Jocko Podcast - 415: How to Find Happiness. w/ Arthur C. Brooks.

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

>Join Jocko Underground<Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column. Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2023 #1 New York Times bestseller, "Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier" with co-author Oprah Winfrey and the 2022 #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness, and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 415 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening. Good evening. It was kind of a classic Southern California day. And the waves were probably like four to six feet, not overwhelming, but just a good solid size, ground swell. And it was at our spot. Glassy, sunny out in the afternoon, no wind. And for whatever reason, which I don't know, can't understand, can't comprehend.

It wasn't crowded. There was no one out. So just Seth and I, Stoner. And we're out there surfing. And we're running racetracks. We call it surfing, which means we're just catching wave after wave after wave. And I'm out there thinking pretty much doesn't get any better than this. And I paddle back out from a wave and Seth's sitting there.

and out of the blue out of nowhere he says how am I ever going to find happiness which is a weird thing to say like we're out there certain you know the 38 seconds before this I was hooting and hollering going down the line on an awesome wave and now he's asking me how am I ever going to find happiness and look he was going through some stuff at the time but it still kind of caught me off guard because we're surfing and like I said hootting and hollering And then he's asking me this kind of deep philosophical question. And so I said, what? And he says, happiness.

How am I ever going to find happiness? And this is coming from a guy who was just a really phenomenal human being. Smart, positive, honest, loyal, and fun, too. We're always having fun. We're always laughing, always smiling. Whether we were surfing or whether we were playing guitar, whether we were working, or whether we were doing Jiu-Jitsu, or whether we were overseas in combat,

it was always smiles and it was always good times. And so now he's out here asking me how he can find happiness. And I said, bro, what are you talking about? This is it. This is it. Here, now. The sun, the waves, the ups and downs. Life this is it this being alive then I caught another wave and he got one and

We carried on and he continued to chase happiness And found it sometimes sometimes on the mats sometimes with a guitar Sometimes in the ocean on a board Sometimes in the sky skydiving the rush the adrenaline the speed he continued to chase the adrenaline the speed He continued to chase it and he died chasing it skydiving out of a hot air balloon on a crisp September morning. I like to think he found it and I know at a minimum he gave me some but I met many people over the years that have been looking for it chasing it chasing happiness searching

trying to find that thing that feeling that emotion well tonight we have someone here with us that's an expert in happiness and you probably didn't know there was such a thing, but there is. His name is Arthur C. Brooks. He's an author, academic, speaker, and a musician. And he's here joining us tonight. Arthur, what did I miss?

I was trying to figure out how to describe you. Author, you've written books. Yeah. Academic, you've taught and continued to teach. Yep. Full-time professor. Speaker, could you speak? 48 weeks a year.

And musician. You play. Used to do that. but you don't do it anymore. I was a French horn player for the first 12 years of my career from 19 to 31. Right.

And actually, we got connected through Rain Wilson. Yeah, that's right. Who is a bassoon player? No, bassoon player. Yeah. More importantly. And she grew up five miles away

from me in Seattle. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. Is that how you guys knew each other? No, no, no. We connected about that because we were both classical musicians. No doubt we met each other at,

you know, state, all state band or something when we were in junior high or something like that. Nerd Central. We're about the same age. Yeah, we're both, you know, then we both kind of tried to make our way. Yeah. Bumpily along. Well, let's start at the beginning. So let's get there.

Yeah. How you got here. So you're born up in Washington? Yeah, Seattle. I was actually born in Spokane, but grew up in Seattle. My whole family is from the Pacific Northwest. And what were your parents doing? What would your mom and dad do? My mother was an artist. My father was a college professor, a math professor. What kind of artist was your mom? She was a painter. And was this the kind of painter that was selling paintings down at the farmer's market? or was she fetching millions of dollars for their paintings at Christie's auction? She was somewhere in between. She was showing at galleries all the Pacific Northwest,

mostly not selling paintings, but occasionally selling paintings, and it's a tough life. And what year was this? This is, well, I was born. I mean, I moved in the late 60s when we moved to our place in Seattle, and I grew up in the 70s, and that's when she was in the heart of her career, 70s and 80s. By the time, by about 1990, she was very ill.

By the time she was in her mid-50s, she was already experiencing some real, real decline, cognitive decline. And so that, it didn't put it into it, but it wasn't great. Was she a hippie? No. My parents were very religious, but they were pretty countercultural in their own way, too. The great thing about my parents is that they were entrepreneurs in the business of their own lives. And they both, they grew up together, I mean, to the extent that they met in college when they were 20, got married right out of college. college and then built a life together that was kind of of their own design. And that was an

incredible example for me. You got to build your life. Your life is your enterprise. You're the startup entrepreneur of the only enterprise that really matters. And that's really under your control, which is you. That's the whole point. And that's really my dad, he was a college professor. That's what he wanted to do. And my mom was an artist because, I mean, nobody did that from her background. She'd come from a working class background. Her, you know, nobody in the history of her family never gone to college. She went to college, was an amateur musician, found that she was really good at art. I'm going to make this a career. And so we grew up lower middle class, but my parents were doing their thing. And I really admire that. And so what were you into? So

you were into the French horn, apparently. Yeah, from the time I was a little kid, I started on violin at four, piano at five, French horn at eight. And that stuck because I was good at it. And wait, you don't play any instruments anymore? Yeah, well, I stopped. I stopped in my early 30s. I mean, I did it for professionally. I mean, I was, I dropped out of college at 19, then took a gap decade from college, you know, traveled all over the world. Tured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird, the guitar player,

played chamber music all over the world, and then played a bunch of seasons in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain. Then, and then went back and got my bachelor's degree by correspondence and became a scientist. But you're in sixth grade or something, and you start playing French horn? Yeah, fourth. Fourth grade.

Yeah, yeah. And sports, any sports you're playing? Nothing, seriously. Nothing. I mean, I wasn't, I was never that good in sports. My kids are great at sports. My kids are unbelievable because my wife was actually a ranked track and field athlete when she was in Spain when she was a teenager.

So some genetics came through. Yeah, they got good genetics on her side. And so my kids are, I mean, my daughter was a Maryland state champion in gymnastics and now play his college rugby. Oh, dang. Yeah, my son was a semi-pro cyclist in high school and then went on to the Marine Corps. Dang.

Yeah. And my oldest son, who was the least athletically capable, was actually a pretty serious varsity wrestler. Oh, okay. Before he went to college. Props? Yeah, good for him. He's just a hard worker.

Yeah. Yeah. Killed it. Did he transition into Jiu-Jitsu? He did not. Okay, we'll work on that. He transitioned into studying math at Princeton. Of course.

He's going to need to work the rest of his body as well. But that's motto a motto. So as you're growing up, one of the things I was reading in your book, you have, I think the term you used as a mystical experience at the shrine of Guadalupe. Yeah. You're 15 years old. Tell me about this. What's going on? You become a Catholic.

So you said both your parents were very religious. They were. They were. They came from, they both came from evangelical backgrounds, evangelical Christian backgrounds. So I have missionaries on both sides of my family. My father was born in the Navajo Nation. in New Mexico where his father ran a school. And then later his father was the dean of students

at a place called Wheaton College outside Illinois, which is kind of the evangelical Harvard. It's a very elite place. My mother grew up as a Southern Baptist in the Pacific Northwest of all places. And so they were really religious, but again, they had this spirit of the entrepreneur, the spirit of the pioneer.

Go build your life, man. Go build your life. And so you don't want to be sentimental about things like religion. You want to be serious about something like religion. You get to choose once. That's kind of my theory. You get to choose your politics.

Choose your politics once. Don't go changing around and converting and being a sentimentalist about this nonsense. Figure out what you think is right and do it. Does that mean that you're anti someone changing their mind and getting older and their views change over time about their political viewpoint? Well, it's normal to change how you interpret the facts. But the whole idea of I go from left to right to left, to left, are right. I mean, that's just sentimentalism. That just means you're going with feelings. Look, you opened up with a monologue about your friend who is obviously an incredibly meritorious guy,

an incredible person, but he was chasing the feeling of happiness. Don't chase feelings. If you chase feelings, you're going to convert your religion every 10 minutes. You're going to convert your politics every 10 minutes. You're going to go with your feelings. Your feelings are liars. Your feelings will deceive you again and again and again. The whole point of a happier your life is transcending your feelings, is managing your feelings. That's the whole point. I mean, discipline, which is central to everything that you talk about, is the reason that, you know, all the cool dudes in America listening to the Jocko podcast is because discipline matters. And you need a coach in discipline, whether that manifests in MMA or math. What it really is

all about is conquering yourself. And to conquer yourself, you have to conquer your feelings. And so that's the point. You get to choose. But don't be bouncing all over the place like a pinball. That's just sentimentalism and that's your feelings managing you. And that's a sign of a lack of discipline and that's a problem for your happiness, but also for your effectiveness as a person. Right. So as you learn new things and grow and become older and more mature and you have an open mind, your perspective can certainly shift. Absolutely. No, no. All of the, you understand the facts in a different way as you get older. The wisdom that actually comes from the emergence of your crystallize intelligence, which is something that tends to happen in your 30s and 40s and 50s.

It makes you see things differently. You're also less rigid intellectually than you've been in the past. But that's different than basing your ideology and your religion and your politics on how you feel. Yeah. That's a different. It's also strange. It seems like people are driven to make a statement about what they believe at any certain time. Yeah, totally.

I mean, it's all virtue signaling in theater. A lot of it is, which is, you know, once again, it's all just sort of feelings-based nonsense. You know, are you going to build your life on purpose? Are you going to build your life with a sense of strategy with a goal in mind of the person that you want to be? Or are you going to go according to how you feel this morning, how breakfast sits and how well you slept last night, whether your spouse yelled at you this morning, probably so? And, you know, I mean, we live in the world, right? But we can't let what the world does to us, the atmosphere, the environment, the ecosystem around us,

determine actually how we're going to feel and therefore create our path for us. That's a mistake. Yeah. We don't want our feelings to dictate our behavior. No. For sure. On the contrary. So we're going back to this mystical experience. So talk me through this. What happens? So wait a second. So you go down there. Are you going to church all the time with your evangelical parents? Yeah, I grew up going to church every week for sure. And praying every day with my family. And I'm a believer. I mean, I'm a Christian guy. So you have that going on. And now you're You get down to Guadalupe. Why are you in Guadalupe?

I was there for a school trip. I was actually there for a school of music trip when I was a sophomore in high school. And, you know, we're walking through all this tourist nonsense. You know, we go through this boring old dusty church. So, I'm 15. I want to talk to the girls. I don't want to be looking at a church. And we were at the Shrine of Guadalupe, a famous place for Catholics.

I didn't know any Catholics. So it's not like, this wasn't registering for me at all. But I was sitting in the church. I was one afternoon. It was the old basilica. A new one is kind of late 70s or early 80s, modernist architecture. The old one was a classical construction from the 18th century. And the tilma of Juan Diego, that was the poncho of the peasant guy, Juan Diego, in the early

17th century. The Virgin Mary appeared to him on a hill outside of Mexico City. Now this was an incredible thing, this apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to Catholic legend or mythology or, I believe. truth, that at the time the Spanish settlers, the colonizers were having a terrible time getting the Native people to follow with the Catholic religion. It's a pretty bad advertisement, you know, convert or die. It's like not very compelling, it turns out.

So the Virgin Mary appears to an indigenous guy, Juan Diego. She appears as a mestita, which is to say a woman of mixed race. Now today, be like, oh, cool. But then, are you kidding me? That's like totally subversive. That's like a complete transgression of everything. But of course, that's what it takes. And her image is imprinted on his garment.

This garment made of cactus. And it's called a tilma. He comes back. He shows it. They shows it to the bishop. They display it. And everybody who looks at it converts. So in the next nine years, seven million indigenous people converted to Roman Catholicism.

That's the story. I mean, that's, that's. And then the whole story is that anybody who looks at it is going to be affected. I didn't know this at the time. I didn't know this guy's like a 15-year-old kid. I'm just there to play the French horn and have some good times. I look at it and I couldn't get out of my head. I just looked at it. Looked at it for maybe 10 minutes left, went home, went back to my life, couldn't stop thinking about it. It's the weirdest thing because, you know, it's not like that was happening to me a lot. It never happened to me before, but I couldn't

stop thinking about the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the tilma of some dudes. in 1609, Juan Diego, and she was looking at me. Now, of course, eyes following you. That's a technique. Elvis on Velvet, those eyes can follow you too. So let's not get ourselves, right? But I couldn't get it out of my head. And so I read and read, read some more, converted.

What are you reading? I am reading the catechism of the Catholic Church. I'm reading, you know, the lives of the saints. I'm just reading the Bible. You know, I'm reading and I'm trying to understand what it is that I was seeing and what it actually means to me. And I'm thinking, of course, about the rest of my life. You get one shot, man.

And I knew that maybe this was what I was choosing or what was being chosen for me. And my adult life is laying itself out in front of me. That's what was going on through my head. You know, I'm 15, so my judgment is not perfect at this point. But I didn't know any Catholics, so I had to meet some. Where did you go to meet Catholics? I went to the local Catholic church.

How'd your parents feel about this? They thought it was probably better than drugs. Your rebellion was going deep Catholic. Yeah, no, they were like, well, you know, it's like all the neighborhood kids are smoking pot. So this looks like it's, and of course, you can do both. You can be Catholic and smoke pot, but, you know, but the point is that that was,

that was, it was good. And so, and they also had a lot, they had a lot going on. My parents had a lot going on. They were, you know, had the troubles of their own. And so they weren't, I was, you know, look, in the 70s and 80s, people, teenagers were completely unsupervised. I mean, this is the era of, you know, getting the back of the station, why I'm going to roll around on the freeway.

100%. Uh-huh. I mean, it was freedom, baby. And, you know, my mom would be like, don't come back until dinner. And there was no cell phones. And so we're like, okay, mom doesn't, you know, literally let us into the house until six. So let's go, like, let's take a bus someplace. I don't know. My parents had no idea. There was so much freedom, which was great and terrible. I don't know.

I don't know. So did you get like a mentor down at the Catholic church? Yeah, the local priest, a British guy, a British Catholic. And great guy, wonderful guy, Father Tony Haycock. I remember him still. And he was a sailor and, you know, played the guitar, smoked cigarettes. And he showed me the ropes. He showed me the ways. And he was a real spiritual guy. And he understood exactly what was kind of on my. mind and he said this is he helped me lay the scaffolding for what was going to be a Catholic existence and now I mean it's the center of my life and I go to mass every day and how many times a week do you do confession once a month I got a mass every day I've got a confession once a month I'm not that sinful so you're 15 years old do you have a vision of what you're going to do with your life besides being this Catholic I mean a French horn player. That's it.

Now I'm going to be the world's greatest French horn. How much do you have to practice French horn? All day every day. Six hours a day? Yeah, five, six, playing at every ensemble that's available. I was playing pro by the time I was 15, 16. Every gig I could take had lessons with the guys who played in the Seattle Symphony. I was studying in the summers at Tanglewood, which is the big music festival in Western Massachusetts. And so my teachers there were the Boston Symphony guys. And I was playing every competition. I was trying to win every competition. It's like, It's like kids sports at a very high level. So you're semi-pro by the time you're in high school.

If you're really good at certain kinds of sports, you're playing every competition, you're doing it all day long. You're completely focused. And there's some level of natural talent, some level of hard work? It's both. Like everything else, it's both. I mean, with hard work, you can be pretty good. With natural talent, you can be pretty good.

And together, they can interact to make you great. Do you get to that point in music, in French horn, or any other instrument where you're looking at Fred and you know Fred, he just has some talent that you don't have and you work as hard as you can, and he's going to win that competition? Yeah. And that was me in high school.

Were you Fred or were you? I was Fred. And then I got out of my local market, you know, and then I met real Fred. You know, this is what happened. So my son, my oldest son went to Princeton. And he was a valedictorian at his private high school and, you know, the smartest kid.

And he got there and like, everybody's the valedictorian. It's 1,300 valedictorians. That's what's going on. where you actually, you have the sort of collective of the people that have this very high level. And I met people who were, you know, significantly better than me by the time I left and went pro. So when you're go pro, what does that consist of?

Well, for me, it consisted of getting thrown on to academic probation in my first year of college because I had dropped my required classes and was taking Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming. What were you attempting to study? I was attempting to study music and music conservatory, you know, up the grapevine here

in Valencia, California. A place called California Institute of the Arts. Okay. And I was, you know, what I wanted to do is play pro, and I didn't want to be studying, and I was an unmotivated student. It wasn't ready. And so I was on academic probation.

I bailed, and I took a job playing chamber music with a group out of Maryland. And we toured, you know, five dudes in a van. And I did that for six years, just driving around. What kind of gig do you play? Chamber music concerts. I don't even know what this means. Chamber music is small ensemble classical music.

Small ensemble classical music. So we did a lot of world tours, but it was very, very poorly paid. I mean, it sounds like, I did a world tour. I could have a T-shirt with a world tour on it, but I was making $14,000 a year and driving a van with two, you know, a big and oversized Ford van with two gas tanks on it. This is the same thing that like punk rockers do. Yeah. Like the exact same thing.

Uh-huh. Yeah, no, it's very similar in this way, except that it's classical music, which means it's not cool. It's like, it's all of things about like, you know, unsuccessful rock and roll, but also not cool. Yeah, that's great. Is there, at least if you're a punk rocker, you're hoping that some label sees you and you get signed and you make a hit record.

What are you hoping for when you're in a van with a French horn? I wanted to get to the point where I could become a soloist, where I could play in front of the solo repertoire, which is most of the great composers, write concertos, which are the solo pieces where the orchestra's playing, and the soloist is in front of the orchestra. And I wanted to do that for a living.

And that requires you be one of the three or four. best in the world at what you do. Where did you make it? There's no ranking. You know, it's not like... But I mean, if you had to estimate, how far were you from? Did you ever get that job?

No. I mean, I did a lot of solo work. I actually did, you know, I got a lot of soul thing, but not at the top tier. I wasn't playing. It wasn't soloing with the, you know, the Berlin Philharmonic.

I wasn't doing stuff like that. I was in the top few hundred in the world at the top of my career. I left to join a symphony orchestra in Spain. You leave college. No, no. I left college. and I played for six years chamber music.

Okay, got it. And then when I was 20, making $14,000. Yeah, it's fantastic. And then- Where are you living at this time? I was living part of the time in Maryland and then I moved to, I was in New York City, living with a bunch of dudes in an apartment

in Washington Heights at a hundred and hundred and hundred and seventy-th and Riverside Drive is very sexy. Yeah. Yeah. And the other people you live with? Are these people all musicians? All musicians. All musicians.

All musicians. All trying to make it. All trying to make it. All trying to be. And, you know, technically I had made it. I mean, I was actually making a living, and I was making records, and I was getting concerts, and I was getting paid. But it was just peripheral to the kind of success that I wanted. I was just outside that all the time.

So I took a job in an orchestra when I was 24, moved when I was 25, because I'd actually met a girl in Barcelona. And it was highly motivating to me. I couldn't, she was, you know, European, which means that she didn't, you know, go to church or believe in marriage or any of that. I sort of figured I could, you know. And she also didn't speak a word of English. And she lived in Barcelona. I didn't speak a word of Spanish. But I had this intuition.

Once again, you build your life, right? And you got to go all in. If you're an entrepreneur in the business of life, you've got to take big risks. I mean, hit it hard. Do it. Take the risk. If you're going to fail, you're going to fail. Right?

And so I'd taken the risk by dropping out of school or, you know, the Catholic thing. But okay, this is the girl. If it's right, it's going to happen. I'm going to close the deal. And that's it for life. One and done. So I moved to Barcelona. How do you interact with a girl that you don't speak the same language as?

Monosyllabic grunts and a lot of hand gestures. And where'd you meet her? I met her. I was on tour in the Burgundy region of France playing chamber of music concerts and she was studying music there. Okay. So there's a little common language of music. That's kind of it. She was also unbelievably beautiful.

I mean, just incredibly lovely. And so we had enough common, you know, common. Latin rooted words or something that we could kind of figure out that I figured that she wasn't married. That was good. It was a good start. And there's some alarming things like, yeah, no, I don't believe in God and I don't believe in marriage and, you know, all that kind of stuff. She's saying these things too. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. But I'm like a mere technicality. No factor. Yeah. We can, we can, yeah, that, and so, you know, I got back from, it was in Dijon, in Dijon, in France. I got back and I, after a week, you know, gone out three times or something. I said,

dad, I've met the girl I'm going to marry. He's like, great. Let's meet her. I said, well, I got these technical problems. I mean, she doesn't live in the United States. She doesn't speak a word of English and she doesn't believe in marriage. But I think I can, I think I can. So I put together a plan. I went and visited her. She came and visited me in New York. I went and visited her in Barcelona a couple of times, as a matter of fact. I didn't tell her, but I took a job in the Barcelona Symphony. And the next summer, I moved to Barcelona. She's like, you moved here? In the meantime, she'd been studying a little bit of English. I started studying Spanish.

And it took me two years, but I closed the deal. We were married 32 years and have three grown kids. And our communication is marginally improved. So you go to Barcelona and you're at the symphony in Barcelona. You're courting. You're soon to be, hopefully wife. Yeah. Are you getting paid over there?

Yeah, I'm not going to living over there. Now it's good. But it's very, it's kind of a, it's, uh, it's, uh, It's journeyman work. It's not the path to start of anymore. I'm off the, you know, I'm a waiter in Hollywood waiting to get discovered. I'm more on the path of, you're gonna,

I'm doing like Dristan commercials now. That's what symphony orchestra work is. You know, and so you're like, oh, you're the guy that was in the nose spray commercial. That's what it's like to be in a symphony orchestra for classical musician. You're not going to jump from that to soloists anymore. It's game over a little bit?

It's not game over. It's game. paused because I'm in love and I don't know. But it was, you know, I tell you, Chaco, I had this experience when I was 22. And I thought I was at the top of my game, but it wasn't. And the way that you, when you're in classical music, the way that you, the notches on the bedpost for your career, as it were, it's a bad image, but is the concert halls you play.

And so I'm really going to make it when I do my Carnegie Hall debut, right? So I'm 22, I get my Carnegie Hall debut in chamber music, playing with these other four guys. And during the concert, there's one thing that I had to do in the second end of the concert. I had to talk about the piece to the audience. That's what you'd always do. We'd come out and tell them a little bit about it so they'd be interested in it. I was incredibly nervous as a public speaker. Now it's what I did do for a living. But I was so nervous. So I was thinking about it. The concert was going well. And as I get up to talk about it, I'm walking toward the audience and trying to be appropriately dramatic about what I'm, and I'm not

watching my feet. And I fell into the audience and my Carnegie Holy Vue. And it was like, this is a signal of something. And I took, you know, the subway back to my apartment that night. I'm like, God is trying to tell me something. And so I kind of knew by the time I went to Barcelona that it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. You know, it wasn't going to be the top of the profession. It was going to be okay. I um talk about guitar. I play guitar. Yeah. Very badly. But do you enjoy it? I love it. But there's um I always say you can go to any guitar center in America right put up a put up a sign with those little take my phone number thing. Yeah. That says, hey, I need a guitarist that can play this song, this song, this song, this song, this album. And

there'll be a hundred guitarist that will contact you because there's a thousand's and and thousands of really good guitars out there. But a lot, most of them are waiters or carpenters or whatever. So you've got to have some other thing. You've got to basically have some creative thing that allows you to write, create music or create something new and special. Is there anything like that when you play French horn or you're in classical music? Or is it like you're constrained by the classical music that's been written by these other people

and that's what you're going to play? And how much can you very, you know, I always talk about, you know, like studio musicians. that are getting paid to play. Like you play the note that they told you to play. That's what you play. There's no variation. You play what they told you to play. Correct.

Jimmy Page was like the famous, you know, Led Zeppelin, but he was a studio musician. He played what they told him to play, and he got so good that when he was allowed to do what he wanted to, it was awesome. So when you're in a, when you're playing French horn, what are the options here?

The options are to play what they tell you to play and where you've got the job, where it happens to be. If you're playing chamber music, you play what's on the score. If you're in an orchestra, you play the music in front of you, the way the conductor tells you to play it. The only time you have any latitude is if you're a soloist, then you're playing the music

you want to play. You're playing the pieces that appeal to you the most, but you're still playing what Mozart told you to play. When I played with Charlie Bird, I played for two years, and I toured with Charlie Bird, the great Bossa Nova guitar player. He's the one with Stan Gets, who brought Bosanova to the United States in the late 50s, early 60s. And nearly the end of his life, he was kind of a lot.

legend and I wound up doing a couple albums with him. You remember Tommy Newsom who is the band leader with Doc Severnson of the Tonight Show band? No, Johnny Carson. I probably would recognize him if I saw him. He did all the arrangements of the Tonight Show band. He did a whole album of arrangements for Charlie Bird and some brass players, five brass players, including me. And I toured with him and I worked a lot with Charlie Bird and he taught me a lot of improvisation. He taught me a lot of what he means to be a jazz musician. That's a different kettle of fish. that was way freer. That was composition on the fly.

It was hard because I was trained as a classical player. And so I was as square as they come. And so it was kind of an exercise in futility. But it was helpful to my soul. Because I got outside the parameters of what the composers would write at that point. So when I think of a musician, I think of a creative person. Yeah. And yet you're a musician, but you're being constrained by being told what you have

to play what's on the pitch. Yeah, that's right. That's a weird dichotomy. It is a weird dichotomy. Except that a lot of classical musicians are really not, they're not compositional artists at all. They're technicians. They're super ultra technicians.

And so you'll find that what they love to do is at the highest technical level to play things correctly. They like to not miss notes and not play out of tune and not get behind or head in the rhythm and do everything exactly right. It's more like accounting than it is like composition. You know, it's like don't screw it up. mistakes. So this makes so much sense when you look at classical music and classical musicians and rock and roll people and go all the way down to punk rock where it's like I can play three

chords and make a bunch of noise and I'm wild. That's right. It's a different, it's a different life. It's a different life and they're usually different people. Yeah. They're called musicians and that's where it stops. And that's about the only similarity. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's right. And you know, the truth of the matter is I would have been a happier jazz musician than a classical musician, about it was trade in classical music. I love classical music. I mean, I love it. I'm crazy about it.

I listen to it constantly now all day long. It's weird, this whole personality thing. So I think I did four podcasts about this book called the psychology of military incompetence. And it's an incredible book, but it's written by a guy. First, you know, I was like, ah, some academic guy, what does he know? He's some psychologist who's writing a book about the military. And then, of course, I researched the guy. And he was in World War II.

He's a British guy. And he was wounded. and he had experienced a lot of combat. And he wrote this book, but the premise of the book is that the military attracts people who have like an authoritarian mindset oftentimes. And people with authoritarian mindsets that like everything orderly and they like high levels of discipline amongst the troops

and they like everyone to be uniformed and everyone to have haircuts and everyone to behave the same way. That's what they want. And they see the military. They look at the military from the outside and they go, that's what I like, that's what I want. So that's what I'm going to go do. And that's what they go do.

and they actually do well in that role when there's not combat happening because in combat people don't listen to you mayhem happens people aren't doing the right things the enemy has a vote they do what you don't expect them to do and so it's total chaos so people that can't improvise don't do well in actual combat they do well in garrison what we call garrison in the military in other words on the parade field

when you're in the Marine Corps was out on the parade field doing the district close order drill movements There are some people that are really good at that, but they're terrible in actual combat because it's mayhem. They don't know what to do. They actually, there's no rule to follow. No rules.

There's no rules. For sure. So it's interesting that in the music world, you can have a similar thing where you have people that would listen to music and be like, wow, I love the way those notes are so quickly played and I want to be able to play those notes quickly

at the right time, at the right moment, over and over again, very professionally. Cool, classical musician. Someone else that's saying like, oh, I want to express my sense. myself and that's a different personality. And these traits come out even in music. That's exactly right.

And actually, I was never happy because of that. In retrospect, I was never happy. And I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Like it was pretty good in music and I like music. But I wasn't happy being a classical musician because I was so utterly constrained. And the reason I continued to do it is because I was good and I wanted glory. I mean, the limited glory that comes from being a professional famous French war player, you're not going to get, hey, isn't that so and so in the end. You're not going to get recognized in the airport.

Your bar for Glory Wislow. This is like, I'd be the jaco Willink of French horn, you know. Do you get, when you're a classical musician like that, you're not getting recognized anywhere. Like, no one cares. It depends. I mean, it's a, except for like, Yo-Yo Ma or something, right? Yeah, well, yeah. That's the only person I can, by the way.

If you're a famous opera singer or something, you know, there are a few people out there. I mean, you know, Yo-Yo, that's how famous he is, right? I mean, because, you know, one person I can name. Yeah. But, you know, there's other people like, you know, plaza. Cedar Domingo that you've heard of. No. But it's all good.

It's all good. This isn't my world. This isn't my world. You know, I never try and act like I'm a super cultured person. I'm certainly not. Today, actually, it's a different world because everything's on the internet. And so, you know, you can get recognized as an author. You know, and I'll do this podcast.

Seven million people will listen to it or something. And somebody will, in the airport, in the next few weeks, we'll be like, hey, you're on Jacko's show. That's the new world. for everybody's a celebrity. So how long do you stay on this path? You're a musical technician. You're playing what they tell you to play.

You're starting to feel like maybe this isn't the thing to do. Yeah. What's your exit strategy? My wife, then I got married, and my wife said, you actually have a brain. Why don't you do something with it? You're unhappy. You're unhappy.

You're unhappy. I thought that I had chosen, you get to choose once, right? that that was my choice. She said, that was wrong. That was chosen for you. You were in fourth grade. Go choose the thing. What's the thing?

I don't know. I don't know what the thing is. She says, why don't you study? She actually dropped at a high school when she was a sophomore in high school to sing with a rock band. So she was a rock and roll singer. And so what was the name of the band? Atlanta. In Spanish, what does that mean?

Atlanta. It's just the city in it. It's just the city of Georgia, but it sounded cool. They were a pretty famous band in the 80s in, In Barcelona, yeah, they're pretty famous family. We got some recordings. Yeah, you can look on YouTube. And you can see my wife at, you know, 18 years old, you know, wearing short skirts.

And she's got some pipes on her. Oh, she could sing. She's a great singer. She's a terrific singer. But she had dropped out of high school. So by the end of, by the time we were in our late 20s, living in Barcelona, now marriage. So you convinced her that marriage was good. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. What did you convince her about God? That took a little while longer, but I got that sale too. Okay. Okay. Now she goes to Mass every day. Okay.

Yeah, my wife is like, she's completely committed to her Catholic faith. Her parents think, you know, I slipped her a Mickey or something. I was like, what did you do to her? And her parents weren't Catholic? No, nobody went to Mass. No, it's Barcelona. Barcelona, everybody thinks it's some big Catholic place. It's a post-Christian country.

Three percent of people in Barcelona go to Mass. It's like Denmark. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so it's completely countercultural to be traditionally religious in a place like, in any place in Europe at this point. actually. So she was studying to finish her high school diploma when we were in our late 20s. And where are you living now? Barcelona. You're still living in Barcelona. She's like, she's like, I think you might dig this stuff. And so she taught me a little bit of calculus,

just for fun, because she was studying. And I said, this is awesome. This is like doing crossword puzzles. This is, and she said, see, you're smarter and you thought. And I said, huh. So I signed up for some correspondence classes and got really into it. I thought to myself, this is this. This is 1992. So this is mail. Like you're mailing. Oh yeah, no, there's a fax machine and books in the mail.

Totally. This is way pre-internet. Yeah, I was an early adopter. And I started studying this stuff and I'm thinking this is the exit strategy. And I started studying economics. I thought this is the most amazing thing. Why?

Because economics is the social science about human behavior and which markets work and incentives matter. And it was the whole theory of your life as a startup. It was the superstructure, the intellectual superstructure of your life is an intellectual startup. And so I studied economics. I got my bachelor's degree by correspondence. And then what was next?

I was living, we moved to Florida and I was teaching at a music conservatory just so I could finance my education. You're teaching French horn? Yeah, at a music conservatory in Boca Raton, Florida. So you got, like brady kids in there or is they undergraduates they were okay but but it was like nine year old

but no no no it was it was a college and it was but but it was like you know broker arthur and esther brooks in bocouverettone florida sounds like we're 90 right and we're getting like metagap insurance sales calls and and i finish my bachelor's degree and i go and get a master's degree in economics at the local university florida atlantic university fine university and then at that point i'm like yeah i'm all in, man, I'm ready to go. So I quit. And to start my Ph.D. And we moved to Ithaca, New York. And I started at Cornell doing my... Do you have kids yet? No. We did kids actually in the middle of my Ph.D. How are you funding this? Out of my pocket. Out of my pocket. So you'd saved up money, teaching French horn? Yep. And I was... I did my entire bachelor's degree at my correspondence for

$10,000, including the books in today's dollars. That's the 10KBA. That's the way. And people can do it. it might be 20, but the whole point is this whole idea where we need the government to give everybody free college for $75,000 a year. It's complete insanity. It's ludicrous. And it's not entrepreneurial and it's a mistake. And actually, it's not free because you got to pay that money back, by the way, and it's going to take you however many years, 20 years. I have friends that are paying off their student loans at my age. But a lot of people think that the government should actually pay for it, in which case it's also not free because, you know, the three of us are paying for it in taxes. You know, it's nothing's free.

And the whole point is do it yourself, build it yourself. Don't take any debt, and there's a way to do it if you think about it entrepreneurally. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was very, it was great. I had a great experience. I also was not in a classroom. I had no indoctrination.

There was no politics. It was just a fax machine and a bunch of books sitting around the dining room table and telling my wife that calculus is awesome. And so from Florida Atlantic University where you get your, where you get your original degree, Yeah. Then you go, where'd you go next? Cornell for a year. And then I finished up my PhD in a place called the Rand.

Is it hard to get into Cornell? It is when you have a bachelor's degree by correspondence. Yeah, like what? Okay, so let me rephrase my question. How did you get into Cornell when you had your bachelor's degree through correspondence? Perhaps an admissions officer was not paying adequate attention. I mean, when I first, you know, this main professor that I had by correspondence, I'd never met him. But I was doing really well in these classes.

And this guy is like, you're the best student I've ever had by correspondence. He said, you should go get your PhD. I'm like, wow, these things like you're like, he said, where should I do it? And he writes back to me. This is all like letters. And he says, you should go to Harvard. I'm like, really? He says, yeah, I think you could do it.

So I apply, you know, with full confidence, because this guy told me that I could get into Harvard. Of course, he doesn't know. I apply to Harvard. I got rejected a week, I mean, with complete prejudice. It turns out their core demo is not a thing. 30-year-old French horn player, college dropout studying by correspondence. That's not what Harvard's in the market for. They weren't looking for you?

Yeah. So how did you get into Cornell? I don't know. I mean, I think they were cool. They were like, this is an interesting guy. It's a French horn player. He built it by himself. Take a shot.

And I did one year of the sort of core curriculum in the economics. And then I transferred to a place called the Rand Graduate School, which is part of the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica. And I worked at the think tank. I was doing theater level combat. modeling for the U.S. Air Force in a skiff during the day. I was doing large-scale math modeling. And then in the afternoons, I was actually taking my coursework and working on a PhD. So they hired you for that job? And then you got the schooling as like a benefit, a benefit?

Well, I came in as a graduate fellow, a graduate fellow to the PhD program. And the way that I paid for it was by working as an analyst for the RAND Corporation doing this, you know, big battle simulation stuff using a string of Unix machines and you know 250,000 lines of 4Tran and all that stuff and I was learning I was learning like crazy I was learning my math modeling I was learning and I you know I was doing military operations research analysis enjoying working for the DoD it was great it was great I had a Pentagon pass while I was a graduate student I was going back and forth I was I had an action officer in the US Air Force a Lieutenant Colonel I was doing you know blue team red team simulation it was very

I learned a ton. I learned a ton about the military. What kind of war gaming were you doing? It was looking at future analysis of potential conflicts and then figuring out, you know, putting together forced deployment schedules and putting them into large-scale simulations of what could happen under these circumstances. I developed with a bunch of other guys, a technique called exploratory analysis, where instead of saying, I'm going to put in all these specific parameters into a model, including the weather over some country, and then say, here's how the battles are going to go,

and here's what the war is going to turn out. We said, here's all the range of parameters that can happen. And so here's the range of outcomes. And in doing that, you can actually look at these highly complex situations. What I learned during that time is something that my father told me about. My father was a mathematician. And he always said, there's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems and there's complex problems.

It sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I'm not. Complicated problems are problems that are very hard to figure out. But with enough brains and computational horsepower, you can, and you can solve it with perfect accuracy over and over again, like designing a jet engine or putting together the internet or building a toaster. Complex problems are the most interesting problems in life. Those are things where you totally know what winning means, but you can't actually simulate it. You can only live it. And so no matter how much computational horsepower, you can't predict if the Steelers are going to win this weekend. You can't do it.

You have to watch the game. That's why we love it. Love is a complex problem. War is a complex problem. That's why we actually don't know. And so the problem is that simulations that the DOD runs are a complicated simulation of a complex problem. And that's why they're always wrong. That's why they said, you know, at the beginning of Desert Storm, they said, we're going to have 60,000 American debt.

Because they were actually parameterizing a complicated model using Vietnam-era data for a complicated, complex problem that turned out entirely differently. And so what we developed a technique for was to actually to deal with complex problems by looking at ranges of possible parameters and looking at the outcomes across spaces. It could be best case, worst case, most likely case. We could put probabilities across an entire range of parameters, across an entire range of outcomes. We got all these academic awards for these techniques that we're using, you know, running future scenarios in war.

And you guys did this in the 90s? Yeah, it was 1996, 7, 8 when I was finishing my PhD. And apparently no one's wanted to use any of these models for the last 20-something years of wars that we've had. There's a lot of the good stuff going on in the Pentagon still, for sure. And they've actually gotten better at this exploratory analysis since we developed it, the RAND Corporation in the mid-90s. But yeah, still too many people want the one-and-done solution. This is what's actually going to happen.

You can't do that in a complex and adaptive environment. like war or love or your cat or a football game or by the way anything that we actually care about. Yeah. But we keep trying to do it. I'll give you an example. People want love and they're lonely. And so we develop something like social media, which is a complicated solution to a complex problem. And all it does is makes us lonelier.

And that's why. How does that work? Complicated solution to a complex problem of love. Exactly right. So I want to interact with other people. Right. I'm lonely. I want to interact with other people.

I pick up my phone. I go to Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or anything else? Yeah. So I go to one of them. TikTok. Or TikTok. And they start showing me other human beings. Yeah.

It's an algorithm that actually that is a simulation of the human experience. It sets you up with people to have it interact with virtually. It gives you nothing of what you actually want. There's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin. you actually need, which only comes from eye contact and touch. The reason we're doing the podcast right now in person is because we're looking at each other. That creates oxytocin. It creates a human bond, a human link. We have a much better conversation as a result of that. You don't get it when the complicated algorithm simulates the social experience, which is the complex issue that we're

trying to solve. This is what we do again and again and again. The reason, you know, people are like, oh, is AI going to make us happy or unhappy? It's like, it's a wrong question. AI is a complicated solution to the complex problems of life. It's not going to help us in the things that we really want. There's a reason I study love and happiness because I'm in the complex problems business. Yeah, as the war thing, I've been talking about, I talk about this all the time. There's so many variables in war, as you now know, because you actually tried to input all of them as many as you could possibly figure out.

You did war. I simulated war. It's like, so does how much cooler you are than me. But as soon as someone starts giving me, like, really, like, really, you're relatively solid prediction of what's going to happen in some wartime scenario, it immediately tells me that I need to watch out for this person because they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't know the difference between complicated and complex to use the mathematical terminology. But basically it's very simple to figure out. Somebody basically says, let me explain to you what being in love is all about.

Don't trust them because it's the same thing as trying to explain exactly what's going to happen at war. They don't know. Or somebody who basically says, look, if the Patriots play the Steelers, this week and here's exactly what's going to happen. You're an idiot. You're an idiot. That's actually not how it works. Everybody kind of knows that's not how it's going to work.

But again, like the world is just given us all these complicated toasters when all we want is complex cats because cats are warm and they give us companionship. It's like, I'm lonely. I want a cat. Here's a toaster. I already have a toaster. It's a better toaster. Okay.

My house is full of freaking toasters. I want some cats. That's- At least one cat. Even one cat. I need some warmth. Anyway, you get my point. All right.

So you get done with this job at the Air Force and you get your PhD in public policy from Rand graduate school. What's after that? I took a job. I taught for 10 years as a professor of public administration, public policy, economics. And I taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta for three years. Then I taught at Syracuse for seven years. Syracuse is usually thought to be the best public policy, public administration school in the country. And so that was a real goal, was to get to – once again, I was just trying to be, you know, the French horn soloist, but just in another field, you know, chasing obscure glory again.

And so I went to Syracuse and, you know, did 10 years in academia and got my, you know, 10-year promotion and all the stuff you do in academia and became a full professor of public policy. published a million articles that nobody's ever read. Did you like that? It was pretty good. I got to say, I mean, it was intellectually incredibly rich because I learned a lot. I learned what I was, I learned my, I learned my math down, I got my statistics down. I became a much better social scientist than I'd been in the past. And I got super interested in human behavior.

I talked about beauty, how people absorb beauty and why. I talked about philanthropy. I did tons of research on why people give, why people are impelled to give. And the tap root of those two things is happiness. And so by the end of that, 10 years, I was studying love and happiness. That's really where my heart was. And I published my first book on happiness in 2008. And then I quit.

Then you quit. You quit that. I remember my oldest daughter was going to college, and it was like she was all caught up in the scene, in the college scene. Of where are you getting your internship? What tech company are you doing? All these things going on. And, you know, she was stressed out about, I'm going to get a job there,

all this stuff. And, you know, what program are you getting enrolled in? All these things going on. And it was stressing her out. And, you know, I said, hey, this is just like a weird ecosystem of the world that you're in. And no one outside that ecosystem cares anything about this. Completely right.

You know, and when I, you know, as I'm sitting here thinking of you as a French horn player trying to get to the top of the ecosystem of French horn players. And like, I can't even name another French horn player in the world. besides you. You're the only friends.

And I don't even play anymore. Yeah, and you don't play anymore. So this is, I can't tell you anything about, you know, when you were in there getting these papers published and that's what the, and look, this is the same thing with you, I'm into Jiu Jitsu. There's a whole ecosystem in Jiu Jitsu. There's a whole team's the same way. There's an ecosystem, the seal team's like people trying to try to get to the top and

I did this job and I did that job and I got this award. So if you are feeling in life like you're competing and maybe you're not going to make it to the top of this thing that you're in, you should. I should actually take a step outside that ecosystem and look around? Because there's a decent chance that no one really cares about that ecosystem except for you. But this is evolutionary psychology. This is what I talk about all day long now. So what I teach my students.

The evolution is that we're hierarchical creatures and we understand ourselves on the basis of social comparison. Now, social comparison will ruin your life. If you let it run out of control and you're comparing yourself to billionaires that you see on social media will be under you. But you understand who you are by looking around at your own ecosystem. And you want to rise in the social hierarchy, and there's nothing wrong with that. Now, it doesn't mean you've got to tear somebody else down, but what does that impel you to do? It impels you to be excellent. It impels you to live with discipline.

And that's a really good thing. I love hierarchies and I love competition because they lead to human excellence as long as we don't let them ruin our lives. And then going, but going back to what you were talking about earlier, if you are looking around in this ecosystem and I am training to play my French horn and I'm doing everything I can, And I actually feel like I'm not, A, I'm not going to get to the top and B, I'm not really that gratified in playing the French horn anymore. Yeah, so I stopped. That's why I stopped.

And that's a piece of advice for people. Totally. Look, we enjoy competition. I love competition, clearly. I love competition. I definitely, we, we and our egos, we look around. We're like, well, I think I can do better than that. I'm going to try that too.

But at a certain point, if you don't actually enjoy this endeavor that you're in, and you're looking around comparing yourself to a bunch of people, that are fighting in this ecosystem to be the top of it, and you don't care about it and you're still in there fighting, to me that seems like a really negative outcome in the long term. It does. It does. And that's the reason that self-awareness is so critically important.

You know, that's why I talk to a lot of young men, I mean, who reach out to me because of the work that I do in happiness and, you know, the work that I do, the social science work that I do, now reach out and say, I'm feeling aimless, I'm feeling lost. And, you know, young men kind of need four things. to get happier. They need hard work. They need ambition.

They need a sense of the divine and a spiritual path and they need a great woman or partner. That's what they need. Those are the four things you need. Those are your ambitions. Those are the things to actually get. So, you know, it's like in work,

bust your pick. Have a sense of greatness and a lust for glory. Good. But also have a sense that there's a divine purpose, a spiritual path in your life and then have a great partner

who's going to kick your butt when you're doing the wrong thing. This is the secret to success. This is the secret to get, I mean, there's more to it. I'm not going to reduce my entire career to these four pillars. And everybody's different

and what the divine means is different to different people. And I'm not just talking about men, women too. But the truth of the matter is, it isn't a rock and science. You need to actually be striving and struggling and sacrificing

and making progress, but you need parameters around it so you don't ruin your life that way. That's why you need to love the divine. You need to love another person and have that other person love you so much that they're looking out for your well-being and they want to take care of you. Sounds like some people need to train jujitsu.

And one thing that makes me a little bit, well, let me just ask you a question about that. So you say people got to have ambition. I just want to make it clear that that doesn't mean that you feel like you need to be at the top of the hierarchy of some system or some ecosystem or some industry because you don't know that's not it ambition is about progress that's what I see we're wired for progress now we think this is called the arrival fallacy in psychology the arrival fallacy is once

I get to my goal then I'm going to just it's going to be the best thing ever but it's not true like I deal a lot I'm a nutrition and fitness nerd and I deal with a lot of people who have all these goals. And they think when I hit my fitness goals or when I hit my weight goals, people who are trying to lose a lot of weight, then it's going to be really great. The worst thing, the reason there's a 95% failure rate in dieting is because of the arrival fallacy and the fact that it's unbelievably frustrating and disappointing. So every day, your reward for the scale going down is the scale going down itself. And it's much better than the cost of actually not eating these things that you find wonderful. Your goal, I mean, your reward for hitting your

weight goal is you, congratulations, you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life, which is why about 25% of people who are on a big diet wind up with an eating disorder, because they go beyond their dieting goals because they still want to get rewards. The point is progress. Humans are wired for progress. Have a goal because you have to have an intention. You have to have intentionality. It's like a sailing trip. You got to know where you're going, even though you're going to be blown off course, because if you don't, you're going to go in circles like a cruise ship, which is depressing. Don't have your life be a cruise ship. have your life be in navigation toward a particular point,

and then make progress every day. The ambition is for the progress. And when we start to understand our lives like this, we get much happier and we can actually have a life full of goals that make sense for us. And we don't get so tied to them that we wind up wiping ourselves out. Yeah, and I guess what stem me to ask that question is,

so a consulting company, I work with all kinds of companies, and I would get someone, and I've had now dozens of scores of people asked me this question over the years. You know, I've got Fred, and you know, Fred's a really good guy. He's smart. He does a good job, but he, you know, he gets here at nine. He leaves at 4.59, you know, 5 o'clock, the bell rings and he's out of here. Right.

I talked to him about, you know, moving up and the, you know, becoming a manager and he doesn't want to do it. He just likes where he's at. And, you know, what should I do to, should I, should I do to, people have had people say to me, like, should I fire him? Yeah. And, you know, in a seal platoon, there's guys, it's a bell curve, just like anywhere else. And it's the same thing with any of these, any, any, any, any, company, any business, any team in the world. There's some people at the top of the bell curve. They're hyper ambitious. They want to step up. They want to run things. They want to do things.

And there's a bunch of people in the middle of curve that they want to do a good job. They're going to get it done. They're going to show up on time. They're going to do the required work. And then they're going to leave because they have a family and whatever. They want to have a really good marriage. Yeah. And that's cool. And of course, you got some people at the bottom that really don't care. They don't want to be there. We have to address them. Right. But I just want to make it clear that ambition isn't tied to your job. It you can be a person that worked for 32 years as a plumber technician at a company at a big plumbing company that grew a lot and you kept working as a plumber and meanwhile you raised five kids or you did all these other things in your life and you just didn't want to do something beyond that inside of being an awesome plumber. Yeah. So does that make sense? It's perfect because here's the deal. Remember your life is the startup. Your life is the enterprise. Your life isn't just you.

your work. Your life is your faith. It's your family. It's your friendships. For some people, it's their hobbies, is their avocations? And so if you just pay attention, if you think of your life as an enterprise and you're only paying attention to the work part of the enterprise, that's like actually having a company and only paying attention to one division of the company. It's going to be asymmetric. You're going to starve the other parts. You're probably going to be unsuccessful, as a matter of fact. There are a lot of different ways for you to run that enterprise. You know, I do a lot of work on the trajectory of people's careers. And there's basically four career trajectories for different kinds of people. There is, you know, the linear path, which is what we sort of think at the Harvard

Business School is our students have to have. That's where you're once, the only time you ever move from a job is because it's the next step up. It's the next best thing. More power, more money, more, you know, prestige. That's why you change. But that's the only reason you change. And most likely every four to seven years you're going to go from one company to another. But that's only one path. That's for the super hard chargers that actually want to get ahead in that, you know, that with the seals, the same thing. Then there are people who are called experts. This is a different career trajectory. It's a little bit better every year. Not a lot. A little bit better. But I want to be able to support my life with this. I want to work to live, not live to work.

And so, you know, my dad had an expert career trajectory. He probably got a 2% wage raise every year. He, you know, he worked moderate hours. He didn't think he was going to be at the best university in the world. He wasn't trying to be, he wasn't chasing glory the same way that I've neurotically done it over the course of my life. And the result was just chugging along little by little by little by little. There's two others.

Where's your dad happy? He could have been a lot happier, but he had a lot of health problems. My mother had a lot of health problems. There's a lot of exogenous circumstances that made it a little bit harder. He should have been happier. I mean, he did a lot of the right things to be happier at intervening circumstances.

The transitory career trajectory is one where your job entirely is to support a particular lifestyle. So if you're like a surfer dude and that's really what you had, you wanna, then you're gonna be a barista sometimes, you're gonna drive a truck sometimes, you're gonna work to support your lifestyle. You fall in love with somebody in Maine,

you move to Maine, you know, whatever it is. That's what you're everybody, listening to us, young dudes, your mother's worried about that. And then the last is the spiral career trajectory that a lot of people have and they don't know it. And that's where your life is a bunch of mini careers. You're no doubt a spiral, Jocko. I mean, you did this and then you go on and every part builds on everything else. And who knows, you know, 10 years from now, you might actually walk away from high income because there's something you really want to do when you want to run your foundation or whatever it happens to be.

But your career is a series of mini careers of your design with a kind of a mad scientist plan behind it somehow. And that's what a lot of people really have and they need to be able to develop. And they can't do that unless they're free to do that. And that doesn't mean they need to be free that the government needs to give them some sort of benefit to do it. It means they need to be mentally free

to be able to understand that they are entrepreneurs and they're not constrained by somebody else's understanding of their own career. So spiral is good. Spiral is awesome. I'm a super spiral and a lot of my students are too. So I teach MBAs. I have 180 MBAs in my happiness science class at HBS.

And they are a lot of up, they're all come in thinking that they're linears, but a lot of them are uncomfortable with it and they don't know why. And then I teach them about the spiral career path. They're like, I finally feel seen. First time in my life,

you know, my parents are like a lot of them have, you know, come from immigrant families where their parents sacrificed a lot to be in the United States. And they feel like, you know, if I'm not doing something that's not traditionally unbelievably successful, that I'm screwing up and what's wrong with me and am I betraying my abilities? No, no, no, no, no. You just need to understand yourself in a different way.

You've got a lot of things to do. So, you know, for me, I've taken my career down totally to the studs every 10 years. And I'm on my fourth career right now. And we can do that. I mean, by the way, God bless America, we're in a system that allows us to do that, too. Yes, indeed. So this is when you're writing books, right? You co-authored a bunch of books, the performing arts in a new era,

gifts of the muse, gifts of time and money. Those things weren't big bestsellers. Portrait of the visual arts. So this is what I was researching. Jock's got my whole Uber. 2006 book comes out, who really cares? The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism. Yeah.

Did George W. Bush coined that phrase? Compassionate conservative? Yeah. I mean, he made it most famous. I don't know if he actually coined it, but during his first election campaign, he talked about being a compassionate conservative. And a lot of people were offended by that

because they said, we shouldn't have to put a qualifier around what it means to be a conservative. But the truth was that it was a good thing for him to do. And he's an unbelievably good man, compassionate man. I love W. I mean, it's just, it's like nobody's perfect, but he's an incredibly good person. He did things that people don't even know about. I mean, his initiative called PEPFAR, which was trying to eradicate AIDS in Africa,

was unlike anything that any American president has done before. I mean, it was from a Republican entirely on the basis of, what was right, what was right to set other people free, you know, in a faraway place. It just because, and what you had basically, the whole premise was, these are our brothers and sisters. We have equal dignity, zero exceptions. And they're being held back by this thing and we can actually do something about it. So that's what the whole idea of his compassionate conservatism was.

And, you know, I wrote a book in 2006 and it changed my career. How did it change your career? I was beavering away in academic obscurity, writing those books. that you first listed. The performing arts in a new era. Yeah, I mean, I had 40, 50 readers, you know, it was. And then I wrote this book, which is pretty boring and, you know, pretty academic too. It had a mathematical appendix to it.

But it basically said all the best data on who gives to charity. Like, who's given a charity? Who thinks they're giving to charity? How's that different? You know, it's like, what do I think we're the most, you know, generous people? They're the people who talk a good game about generosity. Who's actually giving? is the whole point. These are people who are quietly giving, you know, quietly supporting people in need,

doing it out of a sense of, you know, what it means to be a good person in the world. It's not always the people that you actually think and not the people who are actually yelling in the public square. And, you know, I wrote the book. I thought I would sell, you know, a few thousand copies. My publisher thought it would sell a few thousand copies. And George W. Bush read it when he was president and called me to the White House to talk about it. And suddenly I was in the papers. What year was that was 2006 that all this happened? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I was just a professor at Syracuse, and my life was changing.

I was, you know, hearing from strangers. And, you know, I was doing these talk radio shows and going on television for the first time and having to get my haircut to figure out, you know, what is, you know, like, oh, my God. And, you know, I had to get coaching to be able to give an answer on broadcast television that's less than, you know, 40 minutes long. You have seven seconds. No, I know. And it was just, it was, it was.

And my career never was the same after that. So then did you do another book deal for gross national happiness? That was your next book? That was my next book. It was about the social science of happiness. Who's happy and who is? And it was just an observational study about who are the happy people and who are the unhappy people and what's different about their lives.

And that one was completely a complete flop. And so everybody thought since that last that first book, it was like a big deal. So the next one is going to be a bigger deal. It's a great topic. And it was the seventh book about happiness that came out that year. Oh, it was brutal. You know, it sold hundreds of copies. But I hope you got a good advance based on your, on your 2006 book.

Yeah, but you know how it is with advances. You know, you get in advance and then you don't earn it out and you feel embarrassed. And, you know, the point is... I don't know that. But I'm sure that's got a sting. Yeah, yeah, it stung. And I actually, I published the same year of textbook on philanthropy and non-profit management. And then, you know, I was thinking to myself, you know, I can do this and, you know, write

another book every two, three years for the rest of my career. But it was time to take it down to the studs again, so I quit. And so the next move was to the American Enterprise Institute. Think Tank in Washington, D.C., dedicated to better public policy for politicians. There's a 1938 company formed during the Great Depression when economic growth was minus 4%, 25% unemployment. And the whole idea was we need actual scholars, actual intellectuals who are not saying, that the secret to solving the Great Depression is socialism.

The secret to the Great Depression is spreading capitalism all the way to the margins. The solution is setting poor people free, not shackling everybody. That was the whole idea of the American Enterprise Institute. And it had been around for years and years and years and I became their president in 2008. So what do you do and what do they do? How do they make change happen? So a think tank is basically a university without students that does studies that are then delivered to policy makers so that they can write legislation and create policy that's more aligned with good ideas and that will actually help people more. And sometimes it's effective and sometimes it isn't.

The surge in Iraq was actually a product of the American Enterprise Institute. That idea with Jack Keene and Fred Kagan who authored the surge in Iraq policy, which was an inflecting policy. It was a big risk, but it was based on highest intellectual ideals from both military and civilian experts who said this is something that could actually work. Welfare reform in the late 1990s, where the whole idea is... How well did they do executing the surge from your perspective? So you were right in the midst of that. No, no, you missed it.

It was before I was there. And I would have liked to have taken credit for being the president of the place when it was actually doing the surge in Iraq. but it was like everything else it's a limited success you know a great idea but the execution is everything execution and strategies is everything i would turn that back on you how do you think that the surge turned out i think that the surge went well and it definitely had a huge it shifted it shifted the war to a situation where we were going to have a positive impact and you know i just you know there's been obviously a lot of talk going around right now about israel gaza the west bank

the whole nine yards. And, you know, I've talked about the fact that we were fighting a counterinsurgency. Once we recognized we were fighting a counterinsurgency and we needed to fight it like a counterinsurgency, we need more troops on the ground. That's when the surge happened. And actually, I was in the Battle of Vermont in 2006 and they definitely utilized the success of the Battle of Vermont to say, hey, look, what happens when we utilize this strategy?

Right. Right and they utilize that and that's one of the things that was able to convince people that the surge would be a good idea So brought in more troops did what you know I thought this was a great phrase from general Petraeus who said we can't do drive by And counter insurgency meaning you have to get out of your vehicles you have to go into those towns You have to go into those neighborhoods you have to go meet with the local populace you have to show them that you're going to be there You have to be willing to sacrifice you have to show them that you're going to stay and if you do all those things They're eventually going to go this is this is a better way of life is ahead of us right And these coalition forces are willing to make sacrifices.

They're protecting us. And it definitely worked. It worked in the Battle of Vermont. We saw a radical transformation take place there, but it also worked in Talafar. It worked in Al-Qaim. It worked in Baghdad. It worked in Sodder City.

So it worked. Right. Unfortunately, in 2010, 2011, we decided, oh, we're done. We're leave now. And that was not a good move because there was still embers of extreme Islam there. And when we left, they rose up and we got ISIS. It's persistence. And so, you know, it's interesting because what the surge was was a combination really of three things.

Strength, persistence, and brains. And that's what we need. But by the way, this is what we need in our lives. This is what we need. You got to bring strength to bear. get into the gym, develop your body, get your sleep, eat right, be strong, persistence, work your butt off, be ambitious and brains, learn, learn, learn, and use what you learn. If you put those three things together, you become unstoppable. And when you scale that to something like

strategy in the surgeon Iraq, that's what it took because if you only had two legs of that three-legged stool, it wouldn't have worked. If you just sent in a bunch of guys, sorry, if you had only done the persistence where we have the same kind of pitiful force and we say we're going to stay here for a really long time and try to embed in the culture, it wouldn't be good enough. And if we actually didn't have a concept of what the coin, the counterinsurgency strategy was, it wouldn't have worked in the first place because we wouldn't have an intellectual superstructure of what we were trying to do.

So this is the idea. All of us should have a surge in Iraq mentality for our lives. Everybody in particular, when we're in crisis, when the people are listening to us, If you're not in crisis now, you will be. And something's going to happen. Model your strategy for getting out of the crisis and getting your life on track on the counterinsurgency strategy. Brains, learning, using ideas, persistence, hard work, commitment, and ambition, and force. And that force actually comes from being strong and doing what it takes to be strong.

And some of that is just getting into the gym and eating right. Some of that's stopping drinking and stopping the stupid nonsense in your life. Yeah, so I had a conversation with one of my bosses where we just arrived in Ramadi in 2006 and we started doing counterinsurgency operations which was not what SEAL teams had been doing for the previous three years in Iraq and a few weeks goes by and I get a call

from one of my bosses and he says, you know, you guys are doing these missions, those aren't typical SEAL missions and we haven't seen any change in enemy attacks so you need to go back to what we've been doing. And luckily, I had just read from cover to cover, the FM3 Tech 24, which had been released as a draft, which was the counterinsurgency manual. And I said, hey, sir, with all due respect, the average counterinsurgency takes seven years. It's been three weeks.

Can I get some more time to see some impact here? And it was like, yeah. But then, again, if you look at that, the surge started in 2008. And all of a sudden in 2010, we're leaving. Like, we didn't give it the time to, to, we didn't, the persistence part. We failed on the persistence part. And then we pulled everyone out. Now we don't have the strength.

We don't have the persistence. And the thing falls apart. And it's terrible too because unfortunately, we in America are strategic planning is going to be no more than four years. It's going to be no more than the next election cycle. And then it's like, hey, we, we said we're going to get out of that war, whatever it was. We said we're going to bring all the troops home. And listen, there's no one that's more pro bringing troops home. home and not let's not be in war than me I don't want to be in war right I want

all the troops to be back here in America that's what that's what I want but I also realize that you've got to have peace and stability in the world and if you're gonna make these moves you've got to be willing to stick through and and continue until you actually achieve your goals yeah there's a reason that we have people around the world which is because the world's unbelievably dangerous and America's a great country okay so there's two ways to not have people all over the place and not doing things. Either we decide we're not a great country,

or suddenly the world becomes like, you know, rainbows and unicorns and dolphins, you know, flying through the air. Wouldn't that be great? And whale songs. Well, guess what? You know, that's a, it's a tough choice, isn't it? I'll take what we've got and I'll get, and I'll take stronger.

And, you know, it's not, I didn't do it. You did it. But, you know, I have a son in the Marine Corps. And I listen to my son too. And he believes these things. He believes that we have an opportunity. We have a privilege of actually standing up for our values. Why?

Because people have dignity around the world. And people live under circumstances that are not as fortunate as what we have. And we're not going to be everybody's policemen. We're not going to solve every problem. But, man, there is a lot that we can do. And there's a lot of strength that we can bring and a lot of goodness that we can bring on the basis of this strength. Yeah, no doubt about it.

And so that's what you're doing while you're at the American Enterprise Institute. You're helping move policy forward. What do you present it to politicians? This is what we came up with? Yeah, a whole lot of congressional testimony. A whole lot of publication of books, op-eds, in the major papers, you know, getting it in front of the public eye, getting information just in front of politicians as they're thinking through what they're trying to do. Getting it in front of business leaders, other academics, in front of journalists, these are the policy ideas that are going to be helpful that are going to make the world better. you know, on the basis of the free enterprise system,

of American strength, of, you know, health and education policies that are good for ordinary Americans, of bringing opportunity to the periphery of society, trying to wipe out poverty on the basis of opportunity. And so that people can lift themselves up. And what a wonderful world that would be. And that's the basic ideology behind these highly technical ideas that we would bring.

And as you're kind of moving towards the end of that, which is mostly fundraising, by the way. I mean it's a nonprofit organization. I had to raise $50 million a year. I was at a pure philanthropy. We took no government money from any government, any place in the world, not a dime. Because, you know, we shouldn't force any taxpayers

to pay for what we think is right. It's our opinions. That's the Democratic thing to do. That's sadly unusual, that ideology. But we really believe in that sort of freedom. And so our donors were really stepping up. And we're, you know, this $50 million a year, we were putting it toward,

I was supporting 310 people doing this research. Yeah, it's great. You released a film, which is called The Pursuit, which I watched this film. And fundamentally, it's like socialism versus capitalism. That's kind of the fundamental underlying message of the film. You go to different places in the world, but you look at India, pre, you know, post-British rule all the way up through 1991. and all the way up through 1991, it's very socialist. There's no mobility.

It's sort of, and I remember these days, it's sort of the poster child of, you know, poverty and slums and the caste systems in place. Like, it's not a nice place to be in India. And then in 1991, they kind of changed the way they were doing things. And start to liberalize. They started to liberalize, and really had a huge impact.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And now it's not perfect and there's still tons of poverty. But you started to see the emergence of a middle class and an entrepreneurial class creating jobs and opportunity and growth in India. India. And so now people in the United States who have never been there, they think, oh, it's really, it's just all slums. It's all poverty. You go there. It's the most exciting place. India is cooking, man. I mean, it's like it's completely chaotic. It's hilariously chaotic. But it's a wonderful, spiritual, fun, interesting, hardworking place. Everybody's got to go to India. It's one of my favorite places to go. I go every single year. It's interesting. We have a lot of, because it's English speaking. Yeah. The English is the, what, the official language?

Yeah, it's one of the two official languages of India. We have a lot of listeners from India. India's great. I love India. And I go, you know, I have spiritual teachers in India and I meet with entrepreneurs in India. It's great. And by the way, the sense of humor and the food and the sports, it's all good. It's all good.

I wrote down a quote from the movie, set people free. Let people decide what they are going to do with their talent and time and treasure. they will spontaneously organize in a way that creates the most wealth. Yeah. Yeah. And that doesn't mean every single person is making every single good decision. But when you aggregate up to a society of people who have freedom of movement and opportunity and a competition of ideas, good things happen. And it's not even a theory anymore.

I mean, we know this because if you look at the world, you know, what's happened over the world where 80% of starvation level poverty has been wiped out in my mind. lifetime since the early 1970s because of the liberalization of economies and ideas and setting people free, setting women free, setting everybody free to, you know, live their dreams and build their lives entrepreneurially. It's extraordinary. The world's completely different than it used to be. And the reason is because of freedom. You also spend some time in that movie up in the Scandinavian region. Yeah. And you talk about the Scandinavian dream of, well, you know, I think we should everywhere should be like Scandinavia, which has these high happiness quotients and really great social welfare programs. What did you uncover there?

Well, I went to Denmark. And, you know, Denmark wasn't chosen, you know, at random. I didn't throw a dart at a map. My grandparents came from Denmark. And Denmark always comes out in these United Nations comparisons and these big world comparisons of happiness as the happiest country. But those comparisons are all bogus because the way that they set it up, it's like saying, Who's got the best music? Well, I don't know.

I'm going to go to 100 countries and ask 1,000 people in each country how much they like their local music. And then I'm going to say it's got the best music on the basis of that. It's all nonsense. You don't compare countries this way. I mean, they don't even answer the happiness questions the same way in these countries. And so Denmark, for example, when you ask them about how happy they are, they answer that with respect to this concept of contentment, how contented they are.

Now, that probably gives you, Jaka Willing, the hebi-jee-be-jeeves because it's like, contentment, kill me. I don't want content. I want an adventure, baby. I want an act. And that's the reason that the Willinks came. My guess is they weren't landed gentry. They came to America as total riffraff, right?

And started a farm or something or worked in a factory. Now look at you. That's the story. That's the story of America. And that's the reason that people sort into different places and do different things. So God bless the Danes, but I'm glad I'm not one. Because contentment makes my skin crawl. I don't want it.

And they do good for them. That's the whole point. So I mean, I sort of debunk that, but I do ask them, you know, what's the deal? And I learned a lot in, you know, that part. You know, they have a system that's very market-oriented. It's much easier to dismiss a public servant in Denmark than it is in California. I mean, you actually have a tax system that's more egalitarian. It's very high marginal taxes, but it's quite egalitarian.

You know, we have approximately 50% of the American population that has no federal tax liability in the United States. And you find that the top one, five, and 10 percent pay the vast majority of the taxes in the United States. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just a fact. It's a highly progressive tax system, more so in the United States than most of Europe in that way, as measured in that way. And then you ask them, you know, what it's all about? Do you want to live here or not? They all say, yeah, it's good. It's good. You know, they have a word called Hugue in Danish, H-Y-G-G-E, which is hard to translate. It's like the cozy conviviality and the comfort of friends on a comfortable couch or something like that. It's like, I don't want it. I don't want it.

But they want it and they have a highly homogeneous population of people who have or culturally very similar. There's only five million of them. There's 25 million pigs and five million Danes. So it's like it's a small country and they're and they're quite the same and they have this particular culture and the ones who wanted adventure they came to America and were my grandparents. And they made the Willinks and the Brookses, et cetera, et cetera. And so I found that they have a good answer for them is the way that this turns out. But it's not a good answer for us. We're with a highly variegated population, 330 million people living in chaos and all wanting different stuff and mostly immigrant stock.

That's a beautiful thing, but it's a different thing, to be sure. It comes through in the movie. Another quote or another area you went to is, Aynes in eastern Kentucky. Yeah. You know, these are coal miners and just seeing what they're thinking. Yeah. Totally different.

You got a quote in there from FDR, welfare is a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. Yeah. That's crazy. That's from FDR. Totally. Totally. No, no,

because it, you know, the whole idea that you got to earn your success if you're going to have dignity in life. You know, you find that it's not just welfare. It's also winning the lottery or getting a huge inherent and some grandpa is a destroyer of the spirit. You know, it's not just that we're dumping on people

who are getting a check from the state. No, it's not earning your way. It's terrible for people. It's terrible for happiness. It's terrible for motivation. It's terrible for earning your success and feeling like you're a person of dignity and worth is what it comes down to.

So we need a system where people can earn the success. You know, it's where they can get an education. They can make progress every day. And this is not just your opinion. This is... I'm a social scientist. You know, and I come from a, by the way, I come from a very politically progressive family. So these are not the ideas.

These are not mother's milk ideas. On the contrary, my parents thought I was dropped on my head a lot because I like capitalism. I was a little surprised when you get to the Dalai Lama. Yeah, I love the Dalai Lama. Four secrets for a happy life. Enlightenment, spirituality, worldly satisfaction, and wealth. Yeah, these are the four six, the secrets to happiness from Tibetan Buddhism. which is, you know, most people don't understand.

But it's not just wealth, wealth, wealth is in money. It's the whole idea of the accumulation of the resources that are a marker of the success and value you're creating with your life is what it comes down to, which is the depth of your relationships, the relationship you have with God. It's all part of the wealth. It's the stock of love and happiness in your life is really the wealth that you'll accumulate. If you're trying to, you're trying to just count this in money, you're making a big mistake. Yeah, the three things they point out is build some.

something, earn a living, serve other people. Those were the things that will give you wealth. Build something. Build something with your life. Earn your success. Earn a living, meaning that you are standing on your own two feet as a human being and then serve other people. I mean, it sort of makes intuitive sense, but we sure are doing a good job for getting it.

Look, the Dalai Lama, it's like everybody thinks that Dalai Lama is some sort of, you know, robed Marxist or something. no, he's somebody who's taught me so much about, I love him, and I've worked with him for the last 11 years. It's such a beautiful experience for me to learn, you know, I've learned meditation technique with his monks at the, at his monastery in Darm Salah in the Himalayan foothills, where I visited him every year. And so he's taught me a great deal about what it means for me to be a Christian man and for me to have better technique in my meditation practice. But he's also taught me a lot about, you know, basic common sense and ethics. Yeah, I definitely would agree that that's

what people envision the Dalai Lama is, but the Dalai Lama, another quote you have from in the movie is, individuals change the world. Yeah. I was like, hold on. I know, man. This is what we've been talking about. I know. And we got the Dalai Lama saying that. He says that. It's from his lips. Yeah, for sure. You know, this is the fourth law of combat leadership that I teach and learned and now teach is decentralized command. And it's so obvious on the battlefield that if one, person tries to control everything, everything is going to be lost. And the minute you empower people to step up, make decisions, make things happen, you are going to win. And this just happens in business. And obviously it's from a from a governmental perspective as well, the more control that's imposed

on people, the worse off they're going to be. Yeah. This is a, believe it or not, this is a big Catholic idea. It's called subsidiarity. It's a fancy word for a very, a very sensible idea. The subsidiarities always push power down to its lowest possible level. Now, sometimes it's not at the level of the individual. I mean, sometimes you've got to say, everybody, go do this. But if it's a decision that can be made at the state, don't make it at the federal level. If it can be made at the city, don't make it at the state level. If it can be made by a community, don't make it at the city level.

If it can be made by a family, leave the community out of it. It can be made by the individual, then they have to work together in the family to get it done. And if you're in a company of Marines, if you're in your platoon level, sometimes has to do something with platoon command. But sometimes you're in a situation where power needs to be pushed down to the individual where it actually becomes most effective. And that's how we should live our lives, quite frankly. That's how we should be thinking about our society. And that's when things work best is when we're empowered. That subsidiary, that ancient Catholic, that medieval Catholic philosophical notion, sure sounds good to me today.

You can watch that movie on YouTube, by the way. Once again, it's called The Pursuit. And it's free on YouTube. Next book, 2019, Love Your Enemies. Interesting. Yeah. I really like this idea. Talk to me about what's the premise behind Love Your Enemies.

Well, Love Your Enemies is the most transgressive idea and the history of civilization. And so this comes as, you know, anybody who's listening who's either aware of or practicing the Christian faith. This comes from the Gospel of St. Matthew, the fifth check. chapter of the 44th verse where Jesus is giving the sermon on the Mount. And he's given all these crazy ideas. I mean, just like people are going, their minds are being blown by this rabbi. And he says, today, you know, you have heard that that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. And people start just walking off, right? Like, no way, man. That is the most transgressive teaching

ever. Why? Because it's the most pragmatic teaching that is the source of true power. Jesus didn't say, like your enemies. That's sentimentality. Look, you like somebody because you like somebody. I like you, Jocko, because you're awesome, right? But even if I didn't, the job is for me to love you. And even if we're at war and you're on the other side, I'm still called to love you. What does that mean? That's, I mean, it's like, blow in my mind. It's just blow in my mind. But the whole point is that's totally power because you can only redeem your enemy when you love your enemy. And to love is to wield the good of the other, to make a commitment to do so, notwithstanding your feelings. You want to discipline your feelings? You want to discipline the will? Love people, notwithstanding your feelings. That's huge.

And that's what Jesus was teaching. Jesus was teaching the most muscular kind of philosophy ever in that. And so the question is, are we going to do it or not? You want power? Love your enemies. It doesn't mean you've got to have them over for dinner. It doesn't mean you have to give them your money. What it means is you have to, you will their good as them and act as such, even if they don't like it. Which is, by the way, how you raised teenagers. You and I have raised teenagers. And, you know, they're acting like your enemies sometimes.

And you're loving them by willing they're good, even when they don't want it. One of my friends is a devout Catholic and one of the biggest challenges. he has, that he states is like, what was really hard for me was praying for Osama bin Laden. Yeah. Totally. Totally. And again, you know, you know, your military, my son is a, you know,

he's a combat Marine. And we've talked about this. He's a Catholic. He's a church going Catholic. All my kids go to Mass. And they're all church going Catholic. And I said, Carlos, what does it mean? What does it mean for you to love your enemies?

And, you know, he says, well, in the Marines, we're not taught to, or sometimes taught to kill him. our enemies. I say, are those two ideas incompatible? Can you will their good? And the truth is, I don't know how to sort out that. That's a, that's a Gordian knot. That's a really, really tough one. But I can tell you in my ordinary life, I have to do hard things all the time that people aren't going to life like, but I will not hate my enemies. I refuse to hate my enemies. I will, will their good, notwithstanding the fact that I have to do things that are, that they don't think are necessarily in their interest. Like, I've been a boss. I've had to fire people. I've had to say goodbye.

to people who wanted their jobs. But if they're not a fit for the company, I'm not willing they're good by doing this. I'm willing their convenience, you know? I'm willing the easiest possible path for them. And I don't have to tell you because you've, holy mackerel, I can't even imagine the decisions you've had to make that went against the will of a lot of people,

but it was for the good. Is that fair? That is fair. That is fair. You're at this point, this is 2019. book comes out. Now you're also teaching it, this is when you start teaching at Harvard. This is right before I left the American Enderbys Institute. And I had, I had said, I had announced a year and a half in advance that I was going to retire as CEO. You got,

when you're running something, when you're the boss, you have two choices about leaving. You can leave before you're ready or you can leave on somebody else's terms. There's only two choices. And I don't like either. So I'm going to leave before I'm ready because I sure as heck don't want to leave on somebody else's terms. You hang around long enough. You're going to leave on somebody else's terms. So I resigned when I was 55. And this was taking it down to the studs again. That was the studs.

Taking your career down to the studs. Down to the studs. We're going to start again. Yep. Yep. What was your plan? My plan was, I was, I mean, I thought, I prayed about it a lot. Because this is a philosophical concept called discernment.

Whenever you have a lot of people listening to us right now, they've got to, do I ask that girl to marry me? Do I go back to school? do I change jobs. They're discerning something. Discernment takes work. Don't wait for inspiration to flash because it won't. You'll just hang around. And then you'll be forced to make a decision.

It might not be the right one. Do the work. And to do the work, you start basically making lists of pros and cons. And you have to be thinking about something specifically. Usually 15 minutes a day. I recommend I'll put people on a discernment program. Think about the decision you're making. But really think deeply about it for 15 minutes a day for 30 days.

And you will have incredible enlightenment about this that you've never had before because you won't have the decision necessarily, but you'll have structured the decision in your mind. That's also a spiritual concept. In Buddhism it's called, in Theravada Buddhism it's called Pana, which is a word from Pali that means, you know, the enlightenment, where you go through the process of trying to make a decision by thinking or praying about it. In the ancient Greeks called it Sunnisus.

the discernment of spirits in the Ignatian Catholic tradition is a structured way to make these decisions. And I did, you know, for six months, I spent time on my knees every day, man, every day, in front of the blessed sacrament. You know, I would pray in front of the presence of the Lord. Lord, and here's what I prayed. What do you want?

You know, guide my path. Just guide my path. And I felt that the will was, the will was that I was supposed to go someplace to say things, that people didn't expect and where I wasn't necessarily invited. So I left my job at the think tank, which is very comfortable and very secure, and I went back to academia, but in a different role as a professor of practice, where the world is the classroom

in a public intellectual role. I went to Harvard University between the Harvard Kennedy School, which is the government school and the business school, 50-50. And I became a columnist of the Atlantic talking about the science of happiness and how we can use it, how we can spread the ideas, how we can all be happiness teachers and build a life based on love and happiness, spreading the ideas of love and happiness. Back to the studs. Writing for the Atlantic, you got a, there's a ton of articles that, by the way, they're all available. You can just Google them and find them, but measuring your happiness so you can improve it. How to cope with election agony. Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being. Why it's so lonely at the top. Success.

Success addicts choose being special over being happy. Echo's probably going to give me a sideways eye on that one. Addiction does. Is as addiction does, Jocko. A college degree is no guarantee of a good life. So that's what you're writing about. It's every week. Every week.

Every Thursday morning in the Atlantic is 1,300 words on the science of happiness, 52 times a year. I was. intervening with one of my friends who was having a drinking problem. Uh-huh. And I, common, common problem. Went to his house, and this was at the, you know, in the midst of an intervention that had been ongoing for a long time. Right.

And, you know, he'd come clean for a little while, and now he's been missing for a couple days or whatever. You know what's going on. Go to his house. I'm banging on his door, banging on his door, banging on his door. He answers the door. Of course, he's drunk, you know. And, um, I'm saying, hey, listen to you, you got to stop, like you're addicted, you're addicted, like this is controlling

you. And he looks at me and says, well, yeah, you're addicted to power. You're an addict, too. I was an addict to. So that's what he got me on that one. It's fair. It's fair. You know, and, you know, we can talk about the neurophysiology of success addiction, which looks an awful lot like the neurophysiology of methamphetamine addiction does. It's where you get your rewards. The dopamine patterns in your brain are habituated to what gives you the anticipation of great reward. And, you know, the dudes listening to us who drink too much and then quit are going to be in danger of becoming addicted to every single other thing in their lives, including the

gym, including, you know, business success. And the truth is you have to look out for that. You have to look at it. And it's not addictive personalities. It's just brain chemistry is the way it works out. For sure. Absolutely. And so this is what you're writing about in all these different articles.

Yeah, the science of happiness. So it's about 30% neuroscience, which. is a lot of what I teach these days, about 50% social psychology and behavioral economics, and the rest is how you can apply these ideas to your life. So every week, I talk about, you know, what's the question, what's the science? And not for scientists. I mean, you know, I've read 100,000 academic journal articles, so the readers don't have to, you know. I mean, I'm a translator at this point. You know, I'm reading all the, you know, the deep science. This is how I'm trained. And then I say, here's what it means. Here's actually, you turn it into three

lessons for your life. And I'm usually eight to nine weeks out in my column. And so I'm trying these things. I'm a complete happiness guinea pig. I'm trying. And so my wife's like, what are you doing? It's like, ah, it's a column, you know, it's like, why are you trying to learn to walk on your hands or, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is? But it's because I'm trying something out for my column. Now, it sounds like you had another hit with the book, uh, from strength to strength. That was 22. And that was a book that I was working on when I, when I retired. and I didn't retire. When I changed careers, and I came back again to dedicate my work to happiness to the

science of happiness. That was the first big science book on happiness that I wrote after I came back to Harvard. And I guess it spawns from the title of one of the articles that you wrote, which was, your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think. Yeah, that's true. Which is depressing. It's sort of depressing, except that it's, it has a happy ending to it. And here, the problem is that getting into the basic neuroscience of how our careers work,

we're good at what we do in our 20s and 30s on the basis of something called fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence gives you unusual focus. It gives you creative energy, has a ton of working memory behind it, and it allows you innovative capacity to do new things and to solve problems yourself, like a ninja, like a cowboy. And people who are super motivated and really disciplined hard workers, they're listening to your podcast for a reason. That's you dudes. In your 20s, you're getting better and better and it's awesome. And the brain power behind that is called fluid intelligence.

This was identified by a social psychologist in Britain named Raymond Cotell in the 1960s. And the problem is that it peaks in your late 30s. That fluid intelligence, your working memory, your focus, your innovative capacity, your ability to solve problems by yourself in new ways. that peaks in your late 30s. That's the reason that the average startup, tech startup with a $1 billion valuation, the startup founder is 31. That's, which is, you know, it's, but you look at the kinds of professions that require more standing knowledge.

So, you know, medicine or law, you find that, you know, the hottest litigators are in their late 30s. The most innovative surgeons are in their late 30s. The best financial professionals who are doing things in new ways are in their late 30s. Musicians, authors, electricians, air traffic, communications. controllers, their peak focus when they're in their late 30s, and then it starts to decline. And that's why people start to burn out typically in their mid-40s. They're like, I don't know.

I used to love being a dentist, but now I guess I'm going to start taking Fridays off. I don't know why. The reason is the progress principle, once again. Nobody else thinks they're incompetent. They're still really good at what they do, but they're not making progress anymore. And they don't know that it's because their fluid intelligence has started to decline. so they can't actually continue to get better the way they did before. That's why people go in decline.

You see case after case after case. I talk about it in the research like Charles Darwin, who, you know, he did his peak most innovative work in his 20s and 30s when he developed the theory of natural selection, aka evolution. And then, you know, after he was about 50, he never made any more advances. You know, his field passed him by. He wrote tons of books, but it wasn't innovative. And he went to his grave thinking that he was a charlatan and a fake because he hadn't done any new work for decades.

He hadn't done any new theoretical work. It was all coming out of younger scientists. The reason was because he was trying to stay on his fluid intelligence curve. And that curve was in the cellar, man. You know, I was writing stuff in my early 30s. I was writing research that was so mathematically sophisticated, I can't read it today. I was doing work on early artificial intelligence algorithms called genetic algorithms, which are learning algorithms. And I was applying, you know, war fighting simulations into this learning algorithm to see what would work best and let these war fighting scenarios learn to get better.

So I was using artificial intelligence, a rudimentary form. And I was writing papers that was modeling, you know, economic scenarios and getting these high-folut and public. that nobody read, of course, because it's too technical and really boring. And I can't read it now because that was my fluid intelligence curve. And that's what a lot of people get stuck on and they feel disappointed by. And then they wind up the rest of their lives going, yeah, and going and going for that next big hit. You see entrepreneurs who have a huge hit in their 30s and in their 50s, they're trying to start a new thing and struggling and feeling frustrated and feeling kind of burned out.

And that's because they're on the wrong curve. The good news, the happy news comes after that, which is there's a second intelligence curve that's different, that's increasing in your 30s and 40s and 50s, and its highest in your 60s and 70s. And that's called crystallized intelligence. That's based on your wisdom and pattern recognition and your ability to put a whole bunch of different ideas together.

That's why you're a much better teacher when you're 50 than you weren't when you're 30. And even better when you're 70, The best teaching evaluations at my university at Harvard go to professors who are over 70. And it's not because the students are merciful. God knows. It's because they're better professors. You know, like young guys will come out of men and women will come out of graduate school and they'll ask, you know,

what's the secret of great teaching evaluations? I'm like, get old because you get on your crystallized intelligence curve. And your pattern recognition is high. Your ability to use metaphor is really good. You're just a much better teacher. You're a better coach. You're a better mentor. You're a better team leader.

You don't want a team leader is 25. Team leaders who are 25 are actually dangerous because they think like individuals. You want people who are 45 and 55 who really appreciate the unique capabilities of 25-year-olds and put them together in their particular groupings. Is this making sense to you? How old are you, Jocko? I'm 52. You're a young guy.

Yeah. But you're on your fluid. You're a crystallized intelligence curve. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about my life. And so I was like, oh, well, I didn't really read. built, ripped myself down to the studs every 10 years because I was in the Navy for 20 years. Then I was like, oh, no, I was enlisted in my first eight years, went to college, and then

was an officer my last 12 years. And then I got out and then I started doing other things. You're a total spiral. I mean, as soon as you told me that, because you, you know, I knew this about your career. You've told me this before, that you were enlisted. And then you did officers of training, went to college and then did command, which is a completely different kettle of fish related. same company, the same organization, and then you come out in your entrepreneur and being

an entrepreneur in a different way in the first part of your entrepreneurial life than the second part of your entrepreneurial life. Now you're, I mean, like you even have a podcast network. Why? Because you're helping other people to succeed. You're finding other authors and the imprint that you're doing because you're helping other, you're recognizing talent and helping it to succeed because you're under crystallized intelligence curve. You're spiral with crystallized intelligence. My fluid intelligence is gone. I have no new ideas. So I'm like, yo, can we get some young guys in here to make some stuff happen?

But that's, you know, it's like, it's no joke. It's the secret of success and happiness. And so you find the people throughout history who've been happiest, they're the ones who actually became the graybeards. They're the ones who actually, and became very comfortable with the idea of bringing up the next generation of talent and getting their satisfaction from that. They became the great instructors, the talent recognizers. They go from, you know, from startup entrepreneurs to venture capitalists.

Yeah. We can all do that in our own way. The key thing is what's your crystallized intelligence curve? And then if you're in your 20s and 30s, what do you think it's going to be and what are you doing to make it easier to step onto it when the time comes? That's what that book was about. Yeah. Next up came the most current book that you wrote, which I have a copy of here today. Build the life you want, the art and science of getting happier.

Was this just an extension of the articles initially? No. What it was, it was the brainchild of my co-author on this. This is the first book I've written with another person in 20 years, as a matter of fact, which is pursuant to a very interesting phone call I got from Oprah Winfrey. The co-author. The co-author. Oprah Winfrey calls.

This is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman. So Oprah Winfrey. And she's a reader of my column. and she had read from Strength to Strength, the book that we were just talking about. The first day it came out, I went on her podcast,

and her idea was collaborating on something that could get the science of happiness to a different audience than I'd ever been able to touch before into a much bigger audience. Because Oprah Winfrey has, I mean, she's one of the most respected and iconic figures in American culture,

world culture, as a matter of fact. And justly so, she's amazing. energetic, idealistic, helpful, full of love, and wants to bring these happiness ideas because the science of happiness she felt had really helped her a lot during the coronavirus epidemic as she'd been reading my column. And so we spent, you know, we got together her place in California and cooked up the structure of the book and we went away and wrote it and passed it back and forth and it came out September, 2023.

Build a life you want. It's about emotional self-management. It's about treating your emotions and understanding your brain as something under your management as opposed to managing you. That's the central idea. Yeah. I mean, you kick it off here. You got a thing.

You're talking about Victor Frankel. We covered Victor Frankl's... Man Search for Meeting. We covered that book on one of the earlier podcasts that we did because obviously it's such a important, powerful book. You're saying here, Frankl's message was not that life will automatically be good, however, which it obviously isn't. Nor was it that we can somehow escape pain with some special mind trick.

He acknowledges that every life has suffering, some a lot more than others. Further, as a psychiatrist, he knew that we react to suffering with negative emotion, which is natural. But a bad life is not our fate because we have a choice as to how we respond to our emotions. In Frankl's words, everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own one. way. In other words, you can't choose your feelings, but you can choose your reaction to your feelings. You could have written that. You could have written that because that's, you know, I listen to you, that's what you're talking about. You can, you got two choices, man. You can be managed by your

feelings or you can manage your feelings. Choose wisely. Choose appropriately. Choose in a way that will be empowering to you. And too many people are going through life, hoping for a better day, going through life, hoping that good feelings will find them. And so, okay, so Victor Frankel wrote that. And I said, let's do, Oprah and I said, let's actually explain the science on how to do that. Because the truth is to do that, you need to do three things. You need to understand the science. You need to change your habits.

And you need to help others. In helping others, you imprint these ideas in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. You experience the ideas where you can retain them in memory. That's why teaching is so critically important. The reason I teach is because this is not research. me search. The reason is because I want to be a happier person with more love in my life, and so I teach people how to do it. And so that's what we do. We talk about how does this work. What is the science of what's called metacognition of understanding and experiencing your emotions

as simple information. There's no bad feelings. There's no such thing as bad feelings. There's just information coming from the limbic system of your brain, which is taking the outside stimuli that's being sensed by your brainstem, sending it to the limbic system, a console of emotion-producing brain tissue, and that information, sending it to the prefrontal cortex where you decide what it means and decide what you're going to do.

That's how it works. And once you understand that mechanism and adopt a bunch of techniques for doing so, it's like your brain's under new management. And there's a new sheriff in town, man, and it's the prefrontal cortex, the C-suite of your brain. And that is a different life experience.

Change my life completely. Yeah, you have a good... The way you explained it, here in the book, you say feelings in the enterprise of your life are like weather to a construction company. If it rains or snows or is unreasonably hot, it affects the ability to get work done. But the right response is not trying to change the weather, which would be impossible, or wishing the weather were different, which doesn't help. It is having contingency plans in place for bad weather, being ready, and managing projects in a way that is appropriate to the conditions on a given day.

The process of managing this weather is called metacognition. Metacognition. Metacognition. Which technically means thinking about thinking is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously Separating them from your behavior and refusing to be controlled by them. Yep, that's exactly right. You are not your feelings. Your feelings are simply information to help you understand what's going on around you in the world. The decision on how to react is yours. So I use the term detachment to describe what a person, a leader, a human being,

has to do when things are getting crazy, when there's emotions going on, when there's chaos going on. Right. I've now, you know, I talk about how to detach, like what the protocol is to detach. Talk to me a little bit about how you teach people to practice metacognition. So your mother when you were a kid, what did your mother call you when you were a little boy? Jocko.

Yeah, okay. That's good. That's your name. That's your nickname. Yeah, it is a nickname. My real name is John. My father's name was also John. They didn't want to have two Johns in the house.

They gave me the nickname. I'm from New England. They give you weird nicknames. I know, but this is totally badass. Good for your mom. Well, my dad actually made it up and my dad now,

you know, he wants a cut. Yeah, he wants a cut. He's like, oh, I could have named you Biff or whatever. Yeah,

he could have you, Chad or something. It's like, yeah, yeah. You'd have made that cool too. They could have called you, you know, you know,

you know, puffin boy. Now that would be like super cool because you made it as such. So, So what we find is, and what I talk about is the fact that, well, actually, get back to this, your mother probably taught you, hey, Jacco, when you're angry, count to 10. I mean, that's classic.

Classic. Do you know who made up that axiom count to 10 when you're angry? Well, it's in your book. Thomas Jefferson. Yeah. Thomas. And when you're really angry, count 200. Yeah.

And the point is get space between your limbic system and your prefold. cortex. Now your limbic system is a console of tissue. It's evolved over a 40 million year period. Its whole job is emotions and cravings and desires. That sends signals about what's going on. Now, where do you want to make- And by the way, those things used to keep us alive. Oh, totally. And you know, negative emotions in particular. Thank God for your negative emotions. There are four fundamental negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. All of them are evolved for particular reasons. I mean, fear and anger come from threat. And it's final. flight and that actually stimulates a part of the limbic system called the amygdala, which will

then illuminate when something crosses for the visual cortex and the occipital lobe of your brain. That will send a signal through your hypothalamus to your pituitary glands, to your adrenal glands sitting over your kidneys, spitting out stress hormones in 74 milliseconds after seeing that car barreling toward you in the crosswalk. That, of course, bypasses all of your conscious mind and that's when your limbic system with negative emotions has saved your life for the thousandth or the 10,000th time and you in the military more than that. Thank God. Your sadness keeps you aversive from being torn away from your kin,

from the people that you love, your disgust keeps you from eating something that you shouldn't eat because it might have a pathogen. All of these negative emotions are incredibly adaptive and super important, and we should be really grateful for them. We don't want them to be maladapted or to manage us is really what it comes down to. The way that you do that is making sure that your understanding of those emotions and your reactions are occurring not in the limbic system where they're created, but in the in the prefrontal cortex, part of the neocortex, the most evolved part of the human brain, the rinkly outside of the brain is wrinkly because it's a one square meter piece of tissue that's scrunched up inside our cranium. The most evolved part of that, the most quintessentially human part of that is the prefrontal cortex, a bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's your C-suite.

That's where you're making decisions. But it takes time for the information to get from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex. Now sometimes you want to take immediate action like jumping out of the way of an oncoming car or doing something that you've taught yourself instinctively to do like somebody's firing toward you running toward the fire instinctively. So you've retrained your amygdala to do something that doesn't feel instinctive, but it becomes a new instinct. That's great. But most of the time when you have aversive reactions, when you have aversive reactions, when you

you have aversive emotions, you want to understand them and make a decision. What is the right thing for me to do? I've got this negative feeling. What do I want to do? What's the decision that I'm actually going to make? And that requires time. Metacognition is a set of techniques to put time between what you feel and what you do. And the way that you do that is by understanding yourself is by saying, this is why meditation.

Most, for example, the Pasauna meditation, which is a very famous meditative technique, of understanding yourself. You say, you know, Jocko is feeling sad and angry today. Strange because things are going pretty well. So what's going on? You're talking about yourself in the third person. You're observing yourself at a certain remove.

It sounds sort of weird, but remember, that's what detachment is. You are not your emotions. You're a person that has emotions. So treat them as such with that kind of remove. And that's like counting to 100 is effectively doing that. Journaling your emotions is a very easy way to move the experience of your emotions into your prefrontal cortex,

you can't write them down from your limbic system directly. You can only do that using your really modern brain. Prayers of petition are a great way to do that. Lord, help me understand why I feel this way and help me, give me the grace to act appropriately. What is your path for me, given of these things that I'm feeling? This is a perfect meditacognitive technique. And when you understand that you aren't your emotions,

and there are ways that the C-suite of your brain can actually act and help you to decide either to put a substitute emotion in place, to get a different reaction, to act as if you had different emotions, to disregard your emotions. Those are four, you've got a repertoire of four things right there, but you can't do it if you're reactive.

Yeah, so I had to learn how to do this, you know, being in the military, being in the SEAL teams, there's going to be times where people are panicking, times where people are freaking out, times where people are angry, all these things. And so I had to learn how to do it. And then I realized I had to teach other people how to do it too. Because you can't have a subordinate leader that is losing his temper or is flying off the handle or is panicking and freezing up.

So I actually figured out, oh, I got to teach these guys to detach. Some of the things that I would teach them, take a step back away from the problem. Like even if it's six inches, like even if you take a step, this might sound cowardly. But if you're in a gunfight, step into a doorway where you can like take a breath where you're not worried about dying in the next three seconds. And you can take a look around and see what's happening. Take a breath. This is something that I learned from being on the radio. When you talk on the radio, you don't want to sound like you're panicked.

You don't want to sound like you're freaking out. Number one, because you'll make everyone else panic and freak out. Number two, because they'll make fun of you if they're not freaked out. Right. So you don't want either one of those two things to happen. Right. So whenever I keyed up the radio, before I'd key the radio to talk, I'd need something going on. Hey, it's Jocko.

We need to move down the street to the next building. Boom. And you want to sound. But what that does is, and I didn't realize this at the time, but that is slowing down your breathing. And when you slow down your breathing, it detaches you. Looking around, just the physical act of looking around and seeing what else you can see. And we actually do this to a point when you shoot your weapon, when you get done engaging a target,

you train to mechanically turn your head to the left, turn your head to the right. So you can, you're physically scanning and it forces you to look around. And also widening your view, widening your horizon. That's like a calming thing. This is why when we go to the ocean, we watch the sunset, makes us feel good. When we go to a mountain and we look at the broad mountain, it makes us feel good. When we're sitting in a cubicle all day and things are closed in and we're focused, we're too focused. And it's, it makes us, it doesn't make us relax.

It does the opposite. It makes us anxious about things. That's right. So these are the things to do to step back and make sure that you're not letting your emotions make decisions. Yeah. Because if we're making emotional decisions, we got problems. And, you know, this is everybody who's listening to us with those little kids. your kids are freaking out all the time.

You know, why? Because they're incredibly limbic. They're limbic animals. And so you say, you always yell at your kids, use your words. That's just saying, be metacognitive. And so in my house, who'd say to my kids, be metacognitive. It's like, oh, man, what a drag, having a, you know, social scientist for a dad. But people who are highly reactive are incredibly unpleasant to be around because they're being managed by their emotions as opposed to their emotions managing them.

All of us can be way, way better at this if we understand that these things are possible. And it just creates so much power. It's been unbelievably life-changing for me. Now, it's tricky because the wiring between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex is not complete among adolescents. They have a very completely wired amygdala, for example, but an incompletely wired prefrontal cortex, which is why the threats and opportunities are so acute, but they don't understand it. They can't make this metacognitive decisions about risk very appropriately, which is why they'll, you know, the full wiring of the brain is not, for women is about age 21. And for men, it's about age 70. So, so yeah. So the point is that you got to get me canceled, trying to get me in trouble here. I got three daughters and a wife. I mean, so, you know, this is one of the reasons that young guys, they take stupid risks a lot is because they're, they're not as they can't. They're not as good at being metacognitive, literally because of the plasticity or the wiring of the brain is inadequate to it at that point.

But you can make it faster and better by teaching people metacognitive techniques. And you can even do it with little kids. And you can see dramatic results. Yeah, writing things down and you mentioned it, the way I've described that to people when I say, hey, listen, if you're getting emotional, write down, you know, as simple as when your parents would say, make pros and cons, right? That's a way to detach from the emotions of the decision that you've got to make. I tell people it literally detaches. You're now 18 inches from the problems you're looking at them. You wrote them down.

Matter of fact, I opened today talking about my friend Seth who died in a parachute accident. And when he died, he was very close with my whole family. You know, he was over for Thanksgiving and Christmas and all these things because, you know, his family lived in another part of the country and he's, you know, he's in the seal teams. And so he's growing, my kids are growing up around. him and when he died my son who was very close with him because you know we all surfed we all play guitar we're all hanging out all the time almost like a bunch of kids right basically and but my son was very close with him so when when Seth died maybe a couple months go by and he was I think

about 14 he but he's in high school and after a few months came home and you know my son's not a very you know, not a very like highly emotional person or anything, just a normal kid, right? And more important, like a normal boy. So there's not a lot of like emotional things going on. It's like, oh, well, what's the problem? No problem. We'll carry on. You know, just kind of that attitude.

But one day he came home to me and said, like, when I'm in school, I keep thinking about Seth and I'm feeling sad about it and I can't really concentrate. Right. And what I had learned and this kind of crystallized this thought for me was that when my friends had died, including Seth, what did I, when I lost guys in combat, what did I have to do? I had to go and write a eulogy. I knew, I know when one of my friends dies, I start writing because I got to write. I know I'm going to be talking in three days at the memorial.

So that became what I had done. And what I realized was when you write, it helps you process those emotions. So I told my son, hey, I want you to write a letter to Seth and tell him what you thought, what you thought of them, the good times you had, what you're going to miss. And sure enough, he did it and he never asked me about him again. Yeah, this is a classic case. And, you know, this lists are, I mean, journaling is so powerful because of this, because of the metacognitive effect that it actually has on the brain. And so another example of this is, you know, a lot of people,

there's an explosion of so-called generalized anxiety in our society day, especially among young adults. And so they'll go to therapy and they'll say, you have anxiety, as if it were some sort of a switch, which is not. It's a dial. Every single person listening to us is anxious. The question is how high is the dial turned and how disruptive is it for their lives? This is what it comes down to.

Anxiety is unfocused fear. Now, fear is an amygdala response to threat. And the way that our biology is evolved is for fear to be intense and episodic. That's how fear is supposed to work. You're in the place to scene. You're living on the savannah. You're a twig snap behind you. your amygdala illuminates you take off running.

You don't think, oh, that must be one of my friends behind me. No, you're like, that's probably bad, or it might be bad, and you don't stop to think, and you run, you climb a tree, and that's your amygdala saving your life. That's the fear response, episodic and intense. The problem is in modern life, it's constant and vague. And that gives you a little drip of cortisol into your brain all the time, all the time, all the time.

So that unfocused fear is generalized anxiety. The way that you deal with this most appropriately is by focusing it, is focusing your fear. And the best way to do that is when your chest is tight and you've got butterflies in your stomach and you don't know why. You say, all right, I'm kind of freaking out a little bit or a little here. So I take out a piece of paper. Number one, what I'm afraid of right now? Like, come on, put it down here.

What am I worried about? I'm worried about something. I'm afraid of something right now. Write it down. What is it? Why do I feel this way? What's the worst thing that can happen? And what am I going to do if it happens?

Now let's go on to number two. By the time you get to number five, you're like, I can analyze this. Why? Because you've focused your unfocused fear and you've taken generalized anxiety and you've organized it around the way fear is supposed to feel, which is a normal part of a normal life. And it's a positive thing when it's the right, in the right mode. Thank God for fear. You'd be dead.

You wouldn't make it past your second birthday. I'm going to fast forward. And by the way, much of what you're saying is in the book, go get the book. Go get the book. We don't have time to read the whole thing. But fast forward to here a little bit, a section that's about focus less on yourself. And you've got this really interesting, I don't know if I want to call it an experiment, but they take these three groups of people, 263 participants. And they group them into three different groups with different set of instructions.

The first group is called the Moral Deeds Group. And they're instructed today. You have to go and do at least one moral deed for someone else. Listen, go out and help somebody else. Rand it back to kindness. The next one is the moral thoughts group. And what they're directed to do is go out and have at least one moral thought for other people. And then the last group is the treat yourself group.

And it's today, do at least one positive thing for yourself. So these are the three groups. And you go into some detail about it. But I'll fast forward a little bit here. The moral deeds group reported higher scores on a range of, of well-being measures than the moral thoughts group and both reported higher scores than the treat yourself group. Right.

Those caring for others actively felt greater purpose in life and sense of control while others did not. They were also the only ones who felt less anger and social isolation. Yeah. That's, you may want to pay attention to that people. Yeah, yeah, this is the thing. This is if you don't know, if you're feeling bad

and you don't know what to do, help somebody. If you're if you don't know what to do and you're feeling crummy, go help somebody. Go do something. I'm so happy to hear you say that. I have people, you know, say, oh, I can't, I don't really know what I should be focused on. I can't find a purpose. And I'm like, oh, you can't figure out what to do? Go help someone else.

Go out to a soup kitchen and start helping other people. Yeah, yeah. Or what the advice that a lot of young people get to get today is if you're feeling really crummy, self care. You need some self-care. I've even heard radical self-care. I mean, what the heck is radical self-care? The whole point is other care.

man, is what it comes down to. If you're feeling lousy, if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling rejected, if you're feeling blue, go do something for somebody. And by the way, there's so much that you can do. There's so much around us. You know, we're in Southern California right now, which is, I mean, there's so much homelessness around us. What can you do?

I was actually talking to a group of Christian college students. And they're like, so what does it mean to love my neighbor? What do I do for one of the homeless people? And, you know, there's a lot of controversy about that. Should I give them money, not give them money? Probably not because there's so much substance abuse and give them a sandwich. Sure, absolutely. But then go one step further.

You want to make it radical? Say to the guy, would you pray for me and my family? Why? Because you just gave him dignity. Because you said, I need you. I need you. Why? I mean, look, Christian people, we believe that God hears the cries of the poor.

special. God hears the cries of the poor. So he needs a sandwich, great. You need his prayers to get you into heaven. That's what you need. So ask him for him. I mean, your life's going to change. You're going to help him because you gave him the dignity,

but your life is actually going to change. Your day is going to change. Your outlook is going to change. You're ready for that? You're ready to be a radical? Or you can go get a massage. You go get cucumbers in your eyes. You talk about these pillars.

You say you can find thousands of dubious happiness hacks on the internet to adopt for a monthly subscription fee, of course. One weird trick. Don't eat grapes. I don't know. You talk about the social science research and you get to these four pillars. The four pillars are family, friendship, work, and faith. Family, these are people we are given in our lives and generally don't choose. Except for our spouse. Friendship, this is the bond with people we love deeply, but who aren't kin. Work. This is our toil to earn our daily bread to create value in our lives and the lives of others. It might be paid or unpaid in the marketplace or at home. And faith, this does not mean a specific religion, but rather is a shorthand term for having transcendent view and approach to life.

Yeah, these are the four. I mean, there's 10,000 habits of the happiest people, but they're all trivial. You know, should you, you? to be asparagus or broccoli? Should you do MMA or resistance training on any given Wednesday? I mean, it's great, and it's interesting. But the truth of the matter is that there's a portfolio of things that we need to invest in every day. Sort of the happiness 401k plan. Every day, pay attention to your faith. Every day, pay attention to your spiritual walk, the sense of transcendent, making yourself small, getting out of your own personal psychodrama, zooming out, right? Second is your family life. and, you know, family are these mystical relationships.

I mean, we could talk about the neurophysiology of oxytocin, which is the neuropeptide that bonds us to each other. We sort of mentioned that a little bit earlier, and that's especially acute, especially intense in the case of family relationships, but it's magic, man. You remember when your first baby was born? And you made eye contact with your first baby,

and you would literally die for that baby in one second. And that was like the 4th of July is on your head. And it's weird because, you know, you didn't know that baby, that baby didn't know you. And yet, and that's magic. And people are walking away from those relationships because of idiocies like politics. It's so insane. Getting conscripted into some baby boomer politician's culture war.

It's just nuts. And then friendship. You know, friendship is a crisis in America. Huge crisis. It's one of the great climate changes in happiness is the fact that technology has made it harder and harder for us to have in-person relationships. And real friendships, not deal friendships and not virtual friendships. Deal friendships, people who can help you professionally, virtual friendships, people you don't see and touch. Those aren't good enough. You need real friendships. They're good and useless is what it comes down to. And last but not least, you've got to do two things with your work. You got to earn your success, the old-fashioned way through hard work, personal merit and responsibility. And you got to serve others. And if you do those things, your life's going to change. But you've got to not be distracted and you have to pay attention. You have to do it on purpose. And so that's actually worth of.

a strategic plan for the rest of your life is faith, family, friends, and work. And I mean, I have, those are the, those are the strategy that actually gets you to the basic macro nutrients. The protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness are really enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. And the way that you feed yourself, those things are with faith, family, friends, and work that we're talking about here. And you need a strategy for that.

I have a very complex strategy that I have put together with a spreadsheet where I take my macro nutrients, enjoyment satisfaction and purpose, and I have the micronutrients that scale up into those macronutrients. And every month I'm looking at them, and every half year, my birthday and half birthday, I'm putting together a strategy to make sure that it's on point. I'm making progress. That's how important that stuff is. And I'm 60% happier than I was five years ago. So works for me. And I've seen it actually work for my students as well. The chunk on family, you've got a whole chunk on family in the book. It's, it's called build your imperfect family.

So I think everyone, that doesn't need any explanation. You talk about conflict, acknowledging family conflict is good. Yeah. Improves communication. Yeah. This is just that acknowledgement. Like when you have an argument with somebody or disagreement with somebody, it's okay. Totally.

As long as you don't get emotional about it and fly off the hand. If you don't, then you don't love enough. You know, I'm married to a Spaniard, so it's like 10,000 fights. For Spanish people, it's just the, it's a kind of communication. is, you know, angrily yelling. But the, but, you know, I'm married to a Brit and there's like, no. Stiff upper lip. No, we don't, we don't have arguments even.

We're just like so chill. Wow. What's that like? I wonder. Awesome. I mean, yeah. She, you know, we just don't. I mean, first of all, I don't get emotional about things.

I don't get mad about really anything, you know, like no matter what my wife does, doesn't really make me mad. And my wife, when she gets mad, which I do things that will make her mad, it lasts about eight to 12 minutes. She'll clean aggressively during those eight to 12 minutes. That's what her thing is. She'll aggressively clean. And that's how you know.

Yeah. And that's how I know. And then she's, then she realizes that, you know, I'm probably just, I'm just dumb or, you know, I do dumb things at a minimum. And she forgives me and we move on.

Just jaco being jaco. Yeah. That's great. And we all have, how long you've been married? As I tell my wife. She's going to be cleaning aggressively tonight. As I tell you,

She's already hear me say. I always say the same thing. When somebody asked me that question, I go, I don't know what it seems like forever. My wife is like, it seems like 10 minutes underwater. Eight years or something like that. 28 years. Something like that. Yeah, 27, 28 years. 32. It's, it's, you know, and she's the last person you lay your eyes on is you take your dying breath. My wife? Oh, yeah. I'm sure she will be. Yeah. That's beautiful. She might be barking orders that. No, she'll be cleaning aggressively. Why are you leaving? You talk about this complimentary relationship thing and how, you know, you go through this.

And again, get the book. It's all in there. But, you know, this idea that, oh, you got to find someone that's like you to be, to have a happy marriage. When in fact, I wouldn't say the exact opposite, but certainly a little bit of the opposite is true. This is a huge problem in modern dating because it's interesting because I've looked at the data, as you can imagine. When I'm teaching this class at HBS called Leadership and Happiness, this is the unit they're most interested in is romantic relationships. And the neurobiology and psychology of romantic relationships.

So I talked to them about the neurochemical cascade of falling in love. What's actually happening hormonally in your brain? What's the point after which you can't control it anymore? So, you know, when you have a case study of a CEO gets fired for having a romantic relationship with a subordinate, And they're always saying at the end, I don't know what happened. Or what happened is there's a certain point beyond which you can't let it go. And this is the reason you should not be paling around with people with whom you could conceivably have a romantic relationship at work.

That's the reason that you have to guard your affections and guard your heart. That's the reason that you shouldn't be staring into each other's eyes for three minutes because you're going to be releasing a ton of neuromodulators into your brain. That's going to start to capture your brain. it's going to start to hijack the control of your brain on the basis of this neurochemical cascade. And I walk them through all that, how the science works. And they're like, holy mackerel.

I can also talk to them about how you can fall in love with almost anybody who would be appropriate to you, to your sexual orientation and your age and whether or not you're single, et cetera, et cetera. But you can, through a series of steps, actually initiate that cascade. But then I talk about the mistakes that people are making. it on the other person?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of research that shows, for example, that, I mean, there's this one famous experiment by a guy who teaches a psychologist that Sunni, Stony Brook, guy named Art Aaron, great psychologist. And he did a piece of research in which he did an experiment in which people who were complete strangers, but who were theoretically capable of falling in love, college students. They would come into a room.

They'd met each other for the first time. They started by asking each other a series of 36 questions of escalating intimacy. So the first is something dumb. Like if you could have dinner with anybody, who would it be? And by the 30th question of 36 is, when's the last time you cried and why? You know, right? And so it's like, tell me what you're relationship with your mother,

you know, this kind of thing. And then at the end, then they have to stare into each other's eyes for four minutes, which is just initiating this neurobiological explosion in their brains because that is actually how we release oxytocin. And so you're bonding with the other person, this love molecule. endogenously on a pump.

And people walked out and one after the other said, I feel like I just fell in love. That person knows more about me than my girlfriend of six months or two years. And one of the couples in that original experiment got married. I mean, not the day, not the same day, but they started going out.

And so I talked to them about actually how this works and how it can be used for good and how it can be used for bad and how it can ruin your life and how it can wreck your career. And then I talked to them about the mistakes that they're making because they're not initiating these things in their dating lives. You know, if they're on the apps dating, you find that people have way more choice, a lot more

variety than they've ever had before of potential mates, and they like and are attracted less and are less successful in dating than ever before. Why is that? It's a real perplexing, but it turns out it's scientifically very straightforward. The reason is because they're selecting people on the basis of similar characteristics that they're curating in their dating profiles. So when you put together your dating profile, we're all such narcissists. It's like, who do I want? I want, look, if I were dating right now, it's like, I want to, I don't know, I, what I want, I want to date Arthur Brooks. It's like, that is so not hot.

And so what, what people do is that they're, they describe somebody they want to date who's more or less like their sibling. And so that's one of the reasons that they, they get people who are a good match for them as a friend, but not a good match for them as a mate. What you need is a baseline of compatibility. Same religion, that's fine. Same region of the country, that's fine. But then you need complementarity. That's why matchmakers are so good. Matchmakers will find somebody who's the same enough, very low level, and then really different.

There's tons of research that actually shows that when people are really different than us, that we sense the neurobiological difference or the biological differences than us, because that gives us a sense of the immunological differences so that when we have kids, the kids have a more diverse immunological profile, and they're more likely to survive. So, for example, there's one experiment for the 90s. That's really great. That's been replicated a bunch of times, so it's legit.

Where these college students, these women, they're given shoeboxes with T-shirts in them. The T-shirts have been worn for 48 straight hours by different guys that they don't know. And they have to smell, these holes in the shoebox, have to smell the shoebox, and to say how attractive the guy. is just on the basis of the smell. Then they match up how immunologically different the guy

who is wearing the t-shirt is from the woman and compare it to how hot she thought he was on the basis of the smell of his sweat. Turns out the more different he is, the more you like him. Because the olfactory bulb in your brain is ascertaining that he is physiologically more different than you and so your kids are going to be healthier. So this all translates into find different people. Date people from different cultures and different backgrounds and different countries and different races and go wild, man. I mean, it's like embrace diversity, literally. Check.

Another thing you got in this family section is the negativity virus. You say the ambient culture in a family or any close-knit group determines the ability of the members to solve problems. Think of it as like a room temperature. If the room temperature in your house is 100 degrees and you're feeling too hot, it doesn't really matter how many clothes you take off. years still be too hot. Similarly, negative culture in a family can make problem solving impossible so there's no growth or learning just chronic unhappiness. This often occurs because of emotional contagion, which psychologists have studied extensively. There's not a particular problem to solve just this sucks attitude that moves between family members. Yeah. Or between community members or

between, when I go into companies, this is the first thing I look for is emotional negative emotional Contagent and what I try to do is to help leaders inject a positive emotional virus into the company This must be true in the military as well This is when I read that that's the same thing I thought I there was platoons you could see the platoon You'd watch the platoon for three minutes and you go oh this is gonna be a problem I walk into a company I've walked into companies where you feel The horror of the negativity that's going on inside that company and you got to get a grip on that really quick and get it changed around for sure Sure. This is the problem in academia today. It's an emotional virus in academia of sadness and anger. Sadness and anger. What's rewarded sadness and anger is rewarded in a lot of academia. And that's a huge problem for the well-being of the students and faculty. You know, that's, and that requires leadership that's going to inject a better virus is what it comes down to. So you've got to get it under control. You have to acknowledge the fact that the place is sick. You have to say, this is not what we want. We're not going to create a culture where this is.

encouraged and then you have to have a leader who has leaders under her or himself who are propagating a better virus um forgiveness yeah huge part of things huge part of the world huge part of the failure of of people and cultures and countries um you talk about forgiveness and you have some different strategies um there's discussion Let's talk through this so I can let go with the hurt. Explicit forgiveness. I forgive you. Nonverbal forgiveness, such as showing affection after a fight, and minimization, which involves

classifying the transgression as unimportant and simply choosing to disregard it. All four of these strategies can be effective. Depends on the severity of grievance. Right. But the whole point is forgive more. Forgive more. That's the secret staying married is forgiving. That's the secret because she's going to bum you out.

And you're going to bum her out. and you have to have a policy of forgiveness, an explicit policy of forgiveness. And so you don't necessarily need to say, when she's really mad at you, look, honey, I forgive you. Because that's going to make her angrier because she feels like she's the one who's aggrieved.

That's typically how conflict works. But the whole point is you've got to say basically, you know, by the end of the day, I'm forgive, man. That's what we do. It's how we roll. We forgive. We forgive our kids.

We forgive our loved ones and forgive over and over and over again. Now, not forgiving. is basically like holding onto a hot coal, right? And hoping it burns the other person. It's not going to work. And it's an incredibly self-defeating strategy is the way that this turns out.

And a lot of people will hold on to it because they actually want to be fired up by it. They want to get the energy that actually comes from the anger and the hostile and the hatred toward others. And it's one of the best ways to become ineffective personally. And it's a true and tried and true way

to become as unhappy as possible. Yeah. And then you talk again in the book about conditional forgiveness and pseudo forgiveness. Conditional forgiveness is I'll forgive you when you do X and Y. And pseudo forgiveness is like just not true. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to act as if I forgave you, but I'm not. I'm going to hold it over your head and I'm going to bring it up every, you know, it's like, remember when you did that thing?

It's like, I thought you forgave me for that. Yeah, well, I did. But now we're bringing it up again. Another challenge in the family situation, dishonesty. Yeah. And you say here, in the 1990s, the writer and psychotherapist Brad Blanton argued just that in his book, radical honesty. When the truth is hard to accept telling it can have costs, including frayed relationships at home.

But Blanton suggested that complete honesty, no white lies, no exceptions, is worth the consequences because it can reduce stress, deep in connections with others, and reduce emotional reactivity. Yeah, this is actually a strategy that a lot of young people who are listening to us could adopt to great effect is to say, you know, I'm going to stop lying. And so many people's lives are revolving around a series of shadings of the truth and the way that they talk about themselves to protect themselves or whatever it happens to be and say, I'm not going to lie anymore. I'm not going to lie about anything.

I'm not going to lie about how many beers I drank. I'm not going to lie about how many people I dated. I'm not going to lie about how long I've been looking for a job and I've been off the market. I'm going to take every single shading of the truth out of my resume. I'm going to talk to people in an honest way. When I don't like something, I'm going to say it, when I actually do like somebody, and this is the really scary thing for a lot of young people. When I like somebody, I'm going to tell them, right?

It's like, man, I find you so attractive. And saying just that kind of radical honesty, which opens you up to all sorts, it exposes you. It exposes you. But then you become so much tougher. and you've got nothing to hide anymore, it can be truly a life-changing thing. This is the one, truth is the one intervention

that can actually make more difference in the lives of a lot of young people that don't feel like their life is on track than almost anything else. It's kind of like the, it's almost like the magic bullet. There is not one hack, because life is all about habits. But you know how that, you know, what was that, Admiral, was it, McRaven who talked to?

Yeah, who said, you know, make your bed. Yep. Right? Okay, fine. But what that is, is is have integrity, even when it doesn't really matter, have integrity. And in so doing, you put your life in order to stop lying. That's real. I mean, that is, that, and man, you wake up every day and say, today's another day, I'm not going to lie. And sometimes it's going to be

good and sometimes it's going to be bad, but it's going to be interesting. When I think that I've had quite a few discussions about this over the years, because this is a huge component of moving forward in life, right? Is telling the truth. And so we get into these discussions where, well, you know, if my wife makes chicken for dinner. In fact, this is the first time we talked about it on the podcast. It was years and years ago. My wife used to cook very dry chicken.

It's like to cook it for an hour. This now has been completely solved because she got received thousands of recipes and cooking instructions on how to cook chicken and keep it moist. So now she cooks the best chicken in the world. But she used to cook dry chicken. and you know you think through okay when she says how's the chicken you know she spent probably two hours making it because five minutes to prep it that she had to cook it for an hour and 55 minutes to get all the liquid and food out of it but it took her two hours to make this thing right so I come

home she's been working she went out and got the stuff she got it ready she's watching three kids four kids whatever and she you know she puts the chicken in front of me and says how's the chicken and the common theory is well you tell her the truth right hey this dry can you get me a gallon of water please over here to wash this thing down what's that going to get me where's that going to take me but yes i should tell the truth but and here's where i i had a little bit of enlightenment in the way that i lived my life for me being very hardcore with the truth i make sure that i aim that at my myself first so when my wife asked me how's this chicken the first thing I should ask myself is well how important is this to me as a

person right now like what's the truth about this chicken what what is the truth about this chicken the truth about this chicken is my wife spent all day making it my wife did all this things my wife put care and effort into this chicken and that's freaking amazing right now this chicken is it's awesome right chicken is awesome because and this is the same with you know if you if If you work for me and you're not doing what you're supposed to be, you got your project turned in late. Right.

Okay, radical honesty. I go to you and say, hey, you know, Arthur, you turned this project late. I'm going to write you up if this happens again. Okay, that's one way of doing it. But actually, if I aim that at myself first and I say, hey, Arthur, I noticed that you got your project turned in late. I don't think I gave you the support that you needed. I don't think I gave you the resources.

And I actually was reviewing our email chain. and I didn't really clarify the actual timeline in a specific way, so I made it clear enough so you could understand. Next time, those are the things I'm going to change so that this project will get done or the next project will get done on time. So that's me being radically honest with myself and the things that I can change, the things that I can do better,

and I think that's the point to start at. Yeah, yeah, no. Being honest with yourself is the beginning of radical honesty. Being honest with others is derivative. And the people that we like to lie to the most are. ourselves. We love to lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves constantly. And then we'll say, I'll be honest with you. And this is a very good point. It's also the framing of what we're talking about. The truth of the matter is that she's not asking you, how is the chicken? She's

asking you, how do you feel about her taking care of you? And you feel really good about that. And you can say, yeah, and the chicken is one tiny part of it. The temperature and the dryness of the chicken is one percent of the answer to this particular question. So let's answer the 99% which really matters. Yeah. And it's critical because we can do that in almost everything that we do. And that's the way that we can use the truth as a gift and not as a weapon. And you can also answer that question with a question, which is, can you please pass the ketchup?

Yeah, that's right. Can you? As you go through the book, look, you go through the details of friendship of work. You know, what you detail these things. and in how we can move these things forward. And, you know, you end up with really nice kind of pragmatic synopsuses of each of these. You know, you say blissful work of friendship. Friendship is incorrectly seen by many people as something that just occurs naturally

without conscious effort or work. This is false. Like everything else important, friendship requires attention and work. It must be built on purpose. And you go through the protocol. The protocol. Friendship is ruined when we look for people who are useful. too many deep friendships today are spoiled by differences of opinion.

Isn't this the truth? Yeah, for sure. The goal for long-term romance is a special kind of friendship, not undying passion. So you go through these things and you give really, really pragmatic advice. This isn't like a book that's... It's not a theory, but just about theory. Anybody wants to read the underlying science, which is approximately 0% of the readers. It's all in the, it's all in the end notes to the book.

You'll get the actual academic citations to what we're talking about. If you want to read the neuroscience literature, great. More power to you. Anybody wants to come study with me and do their PhD under me at Harvard, that's great. Read the end notes and we'll write some articles together. But for the rest of humanity that just wants to live a better life in an evidence-based, science-based way, that's Oprah and I wrote the book for you. And I'll close out the book with us. Again, get the book.

There's so much information in here. You talk about, you already mentioned this, but become a teacher, right? And you say the reason is pretty simple. You already know it. You need to be metacognitive with the information to use your prefrontal cortex so you can understand and use it. The best way to do that is to be able to explain it clearly. This is what I learned that.

I was lucky enough in my career. I told you before we started that I had a very lucky career. One of the things that was so lucky is when I was an enlisted guy, my last couple of years as an enlisted guy, I worked in the training cell at SEAL Team 1, where I taught land warfare, combat swimmer, close quarters combat, urban combat. I taught those things.

And when you teach, you learn. It's magic. Yeah, by the time I was now in a leadership role, I had learned well where I had crystallized information, really, at a pretty young age. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you're much better what you do right now because of that training and the development of your crystallized intelligence

before that was your strength, which is so great. You were able to walk from one curve to the other. You're probably much happier than you. I mean, you had a glorious, really great career in the military. You're probably happier now, is my guess, because you're living your right curve. You're living your correct curve, right? I would say that I'm always pretty happy. And I was very happy when I was in the military the entire time.

It's funny, you know, I look back, I was a new guy in a seal platoon. I was so happy. I was in an ARG platoon on a ship in a 115 degree birthing space with 18 other seals. I've heard about that from my son, how fun that is. I was happy. three weeks. I was happy. We were happy. You know, like that's, and then became an officer in a leadership position, all the pressure, happy. That's great. Just happy and then, uh, retired, found other missions to execute on. Still happy. Still getting after it. Yeah, it's great. And, but a lot of

people listening to us, they don't, that's hard to relate to because they find that they're, they're more melancholic. They find that happiness comes a little harder to them. The truth is that we all have different aptitudes for it. We all have different characters for it. We all have the same emotions, but we have different intensities of emotions. So one of the things that we talk about in the book, and I do a lot with my work,

is I can actually give people a personality test on the intensity of their positive and negative emotions. You're clearly a very high, positive affect person. You're probably a relatively moderate, low affect person, negative affect person. So you would fit the cheerleader profile, a lot. You know, I fit the... I know it's going to enjoy that one.

And, well, I mean, it's like, yeah, especially because you're there with the pom-poms in a little skirt right now. It's really, it really becomes you, Chaco. I'm the mad scientist, which means I have very high positive and very high negative effect. And this is normal. About a quarter of the population has this. A quarter of the population has high, positive, low negative effect, naturally. This is the poetic affect. It has to do with a part of the limbic system called the ventralateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that's hyperdeveloped. That's unusually big for people who are able to ruminate on certain things, which gives them a melancholic nature.

It also tends to make them very creative because you ruminate on a business plan or an opera or a book of poetry. It makes them very romantic because you ruminate in another person that's called infatuation. And those are beautiful things, but you have to learn to manage that affect. And there are people who are very low affect people, low positive and low negative. They're not unhappy or happy. They just have low expression of their positive and negative emotion. And every one of us is in one of these quadrants and all of us, it's a gift, no matter what it is. You just have to know what it means and how to use it, how to surround yourself with people who can help you, who can complete you, and learn how to manage it in a way that builds you up and helps other people as well.

So some people will listen to you and say, like, like, Jacko's happy doing all these really aversive and hard things. You know, why can't I be like that? Well, because God made you different is the whole point. But that doesn't mean that you can't manage yourself. that doesn't mean that you can't make yourself better. You can't use your natural predilections for the good of yourself and good of other people. God wanted poets too, you know, and a whole world of cheerleaders would be problematic, actually. You know, we want all the different kinds of people that we have,

and we need all different kinds of people that we have, but all of us can be much better than we were. Yeah. Well, that's the latest book. Does that get us up to speed for right now? Yeah, it came out in September, 2023, and we're talking about that about, you know, two months after the book came out. It's been a wild ride. Being on tour with Oprah Winfrey has been quite something.

There's a lot of security. Okay. Yeah, a lot more security than, you know, people are like Arthur Who, but, you know. Yeah, no, it's great. And it's, it's been a joy. I'm actually starting the next book, which will come out, and probably in spring of 2025 called Start Strong, which is the science that people need to start their adult lives in their 20s in a way that will give them the absolute best, trajectory for success, love and happiness going forward. Science-based approach on how to build your life, starting good and young.

And when's that one coming out? In the spring of 2025. Okay. In the meantime, we're doing a lot of media projects. Oprah and I, we did a, we started a, we did a limited run podcast together based on the book. And what's that called? That's part of her super soul series. Okay.

That it's called Build the Life You Want. If you look on YouTube, there's a series of conversations that we did at her place and Santa Barbara. And who knows? We're talking to different television and video outfits on what we can do next. But the whole point is that people want to be happier. And it sure is great to be on the cutting edge of that business.

Yeah, it is. It's working. And people can find you. You've got Arthur Brooks.com. Yeah. You've got, you're on Twitter. Yeah. At Arthur Brooks.

You're on Instagram at Arthur C Brooks. You got a YouTube channel. Got a YouTube channel. At Arthur Brooks, 1, 2, 3. Did you know that? Really? It's at Arthur Brooks, one, two, three. That's good to know.

And then you're on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. And you're giving particular ideas. The one thing I'm not doing is, you know, diet and exercise, but, you know, that's why I'm going to other people. I do work. I've done some stuff with Peter Atia lately. Yeah.

And, you know, good guys like that because that's, I'm an enthusiast, but I'm an amateur. Awesome. Echo Charles, you got any questions. Got a few. Unlimited, but I got it on this one. Okay. So as far as friendships go, right, in person, better. So what about exchanging memes?

Is that conducive to friendship? It is. And part of the reason is because humor is a great source of bonding. And so as long as they're not bitter, as long as they're not denigrating, as long as they're not tearing other people down, that's important. Bonding over stuff that's actually legitimately, I know. Whatever, that's true. We just got rid of all your memes.

But anyway, if you're doing something that's genuinely funny, you know, humor is the, is the universal language of friendship. You know, it's an amazing thing because we actually understand the neurophysiology of how humor works. And it's just a beautiful thing. It just lights up your brain. So let me ask you this then.

Okay, so I have a twin brother. Yeah. Is he identical or fraternal? Yeah. Wow. So we grew up like, I think, a lot of guys and even military like this, you know, when you play team sports like this,

where part of the humor and part of the fun and the bonding is insulting each other. Yeah. You know, but I always, I always had it in my head where the, the better insults are the ones that are more funny than insulting kind of a thing. And the more clever, I guess, you know, so it's like this match back and forth where it's like, you know, and when you take offense, you kind of automatically lose, you know, kind of a thing. What's with that?

Like, why do people bond on that? Whatever, by you the same way. You know, no. No, no, just. Yulte has charged. Yes, sir. The, the closest relationships are ones where we can, we can recognize the foibles and weaknesses of a friend and then and make it into a source of of laughter as opposed as opposed to a

source of actual derision or contempt this is the same this is the thing because you know look we all have weaknesses and when you see the weakness and somebody else and treat it with affection generally speaking the way that the guys will treat will they'll express that affection as with humor and if it's understood as such look as it's a fine line and so when you're making fun of your buddy because of you know whatever he's got you know his premature balding or whatever it happens to be Chuck with socks. If it's a source of affection, you're going to talk about it one way. If it's a source of contempt or actual insult, you're going to treat it in a different way.

And that line is really fine between them. And when you've actually gone from making them laugh to making them unhappy, that's when you know you've crossed that line a little bit. So it's, and it can be pretty subtle. I can be pretty subtle. Believe me, as a guy, I'm like a bald guy, you know, we're sensitive. Understood completely. And then also the oxytocin and the work. place scenario you're talking about. So let's say my wife, hypothetically, has a co-worker,

you know, co-ed, co-worker that she's close to nowadays, you know, kind of a thing. Hypothetically. I'm my wife's coworker currently. Yeah, that's good. That's right. But is that a red flag? It well, it depends. And so one of the things, one of the big mistakes that people make in companies is number one, saying that you actually can't start romance in the workplace. I mean, I understand the liability that comes along with that, but about 17% of people meet their spouse at work. The problem is when people who are not available meet each other at work and have an illicit relationship. That's when the real problems come.

And usually those are pursuant to them doing a lot of stuff outside of work. And that meant me at work, but they're having personal conversations and a lot of one-on-one time and a lot of deep conversations, a lot of the revelation of personal traits and what's going on with their home relationships and a lot of deep looking in the eye, which I'll actually instigate oxytocin release. Then the second thing that workplaces will do that actually that winds up creating chaos in the relationships of their employees

is a lot of offside activities for team building. So if you're going canoeing with somebody who could technically be your romantic partner but you already have a partner and the canoeing with somebody, the outside fraternizing activity with somebody will stimulate a lot of the feelings that you'll get because you'll associate fun and oxytocin

with a person who's not your spouse. And that's dangerous. Interesting. You got to protect yourself. You got to take measures. You got to guard your heart. And if you're a boss, you should be helping

and not making it harder for people to guard their hearts. So if you're a husband at home, your wife's going out on canoeing, team building scenarios with their coworkers, it's not necessarily like, you know, the husband might get accused of being this jealous husband. You know, they're just friends

and all this other stuff. And it might be true. It might be just friends, you know, and you have to trust the integrity of your partner. You want to have a partner who has real integrity. But the whole point is that if they're just, they're, they're, they really, really, really love those activities that, I mean, that's just, you know, people are different, but there's risk that comes from this. There's just natural risk that comes from this.

So the husband kind of has a like to stand on some of the time. Yeah. And, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, I, yeah, the biology suggests that that is, that there is risk involved. Now, how do you react to that in a mature way? it's a different kettle of fish. Kettle of fish. It's true. But it's not nothing.

Br, it's not nothing. But I'm telling you, you get a pretty girl at work with a husband and some single guys at work as well or whatever, you think the single guys have respect for all the oxytocin

or lack thereof at home and all this stuff. They don't. So I'm just saying. Yeah, it's work is a funny thing because people spend so much time there. Most people spend more time at work

than they spend with their spouse. And when you're spending time with somebody in a very, tight-knit work team and especially having intimate conversations that are not work-related and especially doing things where they're sharing fun activities and it's more time that you're actually spending with your spouse I mean you're you're you know you're opening up yourself to feelings that you probably didn't anticipate yeah oh last question so when we're in a chamber French horn scenario chamber music yeah French who are we playing

for yeah like what is not at the nightclub or nothing like No, it's not like it. It's usually audiences. And so what people, the chamber music concert series where, where people subscribe and they come and they hear that they'll book four or five different groups over the course of the year. And then they'll come and it'll be like a Sunday out. Yeah, yeah. And then the touring group comes through. Oh, that's cool.

Like where would it be at like a concert hall? A civic center. Yeah. Yeah. So like a jazz band compared to me speaking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I guess.

Yeah. So there's like an audience. Yeah. Exactly right. That's super into it. Yeah. Yeah. So once again, you know, rising that in that hierarchy is pretty esoteric.

Oh, yeah. Like poetry, right? You know, you go down and watch the poetry and stuff. Yeah, exactly. You know, that's the kind of thing. It just that has its own fan base. Yeah, yeah. People are super into chamber music.

Yeah. I love chamber music. I'm really into it. I like it too, actually. Oh, it's the best. My daughter, like I said, was a ballerina. And my oldest daughter, and so I would go to dance things. And some of them, I know what was.

It was torture, right? Yeah, some of them were torture. Some of the stuff. Kid concerts are brutal. Kid sports is brutal too. Yeah, some of these weren't kids. You know, I mean, eventually I was getting roped into doing like whatever, some real cultured activities.

Yeah. And it wasn't landing with me. It wasn't. You know, I'm a bad person. No, no, you're not a bad person. You're flesh and blood, Jocko. Awesome. Any other ones?

That's it for now. All right. Thank you. Any closing thoughts? Arthur. Yeah, you know, it's like a lot of people I was asking, what's the one thing to remember? And so I was thinking, what's the one thing? There's a study that we've done at Harvard called the Harvard Study of Adult Development that tracked men from the late 1930s until death.

And then their kids and then their spouses. And it matched up, you know, students at Harvard with people who didn't go to college. So it's socioeconomically diverse. And they looked at all the things they did over the course of their lives that helped them end up happy and healthy at the end of life. So it's a crystal ball. You know, what do they do? And some of it's, you know, pretty obvious, diet and exercise and smoking and drinking. They didn't drink or drank very moderately.

They didn't smoke or they quit early. They exercised, but not to the point where they neglected their families. And they kept a healthy body weight, but they didn't do yo-yo dieting. Okay. But then they had a way to deal with their problems because everybody's got problems. They had a way to deal with it, like talking to friends or whatever it happened to be. They had a technique for dealing with their worries and problems, so it didn't build up. They were lifelong learners, and that was really good.

But the one of the seven practices that mattered the most by far is that they had close loving relationships. You know, it was they either had a marriage that they could count on or they had really close personal friends or even better, both is what it came down to. And the conclusion of that is that happiness is love, full stop. And so that's really the one thing to remember. When you don't know what to do, go love somebody. When you don't know what to say, tell somebody perhaps in not so many words. words, I love you. When you're thinking of thoughts that are destructive, turn your thoughts to what you love. Love will bring you happiness. And that's the one thing we can actually all count on.

It's the one thing that really matters in our lives. That's the one thing that gives us all a better future. So the last word is basically this. You don't know what to do? Love more. Right on. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming down. Thanks for your lessons learned. and thanks for sharing your methodologies, and thanks for helping people live better, happier lives. Likewise, Jocko. You're doing a great service for a lot of people, and I'm delighted to be some small part of it today.

Right on. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. And with that, Arthur C. Brooks has left the building. Happiness. You seem to like that. I look over you.

You're into it. Yeah. Yeah, I think you know, I think you know this where I do enjoy the old like finding out how things work, you know, especially if they're just not that real simple to figure out. And I think that's another one, especially those kind of riddle ones because it's like a riddle, right, for this one where it's like it's not like the direct, easy, obvious answer. So you'd be like, hey, what's the key to happiness? Oh, suffering and misery. You know, like it doesn't seem real. It's like counterintuitive a lot of this stuff.

So it becomes interesting, I think. Well, there you go. Get the books. You guys know the deal. Try and be happier. Choose to be happier. That's kind of what I feel like. You can be miserable or you can be happy.

That might be something. Look, you're going through basic seal training. You're young like I was. And you get your look, you're going to be wet. You can be cold. And you can be wet, cold and miserable, which is what they tell you're going to be. Or you can be wet, cold and kind of happy about the whole scenario. Yeah, so I'm gonna be happy. Yeah, and I'll have fun with it at a minimum

So even when you choose not they see it. Oh, the instructors You know what I mean? Oh, you mean if you or your teammates like your platoon mates. Yeah, they're like oh Echo's looking like he's hating life right now. Yeah, that's kind of not cool. It's not cool. Don't want to give off that. No, let's be happy and then even if you are happy during the suffering when the suffering's over it's not like the happiness goes away or nothing. It gets better actually. For real. Now you got the memory of happiness

and you got current happiness. But clearly key components here. We talk about these and it's always surprising right and again in the book it's like if you do what if you do what makes you

happy you're going to end up not happy. You know, this is like a lack of discipline. This is the freedom equaling slavery as opposed to discipline equals freedom. So that's what we got to do. Well, you made it, you made a really good point long time ago. And actually it was such a good point and so simple and so easy to understand that I tell my kids this all the time. And you say, pay now or pay later. So it's like, hey, it's going to be easy or and it's going to be hard.

You just choose when, you know, so you want to do the pay. The pay is the hard. It's hard to pay. It's easy to collect, right? So if you collect now, you're going to pay later. It's going to be way junker, in my opinion. And I explain why, you know, a lot of it, you know, even if you talk about working out where it's like, hey, I'd rather pay now. She's like, oh, working out is hard.

I was like, yeah, working out is hard. But I'll tell you what's harder being weak. I'll tell you what's harder when you're thinking when, you know, when it's time to go to the beach or the pool or whatever. And then you've got to think and you're all anxiety because, oh, how does my body look? something like this you know that's way harder than working out anyway pay now pay later that's a good one I recommend we pay now yep you know health and discipline it's gonna help you deaf reset we got coming yeah and you just made a you made a video I got a what is it a preview of the launch video

well they call it a warning order yeah so this is the thing so for the deaf reset last year was like January 1st oh yeah here you go jump into it. Leif was saying because I was telling Laif and the EF team I was like hey listen I'm trying to give people a heads up for Def Reset because normally it's like oh it's a New Year's Resolution wait why don't you just start now right which I've said that kind of thing like they don't wait for a New Year's Resolution to start now here's the thing deaf reset start January 1st if you're not ready for it it's going to hurt you're going to pay later yeah so put some investment in now Laif made the point that like last year's death reset, he got hurt like, I don't know, a week into it.

He had to stand down. What? Because he went hard out the gate. Went hard. So what I'm saying is prepare for death reset now. That means you should be waking up a little bit earlier. You should definitely start working out now. You should get things staged.

You should be prepared. Don't go cold into death reset. You don't want none of that. You won't make it. You won't make it. You won't be able to keep it up. So deaf resets come in January 1st. Prepare for it now.

We got workouts and fitness with Jason Kalipa. We got leadership training with Eshalom Front. We got discipline directives from me. And we got fuel, obviously, Jock Fuel. So we got a bunch of really good things going to help a lot of people get back on the path. Set the trajectory of your life. Correct the trajectory of your life. Improve the trajectory of your life.

Because that's weird. That trajectory word means a lot. It's like you're just heading in a direction Why not make sure that you're heading in the right direction in a positive direction? That's what your trajectory is and death reset will help reset that trajectory and make it better So that's what we're doing Jago fuel you're gonna want some Jock fuel for this evolution for sure You're gonna want some mulk because you're gonna need some to rebuild

You're gonna want some hydration because you're gonna sweat Do you get that jocohydrate? We got greens joint warfare for sure super krill just mulk just the whole nine yards that's what we're doing go to joccofuel.com and get what you need to be ready to be better to be prepared

you can order it from joccofuel.com or you can get it from the vitamin shop you get it from wawa you can get it from gnc military commissaries aphes hanford death dash stores in maryland wait fern shop right hbb down in teos mire harris teeter lifetime fitness shields small gyms

All over the place, Jiu-Jitsu gyms, CrossFit gyms, powerlifting gyms, Globo gyms, if you're going to one of those, if you own one of those and you want to sell JockoF. Fuel, go to JafSales at joccofuel.com and get some of that. So there you go. Joccofuel.com. It's true. Also, Origin USA.

Don't forget about that. Is origin given away, I think they might be giving away a gift card, right, for the deaf reset? Probably. Yeah, I think so. It's a good deal because they got some good stuff. American made stuff by the way I was wearing the you know the the I don't know what would you call it the moisture wicking hoodie oh yeah I don't know the names pito he says these cool names for him but nonetheless many compliments on that one's a good one

oh yeah all American made did I mention that so I believe you're talking about the tetriloch yeah yeah yeah or USA.com get some cool stuff to wear get stuff that's made in America look man that's what we're doing we're not we're not we're not We're not supporting communism. That doesn't help people be happy. We go look at the communist pictures. You see any happiness over there? You're not going to see it.

See happiness where there's freedom. So origin USA.com brings freedom, brings happiness to the world. Go get it. That's what we're doing. It's true. Also, Jaku Store. If you want to represent on this path, whether it's death reset or beyond, you know, represent discipline equals freedom.

You go to JoccoStore.com. That's where you get your shirts and hats, ladies, all kinds of merch. Anyway, good stuff on there. Also, shirt locker, new design shirt every month. It's a subscription kind of thing. People seem to like it on there. Check it out. Tell me what you think.

If you think it's cool, go ahead subscribe to that one. It's a good one. Everything. Shocco store.com. If you need steak, which you probably do, check out primalbeef.com. Check out Colorado Craftbeef.com. The best steak delivered to your house. That's what we're doing.

Check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also, check out jocco underground.com. We're about to record one of those when we get done here. So that's where we do. Adjacent material, we also answer questions all the time that you email in. So check out jocco underground.com. Also, YouTube, subscribe to that.

Psychological Warfare, Flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books. Obviously, a bunch of books. Love Your Enemies by Arthur C. Brooks. Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. Um, strength to strength. He's got a bunch of books.

So check those out. And then, of course, I've written a bunch of books too. So you might want to check those out. They're out there. Especially check out the kids' books. Look, you don't need to be 38 when you learn these lessons. You can learn them when you're five, maybe seven. Way of the Warrior kid.

Go get those books for the kids in your neighborhood. You got that neighbor across the street. He's kind of a delinquent. Seems a little bit. He's nine years old. He's hucking rocks at trees and stuff. Yes. Look, I was hucking rocks at trees.

You know what I mean? You can just let him. Continue to huck rocks at trees. Next thing he escalates to like mailboxes. Then he's going vehicles. Then he's, you know, see where I'm going with us?

Bad, bad, bad scene. Warrior kid. Get him on the right path. That's what we're doing. Also, Eschalonfront. We have a leadership consultancy.

Go to Eschlonfront.com for details on that. That's what we do. We work with companies. We square them away. We help them unify their leadership. So if you need help inside, your organization go to ashlandfront.com. You can come to one of our live events as well.

It's all there. eselofront.com. We also have online training, online life training is what it is. Look, it's kind of represented as leadership training, but what is leadership training? Leadership is how you interact with other human beings, your friends, your family, your husband, your wife, your kids, and everybody that you work with. And the better you are with leadership skills, the better you're going to be as a human being. So go to Extreme Ownership.com. Check out our courses there.

Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star Families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also, heroes and horses.org. We got Micah Think taking our first responder. and our veterans up into the mountains where they get lost so they can get found.

Heroes and Horses.org. Also, Jimmy May has got his organization beyond the brotherhood.org. So connect with those to help out. And if you want to connect with Arthur, once again, Arthur Brooks.com. He's got Twitter at Arthur Brooks.

He's got Instagram, Arthur C Brooks, YouTube, Arthur Brooks, 123, and Facebook's at Arthur Brooks. Echo is at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocco Willink. Just be careful. you go to connect with us looking for happiness you're not going to find it there don't go there looking for happiness all you're going to find is an algorithm

that's going to grab you by the jugular and kill you so be careful thanks once again to all of the military personnel out there around the world right now keeping us safe and secure we get to do every day what we do because of the sacrifices that you make and we are grateful same goes to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers There's Border Patrol Secret Service, all first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe and secure here at home and everyone else out there. Happiness is not found by doing what is easy or what feels good in the moment.

At least not long-term uplasting happiness. That's not what we're going for. Sure, you can go feel good right now by eating a donut or having a drink, an alcoholic drink, or watching another Netflix program or scrolling through your, social media you can do those things but it's not going to give you the long-term happiness that you're looking for i say you start with helping others working hard and doing the right things for the right reasons and what i mean that by that is basically if you want to be happy i recommend that you go out there and get after it and until next time zecho and jocco out