BigDeal - #11 Harvard Professor EXPLAINS Why We are LESS Happy in 2024 and What To Do About It (feat. Arthur Brooks)

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

🚀 Main Street Over Wall Street is where the real deals get done. Join top investors, founders, and operators for three days of powerful connection, sharp strategy, and big opportunities — live in Austin, Nov 2–4. https://contrarianthinking.biz/msows-bigdeal Codie spoke with Harvard professor and best-selling author Arthur Brooks on various topics, including the secrets to happiness, the interplay between love and leadership, and the ethical dimensions of free enterprise and capitalism. Arthur shared insights on moral influence and how personality traits shape our lives and relationships. He also provided practical advice for navigating these complexities in today's world, drawing from his extensive expertise and experiences. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. 00:00 START 00:19 The Power of Love in Leadership and Happiness 03:44 A Journey from Musician to Free Enterprise Advocate 06:15 The Impact of Social Media and Political Polarization on Happiness 09:53 Navigating the World of Dark Triads in Personal and Professional Life 18:07 The Science of Happiness: Practical Steps to a More Fulfilling Life 27:33 Hope vs. Optimism: Learning from History's Lessons 29:07 Embracing Hope and Personal Agency 30:10 The Changing Happiness of Women: Insights and Analysis 31:53 The Impact of Social Media and Activism on Women's Happiness 32:15 The Beauty Standards and Social Pressures in Modern Society 36:28 Exploring Relationships, Compatibility, and the Power of Differences 44:30 Meeting the Dalai Lama: Lessons on Intuition and Mentorship 48:28 Confronting and Understanding Our Deepest Fears 52:42 The Power of Empathy and Reflection in Personal Growth 58:23 Life Lessons and Anecdotes: Embracing the Journey MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠Our community⁠ 📰 ⁠Free newsletter⁠ 🏦 ⁠Biz buying course⁠ 🏠 ⁠Resibrands⁠ 💰 ⁠CT Capital⁠ 🏙️ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favorite guests of all times. Arthur books coming on the show. Everybody be cool, don't freak out. This man wrote a book with Oprah. He's friends with the Dalai Lama. He's hanging out with Rain Wilson. He ran a think tank I'm a part of. He's got multiple bestselling books.

He's one of the best speakers I've ever seen. And I basically started this podcast for an excuse to get to bother brilliant minds like his for you and me. I want to get into this in detail. Because not only is he a Harvard professor and a PhD, but he has something where he basically tries to figure out how us little crazy monkeys running around with a bunch of anxiety can live lives that we love. Arthur Brooks, I am so excited to have you.

Thank you. It takes me back, actually, to the first time I saw you speak, which was at AI, a million years ago, at a place that we don't talk about publicly online. Hopefully they won't kick me out. The secret conclave. How I snuck in is a little. It's actually on the North Pole. It's a fortress of solitude.

That's where I think most people think things like that are, conservative think tanks. I remember vividly to set the scene, it's like kind of a stadium seating. You've got the world leaders in there, right? Everybody's in suit and ties. It's some of the biggest names out there. And I remember you gave a speech, which I still think is one of my favorite speeches I've ever seen. I didn't expect it to be on the topic. It was on love.

And so, you know, I remember kind of looking around serially at the people in the audience, and you were speaking about love. And there was one scene where, like, you put on classical music. And so the lights kind of dimmed and this classical music goes on. And then the lights kind of come back on again, and I look over, and I think, like, Ted Cruz is wiping a tear. No, I don't know if he actually was, but, like, there were people in the audience that were moved in a way that I don't think they're used to being moved. And I was wondering, one, what made you talk about love to a group of hardened politicians and world leaders on the conservative side? And two, what made you think that you could make it land with them?

Love is the secret to happiness, and it's what we want. Here's the basic business proposition behind it. each of us is a startup enterprise. You are Cody Sanchez, Inc. And you're the founding entrepreneur of that enterprise. That's the enterprise that matters the most. You're in charge of that. You get to build that over the course of your life. That's your life's adventure. And that enterprise has a currency. Like any enterprise has a currency. You know, we talk about business. You and I am an economist, and you're famous for doing this work where you're helping people to invest in a better way and build their lives financially. The fortune that you talk about in your work, and I have as an economist well, of course, is that you're financial resources, is money. The currency of your life, of the enterprise of your life is love and happiness. That's what it is. And if you want to become rich in that, and that's really what matters, you better understand how it works. Furthermore, you can treat it with the same seriousness as I would treat money as an economist. I'm a social scientist. I'm a behavioral social scientist by background. I study love and happiness and the behavior of people to accumulate it and to screw it up.

And so I thought to myself, I'm going to go to the best business audience I could possibly ever meet, talk to them about their lives like serious enterprises and the fortune they're trying to create, which is happiness through love. And that's why it works because I treat it with seriousness. It's not just feelings. Love isn't a feeling. Love is to will the good of the other with the way that you live your life. It's a decision. It's hard. It's hard edged. It takes an incredible commitment. And that's something that any serious person can respond to. Yeah, it was pretty incredible to watch how they reacted. And I think even probably surprised. a lot of them is why you were so successful for what 11 years there and sort of changing the culture

a bit. Thank you. Yeah, and pushing on them to say, by the way, you should want people to think that you're empathetic and care about humanity, not just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Of course. You know, I got into the whole for enterprise game. I came from a family that had no background in business or any interest in capitalism whatsoever. My father was a math professor. My mother was an artist. And they were, you know, properly of the left. They were, you know, I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and a family of artists and academics. Imagine the political milieu, especially in my 20s. I was making my living as a musician, and I was interested in ideas. But I had that cultural background, and I remember thinking to myself, there's so much poverty in the world.

What actually can we do? And I started to look at real ideas, and what I found is that the free enterprise system properly understood is an expression of the generosity that we can bring. When we push it to the margins of society, there's no other force that can lift people out of poverty. And I became a warrior for free enterprise, not because I care about investment banks. I mean, God love them. I mean, the reason is because I want there to be less poverty in the world. I want to lift people up from the margins. In other words, I believe that everything that we can do up to and including our free enterprise system should be an expression of love. That's how it all hangs together in my brain at least. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, you did an incredible, you know, documentary on that too,

on capitalism that I really liked. The pursuit in 2019. Yeah, that I thought did a beautiful visual job of showing what capitalism can do. Remember that TED Talk from that guy who showed the dot chart of how poverty had changed over time? It was like one of the first TED talks I saw. And like your integration of that into the movie was pretty incredible too.

Yeah, and you know John Popola, the filmmaker. He lives in Austin like you do. He's a wonderful, he makes beautiful films. He just followed me around the world for three years. You know, and just shot film. I was in India and I was in Denmark and I was just in all these different places

that I go to do my work when I was president of AEI and he knit it together into this narrative about a way to see the world. I mean, the whole idea that for you to care about success, about lifting yourself up to be the kind of person who is responsible, hardworking, and meritorious, that's not incompatible with trying to save the world. On the contrary, these are ideas that have to be together. If you're not serious about actually marshalling resources with the utmost seriousness in your

life and about the education and the prosperity of other people, people are going to stay poor. That's just the truth. 100%. Well, I think if anybody is concerned about, is it right to pursue wealth and is it right to pursue socioeconomic growth, that video is a wonderful way to ease into it and to explain to other people. I think this generation, it's really important, how mathematically it's just the numbers. The numbers show that while it is a highly flawed system in many ways, there does not appear to be a better one. Yeah, that film is available on YouTube these days. It was on Netflix originally. It's on YouTube right now. Okay. I also want to talk about something. else. So I was thinking about trolls, haters this morning. Now that I'm on the internet, I'm like, do you really want to be famous? 6.8 million Instagram follow. It's amazing. Congratulations. I mean, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I think similar to your pursuit, it's this idea that I think the

world abhor is a vacuum. And that's why I think it's really important for people like you to have giant microphones. Because if not you, no shame to them. I actually respect them in many ways. then it's a world of Kardashians. And I think that's problematic in some ways because the ethical moral compass doesn't seem to better society. It seems that the nuclear family is really important to society being better.

It seems like perhaps for females... That's not a moral point, by the way. That's an absolutely empirical point. Right. That the people tend to be happiest and most prosperous when they have solid, stable families. And that really starts with, you know,

mom and dad who are in love with each other. Yeah. So that's a good reason to do work on happiness and love. Exactly. And one thing that you talk about that is so relevant for today, there was a line that I loved. The more you hate someone for their views, the more miserable you become. And this idea of contempt if you feel it and you are the one sort of throwing shame or contempt at another, you actually are less happy. Can you talk about that and maybe why that's important for our world today?

Yeah. So the Buddha one time said that to hate another person is like picking up a hot coal to throw at him. The one who's burned the worst is you. That's true, of course. When you hate somebody, you want to actually hurt that person, but you're the one who's ultimately miserable, and you're the one who's actually suffered the most grievous harm. That's an empirical proposition that we've tested again and again and again in the social science world as well. Political hate, ideological polarization is one of the great storms that's been lowering American happiness.

So we find in the data that American happiness has been falling for 30 years. Usually little by little by little because of the retreat from institutions like faith and family and friendship and the relationship with work. But then the big storms are social media and loneliness, particularly exacerbated through the coronavirus epidemic and political hatred. The activism in this country is ruining this, just ruining our ability to love each other across ideological differences. Politics is not supposed to be this important. It has a cult-like standing. And part of the reason is because we've enabled activists to have an outsized role in our society, on our campuses, in our companies, in our communities. that supplanted what people would be doing in their communities otherwise.

Some people will say, I'm a really good citizen. I watch MSNBC every day. I know what's going on. That's like, that's not citizenship, man. There are people who would be going to church, but instead they're highly involved in ideological political causes. And we have these kind of malignant narcissists in organizations large and small

in the workforce on campuses that are trying to conscript child soldiers into their culture war. The key thing to remember is this. When you hate somebody for political or ideological reasons, you become somebody's product. And that's an important thing to keep in mind. Somebody's profiting, and it ain't you. On the contrary, you're going to get a lot less happy and you're going to have fewer friends.

You'll be fired up and I can talk about what actually is happening in your brain. And you get a lot of dopamine from hate, the anticipation of the reward of being right. You're going to wind up lonely. You're going to wind up paying a big, big price for indulging in that particular emotion. Yeah, you talked about, you know, happiness in the U.S. two aspects, which you kind of hit on, right, which was this climate change issue, which is basically like we decreased by what, 0.5% every year, and then we have these storms, which would be COVID. And then you talked about the dark triad too, which to me sounded like

a science fiction. I had no idea. That's like a cool band. Right. I was like, great. Where are the dark triad, man? Can you talk about what that is? Because it, these days, everybody's talking narcissists. And sometimes I think, is that just us being narcissistic, thinking everybody else is a narcissist? What's actually going on? Dark triad is a, it's a term of art in the social science world among psychologists and behavioral economists where three personality characteristics coincide. And this happens, by the way, in 7% of the population, no joke. Scott Barry Kaufman, who has that wonderful psychology podcast. He's sort of the world's leading expert on the prevalence.

He'd be a great guest, actually. So the prevalence of this dark triad. The dark triad is to be above average in clinically identifiable narcissism. Machiavellianism. which is to say, I'm willing to hurt or lie to you or in some way harm you for my own personal gain, and psychopathy to have psychopathic traits, above average psychopathic traits, which really is not about being an ex-murder, it's about not having remorse. So in other words, it's all about me, I'm willing to hurt you, and I don't feel bad about it.

That's 7% of the population. That's a problem. That's one in 14 people. Now, ordinarily we shun them. For example, if they have a hard time getting by in the world, if they're cognitively not regifted or whatever, then they'll commit crimes and they'll often wind up in jail. They certainly won't be hired. They won't stay married for very long and will shun them.

But in particular periods in American history, we find that people will be attracted toward dark triads. And these are these periods of bullying and polarization of a sort of acute populism across the political spectrum where these people who are willing to say anything for their own personal gain, no matter how much harm it does and are remorseless about it, will be rewarded. Now, the problem is that everybody listening to this right now, They're thinking about that person on the other side. It's unhelpful to be thinking about the person on the other side.

Every time I write about this on social media, for example, people say, yeah, well, and they, you know, if it's a bit liberal, they'll talk about Trump. And if it's a conservative, they'll talk about, you know, whoever, whatever politician. It's on your side. And that's the problem that we have. We have this epidemic of dark triad leadership in media, in politics, on campuses. There's a very interesting set of papers. There's research now about so-called virtuous victimhood. Virtuous victimhood is the phenomenon in which leaders will get their prestige from the grievance that they get from particular victimhood status.

And that virtuousness will turn into a form of bullying. That's a classic dark triad form of behavior. And we see it again and again and again. I'm such a victim. Oh, woe is me. That gives me a whole bunch of points. That gives me a whole bunch of power. We see it on both the right and the left.

Right now, if people are listening, they're going, yeah, I see it on the other side is because you're not looking at your own side. And that's a big problem for this country. That's driving down happiness, as driving down opportunity. It's creating polarization such that we can't make common cause to solve problems across the ideological spectrum. Is it always a societal issue? Can it also be detrimental intrapersonally? And how do you determine if you are engaged with a dark triad? Yeah, I do a lot of work on romantic love.

It's one of the things that I do. My class at the Harvard Business School, it's called Leadership and Happiness. And the most popular unit of that class is how to fall in love and stay in love. And I talk about the brain a lot. I talk about both the psychology and the neuroscience of falling and staying in love. And it's obviously of intense interest to my 28-year-old students who are really good at business, but nobody's taught them about the business of life, really. And so they're thinking about that an awful lot.

When I talk about the dark triad, man, that is like a big buzz. And I start hearing about it from students who are not in the class who are coming to me and say, I think I might be living with a dark triad professor. Can you help me? And you know it is the bottom line. Because generally speaking, dark triads, they present very favorably. They're very successful in the dating market, for example. They do unbelievably well on the apps.

They do really well on early, you know, the first and second dates. They do incredibly well because they're willing to do and say anything for you to fall in love. Why? Because then the hook is set. And once the hook is set, they're willing to exploit you. They'll leave you with a broken heart in an empty bank account. Almost everybody listening to us has had a romantic interaction with at least one dark triad. The problem is, especially women, who wind up with dark triad after dark triad after dark triad.

That's a pattern of behavior that becomes a pathology. And, you know, we see there's a lot of that. We show them in the literature. There are dark triads who are women, too. So there are men who can do that. But men, generally speaking, break out of that pattern more than women do for whatever reason. You also find people who are in a work situation where their boss is a dark triad. And you can get into a situation where your political leaders are dark triads, or your media leaders are dark triads.

or the culture is being generated largely online by dark triads, and that's a lot of what we find on social media. Yeah, you said something like 7% of the population is a dark triad, but also 7% of the population is the amount of the population that is happy that we are in a culture war. Yeah, so those are two different sets of data. So that, you know, Scott Barry Kaufman's stuff about, you know, the dark triad says 7%.

And we see this in a lot of different data sources. There's also work from Tim Dixon, who has a group called More in Common, and he asks people, and anonymous surveys, do you like or hate how polarized we become as a society? Do you wish that we were more won as a country as a society? And you find that about 93% of Americans hate how divided we become as a country. That means that 7% don't hate it. I mean, who says, yeah, I kind of like how divided we becomes a country. Well, I'll tell you who does that

is somebody who's profiting from that. So no doubt there's a ton of overlap between those datasets. You know what's interesting is we started running the screen when we hire people, which is that we look at their Twitter replies. And what we found, I don't know if it's Dark Triad or not, but if it's largely negative in trolling or hateful comments, there's a high correlation between them not working out well. And so we just... And so we just don't hire that.

There's a lot of research on how people interact on social media, and you find that social media, it tends to reward Dark Triad behavior. There's a very famous paper in the journal Social Psychology called Trolls just want to have fun. And it's about the fact that trolls tend to have psychopathic characteristics. they just do. Internet trolls do that. So one of the things that you should always ask on a first date, what do you do on social media?

And they say, I just like to throw bombs and create trouble and all that. Do not date that person. That person is going to very, very likely, is going to be a big problem in your life. If you fall in love, woe be unto you. God, I wish I'd do this before. I got the two business deals with one.

But you didn't marry one. No, thank God, that's true. No, no, he's not a troll. That is not. I've only ever trolled back and I regret doing it because now I'm like the fixation of this man's life. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no.

There's no margin in that. And you never say to yourself, you know, my only regret is I wasn't more of a jerk. You don't think that. And it's one of the things that I recommend to a lot of people is to look for opportunities where people are trolling you to respond the way that your mother would be proud of. And that will really boost your happiness. When you look at contempt in your ordinary life and use it as an opportunity to return warm-heartedness, you always feel better.

You become more effective. you become more creative, you become more focused. This is an analgesic to ordinary life. It's actually go looking for hatred and answer it with love. Your life will change. That's fascinating. Oh, yeah. It's amazing.

It's amazing how much this works. I've had missionaries on both sides of my family. And it's weird because missionaries, they face intense amounts of rejection. Nobody's ever said, great news. There's missionaries on the porch ever, right? But they're always happy. And the reason is because they believe they're bringing, love and light where there's hatred and darkness. I mean, you can disagree with them,

but that's what they honestly believe. That's why they're happy. And so we can actually say, okay, I'm going to be a missionary for what I believe. I mean, not necessarily a religious missionary, although nothing wrong with that either. Missionary from love. And where do you go? You can't go where everybody's already perfectly loving. You go where they aren't. And you say, I'm going out there. I'm going out there. And I'm going to bring love. I'm going to bring light. And if you make that your passion on social media can be a very generative a very productive experience, and it truly will change your life. Some of the studies that I read in your book were fascinating.

I just finished rereading Strength to Strength. So went back and re-read, Love Your Enemies. You got my whole oeuvre. I know. Did you read Performing Arts in a New Era? 2005? Genetic algorithms and public economics. None of those?

My nerd credentials are impeccable. Yeah, you do. In your newest book, I like the line that Oprah said, which was basically that she always has a story and you always have a study. Yeah. But what I found online that's fascinating is in a world in which I think trust is disintegrated, and people have a hard time trusting institutions, they have a hard time trusting individuals. There's such power in the studies and science interwoven with story. So there were a couple studies that I thought were fascinating. You know, one in particular being the definition really of the book, which is, you know, the four pillars of happiness, which you talked about that seemed kind of obvious, but in a world in which common sense is not so common, perhaps aren't. Right. So obvious. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Yeah. So these are the practices, the habits that the happiest people have in common. We start off the book by defining happiness, which is not a feeling, very important, because emotional self-management is critical to living a good life. And if you're just hoping for happy feelings, this is not going to lead you to emotional self-management. So we start off with a proper definition, which is that it's the macro-nutrients of happiness or enjoyment and meaning.

And we talk about, you know, there's been enjoyment and pleasure about satisfaction, why it's hard to get and keep, you know, why meaning tends to be so elusive. And then we say, okay, well, what are the practices that people have? What are the habits that people have in common who are getting a lot of those three macronutrients? In other words, they have a good balanced diet. Then we talk about the dishes in the happiness diet. And those dishes are faith, family, friends, and work. And we talk about each one.

So faith doesn't mean my faith. I'm a Catholic, the most important thing in my life. But as a scientist, I know that for happiness, there are many paths that all have the same thing in common, which is transcendence. You have to transcend your own little. psycho drama. Mother Nature wants you to think of Cody's the most, the only thing in the world, the only thing in the world. And it's just tedious and boring and terrifying all at the same time, makes you feel dead inside. You need to transcend you. You need to get little. This is the point of these religious experiences from the happiness perspective. I'm not going to talk about the

metaphysics about what's metaphysically correct. That's a different discussion entirely. But for happiness, you can get that from religious or non-religious behavior. When I say faith, I mean a serious philosophy of life that shows you the grandeur of the universe and makes you little. That's important, whether it's reading the Stoics, like our friend Ryan Holliday likes to do, whether it's walking in nature before dawn, in the Brahma Mahurtah, there's the creator's time, whether it's studying the fugues of Bach, whether it's adopting a viphasana meditation practice, or whether for me it's going to mass every day. You've got to have something. So that's faith. Family life is, sounds sort of obvious,

but one in six Americans is not talking to a family member because of politics today, which is the saddest datum in my whole field. We could cover the neurophysiology of a why we need to be around our people and they need to be around us. You know, we're a kin-based species, and we have neurophysiological ways to identify our kin and take pleasure in their company, but we know who they are, and it's important that we maintain those relationships.

Friendships, I'm talking about real friends, not deal friends. You know, a lot of people listening to this show, they want to be really successful. That is fantastic. I endorse that. I endorse the show. I endorse the philosophy. But be careful.

You need useless people in your life. You need real friends who are useless, not just deal friends who are useful. Yeah, explain that a little. I found that concept fascinating. It's a hard one for a lot of us who work super long hours. I mean, I don't think I've worked less than 60 hours a week in my whole career and I'm 60. That's a lot of hours that went into that.

The result is that it's very easy for all of your social relationships to be useful in a kind of a utility sort of way to build up your career and your professional life. And that's what happens to a lot of very successful, hardworking people, that the last time they had real, useless friends was in college, and they don't even know how to do it anymore. 60% of men my age, their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. That's not great. It's not great.

I mean, that's because these guys who are disproportionately people who have worked and worked and worked and worked and worked, have lost their chops for friendship. And that's a big problem. I work a lot with executives. I'm sort of the striver whisperer for happiness. They come to you for financial advice. They come to me for happiness advice.

Yeah. I say, okay, take a piece of paper and have the 10 people that you spend the most, time with on a given week. And then they write ours and D's after their name. That's not Republican and Democrat. That's real and deal. I did this exercise. It's scary. A lot of D's in there. A lot of D's. Yeah. I mean, your husband's

a real friend. But I mean, it's he's useful. I mean, he's family life and making your home and etc. But you need more and what you find is that the happiest people, this comes from the Harvard study of adult development over an 85 year longitudinal study. The people who die happiest, they have

most of them have a successful marriage and at least one intimate, real non-deal friend. So you've got to go beyond just the person you live with, your happily married roommate. You got to go beyond that. A lot of people have, you know, five or six by the time that they're old. But those are the predictors of the happiest life. That's in the friendship one. It's not just are they real versus deal friends. Deal friends like, he can help me out. Arthur, he's going to be on my podcast. He's going to help me get more viewers. This guy's going to help me make more money. But the real friends, you also talk about the way that you speak and communicate with them.

important and how you are actually happier when you talk about one subject versus another. I have a super close friend. It's really my closest friend. He's in Atlanta. And I've known him for many years. He was on my board at AEI and, you know, I'm on the board of his foundation. But those are just pretexts for us to spend time together. I talk to him usually about once a week. And I see him in person at least once or twice a year. And when we talk, it's like, oh, we got to talk about that thing. And we never get to it. What we talk about is our families. We're both grandfathers. We talk about our shared Catholic faith.

We talk about things that are important to us in the world. We talk about real things that actually really matter. And we don't talk about deal things at all. We would, but we don't get to it. And if we lived in the same city, which would be just wonderful, we would probably talk about deal things too. But the whole point is that real crowds out deal for these particular friends. And real is really about the love in your life and the things that you care about the most.

A couple other things I thought were fascinated if people want to be tactical on happiness, is it looks like there were some studies that showed actual, let's say, spatial proximity, friends and family members that make you feel better, make you happier. What are some of the other kind of maybe not so thoughtful things that people can do to be happier like that? So you're talking about these epidemiological studies, there's the Framingham Heart Study that was in Framingham, Massachusetts, where they were looking at a longitudinal study over a long period of time about how people's heart health, because this was, you know, when it started, it was, you know, the heart health was a really big deal. But then quickly they started to realize that they had

data that they could measure all kinds of stuff with. And they found that the proximity to other people would infect you with good and bad things. So you find that people, if you're in physical proximity with people who are obese, you're much more likely to become obese. A amount of people who drink too much, you're much more likely to drink too much. And if you're around people who are happier, you get happier too. Because we tend to mimic each other's behavior as primates were prone toward mimicry as a way that this works. And you see people doing happy things and being happy about their lives. You're like, okay, and you do that too.

They'll measure it. If you're within one half mile of a happy family member, here's the percentage likelihood that you'll get this much happier within a particular period of time. It's a social scientist, actually. See the world those kinds of metrics. But it's really interesting because what that shows us is that happiness is, you can catch it.

It's a virus. Unhappiness is also a virus, is what we find. So there's lots and lots of practical things that you can actually do, and that's what my work really is about, is they're not hacks, they're just basic practices. I talk about the fact that, for example, humans have a tendency towards, what they call the negativity bias, where because of our evolution,

we reward resentment and negativity and fear and sadness and anger and disgust, because that's what keeps us alive. Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions are critical for keeping you alive. So the result is we always see the glasses half empty. That's what we do because our ancestors didn't get eaten on the place to scene because they were alert and vigilant and negative and gloomy. And it's like, uh, today can be the last day. And so that passed on to you. You don't have to be that way because that's actually not accurate in the, you know, the most prosperous, upwardly mobile, charitable, progressive society in the history of the world, aka the United States. Think about how much we talk down this country constantly. And it's just insanity. I mean, what other country would you bet on? What other country would you want to go to as an immigrant? I mean, come on. Are you kidding? And are everybody kind of in their heart knows that our best years are ahead? I mean, the best times are coming.

But no, no, no, it's just, oh, this could be the last election. It's just nutty. One of the most practical ways to get happier is to be realistic about what's actually happening to assess what's going on in your life and say, you know what, I have a lot more to be grateful about than to be resentful about. And so I'm going to write down the things for which I'm going to be grateful. That's the so-called gratitude list that people are actually talking about. But that's the neuroscience or the social science behind why that's an effective thing to do.

You can raise your happiness between 10 and 25 percent within the next 10 weeks. by just writing down and paying attention to the fact that you should be more grateful than resentful. That's wild. Yeah. And theoretically, I mean, because that's higher than prescription antidepressants. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, this is the secret to getting happier. You will be happy because cosmically happy, I believe it happens in heaven.

But as a social scientist, you know, we all know that you have negative emotions for a reason. And as long as you're walking in the earth, you're going to have them because there are threats. you're going to have negative experiences because not everything can go your way. And so you're going to feel unhappiness and that's part of life and that's healthy and that's normal. And you learn from that and that's completely okay. But to get happier, there's just all these incredible things that you can do. And they start with knowledge. It's more important for you to get knowledge about the science of happiness than it is to say, you know, knowledge and pill form.

I mean, look, if you need to go to the doctor, you need to go to the doctor. I get it. I mean, mood disorders are no joke. clinical anxiety, clinical depression and generalized anxiety, you're no joke. But the most powerful tool that we have on our disposal is knowledge about this. This has been revolutionary for me in my life. I mean, I study happiness because I wanted to be happier. I wasn't happy. I wasn't happy as I should have been. I have the best life. I mean, I have a happy marriage and my kids are healthy and my life is good. I live in America for Pete's sake. And I said, you know, this isn't right.

This isn't it right. I'm going to go teach the science of happiness at Harvard, because I want to emphasize this in my own life, share it with other people and get happier as a result. And my happiness is 60% higher than it was five years ago. It's crazy. What I thought was interesting, too, is when you can get to the definitions of something, then you can more easily understand the context, it seems. And when I was listening to some of your work on hope versus optimism, it rang true for me. I mean, I remember I was talking to Ryan Streeter, Ed of Civitas, who were both friends with your very close,

and Pano, who heads University of Austin as the dean there. Connellis, University of Austin and Texas, a wonderful organization. Yeah, and I was going to maybe give a little song and dance to the students. And I was asking Pano, you know, what should I talk about? You know, and so my mind, because I'm kind of a financing nerd, I'm like, we could talk about, like, how you could get equity in a business, and here's how we could break it down and we could do these spreadsheets. And Pano was like, okay. And he's like, or he's like, you could do what kids really need more than anything right now. And I was like, okay, what's that?

He's like, teach him how to hope. And I was like, that sounds fluffy. I don't know how to do that. And you unlocked it a different way for me by explaining what happened during Victor Frankl's concentration camps and the difference between hope and optimism. Right. Optimism and hope are often thought of as synonyms and they're not. Optimism is a prediction.

There's this funny thing in the psychological literature called the Stockdale paradox. And James Stockdale was an admiral who was captured during the Vietnam War and he was in a Hanoi Hilton. He was in a prison camp and kept by the northern. the Vietnamese. It was a bad situation. You noticed this weird thing. The optimist died. They died of a broken heart. He said, it's like, oh, we're going to be out by Thanksgiving. And then Thanksgiving came and went. O'ie, out by Christmas, Easter. And they got more and more and more despondent because their, their predictions didn't come true. The important thing to keep in mind is that you don't know if things are going to be

okay or things are not going to be okay. But there's something you can do, and that's hope. Hope is this active virtue. So among Christians, it's a theological virtue. Faith, hope, and love. The whole idea that there's something can be done and you can do it. I don't know what the odds are, but I can actually do something that empowers you to act in a particular way. So the key thing is to say, okay, what can you do today? So when things are going rotten and in everybody's life, there's grief and there's sadness

and there's difficulty and there's barriers and you wake up each day and say, okay, okay, okay, I got it. I have the situational awareness of these things. It's not perfect. What can I do today? What can I do today? That's a very hopeful way to start your day and you will start empowered. That's incredibly important. As opposed to indoctrinating yourself with a bunch of false propaganda, it's going to be great today.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You can be a pessimistic, hopeful person, as a matter of fact. And you'll be a lot better off than if you're a hopeless optimist, which means I think everything's going to be okay, but there's nothing I can do. I get it. So optimism is much more outcome-based and external. It's just predicting the future. And we don't know the future. We don't know the future.

I don't know what's going to happen. You know, we're recording this in New York City. There's a lot of buses running through red lights out there. I don't know. But I know that I can actually keep my eyes open, look both ways, and not jaywalk too terribly much. I have hope that there's a lot that I can do, even though I don't know what's actually going to happen. Yeah, personal agency. Speaking of what's happening, what's going on with women these days?

We used to be a lot happening. question. You're like, where do we start? Yeah, yeah, I know. Bring out the list. But I was looking at some of your research and it seems like women, you know, across multiple different categories used to be happier than men. Now we're not. Right. How bad are we? What's the difference? And what happened? So that's a good question. What happened? So they take a little bit of background on that for the longest time, Yale has found that women were happier than women were happier than women were happier than women were happier than women, married women, widowed women, way happy. To look at that. You know, women at different ages were happier than single men. Married women. Widow women, way happy. than would have men. I told my husband that one. Yeah, I told my wife that. She's like, huh?

And the only group of women that were unhappy were divorced women. And typically is because they had custody of the kids, and that's incredibly stressful to be a single parent. Because working and kids, et cetera. That doesn't mean that there's not a lot of meaning. It just means that, you know, day-to-day enjoyment can be attenuated. But what you've found is that over the past 20 years or so, women have converged downward to the unhappiness levels of men.

So they've converged. And at first I thought, great, men are getting happy. women are getting unhappier is what we find. And they're getting unhappier very quickly. And so there's a lot of different theories of it. You find that there's a lot less family formation going on. There's a lot less marriage that's actually happening. You find that men and women are diverging politically really, really quickly.

You find that women are getting much more politically progressive and men are getting more conservative. And so the result of it is that, especially in a culture where people think that the most important thing for making a romantic match is voting for the same party, idiotically, as if that, you know, that, so you'll find that they're less and less and less likely to find somebody that can actually love them as a person because of these differences in ideology, and they're just diverging in these particular ways. I think that a lot of the activism culture is particularly targeted at women. Social media is especially targeted at young women. It's creating a whole lot of misery with social comparison, with political hatred, with a sense of loneliness that's crawling out of people's smartphones. And all these

things together are creating an epidemic of unhappiness among women, especially young women in our society today. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advice. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Don't miss the devil wears prodot too in theaters.

Merrill Street, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is find my time until you fail.

On May 1st, icons. I'm going to make something of this job. Rain. The bridges I burn. Night my way. Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2.

In theaters May 1st. Directed by David Frankel. Yeah, I always like to remind people that I have an inordinate amount of face paint on anytime I come on these because, you know, you see people on this and we look okay. But, you know, there's eyelashes on here. There's a ton of face paint. You know, it's not natural. And I think it's important that we kind of tell people that. I don't have the balls.

Like some of the women are like, I'm just not going to wear makeup. And I'm like, the thing is I'm not. But I will at least be honest about it. That's actually an easier thing for me. men to be sure. But of course it's different because men are peacocking in different ways. That's true. They're doing different kinds of flex having to do with their ability, their financial capabilities, their prowess in the workspace.

More and more and more, by the way, you know, with this highly visual media that we have, more and more men feel like they have to be in the gym all the time. It's the craziest thing that you actually see. Guys my age are just like, you know, working out constantly is what they, there's pressure even on that front. It's true. And part of the reason is because otherwise we will be judged by a large public audience, which we shouldn't care about.

But our brains don't know that. You know, our brains are, you know, the whole, there's an interesting little piece of the brain, part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. And its whole job is to make you grieve, aggrieved and afraid of being rejected. And so you're sad when your beloved breaks up with you and you're afraid when you think you're going to be tossed out of your. tribe. And there's a reason for that because, you know, in the place to scene, you would have walked the frozen tundra and died alone if you got rejected. So you need a part of an onboard

capacity to make you not want to be rejected. The way that we use that today is to want to be accepted by, you know, millions of strangers on social media because of the way that we look, which is complete insanity. And yet that's how our brains are wired. Yeah. Do you think that some of the stuff that's going on with women has anything to do with, you know, sometimes I think about it like the food pyramid. It's like, oh, you know, we were told for 30 years or however long. Eat a lot of carbs. Meat's actually not good. And the more processed, the better. And so you did the thing. You followed the pyramid and you had a way of life that you thought was actually healthy, but which isn't. And then I look at women today and sometimes I wonder, and I'm an example of it. You know, I'm a,

I'm a girl boss, if that's the phrase you want to use. I'm a working woman. But we're certainly working a lot more too. Have you seen any studies that show women's happiness while working? I know online there's this big like tradwife sundress movement. What does the data tell us about that? Well, we know historically that women have always worked. There's nothing. I mean, that's like that's historically anomalous, the idea that, you know, women not working and staying home.

This is like this pining for the 50s or something. And everybody's got to do their own thing for sure. But, you know, if you go back thousands of years, women work. They're working on farms. What's historically anomalous is the idea that as soon as you get married, you wouldn't work. Again, more power to you if that's what you're going to do. but if we're just going to look at history, that's kind of the way it is. What we do find is that when work crowds out love relationships, you're going to be in trouble.

We don't really have that much sympathy for men who do that because, you know, we valorize that when men are workaholic. Workaholism is just any other sort of addiction that we have. But when you drink a bottle and a half a jack, nobody says congratulations. Your prowess at drinking is unparalleled. I really admire you. But if you work 16 hours for your startup, people will say that's unbelievable, which is wonderful. you'll get on the cover of Fortune magazine. But that's just straight up addiction, straight up addictive behavior.

What you find is that now that's infecting women as much as it's infecting men. And what that is is a relationship with work that crowds out other relationships that bring more happiness. You know, you need a relationship with the divine. You need a relationship with your family. You need a relationship, a real marriage, not a fake marriage, not a roommate marriage. We're just like, hey, hey. It's not good enough. not going to be happy. And you don't need, you know, a nerd at Harvard with a PhD like me to tell you. Everybody

knows that who's watching us. You need real friendships. And real friendships take time. And what we've found is that, you know, as the role of women in the workforce has increased to the point where we have workaholism rates among women that are as high as they are among men, that you're going to see precipitous declines in happiness. I don't think that this is especially gender-based. I just think that we have a problematic relationship with the way that we objectify ourselves. Interesting. You have a word that I'm going to mispronounce, speaking of relationships. Homophily, is that right? Homophily or homogamy. Yeah, yeah. Nailed it. Okay. Well, well played.

So I have these two girls that come and do my hair makeup each week. And they're in the 20s. Great job. I said. I don't have any of that. I was not fishing for a compliment about my. I just wanted to give you one. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You know, I could tell you needed it. That's right. Let's go lift weights. So you do a lot of that too. So these two women are younger, like early 20s. And what's interesting to me, I'm 37, and I've been married for a while now. And I think actually my husband and I were just texting, like, our partnership is the best thing about life.

Everybody always told me marriage was really hard. I'm divorced previously, so I didn't do it right at once. And now that I'm in it, I'm like, it makes everything easier. I would give up all the money that I had because I think I could earn it back. I was as they say money. I always returns to his rightful owner. Yeah. I don't know if that's true or not.

Partnership is really, really special to me. And these young women, when they come and talk to me, often say, I asked one of them the other day, both liberal. They're young. They're beautiful. They're smart. They own their own business because they do this for a living. And yet both of them said that they wouldn't date somebody that was a member of the Republican Party. Of a voter for Trump.

Right. I didn't ask about Trump specifically, but I could assume. Probably stronger. Yeah, probably stronger. Yeah. And so talk about compatibility, homophily, and what actually matters. Yeah. So homophily is the tendency for us to sort in groups where we are an awful lot of like and fall in love with people who are just like us.

Now there's a natural narcissistic tendency to want to fall in love with ourselves. The problem is that when we can curate our relationships through dating websites, then we're actually able to set the criteria for people that we're going to meet. And what people have a tendency to do is to say, okay, well, what's the most important thing? Compatibility. What's compatibility? Sameness. Okay. So I vote this way and I like this food and I like this food.

live in Austin and I listen to this kind of music and that I like to travel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's the kind of man or woman I want to meet. And that's your sibling. And that's not hot. And so what you find in the data is that people have more and more and more variety in the dating markets and they're less and less attracted to the people that they're meeting. This is, and, you know, the apps have eaten every other way.

And so you find that 59% of relationships start on the apps now, 59%. That's a lot. And the trouble is that they tend to be unstable and they're based on relatively low levels of attraction. I mean, there can be, you know, short-term sexual attraction. I mean, dating is a serious business. This is an audition for life partner if you're doing it in a way that's actually going to lead you to the most happiness. This is not a moral proposition. It's just a science proposition, basically. And this is almost the worst way that we can do it is by trying to troll in a pool of people who are, who look like us, who are just like us.

You need somebody who completes you, not somebody who mimics you. That's what you need. That's the reason that matchmakers are really successful, that parents can be really successful, that blind dates tend to be more successful because your friends are like, I know, you know, Cody's got this thing, but there's this other guy and, oh, she could really use that. They think about a fit as opposed to, you know, two puzzle pieces that are the same. They don't fit together. And that's a lot of what's actually happening here.

Now, homophily and homogamy, people love people just like themselves. that's one of the reasons that we have more and more inequality in our society as well, because you know, you find increasingly that people meet in college. And if they're elite colleges, they're meeting at elite colleges. There are a lot of couples at the Harvard Business School. And they come out and they're both doing these super high-powered jobs. And so the result of that is you have more couples that are more alike with respect to their abilities and their educational aptitude as well.

Yeah, you know, what's interesting is my husband's so different than I am. you know, military, very strong guy could care less about money. I mean, honestly, doesn't care at all about making money. A military. What branch? He was a Navy SEAL. He cares about service and purpose. He could be paid $50 million, and if it didn't have service and purpose, he would be unhappy. And it's been incredibly complimentary because I am in a chase for money and success somehow, and he is in a chase for service and purpose. And when we pair the two together, he got a nice house and doing it like that.

Yeah. He got a nice, yeah. And he can temper. my crazy, you know, and I can temper his in some way. This is very important to recognize, and people need a lot more of this. Now, part of the problem also is in our society today that we become less and less tolerant of people who are not like us, and so couples won't get along precisely because they're complimentary, and that's a big problem. You find that, by the way, the happiest couples, they tend to be one introvert and one extrovert.

And one is the threat spotter and the deep thinker, and the other one is the one who's like, you know, the big personality and make sure that everybody gets out of the house and goes to parties, that's a really very stable thing. But if you're a narcissist, if you've been brought up in a culture that encourages you to be narcissistic, that you're thinking about your own identity all the time. And me, me,

me, me, you're not going to like somebody who's that much different than you. You're not going to have the initial attraction to that kind of person. And the result is that you're only going to keep going out with your doppelganger and wondering why you don't feel long-term attraction to the person. Fascinating me because nobody ever taught us that. No.

In fact, people said opposites attract, but it It's almost like in a bad way. You know, like they attract, but be careful. Yeah, no, no. I mean, it's, you know, complete opposites. There has to be some level of compatibility. I mean, if you're a serious Catholic, you should find somebody who's a good Catholic. And that means, by the way, go someplace where they are.

You're not going to meet them on the apps. You're going to meet them at church. It's one of the biggest pieces of advice that I get to people. It's like, I'm on the apps. And I get a lot of dates, but I don't like anybody that I mean. It's like maybe all the people you're dating because it's the apps are just looking for a fling. Huh. Maybe you should go someplace for people congregate who want.

the same thing that you do. Where might that be? And we start thinking through institutions. And, you know, a lot of it is a lack of imagination for people who are dating age. Thank God I didn't have. I've been married 33 years. And, you know, it's like, it's a long time. I haven't been on a date in, what, 35, 36 years. We've been on lots of days. It's just not a new person. Exactly right. That's exactly right. We had a lot of date nights. It's true. Our kids were a little. You mentioned earlier, you're sort of a whisper of successful people. Scriver whisperer. You're the striver whisper. You know, we were talking beforehand, like I saw Rich Roll the other week, and, you know, I was like, oh.

Phenomenal. Yeah, really like him. He's a visionary, actually. Yeah. And really, you know, measured and calm feeling. He felt a little bit like a weighted blanket. We just got back from India together. That's what's what? He told me. I go, hey, that bracelet's cool. What's going on with that? And he goes, well, you know, it was from hanging out with the Dalai Lama. And I go, okay. I immediately thought of you. And so he gave you all the credit and said, you know, Arthur brought me along. But to you, I was just wondering, like, Dalai Lama, Oprah, you've met. all the presidents basically through AI.

Do you get star-strucked by these people? Did you freak out when Oprah called? Well, I didn't believe it. I mean, I thought it was somebody punking me. It's like, wow, somebody does Oprah's voice really well. Wait, so what happened? Like, your phone rang and it was Oprah? Not exactly.

I mean, it was, what happened was that Oprah, turns out that she reads my column in the Atlantic, which you don't know if you have thanks, I appreciate it. But we have half a million readers. You don't know who's in the reader base. And during the coronavirus epidemic, she was reading it every week. And then she read from Strength to Strength in 2022,

and she called me to be on her podcast. Her team and my team, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, the first time I talked to her is like, it was a little starstruck because I've been hearing that voice my whole life. My wife learned English by watching the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing, it's the whole thing.

But very quickly, you're talking to another person. Very quickly, that's what it comes down to. We all have the same drives and desires and needs. And we have a tendency to objectify other people, and that's the problem. You know, so in my line of work, I get to work with a lot of people who are quite prominent because, you know, and people who aren't. And they're just all the same. And the real gift that you can give anybody, no matter how famous they are, is to treat them like a human being, a beloved child of God, somebody who has the same needs that we all do, which is just to be loved and heard and respected and just to be a friend.

And the Dalai Lama, you've continued to go back to meet with him for 11 years. A long time. Yeah. Different religious backgrounds and faiths. what keeps you going back? Like I hear when you meet with the Dalai Lama, you could ask him a question, but he's going to answer it

sort of how he wants to. Yeah, he's going to say what you need to hear. So the Dalai Lama is the most intuitive person I've ever met, and he's become a beloved mentor and teacher to me over the past 11 years. I've had a lot of interaction with him. We've written together,

and he believes we've known each other for many, many years, a long, long time. And so the first time that I met him, I noticed that he was studying me to tell me what I needed to hear, notwithstanding what I asked him the first time I interviewed him. And that just continued a pace. He's 88 years old. He's turning 89 on July 6th. So everybody mark the calendar and say a prayer for the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama in his presence, you think you're seeking something from him. You're being sought by him and his wisdom. This is true in our

lives. For all of us, we think we're seeking something. And we seek and we seek and we're fernetically running around, looking for it. You need to stop and listen. Because then the thing that's seeking you can find you. That's the secret to actually finding your place, your metaphysical place in the world, your cosmic place in the world, to find the basis of your peace and contentment is allowing yourself to be found. And people don't trust that in this world that's so full of stimulus. Oh, look, I'm just going to read a thousand books and I'm going to stay, I'm going to be very online, and I'm going to listen to every possible podcast, and they should listen to yours. But the result is that what we're not good at anymore is,

stopping and allowing ourselves to be sought. That's what we need more of. The advice I wind up giving to people is getting up an hour and a half before dawn. It's the Brahma Mohruta, the creator's time. And going outside when it's cool and dark and walking for an hour without your device and you can hear the crunch of the gravel on the trail beneath your feet and to be actually alive. And to learn how to do that. For people who will write to me, they feel lost after college.

It's like, I feel lost. I don't know what I want to do. I was supposed to know, and I don't know. I say you need Brahma Mahorta. You need the creator's time. You need to actually allow yourself to be found. And the way that you're going to do that is what people have always done. You need a pilgrimage before dawn.

I'll have very specific examples of that. But the underlying principle is what I learned from the Dalai Lama, which is that you need to listen as opposed to speaking, so that you can hear what it is that you're supposed to hear, and it will come to you. Your voice is so unique. And I think in this day and age, these themes are pervasive throughout society that we need an answer like yours too, which is simple but also very complex, love and happiness. Have you ever thought about getting the biggest microphone out there, the presidency?

Well, you don't just get the presidency, you know. Is America ready for a bald president? You know, every day, I start my day with the same prayer, Lord guide my path. What do you want for me today? I want to be God's instrument. to bring love and happiness to as many people as I possibly can. That's my mission, to glorify God, to serve others, to have an adventure while I'm actually doing it. And I don't know what that's going to take. If I had known that, I would have been blown away. When I was in my 20s, I was playing

the French horn in the Barcelona Orchestra. And I was being a college professor, I was running a think tank. And now I'm doing this happiness mission. I don't know what the next chapter is going to bring, but I'm open to everything. That seems like an unlikely next chapter. But the truth of the matter is that If I feel like I'm called, I'm listening. I want to be sought by the divine wisdom to do what actually will lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness as much as I possibly can. Whatever that path is, I'm going to walk it. That's so good. You know, when you speak, you can hear the musician in you.

I'm sure a lot of people tell you that. You know, your intonation and the way you stop and pause. Thank you for that. Yeah, it's beautiful. You talk a lot about the sort of the second stage. and you call it something else. Second curve. And what to do when you've sort of already had your first iteration,

your first career, your first identity. And I was going back and reading Strength to Strength and and joking with you about how those first three chapters always so hard for me to hear because you talk about death fears. And I always thought that death fears were just, we're all scared of dying. And that was it. And that's not actually it.

So can you talk about the varying death fears? I think I share a death fear with you. and then how you can get over that maybe with the second curve. Everybody has a stated or unstated answer to the question, who am I? And that really is, like we would talk about it, on modern college campus is your identity. But it's a deep identity. It's not just my religious group or my political affiliation

or my racial group or whatever happens to be. It's deep stuff of who am I? How do I see myself? What is that person that I see in the mirror? What's the salient characteristic that defines me? And each one of us has those things. Typically has to do with one of our strengths, for example. your death fear is losing you, the euness. Now, you're not getting hit by a bus. I can joke about that

all day long. I'm not afraid that I'm a Christian. I've been practicing for death my whole life. It's okay. I had a very scary airplane experience. It was about three weeks ago when I was coming back from India where I was with Rich Roll and Rain Wilson and all these ways. This great thing with it, Ali Lama is wonderful. And on the way back was on his two-engine prop plane coming down from the mountains. And, you know, about 15 minutes into the flight, the pilot said we have a major technical malfunction. We're going to land right now, prepare to land. And then, all the flight attendants sat down and no eye contact and looked up the window one of the propellers wasn't work yeah yeah and we landed we had 15 minutes to think about it is what it came down to

okay i know that you know planes can you know we had a rough landing but the planes can run on one engine but it was a dangerous situation that wasn't scary that wasn't scary gave me an opportunity to talk to the person who's sitting next to me who said grab my hand and said tell me it's going to be okay and i said it's going to be okay it's going to be okay that wasn't hard for me what's hard for me is losing the essence of what I think Arthur Brooks is, which is not important in the cosmic state of affairs, but it's my mind. And again, that's not important because when I die, which I will, and I will be forgotten, each of us has eight great-grandparents. How many can you name? First name, last name, two. We're forgotten and we're forgotten fast, is the whole point.

I get that. I totally get that. But losing the essence of who I believe that I am, able to do in our conversation today and the mission that I'm trying to bring to other people in this apostolate of love and happiness, that's all my brain. That's all my mind. My heart and soul are tied up in the way that I'm able to express ideas. Losing that. And to make things easier, we have early onset dementia in my family. So far so good. That's all I can say is so far so good, but when my mother was my age, she was profoundly demented. Cody, I will lay awake nights? Because that's my death fear.

And I offered up in my prayers. I really do. And my wife swears she will still love me if that befalls me at any point in the future. I believe her. But that's death for me. And I'm really, really afraid of that. Now, that's also life for me. Because recognizing that, I can lean into that and pay attention to that and

and savor the days that I actually have where I truly am alive. and I can have this beautiful conversation that we're having right here because this is the life that I want to lead. And furthermore, recognize that should that happen, that I still will be a beloved child of God. And so it's only in leaning into my death fear that can I be truly alive today. So beautiful. What's yours? A lack of relevance. Being forgotten?

Yeah. There's this Emma Bomback quote that I go back to again and again, which is at the end of my days, when I stand before God at the pearly gates, I hope I can say to him, I have nothing left, not one drop. I used everything he gave me. And I have this fear of not. not squeezing it all out. And what if I can't do it? And what if it's not enough? I'm an existentialist in some ways, too.

Like, I know that nobody's going to remember me even past 10 or 20 years or definitely, you know, past one generation of my kids. Your kids for sure. Your grandkids less. Yeah, exactly. So what? Two generations, you're gone.

So at the end of the day, what does legacy really matter? But that's my fear is what if it, what if none of it mattered and I was totally irrelevant? The only way to deal with that is to lean into that. The only way is to envision. that happening, to imagine that happening. This is how the Theravada Buddhist monks in Vietnam and Myanmar

when they have pictures, they have photos of dead bodies in various states of decay, and they stand in front of the photos and they say, that is me. It's only through the exposure, through courageous exposure to your worst fear of death. Can you conquer that fear of death and be truly alive today? And that's really important. And then, of course, offering it up in your spiritual life. Take that. Take that. I offer that up as a sacrifice.

That's so beautiful. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Cody. A little recap on my time hanging with Arthur afterwards. First of all, I think, God, there's so much I want to share with you guys that I couldn't because we were talking about people behind the scenes. So I'm not going to break his trust there at all, obviously. But it was really useful for me speaking to Arthur this week because I had a tough week.

I had this like, you know, a couple of these people on the internet that were not being very nice. And we're giving me a hard time. And it's annoying because they kind of know them through like people of people and their competitors and an industry of one of the businesses I have. And so, you know, I think they kind of have perverse incentives. And to be frank, whenever I see it, I get mad. Like, do you ever get mad when you, like somebody talks shit about you or you hear about it? And your immediate reaction is not like, oh, I bet they had a hard day.

It's like, let's kill everybody starting with them and break their kneecaps. Maybe that's just me. But anyway, so, you know, in my head, I'm thinking things like these guys are such, They're just little ankle biters. They're mad at the success that we've had. They're just trying to go on. The only way that they can get bigger is by, you know, punching up and I can't punch down. And it annoyed me because I'm humid, you know. And I'm sure you guys have had that same thing. Well, what was so useful for me in speaking to Arthur? And this one book, which you guys haven't read it, maybe, it's called Love Your Enemies. It's so worth it. As I was talking to Arthur afterwards, I was like, do you really, are you really this nice to people when they're mean to you? Because I've seen people be mean to Arthur a lot. If it's not, if I I'm talking about world leaders be mean to Arthur. And he said, try it and see what you think. And I kind of wrinkled my nose and thought, is there an option B? You know?

And you have this like fear of rejection, right? Where when somebody's mean to you, are you going to be mean back to, or are you going to be nice back to them? And then they're going to take advantage of that. So anyway, so I did it. And you guys, damn if I didn't feel good immediately after about just like spreading a little love instead. And basically I pinged one of them and said, hey, you know, I saw some of the

the stuff you've been posting. I hope you're well. I wish you nothing but the best. I think that, you know, some of the stuff you're doing is really cool. You know, I'm bummed you feel this way about it. I at least appreciate that you read my stuff. And, you know, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And I just left it like that. And I wasn't like snide or snarky about it. I just really tried to feel this feeling of empathy for them. And it made me feel incredibly better. Now, I don't think this means that you're not still going to get hate. You are. I think the reason we're all on this planet and you are here uniquely is because you need to go through these trials and tribulations to become a better human.

And that's the entire purpose of this game we call life. And yet, if I can sit in what I call this seat of empathy instead of this seat of contempt, it turns out I feel better. And I lost sleep the other night thinking about it instead. And once I had flipped the switch, I slept like a baby last night. guys, I didn't think about it at all. And it reminds me of this belief that, you know, those problems that you have in your head are they real or are they a series of potential imaginations that are keeping you up like a scary movie that you felt in your body, but you know could never actually be true. How much of the things we worry about are just our scary movies in our head,

are just the residual effects of your brain telling you that there's some horror that could happen. But in fact, after you watch the ring, a chick never comes out of your head. mirror with crazy hair and tries to murder you. It's just your brain having these signals in life because it's trying to keep you alive after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And I hope you get that same thing from Arthur. One of the other things I took away from him as I was sitting talking to him afterwards is how this podcast is teaching me one thing. Most of the people that have incredible things in their life and that are at the top of their game that I've met thus far are also incredible people.

I kind of thought that that saying was true, don't meet your heroes. You guys, I totally disagree. I am sure some of them are going to suck. And yet, not one of them has. So from, like, Rich Roll to Arthur Brooks to, you know, meeting some of my all-time legends, I think it might be true

that the better of human you become, the more successful you become whatever aspect of life that you want. Now, these just happen to be monetarily and maybe fame, successful and being thinking successful humans. But I do think that there's a correlation and we were fed a lie, which is never meet your heroes.

Meet your heroes. I bet they're better than you even think. Or you're picking the wrong heroes. And maybe that says something else. The last thing is that when you meet your heroes, if you can take a moment afterwards and pause and reflect. So I do this new thing right now on Twitter called Lessons from the Road. And Lessons from the Road is essentially every single week, because I'm running a

often to new cities. Like I'm in New York City this week. I'll be in Arizona and I was in D.C. I every day at the end of the day, I do this, this tiny little practice, which is in my notes, right here in my phone. You can see this if you're on YouTube. I write down from every meeting I have notes and thoughts I have afterwards. And what's fascinating about it is the lessons stick more when you write them down. Just like when you read a book and you highlight and you take notes, you're more likely to actually keep that content and that information in your brain. How much more likely? Two to three times more likely.

So if life is really just a giant book that you are reading, learning from, why would you not want to take some notes while you're on this road of life? And so this week, I did exactly that. I wanted to tell you a funny story to close this out. So I'm in New York City. I love New York City. I'm walking in Central Park in the spring, best place in the world in the spring. I'm like enjoying life.

I'm listening to Arthur's book on my head. phones, I'm kind of preparing for the interview. And as I'm walking along, like, you know, the smell of flowers in the air, I look over and just as there only could be in New York City is a guy who pulls his pants down and starts, you know, yanking himself. He's basically jacking off. I'm like, oh, New York, that's something else. So I go and walk around the guy and think, well, it's kind of gross, whatever. I keep going. But New York's so great because one of those petty cab drivers, you know, who has like the little bicycle cab. You know, kind of like a big immigrant dude, yells over with the guy and he's like,

what the fuck's wrong with you, man? You know, pull up your pants. That's disgusting. Put their thing away. Nobody wants to see that. How kind of sicko are you? And I'm kind of looking at the petty gab driver like, yes, that's right. You get him.

And so I look over to the guy, you know, he shames the man. He pulls his pants off. He like waddles off to go be a creep somewhere else. And I say, the guy, thanks, you know, thanks for doing that. And he looks over at me and he goes, honey, I know. you wish it was me and said, winks drives off. And I just thought, fucking New York City. Never take yourself too seriously. Maybe be a little nicer to humans. And write some lessons down from the road. Until next week. Oh, if you guys have it, written a review or shared the pot. Do me a favor.

It'd be a big fucking deal if you shared this deal with other people. So please share the pod. That is how this thing grows. It's super hard to grow podcasts. Like incredibly hard. to grow podcasts. So anything you can do to share and review the pod, you'd be my favorite little, my favorite little human. Okay, see you next week. Bye, everybody.