends and In Summer with your friends and and that's actually
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less addictive I mean there are certain you know the sugar and and caffeine are certainly adictive but they don't have
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the same properties of of brain capture in the same way for sure because they don't they don't stimulate as much
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dopamine as as you know something like alcohol does and and so they're less likely to make you really addicted but
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the whole point is that they're it it does give you a little bit of pleasure
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but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment and you only get that when you're doing it with people satisfaction
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satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle you're an entrepreneur you understand this one really well you're
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at deferring your gratification all entrepreneurs are good successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring
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gratification which means I'm going to do this hard thing and it's going to get
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big payoff and that payoff is going to be sweet that's satisfaction there a really
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funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek and
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that's a really important part of our happiness so you find the people who are
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better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction and they're happier there's a lot of that remember
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you've heard about the marshmallow experiment yeah and you know people have debunked it but they actually haven't so
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the marshmallow experiment was taken place it took place in the late' 60s where Walter Michelle was a psychologist
00:25:07
at Stanford out in paloalto he had a you know a little laboratory set up where he
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would come in and sit down on one side of a table and there was a kid on the other side of the table between four and
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eight years old and in front of the kid was a marshmallow and so he says to the kid you want the marshmallow the kid's
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like yeah yeah he says I tell you what I have to go take a phone call in the back
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here but when I come back if the marshmallow is still there I'll give you another one can you wait every kid's
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like yeah totally totally totally worth it he comes back five minutes later or so 80% of the kids had eaten the
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marshmallow 20% of the kids hadn't now that's a lot 80% of the kids could not
00:25:43
to further gratification so the real question is who's the 20% it's Steve
00:25:49
Bartlett that these are the people that went on to do distinguished things they did better in school they got better
00:25:56
grades they went on to have more job success they had better relationships that's what they found that the most
00:26:03
successful kids now the that what people fight about now is why whether it's
00:26:07
nature or nurture it's probably 50/50 like everything else in life it's both
00:26:12
nature and nurture but the bigger point is good things come to those who wait and when you wait you suffer and you
00:26:19
need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience now the bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother
00:26:25
Nature has a big lie at the end of it Mother Nature says if you get it you're
00:26:30
going to love it forever and that's not true see the the the brain the brain
00:26:36
works emotionally and physically in um an environment of homeostasis homeostasis means that you always return
00:26:42
to your Baseline physiologically and emotionally because you can't stay in a
00:26:47
in a in in an unusual physiological State unusual states are are reaction you need to be ready to react and so you
00:26:56
know you step off the tread Mill your heart is elevated your heart goes back to where it was so you're not dead in a
00:27:02
week the same thing is true for you emotionally something really good or bad happens to you you think it's going to
00:27:07
last forever so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing but it doesn't last forever does it
00:27:14
that's the problem we actually think that if I get that billion dollars it's
00:27:19
going to be really great and the first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her himself is I guess I
00:27:26
needed another billion because of homeostasis and that puts you on something called the hedonic
00:27:31
treadmill more more more more more more more more so that's the great conundrum
00:27:36
of the striver is that there's never enough Never Enough never enough I deal
00:27:41
with people all day long I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful but not happy and a lot of
00:27:48
what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that but also gives you the solution which is that your
00:27:55
satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have so have more is not
00:28:00
the right strategy satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want halves divided by
00:28:08
wants successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their halves they need to want
00:28:15
less and that's a whole kettle of fish that's spirituality that's discipline
00:28:20
that's Fitness that's diet that's a whole lot of things that go into that
00:28:26
and that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction sounds like a contradiction
00:28:31
though doesn't it sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is going to make me happy
00:28:36
but I should want less yeah what people actually who crack this code and and a lot of you know Eastern Traditions
00:28:42
actually get into this is not that striving is bad but that striving in itself has an has a a reward to it that
00:28:52
you that the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not a right rival what you
00:28:58
wanted was progress and then you start to get the reward from the progress itself there's a funny thing in the the
00:29:03
in the research on dieting we all know that is the most expensive unsuccessful industry in the world right 95% of diets
00:29:09
fail which means within a year people have gained back all the weight that they've lost but they're successful in
00:29:15
so far as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet here's the
00:29:19
thing about diets every day you're willing to foro the food you like in exchange for the reward which is the
00:29:26
scale going down when you hit your goal it's going to be so great it's going to be so great you
00:29:31
know what the reward is Dave you never again get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life
00:29:35
congratulations once you've got there that's why you fail and the arrival
00:29:40
fallacy which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field is that it's going to be sweet when I get to the goal
00:29:45
it isn't what you're going to have is homeostasis when you get to your goal
00:29:49
frustration and disappointment therefore you need to want less you need to think
00:29:53
about the about less about wanting these arrival experience experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress from
00:30:00
the journey that's really what it comes down to and people who crack that code
00:30:05
over the course of self-discipline self- understanding self-management they can actually experience remarkably higher
00:30:11
satisfaction the dolly Lama I've been working with the dolly llama closely for
00:30:14
the past 11 years and I asked him this question how can I get lasting satisfaction and he said you need to
00:30:23
want what you have not to have what you want and that's what it comes down to
00:30:28
it's the management of my wants not my Hales on that point we're at the time of
00:30:39
year now where so many people are thinking about diets you mentioned that there so for those people that are
00:30:44
approaching that moment and that you know they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of
00:30:47
things what is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever what's a better more
00:30:54
realistic um goal to set that has more chance of success yeah has it it's it's
00:30:59
interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't
00:31:03
homeostatically return us to the Baseline that won't throw us onto this honic treadmill over and over and over
00:31:08
again those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life and the more you have the better off you
00:31:14
are or more actually is better but they don't fall into the categories of money
00:31:19
power pleasure and fame which are the typical kind of goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or you
00:31:25
know whatever it happens to be the four goals that really matter are Faith Family friendship and work that serves
00:31:33
others those are the four really great and Transcendent goals that we can have now there's nothing wrong with money or
00:31:39
power or pleasure or fame there's nothing wrong with those things but only as intermediate goals to make it easier
00:31:44
for us to pursue and accumulate deeper Faith or philosophical life I'm not talking about traditional
00:31:50
religious Faith necessarily better family relationships which are very mystical um poorly understood even in
00:31:57
Neuroscience in a lot of ways friendship deep friendship it's hard for a lot of
00:32:02
people especially successful people and work that where you earn your success and serve other people that's what it
00:32:08
comes down to so those are the right New Year's goals that we need you know this
00:32:12
year what am I going to do what how am I how am I going to grow closer to the Divine how am I going to do that this
00:32:18
year what am I going to do to draw closer to my family and to have a a more intimate relationship with my family how
00:32:23
am I going to have deeper friendships this year and how am I going to take my work
00:32:27
and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people how am I going to do that what
00:32:34
is we haven't got to meaning yet yeah we haven't got to meaning yet you said the
00:32:38
word there but but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal because there's still going to be a
00:32:43
huge group of people that go listen I get it love it I believe it but I hate this belly fat yeah I get it and this
00:32:49
belly fat yo-yos every year so so those are intermediate goals and there's nothing wrong with those things the
00:32:54
problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the
00:32:57
final goal Because by the time you get there you think why why that wasn't as
00:33:03
meaningful as I thought that wasn't as good as I thought that's the arrival
00:33:06
fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat then I'm actually going to
00:33:09
have somehow a more wonderful life that's actually not true the reason that you're doing that is because you want to
00:33:16
live longer with your spouse and see your and and you dandel your 11 grandchildren on your knee that's the
00:33:21
reason you want to do this because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason as opposed to an extrinsic reason having
00:33:26
to do with people will love me more I mean it's amazing to me cuz I you know
00:33:30
I'm I do a lot of you know wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with
00:33:34
happiness I I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity Community because I have sort of the
00:33:38
happiness console the science of the happiness console that I put into those things and and so I meet a lot of people
00:33:43
that are really into the fitness part and and what what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these
00:33:49
fitness goals like I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and I'm
00:33:53
going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing and and buy if they stick to it by September or October
00:34:00
where they're finding is that you know they're not getting any more attention
00:34:04
or compliments from women but a lot of dudes are going looking good dude and they're like that's not what I
00:34:12
wanted and part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this
00:34:16
image of what will actually come from the the satis the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate
00:34:22
goals these aren't the right final goals you got to have the right final goals
00:34:27
then set some intermediate goals along the way but not let's not kid ourselves
00:34:30
and when you think carefully about that that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower
00:34:36
abs which by the way is not necessarily that healthy is going to materially improve
00:34:44
your life and your relationships it's not just isn't what's a better end goal
00:34:47
then as it relates to Fitness would it be something more centered on health yeah it is something that's actually
00:34:53
sustainable and having you do with health also with happiness is the way that this works so I work out 60 minutes
00:34:58
a day it's not because I'm vain look I'm like I got a face for radio Steve I mean
00:35:02
it's good I don't know what you're talking about I know but it's age
00:35:05
adjusted I look good you know this I think you look good period and I'm not you know I've got a girlfriend but
00:35:11
credit where credits to you the thank you Steve I appreciate that but you made my week see this was my
00:35:18
goal yeah but the reason that I do this is because I find that for me that working
00:35:25
out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day working out every
00:35:29
day is much easier than working out as often as I can right amen yeah and practicing my religion every day is much
00:35:37
easier than practicing my religion when it when it comes naturally to me or when
00:35:41
I find it convenient eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day and so the result of that is that I find
00:35:46
that with those particular routines I program those things into my life and I'm a much happier guy look at lowers my
00:35:52
cortisol levels which are naturally very high I'm a very anxious person um and
00:35:57
and I understand anxiety I understand the cortisol production I understand how to manage it and and this is one of my
00:36:01
management techniques thing about Fitness to understand is when I say it makes you happier it actually doesn't it
00:36:07
lowers your unhappiness happiness and unhappiness largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which is to
00:36:14
say posi positive and negative affect they're produced in different parts of
00:36:18
the lyic system so you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness
00:36:24
I have tests for that that I put my students through you're probably somebody who experiences both very high
00:36:30
positive effect and very high negative effect we've only met but my guess is
00:36:34
that you're a mad scientist that's the profile and so that means is you got two
00:36:39
strategies you want to keep your positive effect high and you want to manage your negative effect effect and
00:36:44
one of the best ways to manage your negative effect effect is physical exercise vigorous physical exercise
00:36:49
today today for me was leg day I hate leg day but I feel pretty good right now okay that makes sense I've got an
00:36:57
answer there that I that I'm super clear on um I should be aiming at the end goal
00:37:02
of Happiness ultimately even if it the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short-term things that are
00:37:08
measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal and the real key here is consistency yeah I this was the big
00:37:15
unlock for my whole Fitness thing because I was that person which will be 90% of people listening now that made
00:37:20
the goal every year that I was going to go to you know change my life every year
00:37:23
never worked right because I was aiming at getting a pack for summer so when I arrived with the six pack and it worked
00:37:31
or summer it was great I look great I got I actually got I think I got a couple of compliments which was nice
00:37:37
however the minute summer finished or the six-pack arrived I could not find for the life of me the motivation no so
00:37:43
I'd go into winter and I'd become there's no willpower that can that like
00:37:46
you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life consistency making my goal consistency
00:37:53
andits was the big unlock for me for sure because then okay the goal becomes if I go to the gym every day if
00:38:00
I make that part of my habits I'm going to be healthier happier better at my job
00:38:04
[ __ ] is there anything more important is that less important than a six-pack and that mind set shift changed my life
00:38:11
for sure meaning then meaning was the last of the three yeah meaning is the why of your life this is the hardest for
00:38:18
most people especially young adults this is really really hard so meaning is is really a combination of three things
00:38:25
it's coherent purpose and significance coherence is things happen for a reason
00:38:31
and so meaning in your life means you got to have a theory about why things happen like it's one damn thing after
00:38:36
another I mean you got to have some concept of why things happen purpose is my life has Direction and has goals
00:38:42
that's what purpose really is I'm going in this direction toward these things
00:38:46
without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy and the last but not least is significance which is it would matter if
00:38:52
I weren't here I'm significant those are the three parts of me meaning in
00:38:57
people's lives according to you know philosophers and social psychologist so
00:39:00
there there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompasses these three ideas so you can
00:39:06
remember them into two questions and you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions
00:39:13
that you believe and there's no right answers you just got to have your answers you want to play yeah here's the
00:39:19
quiz question number one why are you alive you can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on Earth
00:39:28
to do both okay so why am I alive that's something that I get to answer every
00:39:34
single day I get to Define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up what was it I went to the gym I was
00:39:40
on the running machine because I know I've got a not going to be able to today
00:39:44
and then I came here and had this conversation with you yeah but why are you why are you doing this conversation
00:39:49
with me Steve the iag guy Theory comes to mind when you ask that which is it's
00:39:54
incredibly selfish I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation and I know that it pays um
00:40:00
pays it forward to other people who are going to going to learn from it as well and that makes it feel worthwhile so you
00:40:05
said two things fun and service yeah right which is more important to you transcendentally which is more
00:40:12
important to you it's the service part yeah okay good we're that gives me all
00:40:17
my that gives me all my Worth right but the more you focus on that the better it
00:40:21
gets now we uncovered that so now thinking about that you put the order of operations into the podcast to say did
00:40:28
it does it serve is that guest going to serve is this question going to serve is
00:40:32
this show going to serve is this sponsor GNA serve the people who are watching this podcast then suddenly
00:40:41
meaning starts to go starts to really spread out of the soil because you we got to that if it's like is it fun yeah
00:40:48
good so look my my whole have a company and that that that rides alongside what I do academically and everybody that
00:40:56
works with me we have an order of operations and the order of operations are these are the four goals but they
00:41:01
have to be in this order you just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work
00:41:06
that's what you basically said it's probably more like lift people up and
00:41:10
have an adventure that's probably in intellectual Adventure right but the order of operations has to be right if
00:41:18
you're having fun more than you're serving other people you're not going to
00:41:21
find your sense of meaning based on that first question so you see you see where
00:41:25
we're going with that right so the second question is harder for what are you willing to die today
00:41:31
there's a couple of people in my life that I die for I die for my romantic partner i' die for my brothers and
00:41:37
sisters any of them MH interestingly I don't know if I die for my parents which is interesting did
00:41:44
you die for an idea did you die for your country I would die it when you say for
00:41:52
my country do you mean to save the country I don't know I mean if you were called to even if it were
00:41:59
ridiculous even if you thought it were ridiculous would you die because you love your
00:42:05
country it depends what you mean by that what's the cost if I what's the cost if
00:42:09
I stay alive no I know and I and it's it everything is context specific to a
00:42:13
certain extent but really what I'm I'm trying to see is what's your what's your
00:42:19
kind of reaction is to this you know to see what the there are good things in there you are willing to die for your
00:42:25
girlfriend yeah Will to die for your brothers and sisters Mom and Dad it's like jur kind your mom listen to this
00:42:32
podcast they do but I'm just being honest because I think I think I don't
00:42:37
know why I said that but I just I no for sure this is good this is really important right this is worth thinking
00:42:42
about right now the worst answer is I don't know or nothing those are the worst answers that doesn't mean it's a
00:42:49
problem on the contrary it's a huge opportunity huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have
00:42:55
answers to these questions because you don't have to go to you know get your
00:42:59
PhD in philosophy you don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with the guru
00:43:03
someplace in the himas you need to look for your answers to these questions that's it that's the quest that's the
00:43:09
Vision Quest so and when you see somebody find these things like a lot of young adults have they're nowhere near
00:43:16
you where you are on your journey you're solid Steve I mean this is good stuff
00:43:20
but I meet a lot of people like why am I alive cuz a egg met a sperm really yeah and what are you willing to die for
00:43:29
nothing really or I don't know right A lot of people and then they uncover that
00:43:33
they don't have a why is what it comes down to repeat the questions again why
00:43:38
are you alive and for what are you willing to die this very day there's no wrong
00:43:45
answers I have so many young kids in particular messaging me on Instagram with the same question which is I think
00:43:52
Society Instagram quotes all of that stuff has told them that they need to find find their purpose and it seems
00:43:57
that they're in Hunt of their purpose like it's some Easter egg um and you
00:44:01
think about that phrase itself find your purpose it comes loaded with two assumptions find which means you got to
00:44:07
go search for it and purpose which is a singular word means there's one of them
00:44:11
somewhere and the unhappiness that I sense because they were unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they've
00:44:19
been searching for causes them to feel all kinds of inadequacy what do you say to that yeah well part of it is because
00:44:26
that's the what we call in in business the go find a rock theory of leadership
00:44:32
where the the CEO says to an employee go give me a rock like what go give me a rock okay so you go outside and you
00:44:39
bring a rock back in the boss says wrong Rock that's not helpful right that's go
00:44:44
find your purpose that's the go find a rock theory of leadership it's like what
00:44:49
rock how where do I look the world is full of rocks that's so you need to be a
00:44:54
lot more specific and figuring out deeply why you believe you're walking the Earth why you actually are alive
00:45:01
besides just the mechanical you know explanation for what we understand in in 10th grade biology the real why the Deep
00:45:08
why you're alive and and think really I mean if with push came to shove I would
00:45:13
die for this I actually would die for this thing that's when you understand what your deepest values are that's when
00:45:19
you can actually write your mission statement that's what it comes down to and that's how people actually find is
00:45:25
opposed to just platitudes on the internet of go find your purpose as if I mean I I spent a lot of time in darmala
00:45:32
in in the Himalayan Foothills this where the Dal Lama lives in in um in Northern
00:45:36
India and uh when I'm me in darm Solo was a little village until the Daly Lama
00:45:43
went there about 1960 when he was exiled from China when was kicked out of Tibet
00:45:47
and now it's not a metropolis but there's tons of people there and there's
00:45:52
I meet a lot of westerners there there's Seekers I'm a seek Seeker man gosh yeah
00:45:57
yeah I'm a seeker and so I'm going to go to a place where I feel like there's a
00:46:00
lot of positive spiritual energy and don't get me wrong I mean I've you know
00:46:04
I've studied meditation with the Dal Lamas Tibetan Buddhist monks I mean it's
00:46:11
I'm a much better Catholic on the basis of this I feel like I'm I'm I'm a deeper
00:46:14
Christian on the basis of this but the idea of just going someplace and and and randomly looking hoping that your
00:46:23
purpose just hunts you down is misguided you have to have a much better more specific sense of what you're looking
00:46:31
for and these things coherence significance and purpose as part of meaning or the way to do it and those
00:46:37
two questions are a good way at least to get started there's going to be a huge
00:46:40
you know group of people that are listen to this and thinking you know what I don't have anything that I would die for
00:46:46
and I don't really know why I'm alive yeah and that's just made me hugely good
00:46:50
news it's incredibly good news because that's the basis of your adventure is to
00:46:55
find those things cuz in point of fact there are things out there you just don't know them yet and you haven't been
00:47:00
looking for them you've been who knows what you've been looking for like maybe
00:47:04
even looking for what I like right why is that wrong there's nothing wrong but
00:47:09
it's just not going to find it's not going to be the secret of finding your
00:47:11
meaning what I enjoy is a different pillar of Happiness a lot of people will say if I figure out what I enjoy then
00:47:17
I'll find my meaning no those are different there different you're over on
00:47:20
that branch of the tree you're trying to get over on this branch of the tree
00:47:23
different questions so I'm that person say that person now and I don't have
00:47:27
answers to either you tell me it's that's a great place to be because it
00:47:29
means the start of my adventure yeah what do I do put my shoes on and leave the house what what Jo so there's a a
00:47:36
lot of different protocols you can actually start depending on where where you on your life one of the things that
00:47:40
I actually recommend is reading more not reading garbage and dumb stuff and not even reading the news I put people on a
00:47:47
protocol of 15 minutes a day of of of real reading actually there's a three-part plan you want to hear the
00:47:53
three-part plan to actually start figuring out the answers of these questions M you don't have to answer the
00:47:57
questions directly but number one is start thinking to yourself what do I think is right and wrong what are my
00:48:04
moral principles what are my moral non-negotiables that's the moral basis of living it's the foundation of
00:48:11
actually figuring out the answers to your questions so for me that might be I think like free speech is important for
00:48:17
example um treating people with dignity equality cool right and this is going to
00:48:22
change over the course of your life too so you know you're 28 years younger than
00:48:26
me when you're my age is going to be different and and saying to yourself that's good I want to change I want to
00:48:31
change I want to change and that means that one of your non-negotiables is moral flexibility perhaps really
00:48:38
important that you're able to evolve right the world doesn't want you to
00:48:41
evolve the world wants you to be rigid because you're a better soldier in the
00:48:44
culture War when you're not able to say huh what I thought actually probably
00:48:48
isn't right huh weird right okay so so that's that's number one is the moral
00:48:52
foundations and thinking about that you know I I asked my students to take out a
00:48:56
piece of paper and write start writing things down that they think he the things that I actually think are right
00:49:02
and wrong here the basis of the way that I want to live now this is a very yian idea Carl Jung said that the basis of
00:49:08
happiness is figuring out what you believe and acting according to it living according to it that the basis of
00:49:13
unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals in other words I believe these
00:49:21
things are right and wrong and I'm systematically violating them it's so
00:49:24
incredibly empowering when talk to a young woman or man and I say for example what do you think is a decent way to
00:49:32
treat a member of the opposite sex when you're on a date and they'll tell me and
00:49:36
I say are you acting according to that they're like no I said that's why you're
00:49:39
unhappy according to Carl Yung but also according to Common Sense Once you know what that is and say I'm going to start
00:49:45
acting and living according to my own principles your life starts to change why is that so say someone right now is
00:49:52
for example cheating on their partner but they know and they're against cheating they're against cheating they
00:49:57
know it's everybody's against cheating by the way betraying somebody you love
00:50:00
everybody's against betraying somebody you love right that's actually natural
00:50:04
law if you believe there's any natural law why is why why is that making them
00:50:07
unhappy that's making them unhappy because that's doing violence to their
00:50:11
own sense of propriety you're hurting yourself you know the most ancient wisdom traditions and religious
00:50:17
Traditions when they talk about Sin you know Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and name the religion
00:50:24
there's a concept of sin right sin in almost every religious tradition is not
00:50:28
offending God it's hurting yourself it's self-destructive Behavior you're doing
00:50:35
something not in accord with the way that you want to live and in so doing you're weakening yourself you're making
00:50:41
it harder for you to understand yourself as a good person as a person of Integrity as an upright
00:50:48
person which we actually need and again there's a lot of go back to the social
00:50:52
psychology research on this we need to see ourselves as good people it goes back to your point as well about
00:50:57
helplessness and agency because if I know that that is bad but I can't seem to stop myself doing it yeah I'm telling
00:51:03
myself that I'm low agency and I'm helpless I'm a victim of my own sin yeah
00:51:07
I'm a victim of my own weakness I'm a victim of my own impulses so this is one
00:51:11
of the reasons that people will be like I hate how I eat what are they actually saying they're not saying that I I hate
00:51:19
you know I mean like I I'm a sugar Fiend I love I just can't get enough of it I
00:51:24
don't drink alcohol but I drink tons of sugar lots of sugar I shouldn't do it
00:51:28
now it doesn't offend my sense of propriety to be sure right but I could get to the point where I'm so unhealthy
00:51:34
that I hate that about myself because I'm actually hurting myself but I'm
00:51:37
being controlled by my impulses this getting in line with your own views and making a plan and this is where the New
00:51:44
Year's resolutions about taking off the weight actually make sense because it's not
00:51:50
about the ab veins it's about being morally consistent with your own view of
00:51:55
the person person that you want to be is what this comes down but you can't do it
00:51:58
till you lay it out until you actually put it in black and white write down your moral philosophy I don't care how
00:52:03
dumb it is write down your moral philosophy and say make a plan to start living according to it that's the base
00:52:08
of the pyramid there's two other parts okay the second part is a contemplative
00:52:13
tradition is contemplation you need more contemplation such that you can experience Transcendence now there's a
00:52:21
bunch of different ways to do this right um this is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation that's all that
00:52:28
is is basically is sitting still without your phone and and and and focusing on being alive so there a lot of ways to do
00:52:37
it there's informal ways to do it my colleague Ellen Langer if you had her on
00:52:41
the show no super interesting person she actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about
00:52:46
30 years ago wow she wrote a book called mindfulness she's a she was the first
00:52:50
woman tenured in the psychology department at Harvard she's phenomenal and she's just absolutely frustra and
00:52:56
and she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you're sitting on the train
00:53:00
by putting away your phone putting your hands in your lap and looking out the window can they listen to this podcast
00:53:04
while they do that because no you should listen to the podcast but not during those periods okay and start with five
00:53:11
minutes of a of of just simple contemplation of life now there are other ways to do it prayer is a really
00:53:16
good way to do it too religious Traditions are excellent at doing it but people in a distracted world don't do
00:53:21
that at all you need to be in your head you need to stop distracting yourself and systematically stop distracting
00:53:28
yourself because in your default mode Network you'll actually start to think
00:53:33
about things that actually matter including the things that are in the fundamental moral basis that you've that
00:53:38
you've started to formulate you need contemplation I was thinking about this
00:53:42
last night I don't know why I was thinking about this but this is how weird I am I was thinking about why I
00:53:47
don't pray anymore because I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about
00:53:52
18 are you still Christian no and every time we had dinner for my whole childhood the family sit around the
00:53:58
table one of us would have would pray and we'd just basically give thanks for
00:54:02
things we're you know grateful for right and I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith but but
00:54:08
I was thinking last night it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer which
00:54:11
is just an exercise in gratitude to be thankful for the nature of my life and that would serve if and I don't have to
00:54:16
pray to something I can just pray for gratitude well you can contemplate you can contemplate the source of your
00:54:22
gratitude so gratitude listing is really important way for to focus uh on the the
00:54:28
we're resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias we have a tendency to pay attention to the
00:54:32
negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival you know you know
00:54:39
you pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner not the best thing that happened to the dinner for a
00:54:43
reason I mean we've evolved to the snap of The Twig behind you does not make you
00:54:48
think oh bet that's my friend right so that that's just how we're Revol and the
00:54:53
way to not that let that become all adapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude which are
00:54:58
incredibly abundant now the reason you stop praying is because you don't believe there's anybody on the other end
00:55:02
of the line listening yeah yeah you think that you're it's like the ghost
00:55:05
phone in Japan after the after the the tsunami the earthquake and tsunami a guy set up a telephone booth that's not
00:55:13
connected where the phone is not connected and 30,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talk to
00:55:19
their dead relatives that's the ghost phone and um that's not satisfying for you with with
00:55:27
respect to prayer because your kid version of religion was the reason you're doing that is because you're
00:55:32
talking to God you've got a direct transmission mechanism to God and now you don't think that's actually the case
00:55:36
so you stop doing the contemplation right now it's probably worth think rethinking an adult version
00:55:43
of your faith as opposed to being put off by the a lot of people are really put off by the kid version of their
00:55:49
faith it's like really yeah like all weird stuff and doesn't make doesn't
00:55:53
make sense but a a most likely according to the data you're going to start becoming interested in
00:55:59
your Christian faith again as you get older it doesn't mean you're going to
00:56:02
have the same faith that you had on the contrary you probably won't but you'll
00:56:05
start being like you know there's certain things I miss about that and and life actually is messy and there is
00:56:12
suffering that's hard to explain but there's lots of things in life that are
00:56:15
hard to explain and maybe there's something in there that I didn't understand before so openness to that
00:56:20
I'm not saying for sure but I'm saying just be open to it and then the top is
00:56:25
wisdom and that requires reading or or you know the accumulation of knowledge not
00:56:32
everybody's a big reader and there's so many different ways to get good information at this point pod podcast
00:56:37
for example but the whole point is is reading or or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition so uh you know read
00:56:46
the stoic philosophers read the nicomaki and ethics of Aristotle read the babad Gita read the Quran read the Bible read
00:56:56
read read and start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading which you can go years saying I wish I read it and
00:57:01
you don't right I mean it's it's crazy we'll spend all this time scrolling
00:57:05
Instagram when we could spend just 15 minutes a day reading the meditations of Marcus
00:57:10
aelius and and the letters of Sena and they incredibly enriching right it's like whoa boom starting at 15 minutes a
00:57:19
day so do the work what do I believe spend some time in contemplation and do the reading your life's about to change
00:57:29
that's the protocol that's the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for actually finding F starting to find meaning in
00:57:35
your life but I've I've prescribed this to others and I've done it myself and
00:57:39
this really works it helps you find on the path to the answers to those questions build the life you
00:57:45
want it's a book it's a book sat in front of me here that that has your name
00:57:50
on it and who's this Oprah Winfrey I'd like to give you young authors a leg
00:57:56
up how did you so you co-wrote this book with Oprah yeah yeah how how did you meet Oprah she called me turns out she's
00:58:04
a I know it's it's she this is Oprah Winfrey I'm like yeah I'm Batman I mean
00:58:10
it was Oprah Winfrey The Voice she's iconic all over the world for sure and it turns out that she was a regular
00:58:17
reader of my column in the Atlantic on Thursday mornings how to build a life which is a different area of the signs
00:58:22
of happiness every week that I cover and read my last book which is called from strength to strength finding success
00:58:28
happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life right so that was a book she read on the first day it came out
00:58:33
and I went on her Super Soul podcast and we were thick as thieves just immediately because we have the same
00:58:39
goals as lift people up and bring him together in the spirit of happiness and love she does it differently because
00:58:44
she's not an academic she has incredible platform I've never seen a platform like
00:58:51
she has where you know she says one thing and people are like H that's it's
00:58:54
good thing to do but she's always looking for it's interesting because she
00:58:58
has the money and power and fame and she uses them she's cracked the code she
00:59:03
uses them in service of other people and that's her whole goal from the very
00:59:08
beginning she's never said anything to disabuse me of the idea that that's how
00:59:11
she lives and uh we started doing some some things together and some podcast together and she called up and she said
00:59:18
you know if I had my show still she for 25 years she had this iconic show on television in the United States called
00:59:24
the Oprah win show and millions and millions of people watched it every day and went off the air in about 2014 or
00:59:29
something she says if I had my show I'd have you on 30 times and then you'd have
00:59:33
your show she said but I don't have the show anymore so let's do kind of a
00:59:37
version of that and let me host a book and and so we wrote the book together all over the last winter in the
00:59:44
winter of 2022 2023 I went away to she lives in mono California I live I went and got a house in San CL California and
00:59:52
we we structured the thing and you know at her place and we went back and forth on the and it was just blast it was
01:00:01
about you know how to manage yourself and once you're able to manage your own
01:00:04
feelings and emotions like a pro then you'll no longer be distracted and you
01:00:08
can focus on the things that actually matter for your life and that's how you
01:00:10
build your life and you you called me um a mad scientist earlier I'd have to take
01:00:17
the test I think you nailed it I think you nailed it most likely yeah a which is that
01:00:24
which appears in your book in the the section about the unique sort of unique mix of um Happiness and happiness and
01:00:30
you talk about this panas schore system what are these categories and why did you call me a mad scientist so the panis
01:00:37
test is in the book and it's actually on the website um at Arthur brooks.com
01:00:41
where anybody can take it for free it's a it's a personality test based on the
01:00:45
intensity of your positive and negative affect AKA mood everybody's got more or less the
01:00:51
same emotions everybody feels joy and interest and surprise and anger and sadness and disgust and and and fear but
01:01:00
we have them in different intensities depending on who we are and there's really four kinds of people with these
01:01:05
different intensities there's some people that have very high affect High positive affect they have high highs and
01:01:13
high negative effect effect low lows these are mad scientists that's a quarter of the population Now by
01:01:19
construction it's the quar of the population because it's above average on
01:01:21
both then there are people who are high highs and low lows I mean I should say that they
01:01:27
have intense positive emotion but but weak negative emotion right these are cheerleaders okay so they have they feel
01:01:37
their positive affect very intensely and their negative effect effect very weakly
01:01:41
oh okay so they're like always happy they're not always happy but they tend
01:01:45
to they tend to be in a better mood and see the brighter side of things they tend to downgrade threats and think
01:01:53
everything is going to be okay okay that's a quarter of the population M and
01:01:56
everybody wants to be that by the way but that's not necessarily the best way
01:02:00
to be and they don't make the best CEOs because they're they have a hard time
01:02:03
paying attention to threats they don't want bad news and they have a terrible
01:02:06
time giving bad news or giving people bad valuations so working for a CEO who's a cheerleader is great for a
01:02:12
minute but then it starts to become very frustrating because you hear him telling
01:02:15
the the incompetent idiot in the cubicle next to you that that she's doing an an
01:02:20
unbelievably good job ah okay so you I mean you got to be realistic to be a good I mean you're an entrepreneur you
01:02:25
know perfectly there's lotss of threats out there you got to take them seriously
01:02:28
yeah yeah yeah so then there are people who are high negative low positive these
01:02:32
are poets these are people who generally speaking there's a place in the lyic
01:02:36
system called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that's the part that makes you a ruminator ruminators are
01:02:44
people who this part of the brain this this part of the brain is dedicated to making on problems and negative things
01:02:52
and regret and that I can't believe that I said that thing I feel so stupid for
01:02:55
saying that thing and what does she really think of me etc etc it's also the
01:02:58
part of the reing that you use when you're highly creative comedians yeah well for sure for sure you know I pal
01:03:04
around with a guy Nam rain Wilson who was in the American version of the office he played Dwight and Rain told me
01:03:09
that comedians tend to be depressed but the reason is because they find out that
01:03:14
they're funny and they can substitute humor for sadness it's a substitute
01:03:19
emotion it's called a metacognitive Technique we talk a lot about that in the book so then poets are they tend to
01:03:24
be high ruminators so high negative affect they focus a lot of negative things because of this hyperdeveloped
01:03:30
part of their brains they also tend to be really creative because that's the
01:03:35
same part of your brain that when you're working on a business plan or a symphony
01:03:39
and they also tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person that's kind of the poet
01:03:46
profile right and then last but not least there's low low people who are low
01:03:50
affect people these are Judges these are people who they they're happy and unhappy but they feel their moods less
01:03:56
intensely than other people and so they they don't freak out you know these are
01:04:01
really good surgeons these are really good judges they're very good Secret Service agents you don't want somebody
01:04:08
to cut you open and say oh my God you you don't want your surgeon to be like
01:04:12
that and so there's a a gift and a role for all four of these quadrants most
01:04:18
great entrepreneurs are mad scientists because they they the reason that they're Entre is because they want to
01:04:25
feel things intensely because everything is intense and they do everything intensely right you don't have that many
01:04:30
people who are just like super chill like yeah interesting yeah it fits that's why
01:04:37
you just having a deep conversation with you you I can see that you have a lot of
01:04:42
mad scientific characteristics to you you feel things deeply is that fair it is fair yeah I mean that's the one I I
01:04:49
resonate with the most and I do describe myself as being a bit intense my team know me I think I'm I think I come
01:04:53
across as a bit intense what's your girlfriend I'm going to say that she is
01:04:57
a cheerleader a I'm married to a cheerleader oh really yeah and what you find is that cheerleaders they can they
01:05:04
can have the best of times but cheerleaders tend to be struggle with the mad scientist yeah right it's like
01:05:12
like why like everything's so great for you why are you gloomy you know it's
01:05:16
like why can't you look in the bright side of things like why are you grouchy
01:05:20
all the time what's wrong with you Steve like there's a spelling mistake on our I
01:05:23
know it's like why why is that bothering you yeah yeah so that's That's a classic
01:05:28
thing everybody can be with everybody else but the compliments are really important the biggest mistake that
01:05:33
people make in dating markets is they look for their their op they look for the their their doppelganger they look
01:05:39
for their clone you shouldn't look for your clone you should look for your compliment why because you'll be happier
01:05:44
when you complete each other that's when people who complete each other you find
01:05:47
that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert if they learn to appreciate each other so
01:05:52
it's not you know hammer and T songs all the time for the differences but when
01:05:56
people for example one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people you know satisfactory
01:06:01
dating experiences people have more and more and more choice but they're more
01:06:04
likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not
01:06:07
attracted to the people that they're dating it's because they'll set up a
01:06:10
dating profile saying I vote this way I like this music I live here I like these
01:06:15
things I want somebody with these preferences and they get somebody who's their sibling which is as my adult
01:06:20
children will remind me is not hot difference is hot it's so true because I never would have said I want
01:06:28
someone that is spiritual um that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't
01:06:34
see my girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read and she just believes in it all and
01:06:39
it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted but I absolutely love it and that means that I
01:06:44
actually she's actually pulled me into her world she's made me more spiritual
01:06:47
she's made me believe in things I never would have believed before uhhuh and
01:06:51
she's completing me in that regard it's really great it's really great you mean
01:06:54
you crack the code in that way and finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those
01:06:57
particular differences is really key to a to a good relationship and not wishing
01:07:02
the person were more like you this is very important that this is a relationship killer is that wishing that
01:07:08
your partner were more like you is is just a form of egotism everyone tries to change their partner though don't they
01:07:14
yeah well I mean it's interesting it's like there's there's the old Axiom that
01:07:17
women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't and and um h husbands are
01:07:24
frustrated because they thought their wives would never change and they do I don't
01:07:28
know there is truth in that relationships and love how important is this as a subject for happiness it's the
01:07:35
number one area of interest of my students really my average student is 28 years old so they're MBA students
01:07:40
they're Master's students they've all gone through college they've gone to
01:07:42
work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School you have to have some business experience to get the
01:07:46
business master's degree and this is the number one thing they want to talk about
01:07:50
they want to learn about they want to learn about it scientifically they want toar learn about the neurochemical
01:07:55
Cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't
01:07:58
control it anymore we have a lot of case studies at the business school about you
01:08:01
know CEOs who were dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates I mean it's a classic theme
01:08:08
you know it's I and the last line of the case study is I was the the CEO looking
01:08:12
out the window of the train after being dismissed going I don't know what happened yeah and so we look at brain
01:08:17
scans and say this is what happened and you can see it in the brain kind of I mean that somebody who's really in love
01:08:23
uh has you brain activity it looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict brain scan I mean your brain is if
01:08:29
you're at a certain point in the falling love process your brain is captured so I
01:08:33
mean at the beginning when people meet there's a there's a a hormonal um
01:08:37
reaction with testosterone and estrogen which are you know sex hormones obviously and you know when people see
01:08:41
somebody who's really attractive that's why they they want to look attractive
01:08:44
because that's the that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens after
01:08:48
that you see a big uh increase in in noradrenaline AKA nor um epinephrine and dopamine level so you have anticipation
01:08:56
of reward and Euphoria that's sort of the second line of things that tend to
01:09:01
happen in this chemical Cascade that's going on when you're falling in love
01:09:05
after that you see a dip in serotonin which is really interesting so serotonin we think about as the as the neurom
01:09:11
modulator of of peace and happiness which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when when
01:09:18
they feel that it's an imbalance so people who are clinically depressed will
01:09:20
often get selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors meaning you maintain a higher level of Serotonin and that's all really
01:09:26
controversial still I mean because we don't really understand that very well
01:09:30
but we do know that when people are falling in love that they're more likely
01:09:34
to be ruminative and infatuated remember that part of the brain the ventrolateral
01:09:38
prefrontal cortex that does rumination it'll be more active when serotonin is
01:09:42
low and so serotonin will be low so you start ruminating on the other person that's when the infatuation part of the
01:09:48
relationship really kicks in and then you get to the point of attachment which is which is invol which involves
01:09:54
oxytocin which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attached to the other person very
01:10:00
profoundly attached to the other person that's intensely pleasurable so it's
01:10:04
like and the longer you let it go the harder it is for your brain not to be really really captured you wouldn't go
01:10:11
to a methamphetamine addict and say why did you buy methamphetamine that's illegal they' be like I'm an I'm an
01:10:18
addict I'm a junkie it's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a
01:10:21
subordinate are people that are in love in in relationships happier statistically no on the contrary because
01:10:29
being in love especially in the early stages of being in love is not associated with what we would associate
01:10:33
with actual happiness because it has jealousy tons of jealousy which is you know the rumination part when your
01:10:40
serotonin levels are really low it's hard for you to say ah I feel so great you feel euphoric and you like it in its
01:10:47
own way but if you kept that if you stayed in that stage you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable because
01:10:52
there's jealousy there's surveillance behaviors are really common and you know
01:10:57
this there's no nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner
01:11:01
that's when I'm happiest nobody likes that but but people tend to do that because you're
01:11:06
there's a lot of your brain is basically saying I'm trying to figure out if this
01:11:09
is somebody who's going to betray me back to evolution is this somebody who's
01:11:13
going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids is this somebody who's going
01:11:16
to be when I don't know it carrying somebody else's baby which is how men
01:11:21
and women actually they tend to express sexual jealousy in those two interesting
01:11:26
there's a guy at um University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy the most
01:11:30
jealousy provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else for women it's an
01:11:38
image of their intimate partner saying I love you to somebody else and the reason
01:11:42
is because traditionally or evolutionarily women have to be worried that their partner is going to take go
01:11:50
take care of somebody else's children and men have to be worried that they're
01:11:53
not the actual father of the children which According to some estimates is 15% of paternity which is misattributed
01:12:00
worldwide makes sense that's a lot no it makes sense well so fortunately my kids look like me yeah I
01:12:07
one that's adopted she doesn't look like me this idea in chapter four of your
01:12:11
book of focusing Less on yourself leads to happiness how can you prove that's
01:12:15
the case so there's a there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show
01:12:20
this using human subjects and so one of the classic uh experiments there's these
01:12:23
guys at at Northwestern there's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam weights I don't know if you've had him
01:12:28
on your show before he's a really impressive and Innovative social psychologist he did a an experiment
01:12:33
where he took the undergraduate students you always use the undergraduate pool at
01:12:36
your University because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks and and and he put them into three groups one
01:12:41
had to do moral Deeds they had to do random acts of kindness one had to do moral thoughts they had to sit and think
01:12:48
beautiful thoughts about other people and one had to do self focus sort of self-care things go do something
01:12:53
something that really makes you feel good and they looked at their happiness over you know a series of weeks with
01:12:59
these interventions and we they found that moral Deeds were happier than moral thoughts and moral thoughts were happier
01:13:04
than self-care that's what they found in other words you and again this this is
01:13:09
basically showing the same thing that you know I did research for years and years and years about happiness and
01:13:14
sharable giving if you're lonely the most important thing you can do is volunteer just is if you give money away
01:13:21
statistically you're more likely to make more money next year incredible investment strategy and the reason is
01:13:27
because you see yourself as an agent of of positive change you're empowered when
01:13:32
you're helping other people you when you give love you get love that's the bottom
01:13:37
line is what it comes down to and so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing if you put uh you know two
01:13:42
groups randomly selected of people um one group is playing board games and the other is helping you know sixth graders
01:13:48
with their math the ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward I mean this is
01:13:54
just helping other people helps you not focus on the Psycho Drama inside Steve's
01:13:59
head and it makes it so that life actually has a Transcendent aspect to it you get perspective you get peace and
01:14:06
furthermore you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be is happiness or
01:14:14
negativity contagious yes that's emotional contagion there's a lot of literature on emotional contagion it's a
01:14:18
virus it's a mind virus negativity is a virus negativi is a virus but so is POS
01:14:23
positivity that you can actually so you find that you know when I go into companies which I do a lot these days I
01:14:27
do a lot of Happiness teaching inside you know executive teams and corporations and when I walk into a
01:14:33
company I can I can I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around you know this is why the mood and
01:14:40
emotional well-being and emotional self-management of CEOs is so critically important because you know everybody's
01:14:45
like oh the bosses the boss is having a hard time today though I think a boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast
01:14:50
or whatever it happens to be because the they can see it and the result is it tends to the virus tends to pass around
01:14:56
a this sucks attitude is horrible inside families and we see it and it will transmit from one person to one person
01:15:03
to another person to another person that's why it's hard to live with a high
01:15:06
negative affect person that's why because High negative affect people will spread a negativity virus even if you
01:15:13
live down the street well it depends on how much contact you have with that person and so you know that's why you
01:15:18
want your kids to hang out with positive friends that's why would you you'll when
01:15:23
you have your kids and when my kids were little they would have that one friend who's like happy all the time you love
01:15:27
that kid you have the one kid who's just bummed out all the time you're like I
01:15:30
don't want my kid to be around that because that that infects the attitudes of of the of your children in the book
01:15:36
you say living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25% likelier to become happier
01:15:43
too if you have contact with that person obviously it it's not going to transmit
01:15:47
just through the air it's not you know it's not the Corona virus but uh but you
01:15:51
have to have contact with the person but you know and the way that they they measured that that's called the
01:15:55
Framingham heart study which was out in fra that's a suburb of Boston but for
01:15:59
many many many years they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives to
01:16:03
look at heart you know issues but then they started measuring everything else and they found for example that obesity
01:16:09
is highly is is is very easy to catch when your friends become obese you become more obese that when your friends
01:16:16
get divorced you're more likely to get divorced that when your friends get happy you're more likely to get happy is
01:16:21
what we see and and and the more proximity that they have to you measured geographically or in terms of the
01:16:26
intimacy of the relationship the stronger the transmission mechanism I think a lot about that and how we take
01:16:31
on other people's problems when they're friends and family um what you say to
01:16:36
that and does it matter that we take on other people's problems sort of I mean
01:16:40
that's there's a big distinction between empathy and compassion so the best way
01:16:43
to be a parent or a partner or a friend is to be compassionate and that's not
01:16:46
the same thing as empathy our society overvalues empathy empathy is feeling somebody else's pain that's Tak taking
01:16:53
on their problems the worst parents of teenagers are empathetic or highly empathetic people it's like yeah I feel
01:16:58
your pain why because you're not actually helping you got to do things that that that you know I may feel your
01:17:04
pain but I can't be I can't be paralyzed by that on the contrary I got to do hard
01:17:08
things you're not going to like son that's what being it that's the reason
01:17:11
we always say you're not his friend you're his dad you know and that's means
01:17:15
be compassionate don't be empathetic the same thing is true with the big level I
01:17:19
mean I I would argue that our our welfare systems in our countries are need to be more compassionate um as
01:17:25
opposed to Simply empathetic and you know that's and that we could actually help people a lot more too being
01:17:30
compassionate means being hard as steel and doing the things that people actually need because you love them not
01:17:36
just because you're actually feeling their pain so in our families we need to
01:17:40
say what does this person that I love actually need notwithstanding the feelings that they're transmitting to me
01:17:46
and sometimes that means you got to care for your own happiness like they say in
01:17:49
the plane put on your own oxygen mask first take care of your own happiness so you're not you're not getting this
01:17:55
negativity virus all the time being paralyzed by somebody else's pain you're
01:17:58
not going to help him enough no it's almost never well I mean there there are
01:18:01
cases when somebody is just a Schism but I I only recommend pican family Schism when there's abuse and you know somebody
01:18:09
being unhappy is not abuse political differences really not abuse those are that's a it's like one in six Americans
01:18:16
in this country is not speaking to a family member because of Pol political differences that's insane that's simply
01:18:22
insane that doesn't not count as any good reason to do that unless there's
01:18:25
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01:18:31
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01:19:28
happier introverts or extroverts yes so extroverts is the classic finding tons of studies sign find that extroverts
01:19:36
have more positive affect they have higher they tend to have higher mood but introverts have special gifts they have
01:19:43
closer relationships they have deeper emotional connections to other people and the
01:19:48
result of that is that they have long-term friendship and Marriage Partners that sustain them in a way that
01:19:55
extroverts don't extroverts often get can get really lonely because they are
01:20:00
you an extrovert it's such an interesting question because you might not be even though you're a mad
01:20:04
scientist I don't think I am do you get when you're at a party do you find that
01:20:07
you get exhausted I looked at Jackie's know me many many years five years I'm
01:20:10
an introvert I just want to be alone so when you're at a party do you find that
01:20:13
it sucks energy out of you I don't go to the party certainly your Baseline is
01:20:17
introversion but you have extroverted characteristics because you're able to
01:20:20
do good entrepreneurs know how to be extroverts when they need to be which is important and you run a podcast if
01:20:26
you're a true introvert it's like I got to meet Arthur Brooks what a pain no I
01:20:29
like deep conversations I don't like small talk yeah yeah you do you have close friends oh yeah the same five guys
01:20:34
i' I've known years that you've known since College yeah basically no others
01:20:38
other than this slot here who I consider friends but the same five that I've
01:20:41
known for 12 12 years they're real friends not deal friends no they're real
01:20:44
friends they were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself same Five Guys so that's interesting and and
01:20:50
but so extroverts they tend to get more shortterm happiness and introverts tend to have more long-term happiness so what
01:20:57
you find is that extroverts they tend to get more enjoyment and and introverts tend to get more meaning metacognition
01:21:04
you used this word earlier on when we were talking about happiness it sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness
01:21:08
in respects what is metacognition explain this like I'm a 10-year-old yeah okay so metacognition simply means
01:21:13
thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions that's what metacognition is all about
01:21:21
so theot are produced in the lyic system of the brain an ancient part of the brain you react to them and decide what
01:21:28
they mean in the prefrontal CeX the sea Suite of your head that takes time those
01:21:34
are not the same place you need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain which is the
01:21:40
part the front the part of the front the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead so when your kids are little
01:21:44
when your kids are 10 and they're freaking out about something you don't
01:21:48
say don't be so limic you say use your word what you're saying is be metacognitive
01:21:55
allow yourself to explain this thing that you're feeling and in so doing you're using your prefrontal cortex as
01:22:01
opposed to relying on the lyic tissue of your brain so write it down would be an
01:22:04
example writing externally is phenomenal classic case so you're anxious yeah
01:22:09
anxiety is unfocused fear that's what it is fear was adapted in in the human
01:22:14
species so that to be episodic and intense the way that fear is supposed to work is that something happens it alarms
01:22:21
you it illuminates the igala of your brain that sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland
01:22:27
which then signals the adrenal gland sitting above the kidneys to spit out stress hormones this happens in 74
01:22:32
milliseconds of the the perception of a threat in you know the occipital lobe of
01:22:38
your brain where you're you know your visual cortex exists boom this thing happens really really quick this is and
01:22:43
saved your life many many times thousands of times you know because you live in London and you can get run over
01:22:49
at any given second it's crazy well actually because I'm looking the wrong
01:22:52
direction for oncoming traffic that's my problem there so so that's how that's
01:22:56
how that works is the whole point so fear is supposed to work that way very episodic very occasional the problem in
01:23:03
Modern Life is that we have all of these vague threats that are happening that are kind of half Illuminating our our
01:23:10
amydala which is giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time
01:23:14
and that's unfocused and freaking us out so the way to actually solve that problem metacognitive is say okay okay I
01:23:21
got to focus it take out a piece of paper number one number one thing that I'm afraid of right now that's actually
01:23:27
giving me this anxiety that's giving me this discomfort write it down why is it
01:23:33
happening what's the worst thing that can happen and what would I do if that
01:23:37
happened and you literally moving the thing experience from the amydala which is the emotional Center to the
01:23:43
prefrontal cortex which is The Logical which is that's for your SE suite and
01:23:47
that should kill the anxiety it will it greatly attenuate the anxiety it will turn it into a logical kind of fear
01:23:54
that's the right reaction to these threats and it will change your life so if you do that if you're experiencing a
01:24:01
lot of anxiety you know unfocused fear focus it every day for 10 minutes write it down I
01:24:08
have a I have a I'm a very anxious person I have a running list of the things that I'm afraid of a running list
01:24:14
I have lots and lots of lists I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critically important I also have a
01:24:17
failure list what are you afraid of I'm afraid of failure I'm afraid of failing
01:24:22
I'm a total striver from the very beginning failing what's what does what
01:24:25
would failure look like I know that's the thing it's an unfocused fear and so
01:24:29
when I write it down and I focus it I go oh yeah it's true you know that's that's
01:24:33
the point so it's failure is a spectre for Strivers it's a kind of a when you
01:24:38
look at it it goes away yeah yeah but when you're not looking at it it's there
01:24:42
and part of the reason is because your self-image is one of somebody who's successful so you're self- objectifying
01:24:49
as a successful person you're success addicted meaning the vental item of your
01:24:52
brain gets tapped every time somebody says Steve you got another 7 million downloads or something that is not
01:25:00
inherently meaningful in that particular way because the metric is actually what
01:25:03
Taps your ventral stum again and again and again and so then if that's going in
01:25:07
the wrong direction and you're not making progress then that sort of feels somehow not successful which means that
01:25:13
things are going in the wrong direction and that's just like this fantasm right it's like and so okay
01:25:20
focus it focus it look at it poof right disappears it doesn't entirely disappear it turns into what it really
01:25:26
is which is a mouse not a lion oh your book is fantastic I mean we could talk for for so long because
01:25:32
there's so much more in it there's some of the unb unbelievable stats that I was
01:25:35
reading about around social media and this one St about um a study showing that teens who texted more often than
01:25:41
their peers experienced more depression anxiety and relationship and po relationships the other things about
01:25:45
laughter and that you can feel 35% happier um using some humor therapy all of these things gratitude all of these
01:25:51
things that we haven't haven't covered but they're all in this fantastic
01:25:54
fantastic book which is so unbelievably accessible for someone that as smart as you Oprah had okay oh okay right okay
01:26:02
yeah and I thank you for that because happiness is a complex thing and I think there's an industry out there that are
01:26:08
trying to simplify it and put it down to three steps to happiness or one this one
01:26:13
secret to happiness one weird trick don't gra you know whatever but your approach provides the nuance and the
01:26:19
complexity that the subject matter deserves and I think that offers us a towards being happier as you talk about
01:26:25
in the book um that's why I wrote it I wrote it for you oh it actually reads
01:26:31
like you wrote it for me that's the kind of but I imagine everyone that reads
01:26:34
it's is going to feel that way um I highly recommend everybody goes and gets
01:26:37
this book ASAP it's a really really beautiful book as well it's so beautiful
01:26:42
um we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing
01:26:45
who they're leaving it for what are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control what is
01:26:51
your opinion on this the things that we can't control are virtually all outside
01:26:58
ourselves we have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where there are many things that
01:27:04
we can't control and focus on the things that we can how do we deal with things
01:27:09
that we can't control by refocusing our attention on the parts of our life that
01:27:13
we actually can thus giving us agency and giving us a sense of peace and perspective about the truly
01:27:20
uncontrollable ala thank you so much so wonderful to meet you you've energized
01:27:24
me this morning and we started pretty early for me this is super early know it's apprciate it I appreciate it so
01:27:30
much thank you Steve it's wonderful to be with you I've admired you for such a
01:27:32
long time I get to meet you in person it's been a joy that means the well to
01:27:35
me someone is uh profound and as smart as you to say that to me means a ton so thank you so much Arthur from the bottom
01:27:40
of my heart really really appreciate it thank you you too thank [Music] you as you'll know if you've listened to
01:27:51
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