Know Thyself - E194 - Arthur Brooks: How To Find The Meaning of Your Life

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist, and three-time New York Times bestselling author whose life's work centers on a single, urgent question: what actually makes a human life feel meaningful? In this conversation, we explore why depression and anxiety have surged since 2008, how technology has hijacked the part of the brain responsible for wonder and meaning, and what it looks like to live, as Arthur puts it, like his great-grandfather Leroy, present, bored at times, and genuinely alive.What moved me most in this conversation is how Arthur bridges the ancient and the scientific without losing either. We get into the three components of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance, as well as the dangers of extrinsic reward, the psychology of calling, and why the formula most of us are running on is just slightly off. His answer to the meaning crisis is not complicated. Use things, love people, worship the divine. But getting there requires honest self-examination, and this conversation is a strong beginning.MUDWTR - Up to 43% off sitewide (and a free frother!)https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself[Code: KNOWTHYSELF]Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfBiOptimizers - Best magnesium to enhance your sleephttps://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off at checkoutAndré's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Introduction: Arthur Brooks01:54 The Modern Meaning Crisis02:47 Coherence, Purpose, and Significance06:17 Why Meaning Collapsed After 200814:19 The Doom Loop of Technology20:22 The Death of Boredom25:13 Ad: Mudwtr26:34 Living Like Leroy: The Case for Real Life30:05 Six Practices for the Right Hemisphere36:22 The Morning Routine and Brahma Mahurta43:35 Ad: LMNT44:39 Ad: BiOptimizers45:47 Breaking Free from Your Phone49:07 Romantic Love and the Paradox of Choice54:59 Finding Your Calling1:01:29 Progress, Arrival Fallacy, and Living Now1:17:22 Enjoyment, Satisfaction, and Meaning1:19:36 The External Scoreboard and Love Is Not Earned1:25:10 The Four Idols1:29:49 Self-Transcendence and the Divine1:37:40 Marriage, Adoption, and Walking to Heaven1:45:03 Suffering, Beauty, and Meaning1:53:59 Use Things, Love People, Worship the Divine___________Episode Resources: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

It's unprecedented what's going on today. Depression tripled since 2008. Anxiety doubled since 2008. The biggest predictor is saying my life feels meaningless. The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. It all feels fake.

I get up, check my phone, scroll, social media. I want a big project, but I can't dig in. And it all feels like I'm living in a simulation. No, I won't have it. I want the real thing. I want to suffer. We try to solve life, like a complicated problem. But most of the things you care about, you can't solve.

Everybody wants their calling. They want to feel complete because of what they do. People who have a calling have two things in common. Earning your success in service to other people. I would have loved being a French horn player, which I didn't do it in love. This was my mistake. When I was 55 years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking, the commuter to Santiago, praying, Lord, what do you want for me?

Who do you believe you fundamentally are? It's an absolute thrill to be an apprentice and the divine purpose that I believe is my life. That's where I am. There is a crisis. It's not your imagination. And so the way that you fix that is by... Wow. You're missing your life.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast. Our guest today is a social scientist, one of the world leading figures on human happiness, which is a big subject. He's a Harvard professor, a three times over New York Times best-selling author. and somebody who's going to help guide us as a maestro in the conversation today around the meaning of your life, Arthur Brooks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Andre. Could you help us by setting the lay of the land in terms of what the studies and the science is saying for the current meaning crisis? Like how bad is it compared to, say, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago?

It's unprecedented, actually, what's going on today. People have been asking, does life feel meaningful or meaningless? Just kind of a throwaway question for the longest time. a small percentage of people would say my life feels meaningless. That exploded after 2008. And it was exactly coincident with the increases in clinical depression and generalized anxiety. So there's this big debate going on. You know, why has depression tripled since 2008?

Why has anxiety doubled since 2008? And there's all kinds of blame going around. You know, the millennials and Gen Ziers blame the boomers. And the boomers say, you're just a bunch of, you know, delicate flowers. But it really comes down to this meaning crisis. You find that the biggest predictor of saying, I'm depressed and anxious, is saying my life feels meaningless. And that didn't exist before.

And boy, did it actually pop up after 2008. Can we define the term? Yeah. What's the meaning of meaning? Yeah. What's the meaning of meaning? Oh, that's such a Harvard question. That's such a logic chopping question.

And I promise I won't. I won't just wrap around the axel on this. But that's a really smart thing. Because the question, because when, if I told you, you know, you will find. your bliss in squim, you'd be like, what's squim? You know, is it a meditation technique? It is a, is it a nutritional supplement? It turns out it's a small town in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. But you have to know the meaning of what you're looking for. So if you're going to find the meaning of your life, which is not the meaning of my life, you need to know the meaning of meaning,

what are you looking for? And it turns out there's been a lot of work that's been done on that. In my field of behavioral science and in philosophy, there's kind of an agreement that meaning has three parts, the three big whys. So the meaning of your life is an understanding of the answer to three big why questions. Meaning is always why. It's never how to or what. Why question number one is, why do things happen the way they do? That's coherence. Why is the world coherent? You know, some people will answer that like you and me because of the mind of the divine. or I would also answer that because of the laws of nature and because of science. Some people who reject those ways of thinking will say because powerful, shadowy figures are doing things behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories are a struggle to answer the coherence question of why things happen the way that they do, which is why if you have a relative going down the rabbit hole doing his own research on the internet, don't yell at them and say, you moron, you know, read these studies. That's a cry for coherence, which is a cry for meaning. The second is, why am I doing what I'm doing every day?

You know, that's purpose. Am I just going in circles? Is it all for nothing? That why question is critically important because you need to be able to make progress in your life. You need to feel like you're doing something that actually makes sense. Like you say, like, if I asked you,

why are you doing this podcast? You're like, no reason. That would be pretty meaningless. It would mean that you're saying that the podcast doesn't have a whole lot of purpose, thus it doesn't have a whole lot of meaning. And that's why goals and direction are so critically important. When you give like an adolescent, just almost a trivial goal, like go from B pluses in this class to A minuses in this class.

And they start going after that particular goal, they get much happier because they have the sense of forward progress, which is how homo sapiens are built. And the last why question is, why does my life matter? That's the significance question. That's really the question of love. Why does my life matter? because my mom loves me, because God loves me. That's the real sense of your life's significance. And if you believe that you have no essence,

that you have no significance, your life is going to feel meaningless. And so when I'm talking to young people or anybody who's in a meaning crisis, I try to dig in on which one of those things I need to do work on. Do I need to help them understand who loves them? Do I need to give them goals and direction?

Do I need to introduce them to ways to understand the coherence of the universe? but I got to know first. So if we take that lens of coherence, purpose, and significance, and look back historically, and we see this decline of meaning, which are, in your definition, constituting of those three things, what would be the predominant reasons and factors for why those three things aren't being met on an individual level, which builds to the collective issue? So that's the big science question.

You know, I started doing work on this five years ago when I saw this huge crisis. I left academia in 2008 to go run a big nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. And I wasn't paying much attention. I came back in 2019, 11 years later, and it was like the boobonic plague had gone through my village. What happened here? You know, it was the happiest place in the world when I left 2008. When did you go to college? When did you finish college?

Well, there's an assumption baked in there. I didn't go to college. Then I finished it. Yeah, like 2016. I went up to MSU for a very short period. Michigan State, Lansing. Dropped out. Yeah, and then dropped out and came here.

Yeah. And you see my own thing. I did a, I took a gap decade too, by the way. From when I was 19, I dropped out. I didn't drop back until I was 28. Maybe that's my arc. Yeah. Maybe I'll come take your class.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I finished a month before my 30th birthday, as a matter of fact. That gap decade was awesome. It wasn't much fun for my parents. They were a little worried, mostly because they were academic. But, but, you know, so, so, you know, the whole, tell me, wind back on the question. I got down to Rabbit Hall. The coherent significance and purpose.

Oh, what happened? Yeah, what happened. So when I came back to academia in 2019 and I found the, and I found the plague had gone through, something had gone wrong. 2008, when I left, college was happier than non-college. You know, people were falling in love, like every week. And people were making their best friends for life and they were experimenting with ideas. I mean, the whole idea you'd go to college campus and hear crazy ideas and you'd like protest and try to get your professor fired. That's insane.

That's just the nudiest thing ever. You're supposed to be like, that is thrilling that they're telling me everything I learned as a kid might be wrong. That's the whole point, right? It's supposed to be a big adventure, right? It's supposed to be scary and dangerous intellectually. But that all changed. When I came back in 2019, it was like cancel culture and safe spaces and the huge amounts of depression. anxiety, and some campuses, 55% of the students were in counseling, which I got nothing against

counseling, quite the contrary, but that's a lot. That is an indication that something's really, really up. So I said, all right, what's the deal? And I started interviewing students. I looked at the data, and that's where I found these data on meaninglessness that it exploded. And then I started talking to people, because the way you do forensic social science like I do is that you see a pattern. you look for data to confirm the pattern, and then you start talking to people, so the penny will drop that will give you clues. Then you can start running experiments

and do these other approaches. It's kind of like figuring out the source of a virus. That's kind of how it works, is if we're trying to figure out what caused COVID or something. And I started talking to students and young people. My students are in the 20s. I teach master's students, MBA students at the business school.

And they would talk about their lives and be like, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what I'm meant to do. I do everything I'm supposed to do, but I don't know what I meant to do. And I don't know the meaning of any of these things. I don't know the meaning of these relationships. I don't know the meaning of my experiences. They kept talking about meaning. It's like, wow, this is really deeply philosophical. And so I knew that that was up. They also said something really interesting, though. They would say it all feels fake. It all feels fake. Like, you know, I get up, check my phone, scroll, social media,

you know, watch YouTube shorts. By the way, this is going to be YouTube. YouTube short. And then I go to work. I don't go to work. I go into my bedroom and I'm on the Zoom screen. And I date on the apps and I do a lot of gaming. And I want a big project, but I can't dig in. And it all feels like I'm living in a simulation of a real life.

And so that's when I'm starting to understand that there's something actually going on with the brain. That's the dead giveaway. And as a scientist, that's where you start to get these clues because of these words that people say. And that's when I started looking deeply into the neuroscience of how life changed, especially after 2008, that broke our brains. And the truth is, it happened. And it broke our brains in a way that we couldn't even understand or even ask questions of meaning. And that's where we are today. And I know that you seem to have quite a proclivity towards studying the eastern side of the diagnosis for these reasons as well.

I'm just curious why or how did you come to that? exploration for, you know, discovering what the solution to the crisis is. I have found in my work studying human happiness, which is my main area, the science of happiness, is that one discipline isn't enough. You need to triangulate across multiple disciplines. It's inherently interdisciplinary because happiness is the experience of life. The best questions come from the faith and wisdom and philosophical traditions. That's where you get the questions. You get the structure, the causation, the understanding was happening largely from biology, from studying neuroscience. You get data about why things are

happening and how they work from behavioral science. And then you actually go back into the wisdom in Eastern traditions and Western traditions to have practices, to use what you've learned to change the situation, to fix the problems, to enhance the strategies that you've actually got. So the whole thing requires triangulation across faith or philosophy, neuroscience, behavioral science, and then committing to action. That requires that I'm reading all the traditions and the different angles on these things. Now, when you find there's a discrepancy

between Buddhism and Western psychology, something's up. Something's up. You know that probably we're coming at it from the wrong direction, often in Western psychology, as a matter of fact. But when you find that these are consistent ideas and they're pointing you in the same direction,

then you've got some confidence because you'll also be able to develop some tools, deep understanding and tools. So for everybody who's listening right now, we have probably a wide spectrum of people at different points in their life. Some feeling fulfilled. A lot, probably feeling this low grade of numbness in their life. Some malaise. Yeah.

This feeling like you're in an airport lounge waiting for a flight that's super delayed. And you're just kind of scrolling or gaming to take the time away. Waiting for something, something, something. But it doesn't happen. Yep. To the other end where, you know, at the deepest end, you know, full crisis. like I can't stand every day, you know, and for all of them, your new book, the meaning of your life, the studies that you've been doing, what you've really devoted the past many decades of your life,

researching and triangulating on is why that's the case, the solutions, the many different solutions to that. So for everybody who's listening to this conversation that maybe reads your new book and studies your work, what is the promise after having listened to this conversation that they can get more insight on so that we can spend the rest of this conversation for filling on. And keeping everybody into the end of the show. Listen to the end. Retention. It's like this is the internet.

Number seven will shock you. See, I can work the algorithm. We're doing it. Unbelievable. The promise is this. Your life does have meaning and you can find it. But you have to know where to look and you have to know how to live differently to do it. That's what this book is about.

You know, there is a crisis. It's not your imagination. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. There's a reason that your brain has changed. You can change it back and live in a new way, and your life will never be the same, and it will be much, much better.

Fantastic. So let's go through some of these. That was well said. The doom loop is an aspect that I think a lot of people can relate to, obviously through 2008, even before, and especially the past many years, this advent of social media and technology has buried so many incredible fruits

and at the same time enabled so much neuroreys, and dopaminergic solutions to what we used to, you know, have much healthier outlets for. So what is the doom loop? And let's kind of go and I'm curious your thoughts on technology in particular. Yeah. So I'm not anti-technology, by the contrary. I'm a techno-optimist. But I recognize that the technology that we've developed makes promises that it can't keep

and it does change our brains. And that's a really big problem. the problem actually isn't technology. The problem is the promise of engineering. You know, it's interesting that if you go back to the industrial revolution or even the late 19th century, the promise was that, you know, physics and chemistry were going to solve every problem. And science was going to find the solution to every social problem. And so you had Karl Marx promising scientific socialism, which ended pretty poorly,

or even people in countries like the United States promising, scientific public administration where we could set up a government that would, where people would work like machines and everything would be great. And that doesn't work that way. And there's a reason it doesn't work this way, which is that all the things that we care about as human beings, this is the beautiful thing about those of us who are interested in the metaphysics of life, not just the physics of life, is that we are complex adaptive creatures, that we live in a complexity of mystery and meaning. Now, there's a neuroscience behind that. Your brain, brain is hemispherically lateralized. You got a right side, you got a left side. The right

side is dedicated to the why questions of mystery and meaning. The left side is dedicated to the complicated questions of how to and what. The engineering approach to life, which is largely emanating from the philosophy of Silicon Valley, which is that we can hit the singularity. We can figure all of it out. We can build algorithms that are even better than humans and suggest that we're nothing more than the left hemisphere, that life is nothing more than a series of complicated problems. But we live in the space of mystery and meaning. We live in the space of complexity. Most of the things you care about, you can't solve. I mean, my marriage, I've been married 35 years. I haven't solved it. I'll never solve my marriage. That's why I love my marriage, because it's

different. It's alive. You know, it's funny. I was having a kind of a stressful conversation with my wife as I was driving up here today. And just as I threw my phone away, she texted me, I love you. That's the complexity of my marriage. No, would predict the dynamics of how that actually worked. And so the result of it is when we're looking for these complicated solutions to the complex problems of life, we become alienated. We turn off the hemisphere of our brain that we actually need to understand the meaning of our life.

That's the problem. And that's a doom loop. Because the more that you distract yourself, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the more miserable you are. The more miserable and meaningless things feel like they are, the more resistant that you are to sit in the in the stillness of yourself the less tolerant you are of actually being with yourself so the more that you scroll and the more that you swipe and the more that you shop and things get worse and worse and worse it's very much like anything that actually implicates the brain chemistry

of addiction yeah you know people are bored or anxious and so they drink alcohol those are the big predictors of alcohol abuse or boredom and anxiety and that temporarily relieves it but it makes it worse. And so you do it more and you escalate and you wind up in alcoholism. And we have the same basic set of problems. That's the doom loop of technology. I think as the rise of AI becomes more and more pervasive, we can see how what we really value is competence and predictability and narrowing in on that. And we are inherently unpredictable, complex creatures like you were referring to, you know. And so when someone's scrolling to their last brain cell fries on social media or TikTok, and their life feels devoid of meaning,

it can get this, this ex-ist, I'm curious your thoughts on how this existential, this existential angst to find the meaning of our life could be really simply supplemented with a walk in nature. Yeah, yeah. So, so you're hitting on the solution of the problem. Now, to begin with, when you have any problem like this, you've got to get clean first, and then you have to live differently. But when if you said, hey, Arthur, I've studied addiction, psychology and medicine for a long time. And when people have a real problem with substance or behavioral addictions, the first thing you need to do is to get really pissed, right? So you're determined to actually make a change in your life.

Then you need to get clean, which means you need to do something to heal your brain. And then you need to do the hard part, which is live differently, right, to become comfortable with yourself. You know, what an interesting thing about alcoholics. they always move. They always think if I get, you know, move to a new place where I don't know anybody and I have all those like degenerate friends, things are going to get better. So you move from L.A. to New York. And the first thing that pops out of your suitcase is you.

That's the problem. And so really the solution to this is we got to get clean. We have to have a better relationship with technology and the engineered life. And there's a lot of stuff in the book about how to do that. There's a lot of science about how to get clean from, you don't throw your phone in the ocean. I mean, you look at you. you're a spiritual adept, but you still have a phone. And that's because you have a proper relationship with your devices.

You manage them and they don't manage you. And I talk about how to do that very practically with actual protocols. But then you have to live differently. And the way that you have to live differently is by doing things that stimulate the right hemisphere of your brain. They were ordinary. You know, my great grandpa, Leroy Brooks, didn't have to think about this. But I'll tell you something.

He didn't come home from work and say, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today because his brain was working right. His brain wasn't, he wasn't flooding his HPA axis. He was using his brain properly. So what was ordinary no longer is, and we have to retrain our brains in the old ways. And that's really what this is all about. How are the ways that you can illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain once you're no longer being managed by your technology? So to zoom in on that a bit more, what are your thoughts on the death of boredom? Yeah. Because it seems like any. single moment we have for silence or stillness, we just have the technology to fill it with something

stimulating. Yeah, we don't like boredom because it's boring. And that's uncomfortable. But there's a lot of things that are uncomfortable. I mean, I go to the gym every day because I want to take care of myself and I want to live to, you know, take care of my family. And I want to be able to be at the top of my cognitive game. And so I go to the gym every day. I don't go in thinking, man, this is going to be a feel as good as a massage. It's going to hurt. Today was a little. Today was a lot. I'm leg day. That's really uncomfortable is the whole point, but I'm intolerant of psychic pain. People don't want mental pain. They don't want, they try to, they resist sadness and fear and anger and disgust and boredom. They don't like that. So they think that there's something wrong when

they feel those things. That's, that's as wrong as thinking that the pain that you feel when you're underneath the bar and when you're doing the bench press, supposed to feel that way. And a characteristic of a life with a brain that's working properly is that you're bored a lot. You know, that's, there was no way to escape that. You know, great-grandpa Leroy was bored all the time. But here's the irony. He was bored for a moment to moment, but his life wasn't boring. People today, the average American checks her or his phone 205 times a day.

If you're at the supermarket checkout line, everybody's looking at their phones. Right. And that's because they're resistant to bored them. And they're never bored moment to moment, but their lives are boring. That's the irony. We're the opposite of Leroy. And so what we need to do is one to get clean, as I mentioned, but then live like Leroy. I should have just called this book, Live Like Leroy. Doesn't quite have the same ring. I know. It doesn't. It sounds like, who the heck is Leroy? This is not a best seller, live like Leroy. Or maybe it is. I don't know. You never know. Yeah. So life becomes boring. Life becomes boring. And so the way that you fix this. that is by doing the ordinary things in life that use your brain properly, that illuminate the mystery and meaning of your life. And, you know, that's a lot of things. That's asking deep, deep questions. But it really starts by giving yourself the space. Okay, so back to boredom itself. There's a lot of studies that laboratory experiments on how much people hate boredom. They're hilarious. I mean, I have this colleague named Dan Gilbert at Harvard. He's a psychologist. He's a great and visionary psychologist. And he's done these experiments where he invites a bunch of undergraduate students into the lab, because they'll do like anything.

for 20 bucks. And he'll sit him in a chair in an empty room with nothing to do. 15 minutes. Just sit there for 15 minutes. Nothing to listen to, nothing to see. And he gives them just a little key fob. And if they touch the button,

they self-administer a painful electric shock. So, you know what he's studying? Bortem or pain. A quarter of the women shocked themselves. Two-thirds of the guys. It's kind of what you need to know about men. We're clearly the more intelligent species. Yeah.

Right, sure. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and like got eliminated from the experiment because clearly he was some sort of a freak who liked it. Like, oh, not that. So, so this is what we do. And we've created these key fobs. They're just called our phones that eliminate boredom. Look, social media is the shock machine. You don't like it.

Who's like, I just love Twitter. I just love it so much. I mean, there's somebody out there. people are like, it's okay, it's okay. But it's a shock machine fundamentally. And when you're looking at your phone every 13 minutes, and that's on average, if you're sitting behind a light, you're looking at it the whole time. Like I wonder if anybody texted me. There's something over there on WhatsApp. I wonder, you mean, right? Yeah. That's what we're actually doing. And the result of it is that we're keeping our brain

in a complicated space into the space of the wrong kinds of questions. of information, because this is what we're getting is information. Information, information. Did you want that information? Not necessarily you're being flooded by information, information, and that's keeping you away from the mind wandering, the flights of fancy. It keeps you away from the space of deep meaning. You're going to have to suffer blank space if you're going to get to meaning is what it comes down to,

which is why I give my students homework to get on a flight and not look at their phones, to ride the train and have their hands in their laps looking at the window and say, huh, a tree to walk for an hour before dawn without devices, to not look at their phones for the first hour of the day during meals in the last hour before bed, and life changes fast. Hey, fam, a quick share. One thing that reliably brings me a sense of joy in the morning is having a morning ritual, a warm, nourishing drink to start my day is part of it.

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That's M-U-D-W-T-R.com slash know-l-o-o-o-o-self. I hope you guys enjoy. Back to the show. I love Young's phrasing of how pleasure is tension reduction. Yeah. It makes me think about how that is very much in essence what we're doing. And in all of those moments where we feel some sort of unease within ourselves and we cope, you know. It's providing us some sort of solace moment to moment.

In your book, I heard, I saw you referred to Emerson and his, you know, as his writing on self-reliance and cultivating this rebellious spirit towards a culture and society that profits off of the vampirification of your attention and your energy. And so I'm curious your thoughts on that because I feel like it really does take, you know, going against the grain when the grain, the culture is every second of every day. of every moment is taking your attention towards this social machine. Yeah, you know, when I was talking to young people and I was doing the interviews to actually figure out what was going on, I was doing my Sherlock Holmes' behavioral scientist routine,

and they started talking about the simulation. It reminded me of a movie that came out in 1999. It was a long time ago called The Matrix. And if you had Keanu Reeves on your show, no, I mean, he'd be a great guest. Yeah. He'd be a great guest. He's a very deep guy, I understand.

I don't know him. But the whole plot of the Matrix is like far out, fantastical, impossible science fiction in 1999. There's an artificial intelligence, a machine intelligence. Okay, so far as it good. Back in 1999, it's like, what? And what it does is it feeds on human energy, and it keeps humans placid enough to take their energy

by keeping them in a simulation, by putting them in pods. running a simulation of life that's like sort of good enough that's pleasant enough and the rebellion against it comes when neo played by kander reeves like no no life is meaningless i won't have it i want the real thing i want to feel it i want to love it i want to suffer i want the real thing and some people don't some people don't they want the blue pill but the whole point is this you're not fully live under the blue. And that movie, and you're not fully alive when we're talking.

When you're going with the flow, when you're in the matrix, when the artificial intelligence that is just sort of the culture, the machines, the technology, the overengineered solutions to everything, when you're living in that and saying good enough, good enough, just take away the, just sand off all the rough edges, take away all the right angles, just give me a simulated version of my life? For me, it's not enough. And for most people, it isn't either. And there's a side effect to it, which is there's a disease, a psychogenic epidemic that crops up, an unintended secondary consequence called meaningless downstream from which we find depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, self-harm. It's no good, man. So let's continue to take the red pill in this

conversation. Right. Let's do it. No, no, for sure. Let's do it. Absolutely. Because The only way out is to live a full life. Live like Leroy. How did Leroy live? How else did Leroy live outside of the tech side of things? Yeah. So he didn't have the tech, which means that he had to live in real life.

And this is the IRL experience is what it comes down to. What I've found in the research is that there are six big, previously ordinary ways of living that dramatically illuminate the right hemisphere of the brain. So I'm going back and forth between philosophy. neuroscience and behavioral science, obviously. We've had Ian McGilcrison. We did a deep dive on the differences hemispherically. And so these are more now...

Mainstream. Yeah, and then also is it Tolstoy's irrationality? Irrational knowledge. That's Tolstoy's concept of irrational knowledge, which Ian McGilchrist would say is right hemispheric knowledge, right? Yeah, Miguelchrist is the world's leading expert on hemispheric lateralization. And his ideas have had huge influence over me. And actually, we did an event together, Duke University,

just a few weeks ago talking about these ideas. He's a neuroscientist and philosopher. I'm a behavioral scientist. And so we fit together pretty nicely on this, and I'm able to use his work in really useful ways. Right Hemisphereic Experience largely comes from sort of six things. Number one is asking deep why questions that don't have answers, that you must ponder, that lead to wonder, that lead to discomfort.

This is Aporia? Yeah, Aporea. Aporea. Exactly right. The Greeks talked about this. So almost every religious and great philosophical tradition is based on unanswerable questions. I like the coens of Zen Buddhism. So I've studied a lot more Tibetan Buddhism because I spent a lot of time in Dharma Sala in the Himalayan foothills with the community of the Dalai Lama.

And so the Tibetan Buddhism is a different tradition. Zen Buddhism is sort of is more of an attitude of observation, but it's largely based on these coens, which are riddles. and they're senseless in their way. So I'll give you an example. A young monk, right? En Sui is a junior monk. And he finds a jikiditsu, the master monk walking toward him on a path in the forest. And he asks the master monk, where are you going?

And the master monk said, on a journey. And he says, what's the destination? And the master monk says, I don't know. And the junior monk says, why don't you know? And the master monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate form of knowledge. Consider. That's a ponderable question that will illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain because it's not based on information.

And that's the key thing. If you can ask Google or chat GPT, it's not a right hemisphere question. The classic one is, what is the sound of one-hand clapping? which is that's actually only about 150-year-old Cohen in Zen Buddhism. But it seems senseless. But when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense, which is the sound of one-hand clapping is an illusion. It's an illusion of sound.

And it only becomes a reality when you add a second hand. Your life is incomplete in the absence of others, which is a deep Buddhist concept of emptiness. But that's an example. And doing that, the classic questions in the West would be, why am I live? For what would I give my life? Those are deep questions. I defy anybody to put those into chat, CBD.

It makes me definitely think about some of the current faults with the current structure of the education system and this sort of top-down versus bottom-up processing, right? Like if we're told what everything is from the external world in this top-down way, then we presume. and we walk through the world as if we know, as opposed to experiencing a tree or a bird, not through the name we've learned, but through the bottom-up processing of experiencing it raw in each moment, which allows us to actually meet life more fully and fully alive,

and discover things that we otherwise might not have if we just move through life with our preconceived notions and prejudices of it. Likewise, Aducco, right, which is the Latin origin of education, means to evoke from within. And so it seems like that, that Greek term, Aporia and this like posiment of the seeking and searching allows us to discover instead of just take the blue pill and walk through and do what you're told through life, you know? And the blue pill of the engineered existence is one in which we find more information to be adequate.

You don't understand something. Go get more information. And no, understanding does not come from more information. It's interesting. There's a quote that's attributed commonly to Einstein. who knows because most quotes on the internet are completely unattributable. But it's possible where he said most people will read too many books. Most people, and what they're doing is they're substituting information for the process of deep understanding.

You need to read less and ponder more. And that's actually a very sound neuroscience and behavioral science. What you find is that your understanding that your learning doesn't come because you have such a great teacher who explains something. you say, ah, if you're sitting in class and there's something is very deep, you're learning philosophy or science or something is very hard, and you understand it exactly when the professor explains it, probably it's not very good. What you need to say is, I don't get it, I don't get it, then you need to go home and chew on it, then you need to go home and work on it. That understanding integrates the hemispheres of your brain between information and understanding, which is the way your brain is supposed to work. The modern information economy is just throwing random information that's pretty easy to understand all the time. Now, that's not your philosophy in the show.

Your show is dedicated, I know it, is dedicated to asking people to ponder bigger ideas more deeply. And that means that the big benefit from this is for people to watch this and then go on a walk without devices, ideally an half hour before dawn, as the Senate. is coming up and think about the ideas. Think about the three or four big ideas that actually they're presented with in your work. Amazing. So that was the first of the six. That's the first of the six.

All right. That's assignment number one. Yeah. Is the Brahma Mahorta to rise before time? Yeah. So Brahma Mahorta talk about that because that's been a big practice of your life, you know, and guarding that's your time in the morning.

Yeah, no. So Brahma Mahorta is the idea of the creator's time in Sanskrit. And it's an hour and three. 36 minutes before dawn. An hour and 36 minutes before sun rise. It's two majortas, which is 48 minutes each, which has particular significance in ancient Vedic wisdom. And the neuroscience of this doesn't specify. The neuroscience clearly says, however, getting up before dawn, if the sun is already up and warm by the time you get up each day, you've kind of lost the first battle.

And getting up has before dawn has special properties for creativity, for the depth of understanding, for focus, and for mood. for mood management. It's just really good for you to get up before dawn. I recommend when, you know, I get, you know, 15 emails a day from people who's like, Professor, what do I do? You know, I graduated from college. I feel so lost. And the first thing that I'll recommend to everybody who really feels lost is, you know, it's not going to, taking more creatine monohydrate, good, but that's not going to do it. I took 20 grams of it before this conversation. 20? You're doing 20? Just today. I haven't been doing it every day this week. I do 10. I do 10.

So, and, uh, because I have this old grizzled adrenal system. It's very inefficient. You, you're young. But anyway, it's good. That stuff's great. But, but the whole thing to think about is not, is not some supplement. The way to do it is to actually awaken your senses and awaken your full brain. Get up in a hour, half an hour or so.

Get up before dawn. And walk for an hour. So ambulation, a pilgrimage every day. There's a reason that every religious tradition. has pilgrimage. I've done religious pilgrimages in my life. I very deeply believe in them. We're a walking species. Camino Trail. Yeah, Camino Trail. I mean, it's just pray and pray and pray and pray and walk and walk your way into it, an open aperture of spiritual knowledge that will then find you. It's a guana Camino for an hour without devices before it gets light. And as the light comes up and do that

every day for 30 days and then we'll talk again. That's when I tell young people. always say the same thing. I didn't find what I was looking for, but it found me. And that's what we're looking for, is something that we're looking for the thing that's actually looking for us. Yeah, not just what you want of life, but what life wants of you. Yeah, so, you know, we think we're seekers, but we're actually, we're sought. That's deep, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that time, that window, providing that space to see what is called of you, what you stumble upon to, if we're, again, consumed by various different stimulus in our life and we don't give that space, then we're less likely for those things to find us or to be sought in that sense. Just to wrap a bow on that. So your, could you just run through a quick overview of your like your time in the morning? Yeah. Yeah. I have protocols that I set up. So it's not as if I'm just taking it as it comes. As much as I am fundamentally spiritually based, I do honestly believe that I'm a spiritual being having a physical experience. I mean, I deeply believe in this. And I'm my, my faith is literally the most important thing in my life. But I honestly believe also that, you know, the organism per se requires that I use, I use it appropriately and that requires healthy protocols such that I I can tap into the metaphysics, and I'm not stuck in, you know, trying to build with willpower and

cognitive bandwidth, the, you know, the harvest that I need. So I get up at 430. And now I'm off jet legs. I'm on the road about 48 weeks a year. Three or four nights, not all week, but that means I'm changing time zones a lot. So this is correcting for time zones sometimes. I get up at 430. I lift heavy things and run around for an hour, first thing. I really, I wake up my body. And I'm fully alive in this way. I work out, you know, and as much as it sounds like kind of a bro-culture thing, I'm sure you do too. And this is a great thing. This is to say, I'm still alive.

It's so beautiful. And then is the time that I actually dedicate to my religious practice. And so depending on where I am, I either have half an hour of meditated prayer or I attend a religious service. I'm a Catholic. And I'm a daily communicant. So, which sounds like your grandma, right? I bet your grandma literally was the daily communicator, right? I mean, you're Middle Eastern Christian tradition.

And so there's a lot. I mean, those, they're badass, by the way. They've got it together that, you know, you're raised Orthodox, right? Yeah. That's a cool thing because they've got it together with respect to their religious protocols. I'm Catholic. And the great thing about being Catholic is like Starbucks. You know, it's a highly uniform and high quality product every place.

It's like every place. So generally speaking, I'll go to Mass right after I'll get cleaned up and I go to Mass for a half hour. If there's not a Mass available, I pray my rosary. And then I'll go to Mass at night, sort of depending on where I am. So either the Mass or Rosary in the morning, and then what I didn't do at night. And so I begin and end the day in that particular way in the space of relationship with the divine. Critically important. And I've studied many of the karmic traditions as well.

And I've learned much of the technique that I use as a Christian from the karmic tradition. Sitting in meditation with the Tibetan monks, for example, has helped me very much in the way that I practice my faith. After that, and I have, I don't ingest any calories at this point because I want complete clarity. I'll have, because I'm working out hard, I'll have electrolytes and creatine monohydrate and a few other supplements that I use that I like that I think are actually really good, but not caloric. I don't want nutrition. By the time I get back from mass, and then I take the first bolus of something. like a stimulant. You know, I take, which is just a nerdy way of saying I drink coffee. And I drink a lot. I mean, I drink, but in one dose I'll have between three and 350 milligrams of caffeine, which is a lot.

I mean, but you have to wake up to focus. No, no, no, it's nootropic. Yeah. I don't use it for for waking. I use it for focus, which is really critically important. So caffeine blocks the A2A adenocene receptors. And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that if you use it to wake up, you're going to get a crash in the afternoon, and you've wasted the focusing properties. So I don't drink caffeine for two and a half to three hours until after I get up. And then I take my first nutrition. And when I do it, which is heavy in protein, a very low in carbohydrate, and do it with micronutrients that I actually get from nuts and berries, etc.

But a lot of Greek yogurt with protein powder, et cetera, very clean. And then I get four hours of dopamine in my free frontal cortex. I get the best concentration and focus I can get. I've done body and soul, and I've taken care of myself in a particular way, and I don't have to think about it. None of this takes cognitive bandwidth or whopar. Hey, fam, a quick share from a partner of ours, caffeine does not actually give you energy. It just mutes this signal that tells you you're tired. The fatigue is still building underneath.

You just can't feel it until it wears off and then it hits all at once, which is the crash. What actually produces energy in your body is a process that runs on electrolytes. So if you're depleted, no amount of coffee is fixing that. You're just masking it. This is why I've been really enjoying elements new lemonade iced tea. It uses a full black tea extract, not isolated caffeine like most energy drinks. And they also make these stick packs and sparkling 12-ounce cans that I've talked about and love. The lemonade and grapefruit flavors are personal favorites.

And they have a chocolate salt, which in hot water is a low-key gem. If you want to try them out, it's 100% risk-free. Order it. And if it's not your vibe, they'll give you. a full refund, no questions asked. You don't even have to send it back. Go to drinklminty.com slash know-liself for a free eight-count sample pack with elements, most popular flavors with any purchase.

Links down in the description, as always. I hope you enjoy. Hey guys, a quick share. Did you know that your body runs on magnesium? It's involved in over 300 biochemical processes, everything from how your nervous system regulates itself to how well you sleep and your muscles recover. Yet roughly 80% of people are.

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money-back guarantee, so there's actually no risk. Link in description, as always, back to the episode. Any quick little tips to help intermittent faster tech and like set herself up for success, i.e. phone out of the bedroom or like, what are some things you've found? Yeah, the protocols are pretty straightforward and very well studied. First hour of the day because your neurocognitive programming is happening largely when you first get up. So if you're having trouble with a particular habit or people who suffer from ticks, for example, ticks that come and go, like not full-on Tourette, but people who suffer from nervous ticks, if they can actually not start the day with any ticks for the first hour, they can break the tick.

but if you can't do it after the first hour because of this programming that actually occurs. And so think of your phone as a tick. The 205 checks a day, that's a tick, right? And it's much the same way. It affects the brain much the same way. Now, if you're in media, for example, you're going to look at it to see what came in overnight,

what's on fire, right? But that's just quick information and then down. No scrolling. No scrolling. Put it away. The second protocol is not during what you eat. I recommend, if you can, not eating alone.

human beings, homo sapiens, I realize you live alone, so that's a hard, that's hard to do. But homo sapiens were evolved to live in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based hierarchically arranged individuals, and we get a good deal of the neurochemical reward of that when we eat together and talk. So we sit around a campfire and talk about our day while making eye contact and put pieces of yak meat into our mouths or gazelle into our mouths. And that's what word. And so never have your phone at the table.

never have your phone while you eat. Even if you're eating alone, never have your phone while you're eating. It's critically important. And the third is the last hour at night before you go to bed and put it away in a closet, locked away.

Never, and this also requires, given this first and last hour that you're not sleeping with your phone. My students will be like, how do I wake up? And I said, well, I have this incredible new invention. It's called an alarm clock.

It's unbelievable. Five bucks on Amazon. Do you still use it if you feel like you've hit in your routine? Does your body normally? That doesn't matter. So I can use my phone as an alarm clock now and I won't look at it during the night

because I've got the protocols to the point where I've broken the grip. But it takes usually about six weeks. The norm is 42 days on anything like this to break the grip is how that works. And then some certain zones. You know, the bedroom is a phone-free zone. Classrooms should be phone-free zones.

It's insane that there's a single classroom in America. from kindergarten through PhD, where you can have your phone. That's just nuts. That's child abuse. As elder abuse, too, because a lot of people are, in a way. And then last but at least, you need a fast. You need at least one fast a year.

I recommend 96 hours. I go on spiritual retreat every year. Strongly recommend. It's great. The first day, your brain is screaming for the device. The second day, you're calming down. The third day, you're in bliss. And the fourth day, you just wish it were lasting all year around.

Yeah. And so just those protocols. That's simple stuff. Your life will change. Fantastic. I love that we're balancing between the theoretical, the practical. I'm a practical guy because, you know, the theory is one thing. Yeah. But, you know, look, you and I are spiritualists, right? It's not helpful to say, I believe theoretically in spiritual practices. You've got to do the practices.

Yeah. Really? All right. Do you want to touch on any of the remaining six, romance, transcendence, calling, beauty? We have five left. Take your pick. Oh, boy. This is a Whitman sampler. Which chocolate do you want? A little scent. platter. Yeah.

Hmm. I want to talk about romantic love. Yeah, sure. You're going to do some, you're going to do some self-disclosure to me here? Yeah, is that? Let it give something away there? People find meeting in the pursuit, even the unsuccessful pursuit of romantic love. Yeah.

Is this true in your life? Um, yeah. I did last year sell a bit, and right now I'm not in partnership. On purpose. No, just no one wanted to hook up with me, dude. Involuntary. It sells it in a worst kind. Now you're going to get a whole lot of proposals, you know, in the, that's right?

It's all part of the strategy. I'm a single. I have no idea. No, it was intentional to really focus my creative energy. But I agree. I mean, falling in love being, you know, and in the exploration of that, it's like, I think everybody can agree you're in your, alive to a big degree during that.

It sounds like the time we live in, though, with all the apps and all the different ways, again, incredible on one hand, but then also a detriment to another. Yeah. So falling in love is a right hemispheric experience when you do it right. How do you do it wrong by reducing it to an algorithm? By making it into a left hemisphere, complicated engineering problem. But it's like, I'm going to find somebody who's just like me. Now, it's a weird thing that you'll find.

to people who are on the apps too much. Some of the apps are actually getting much better by injecting more human experience into the algorithm. And this is a truth in life. Look, the robots are coming. The cyborg experience is coming. But the secret to living well under those circumstances is not by adding more robotics to your human experience,

but adding more humanity into the robotics. We need to add more human friction into all levels of what we're actually doing with machines. And dating is a perfect example of this. So when you go on the apps and you date, thank God. I mean, it's like I'm old. So it's like I got married in the before times. But what people will do is try to solve the problem of romantic love by setting up the sameness.

I want somebody who votes like me. I want somebody who, you know, likes California like I do. I want somebody who likes Saracha. I want somebody who wants to move to Austin. I want, and pretty soon they're dating themselves, which is. super not hot, right? And part of the reason is because we intuitively know this is a right hemispheric intuition that we want somebody who completes us, not somebody who copies us. You don't want somebody who's just like you. You want somebody who makes you, you know,

is the perfect amalgam. Yeah, strong, not like, complimentary. You want the yin and the yang. This isn't, this is a truism across all philosophies is things that fit. You know, the pieces of a puzzle are supposed to be different and opposite. And yet we forget that when we try to solve it like a complicated problem. When we live it like a complex problem, it's super risky and it's super scary, and it's impossible to understand. I mean, I have an unsolvable marriage.

35 years, man, unsolvable, unsolvable. That's the point. The point is getting to deeper understanding with somebody who's not like you, with whom you can have best friendship. that's really what's going on. And so when you allow yourself to give your heart away, when you do that risky thing,

you're stepping into the unknown, it's super scary. It's way beyond the complexity and the mystery of what most people do. And what we've done is engineered it into something that we can clearly understand and the result of it is that we don't like it. And even though there's more availability of people

than there's ever been before because of the technologies, there's less attraction. people are about a third less likely to be in love in their 20s as people were when I was in my 20s. Look, that's all there was to do. That's all I wanted. I mean, it was all about love.

And because we were more comfortable exploring the mystery and the danger of the right hemisphere of our brains. The optionality, too, is like a, it's like, is wild, you know. You live in Tuscaloosa and you got Kathy and Susan are like your options, you know. And that leads to the paradox of choice. Yeah. And the paradox of choice is just another manifestation of taking a right hemisphere mystery and turning it into a left hemisphere problem to solve. Well, I want to circle back to romance, but I want to jump forward to calling right now because I think a lot of people can, you know, we both live in a time that is more comparative than ever, right?

So we're seeing everyone's highlight reels, of course. And we're oftentimes feeling devoid of having what in the Hindu tradition is Sva Dharma, which is like this not just like doing what you're supposed to be doing, but the natural occupation is actually a vehicle for self-realization. And it's not just something nice to do. It literally becomes your vehicle for self-actualization and realization. and I'm curious how we can just talk about how to zone in on discovering that calling. Or do you refer to, you know, discover your viewers?

Because you're somebody that started making pizzas, French horn player, think tank, happiness expert. You've gone through many different iterations, and I'm curious how you've arrived. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people, they're looking for, I mean, everybody wants their calling. They want to feel complete because of what they do. The problem with that is that once again,

we have a tendency to solve it like a complicated problem as opposed to experiencing our lives, finding our calling by what we do with an integrated approach that allows ourselves to do something that might be way off the beaten path or do something that's really different than what the best, you know, the engineering department at university says

is actually the best life. Here's the way to think about it. People who have a calling in their work have two things in common. These things do not include salary or position or title or mom's deepest dreams or what your college counselor told you to do. They have the sense that you're earning your success, that you're creating value, that you're rewarded and recognized in some way, shape, or form for something that you're authentically earning. This is why merit-based systems are everything in like 10 years. and trust me, I'm an academic, tenure's terrible. It's completely demotivating because you're not earning your success.

They can't fire you. And loyalty-based systems are the worst. You kiss up to the boss and you're his friend and you hang around. They're completely demotivating. And they lead people to actually feel depressed and learn their helplessness. Earned success is the idea that people need me. And that's the second part, which is service to other people. If you earn your success and you're serving others, then you're in the zone of your

calling and it can change, you can spiral in and out of that eight times. I'm sure that you feel like you're living your calling with the show. I'm sure. I can see it in your eyes, but I bet that there have been other things that in which, and there will be more things because you're young that you're going to be able to manifest. You're a classic spiral, by the way. There's the social science of career trajectories. It says there's four kinds of people psychologically and the way they pursue their careers. Some are what they call experts. That's like your grandfather who kind of stayed on the same track. My dad had the same job for 42 years. Same university, 42 years, college professor. Got about a 2% raise every year. Came time for tenure. He didn't even apply. Just showed up in the mail.

It was like super predictable. He had a lot of security. And the reason is because what he wanted was something that led him to have a lifestyle that he wanted and he could count on. That's the, that's the expert career path. the transitory people who jump from thing to thing because they don't want to live to work, they want to work to live, right? Then the two among real strivers, really successful people, are linear careers, which is ambition and points on the board. These are not the happiest people.

These are people who only change jobs, let alone careers, when there's something bigger and better in line for worldly rewards, money, power, honor. The happiest people who are really, really, really, successful strivers are the spirals. They have seven to 12 year careers of their own design and nobody gets to, nobody understands them but themselves. Where you funge the greatest spiritual gifts from one to the other sound like you? Starting to sound like you, right? Yeah, I can see for sure. Yeah. That naturally transitioning at different points. And mom's like, what's going on? But it doesn't matter because you're actually building that. That's how going from French horn player to doing my PhD and becoming

academic, to being a CEO, to building a happiness company, dedicating my life to lifting people up in bonds of love and faith of hope. You're spiraling more and more closer towards alignment of what you're here to do is what you would say. I hope it's heaven. I hope it's heaven. I hope that it's the spiraling upward toward my true home, which is the image always of angels, by the way. They're always in a spiral, you know.

up toward heaven. But of course, I don't know. But the whole point is that that's the adventure of finding your calling. And it manifests itself in different ways. And the two things to look for, am I earning my success? Am I serving other people? In other words, am I needed? Is how that works. And I don't care. Maybe it's, maybe it is making pizzas for a while. Maybe it's with a really frustrating boss. Maybe it's something you don't want to do. But the truth of the matter is that that's not the point if it's in the spiral trajectory of your calling. Yeah. And that's a beautiful thing.

It reminds me of this quote, which I underlined from the Gita that you quoted in your book, By performing one's natural occupation, one worships the creator from whom all living entities have come into being and by whom the whole universe is pervaded. By such performance of work, a person easily attains perfection. I know. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't it beautiful? Because that's the whole concept that were made in the image.

of the divine, the divine is a creative entity. The divine, the God had created the heavens and the earth. And our little version of that is us creating the heaven and the earth in our own way. You know, in the Hebrew Bible, we know, people talk about the, you know, the unpleasantness of the snake and the, and the tree and the apple and all that. And the penalty for Adam and Eve was they had to go toil in the garden, right? But read it closely, the bliss was working in the garden. The whole point is whether or not it has meaning. The whole point is whether or not it's the calling. They were working the garden. They were working the fruits of the beautiful labor of God. And then later they were working by the sweat of their brow. They went from calling to no calling in its own way. And what do we want? We want to live in a particular

way of integration, of faith, of hope, of love, that actually makes it so that we're working in the garden before the snake. It reminds me also of, I was very lucky and blessed to stumble upon some teachers early in life. So like at 16, not even necessarily just in person, but, you know, through different books and audios. I remember Earl Nightingale saying, you know, the strangest secret is that man becomes what he thinks about most often and that success, his definition.

of success, the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Yeah. The progressive over time, realization of an ideal that you deem worthy. Does that resonate with you? Completely. Holosapians are dedicated to progress. The biggest mistake that strivers, and by the way, this is a striver show. These are people who want to be better. Nobody's like, yeah, I don't want to be better. I don't want, you know, anything like spiritual perfection. You know, no, know thyself is the anthem for the striver. That's good. That's good. All strivers are sort of homo sapiens par excellence and what we truly want, which is progress toward something. The problem for the striver is the belief that once you actually hit the object of your affections, then you'll have a permanently happy

mood that your limbic system will keep you in a state of bliss. That's not how your limbic system works, man. I mean, you're not there. I mean, your limbic system isn't there to give you happy days, every single day, you'd be eaten by a tiger summarily. If you actually didn't have negative emotions, if your bliss were persistent, that's why Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. He should have said, I can't keep no satisfaction.

But I try and I try and I try. The first thing that a billionaire says upon earning the first unit, I need another unit because I don't feel it. It doesn't what I was going to feel. And so the point is, Nightingale's point, It's the progressive unfolding of a goal that's worthy. Progress is everything.

And we see this all around us. You know, you can lose weight on any weight loss program practically. I mean, there's something stupid. You know, the all-pisa diet is probably not going to do it. But any serious weight loss diet, you're going to lose weight. And the reason is because you will be rewarded with the goal of a scale going down that's sufficient to keep you from eating things that you like. the problem with hitting your goal weight

is that the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations, which is why weight loss programs generally don't work. And that's this whole principle. What we need is a worthy goal that can only be, that really is always on the horizon

and that we're working toward that. Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let me ask you, if you see if you agree with this. I've actually never talked about this, so I've been thinking about this. we believe there's an ultimate cosmic goal. We believe there's something beyond this life.

Most people do. Right? I mean, and it's in different traditions. It's described in different ways, right? We want to be happy in this life, but we actually can't be. We can be happier. That's my job. But it's imperfect happiness.

But we believe that there's a cosmic bliss. We actually believe that. You know what I believe that. that to me kind of like thirst is evidence of the existence of water hunger is proof of the existence of food

that hunger for a perfect bliss is evidence that it exists there is something beyond the here now yeah I keep quoting honestly man your book this book is great like I really loved it and it reminds me of this section humans lack these senses but to assume they don't exist would be silly even dangerous

We have no reason to believe either that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware of and that are as yet undiscovered. And it just makes me think of, okay, this is what you're referring to is a bit more of a mystical calling and that there is water that we are thirsty for, union with God, however we want to describe it, that we feel. find in our own, you know, individual ways. Do you feel that our calling is bestowed upon us by some unseen force or that we are co-creators with it, that we are complete generators of it? How do you conceptualize that? So that's a really interesting question because that is the, in essence, the answer to that question is whether or not you follow the Abrahamic or karmic traditions. Right? The whole idea of co-creator of what the destiny is is a more karmic view. The idea that your

essence precedes your existence is more Abrahamic. The essence is the true you, who you're supposed to be. Your existence is being born in this earthly experience that we're having. And the essence precedes you, meaning that there is a plan, but you have to discover it and live according to it. That's your goal in life. That's what it comes down to. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, of course, I have a view. I follow an Abrahamic religion. I go to mass every day. And so my natural muscle memory is that essence precedes existence, that my essence is not co-create. with my earthly existence. I have to, my intuition tells me,

as well as my religious training, as well as Sunday school, that God had a plan for my life that existed before I did. And when God created my soul, he said, be a good and faithful servant, you know, live according to this essence.

But at the end of the day, if I'm wrong, that's okay too. That's actually okay too, because I believe that in the ultimate metaphysical sense, probably these two ideas that converge. And the idea of pre-existence of essence and the co-creation of essence, there's no reason that they couldn't be the same thing

when the continuum of time collapses, which in the deepest metaphors, physical sense, it almost certainly must. Yeah. No, absolutely. Well said, man. It reminds me of the, you know, it's better to be an optimist and wrong

than a pessimist and right. whatever the objective truth to the claims we have within our beliefs and religious beliefs, what is the ontological experience of the person who believes it, you know? And is that leave you in a better place where you're contributing more to the world? Well, I'm going to take that one. Yeah, no. And there's nothing wrong with following a particular physics. Yeah.

There's nothing wrong with that. I like my physics. You know, I think it's a really a great way for me to understand, you know, God in my life. And I have no reason for, I have no reason to say, because I believe that this is right, that I must condemn everybody else. Right. Right. I mean, I encourage people all the time to, to, to, who grow up as Catholics, for example, or who are curious about it to do it. It's so great.

It's so great. I just love it so much. It's the most important thing in my life, right? But I'm also just an admiration of people who have that experience who are my Muslim brothers and sisters who are, you know, and I, and I have many Hindu. teachers when I go to say, I'm not a Hindu. That's not my beliefs. I study with a Dalai Lama. I've been studying with a Dalai Lama for 12 years. I love that. I love him. He's greatly enriched my life. And I don't understand how to quite how to how to, to accept mine is not to reject theirs. And to figure out what that means is something that hasn't quite unfolded for me yet.

But I think it's right. I think one thing that is a pervasive plague is what you refer to to earlier, what you also name is the arrival fallacy. Yeah. So, you know, even this kind of goes into the positive psychology movement, right, which in its sincere form is a vehicle for self-realization. At a certain point, it can cross into a path of solacism and this unending task to fix a perceived broken self. You know, people that take up the spiritual path much, you know, there's a saying that

like enlightenment or meditation is porn for perfectionists, you know? And so whether it's building a business or pursuing this path, we have this pervasive and consistent delusion that our ideal life is someday not present now. I was reading this book, The Age of Anxiety from Alan Watts. Yeah, that's a great book. It's great. I just started putting together a new book list for our community. And he was such a deeply troubled individual, which, by the way, is characteristic of everybody in this business.

Yeah. No, totally. It's not all me search, not research. And, you know, you don't find somebody who studies the, who's looking for, to understand bliss, who has it. Yeah. You know, I don't study air because it's plentiful. But if it wasn't, it weren't plentiful, I'd be pretty darn interested in it, right? Almost everybody I know in my business of the science of happiness lacks it and finds it hard.

You know, in a weird way, it sounds off brand, but it's actually perfectly on brand, isn't it? Went into the field for a reason, you know? One quote from that book that stood out was, to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future, which when it comes to me will find me absent, looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face. they fail to live because they're always preparing to live. That's the whole idea of the miracle of mindfulness from Ticknacht Han. We starts off that book describing the experience of washing the dishes.

He said, when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully alive while washing the dishes. You should be paying attention to washing the dishes. Because if you're not paying attention to washing the dishes, when you're washing the dishes, you're someplace else and you're missing your life. And that's important because, you know, we have this uncanny ability with this incredibly developed,

prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer of the brain. This is really distinguishing factor, not the limbic system of emotion, but the 30% of our brain, that's the prefrontal cortex, that allows us to time travel. Your dog can't time travel. It can't, you know,

think about the past and learn from its mistakes, except intuitively, except depending on instinct. It can't think about the future and practice future scenarios. The problem is we're so good at it that we're never here now. And it's incredibly uncomfortable. Now, the father of positive psychology that you just referred to a minute ago is Marty Seligman, my great

mentor, Marty Seligman. He's incredible. And he believes that presentism, mindfulness is actually unnatural to the homo sapiens. That's why it's so hard. People are like, okay, be here now and get into a mindful state. It's super hard because immediately the default mode network and your brain turns on, you start thinking about the future. He says we shouldn't be called homo sapiens. He says we shouldn't be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus because we're naturally thinking about the future. The average person spends 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future. The average striver, fellow striver, is 80% of the time. That's a lot, but you're missing your life. You know, here's the thing to remember, really old people spend more time thinking about the past.

Really young people think about the future all the time. Very few people spend very much time right now. but you can only love now. Love only happens right now. The less you're here, the less you love. And that's God's plan for your life is love. To love and be loved, which requires that you be here now. To quote Ram Dass, be here now. Why would you want to be here now?

Well, let's think about the porn of meditation. The Dalai Lama told me that he discourages Westerners from becoming Buddhist. I was like, why? Why? He says, because they're doing it wrong. I said, what do you mean? He said, they want to meditate to feel better. Meditate to feel better. And so what should they be doing? He says, you should meditate so everybody else feels better. The point of your meditation is to lift up the whole world. That's the point of your meditation, not so that you will lift yourself up, so you'll feel less anxious, so that you'll become more productive, so that your depression will be alleviated. On the contrary, it's completely secondary to this. And that's the point of understanding that right now, right here is the only time that we can love. And that's why when we have this conversation, you and I are here right now. We're not thinking about the future. And we're loving this moment. And that's what we're trying to achieve. Because as we love this moment, we get to have this conversation and we're trying to bless other people. The point is not

so that Andre and Arthur feel better. The point is that we're trying to lift up the world. And that's the essence of now. And that's the essence of love. the act of service to me feels like it fills those buckets of coherence and purpose and significance, you know, that we mentioned earlier. And it seems like no matter what the calling is, whether it's flipping pizzas or talking on a podcast, you know, or professing, you know, there's this quality of meta, of wishing for the well-being of others through the unique lens in which life, God, whatever is creator, the universe has given you certain gifts and skills and aptitudes. proclivities, and through that, you're giving to the greater hole. Chop wood carry water. Once again, that's just another of the Zen Buddhist Cullins, where the ensui goes to the Jikigitsu. Is it great names? I know, I know. And says,

I'm ready for my assignment. Master, I'm ready for my assignment. And Jikigitsu says, your job will be to chop wood and carry water. Okay. He's in the monastery. For years, he He's got chapped hands. It's cold in the winter. He's got sore muscles. Finally, he's attained enough enlightenment, enough knowledge that he can become a master himself. And he goes to the now aging master and says, master, I have attained all of this knowledge. I've done everything asked of me. What is my job now? He's thinking, I'm going to become maybe a contemplative. You know, maybe I'm going to become a teacher. I'm going to be able to work inside. And then master says, yes, you have attained enlightenment. Now your job will be to chop wood and water. Because the whole point is, as Mother Teresa said, don't do big things, do little things in love. You know, if I had known what it meant to make pizzas, I wouldn't have resented making pizzas. Look, I would have loved being a French horn player, which I didn't do it in love. This was my mistake.

This is the reason that it didn't last because I didn't do it in love. right finally i mean better late than ever when i was 55 years old i retired from a CEO job after walking a long pilgrimage the commino of the santiago and praying lord guide my path what do you want for me what do you want from me and i believe god put the knowledge on my heart that i was supposed to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And I said, okay, I get it. Okay, I get it.

And now finally, I can do this in love. I wish I'd done it when I was your age. I mean, the relatability and the arc of your journey, I feel like is also what allows you to connect with so many people. Yeah. Like, because... This is life. Yeah.

This is our lives. Yeah. And, you know, I really specialize in people who have big dreams and a lot of ambition and we're hard workers, super strivers. I get it. I mean, I know not everybody's like that, but everybody thinks quite mistakenly that if they had your success,

they would automatically be happy. And you say, shoot for happiness and you'll be successful enough. Now, the striver panics at that last sentence because the word enough. Yeah. Right, because we're under this consistent thought that, like, happiness is the goal.

We're supposed to be like happy moment to moment. How would you describe your feeling of like joy, of fulfillment, like what is the better approximation of really what it means to not miss our life? So happiness per se is a combination of, it's not a feeling to begin with. Stop chasing feelings.

Feelings are liars. Your entire limbic system is dedicated to producing emotions that are nothing more than threats, signals of threats and opportunities. It's a very unsentimental way of understanding emotions, but it's literally true.

You have fear, anger, disgust, and sadness to alert you to threats that you've perceived below your level of consciousness, You have joy, you have surprise, you have interest to alert you to opportunities that will allow you to get food and pass on your genes, you know, mating, etc. And those are animal impulses, is what it comes down to. That's not the goal is to actually have a series of feelings. And the biggest mistake people make about having happy lives is they chase feelings. Stop chasing feelings.

Let feelings occur as they occur. This is the proper functioning of your brain. look for the three elements of a truly happy life, which is enjoyment, not the same thing of good pleasure, satisfaction, which is the joy of actually achievement after struggle and meaning, the biggest one of all, which is what we're talking about here, which is what the new book is about. and that's finding coherence, purpose, and satisfaction. And so there's a science behind each one of these things. There's a spirituality. There's a theology behind all of these things. And the best part is this, man, it's a complete adventure in each one of these silos.

And God gives us like 80, 90 years to go on these adventures, to figure out what does it mean to go from pleasure to actual enjoyment of life? What does it mean to become comfortable and celebratory of the struggle that goes into, achievement and not just the achievement per se. What does it mean to find the meaning of my life through all the pain and suffering, which is actually part of the experience itself? Would you say around like your late 50s when you went on that trail, was that a time where you really kind of collapsed or stop misconflating internal worth with external success? I'm sure it's a theme that, you know, still comes up. But like that that gap and that that that that perceived relation between external success and it being enough.

Yeah, the scoreboard. The scoreboard's a killer. And the scoreboard is really the bane of the existence of this driver. Those are called extrinsic rewards. And there's a big literature on extrinsic rewards. Like if a kid loves playing with a toy just from the joy of it, and then you give them a cookie to play with the toy, they like the toy less.

Paradoxical, right? It seems like it would compound the satisfaction that actually comes from it. It diminishes it. because we say, if somebody's paying me to do it, then therefore it must be onerous. And so the joy, the intrinsic joy of something is lowered by the extrinsic rewarding of that things. And so the superstriber, the highly motivated achievement-oriented person, is all about the external scoreboard.

That's hard. And that's a real problem in my life. How have you guarded when your passion turns into a business? Yeah. How do you guard the, you know, because it can quickly become this engine and this machine that's running and you become again like a cog in it instead of, you know, we can become disconnected from the original intent. No doubt you're looking at your viewer numbers.

There's no way to avoid that. And that's so deflating, right? And on the weeks, I'm hoping that this one will be a million and a half viewers. YouTube algorithm bless us with a one out of ten. Come on. do it. But, and we joke, but sort of no joke, right? And, and so what we're trying to do is we're, we're in the meditation, we're doing the meditation to lift up everybody else. That's the, that really is why we do it, of course. Because, you know, this is not like the most financially rewarding

thing that you can do, and I'm not making any money at all, right? But we love it. This is love because it's present here and now. We spoil it by reducing it to these scoreboard effects. I write books. Do you think I don't look at the New York Times best cell list. I want it to open a number one baby. That's what I want. But it spoils it. It ruins it. So how do you guard against it?

Number one is knowledge. Number one is actually recognizing that that's the case. It's actually feeling that that hollowness is motivated by the extrinsic rewards. The second is actually having people who love you enough to hold you accountable to it. That's where marriage comes in. You know, that's where you're. You have to, you know, somebody who denies you love except for the extrinsic rewards doesn't love you. Yeah.

You know, here's the pathology of strivers. They have the same kind of childhood. I write about it in the book a little bit. These are people who become workaholics, for example. It starts from their kids, and they get the attention and energy and affection of adults when they do something good. They get a good report card. They make first chair in the orchestra. They, you know, they're the lead in the play.

and they're synaptically plastic little brains process this conclusion. Love is earned. Love is wrong. Love is a free gift freely given, or it's not love. Anybody who makes you earn her love doesn't love you. That's an important thing in the dating world, right? And people go through life. If they believe that love is earned,

they'll marry people who demand that love be earned. They'll surround themselves with suck up friends where love is earned. They'll believe that God, God's love can be earned. And that's a craziness of life is a way that that works out. When you have the person who completes you or the one flesh in a good marriage, in a romantic partnership, is the union of the right hemispheres of your brain, which becomes an antenna to God. That's what you're looking for.

That's not about sex. It's not about not being lonely. It's about a link to the divine. That's what marriage is supposed to be. That's what best friendship with your spouse is supposed to be. is that antenna to the divine, with this union, the complex spaces of your brain, that's the person who will say, you can't earn my love. And what you're doing in the world is deleterious and it's harming you and it's harming us.

And that's what I get from my wife. I have a deeply, deeply mysterious relationship with my wife. My wife is trying to walk me into heaven, side by side. I mean, she's the last person on whom I will lay my eyes as I take my dying breath. I firmly believe. And the next person I'll see is the Lord. That's what I hope. That's what I believe, because that's what I feel with this union of our hemispheres.

And she's the one who holds me accountable to get back to the grubby reality of the extrinsic rewards. When she sees me waiting until 510 on Wednesday, which is when the New York Times bestseller list comes out, it's like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? That's just going to lower your sense of love. That's going to lower your sense of purpose. This is going to lower who you are. This degrades who you are.

And it pisses me off when she says that. She's completely right. It's interesting because we both have that side. And then also when our work is aligned with what we want to see more of in the world, success becomes, at least the story. I'm telling myself a benevolent, altruistic thing. The more success means the more positive impact in the world. So it's like both of these balances, right?

No, there's nothing evil about it. Right. This is the thing. The problem is when it becomes an ultimate reward. Yeah. See, here's the thing. So Aquinas and 1265 writes to Sumothelogy. He says that people are beguiled by idols.

Man is beguiled by idols. Now, idols are a substitute for God, right? In his view, we want happiness, which is the same thing as we want the divine. Yeah. Which I believe, you believe. Many people watching us believe. Many don't, but that's okay, too. the idols that beguile us are false versions of that.

They have divine characteristics, but they're golden calves. What are they? Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four. Very astute social science. Because now, of course, we have all the brain scans that show that the four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

He was right. He was completely right. Each one of us is beguiled more by one than the other. And we know what our idol is. We have power because we're able to, we're able to avoid falling into the trap sometimes. Not always, but we'll always be beguiled by that. The problem is, however, that we shouldn't get rid of these things.

The whole idea of sell everything, you know, live like a pauper. That's not the right solution necessarily, certainly not for most people. It's recognizing that those are intermediate goals and dangerous goals, but they can refract to the blessing of other people. You can do good things with money. I believe that the free enterprise system has lifted people out of poverty at rates unbeknownst to humanity. But if we make it into religion, if we make capitalism into a religion, then it ruins our happiness. It ruins our bliss.

But if we use it to pull people out of poverty, that's great. Your fame, for example, you're well-known. People recognize you in the airport for sure. But here's the thing. That can't make you happier. What it can do is make you more magnetic and have people seek the source of your power, which is your belief and your bliss, and that will lift them up. And that's how it works. Use what could have been an idol as a way to refract to the greater glory and bliss of other people.

That's a powerful reminder, because I feel like, you know, I have some friends that are, like, truly famous. Yeah, we have mutual friends. We're truly famous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mutual friends. And there's a level of, I mean, it's, I feel like, incredibly burdensome from the outside at times, but also it depends from where it's being received when somebody comes up to you, especially for me in like small pockets where people come up to me. If it's like, if it's a received from the head or if it's received from the heart, they have two completely different qualities. One can be inflationary or deflationary. The other one is just like being appreciative that whatever you've done has some sort of semblance of impact on people. That's absolutely

true. And by the way, that's a very good point. If you're an actor who gets like really, really famous and people yell, I love you from moving cars because of a character that you played that's not you. That's hugely alienated. That's really, really bad for you. Right? I mean, you have to be incredibly well. I love you for who you're not. I know, exactly. And, you know, I've been on tour. My last book was with Oprah Winfrey. We co-authored a book. And that was an incredible experience. She's one of the five most famous people in the world. She's incredibly well-equilberated emotionally because she understands. who she is. And many people forget who they are because of what other people project onto them. On the other hand, people are going to come up to you and say, I really, really love your work and it's helped me in my life. And they love you for the true essence of who you are, which is a great blessing. That's the least obnoxious fame you could possibly ever have. Yeah, no, I love, we just had Joe Hudson on. Do you know? You guys would really like. No, uh, this is amazing human being who just talked a bit about humility and how it's like, honoring your God-given place on the planet.

Right. And so even in, you know, the reflection of your bigness or appreciation from somebody who's been impacted by your work, disowning it or not acknowledging who you are in the role that you've had and impacting others is not this altruistic thing that you're telling yourself. You know, it's actually a shadow aspect to not own and accept who you are and the impact you have. That's not humility, actually. That's false humility. Yeah, exactly. is to, humility is, is not thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less.

Yeah. It's living in the eye self. So William James talked about the eye self and the me self. The eye self is looking outward at the world and blessing the world. The me self is looking in it yourself and saying, what do they think about me? You need to be able to do both. You can't drive if you don't think about others in traffic and what you're doing.

The problem is that Mother Nature wants you to stay in the me self all day long and it creates great misery, and it creates great idolatry, and it creates great harm. Living more in the eye self to understand who you are perfectly, but to not dwell on it, that's the secret. What have you learned about self-transcendence from the Dalai Lama? Yeah, self-transcendence has two aspects to it. One is vertical and the other is lateral.

So vertical self-transcendence is one in which you stand in awe of something greater than yourself, and lateral transcendence is to serve, other people selflessly. And both of them gets you into the eye self and out of the me self in a way that's actually the best kind of experience because it's blessing the world. It's a blessing to the world or it's a blessing to the divine. And both of those things are incredibly good for understanding the meaning of your life. Now, neurobiologically, it's because these are right hemispheric experiences. But once again, I believe that the spiritual realm has

physical manifestations. So this does not rule out the metaphysical properties and the ultimate truths that we're talking about here. So he talks about this all the time that there is a sameness to worshiping the divine and serving others. That in point of fact, you serve the divine when you serve others. You worship the divine when you serve others. And when you serve others, you're worshipping the divine, whether you believe in the divine or not. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could look at it through Spinoza's conception, right, pantheistic kind of conceptions of God, not being two separate things, you know, all the natural world and human beings. I'm curious, do you view all life around you as God or as created by God

or the same thing? Is it semantic? Well, so all being God and being created by God can be one and the same when God is, I am. The great misconception of God, according to Aquinas, and according to you know, all great, both Abraham and even karmic philosophers, is the idea that God is something in the world. You know, that's idolatrousness. That's idolatry. It just is, you know, that God is a guy with a beard in the sky and he's up there. He's mad. He's pissed, man. He's really pissed because, you know, sorry. It's like, he saw what you were doing last night. And that's just, it's just nutty. But when God appears to Moses in the burning bush, and he said, he basically, and Moses is like, so what's your name? And God is like, I am, right?

I am. That's important. And that's a really important concept that we can only understand metaphorically. St. Augustine said, if you think you understand God, you don't. Right? And the ancients would say

that you need the via negativa to understand the divine, which is not this, not this, not this. In Sanskrit, neti, neti, neti, neti, an notman. The whole concept of what God isn't is the whole thing. And the best metaphor for understanding this,

this is my father's metaphor. My father was a great, was a most brilliant man I ever knew. He was a biostatistician and deeply religious. Biostatistician. Yeah. So he was a, you know, he was a scientist, but he was a brilliant scientist, but he was a deeply religious Christian. And he said that if I, he said, if I were a scholar of Picasso,

I'd need to know two things. All about Picasso's paintings and all about the man. And I can't get information about the one by looking at the other. I can't find any information about Picasso the man by looking at his paintings because he's not in there. Similarly, if I revel in the creation, it's wonderful, which I do as a scientist. I'm in awe. But you know what? I want to know the creator too.

I want to know the creator too. You know, that's what I want. I want the painting and I want the painter. That's where it really comes down to. That's the fulsome knowledge. That's the, that's holistic in the understanding. of what it's all about. That's the ultimate experience that I seek. And that's the reason that my faith and my reason complement each other, ultimately. Yeah. And this gets matched to your

point about the things unseen. The ultimate thing unseen is the ultimate seer. That's how I understand God, is an example of what can't be seen because it's not in the creation. It made the creation. Yeah. What you refer to about kind of on some level admitting your own ignorance. I read this book recently, the unknown craftsman. It's a Japanese insight into beauty. Oh, nice. I haven't read it. I have to understand this. Yeah, it's great. Tell me more. There is one Arabian saying, which it quotes, if a man knows and knows not that he knows, shun him. If a man knows and knows that he knows not awaken him. If a man knows and knows that he knows, follow him. And it's a beautiful kind of Zen and Buddhist kind of take on the knowledge of ignorance.

Like knowing that you don't know is a starting point. The Socrates idea that wisdom is a true recognition and understanding of your own lack of wisdom. That was the paradox of Socrates was exactly that. To know thyself, ultimately, is to know that or maybe the great sage Donald Rumsfeld got it right. there's no knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown unknowns, the basis of foreign policy. We've turned into blues clues or a. Seneca, death lies heavily on him who, though to all the world well known is a stranger to himself alone.

Yeah, that's the, that could have just been to model your show. Isn't that what it's all about? Who am I? Who am I? This is a huge mystery, but it's a huge adventure, isn't it? I mean, it's funny because we're being distracted from this question. I mean, the problem with engineered culture,

the tip of the spear of which is the supercomputer in the pocket, is that it militates against your show. That's the problem. You're being distracted from the one thing that you get to figure out, which is to know yourself, the ultimate mystery, the ultimate adventure. And you're being distracted from it by what, Twitter? Why would you distract yourself for one single second? And the reason is because it's an

uncomfortable bit of knowledge and because it's a hard question, because it's a complex question, and because you have bad habits, and because you're exhausted and, you know, because you had a bad day at work or because the thing is blinking and saying that somebody is on your notifications. It sounds like there's from the context of this whole conversation been a few very important aspects to be able to know yourself and discover your calling from these yearly spiritual retreats to the sacred time in the morning where you're not being stimulated by the outside world. Who do you believe you fundamentally are? I believe I'm a child of God, made in his image, put on earth to love and be loved, and to lift other people up. I believe I am put on

to glorify God to edify others. That's why I'm on earth. I do it poorly. I'm bad at my job. But I'm trying to get better. I disagree. Thank you. But I get a year or two or a couple of decades to actually figure out how to get that done.

And it's an absolute thrill to be an apprentice and the divine purpose that I believe is my life. That's what I am. Beautifully said. Thank you. Both now and earlier when you were speaking of your wife, there was this emotion bursting through your eyes and your being. I'm in love. I'm a man in love.

Yeah, man. This is, there are connections to our divine spirit. And that's what marriage is supposed to be. That's what we're supposed to be looking for. You know, so I talk to my students. I have a unit in my class called falling in love and staying in love. It's the most popular class, the most popular set of lectures that I,

give every semester because they're super interested in it. But it's very important that people understand what the purpose of this is. Dating is not for entertainment. It's serious business because you're looking for the person that can actually walk you into heaven and that you will walk into heaven, whatever heaven means to you. Because this is your divine connection. And again, like there's a lot of people watching us, but they're, you know, viewers of this show are not like, ah, it's all nonsense. They turned off the show a long time ago. They think that's nonsense. And, and, and romantic love is, you know, hooking up and no, no, no, no, the sexual revolution got this all wrong. It's divinity, man.

It's really, really deep and beautiful and serious business. And you're trying to find the person that is supposed to become your Sherpa in the business of the metaphysical. It sounds like from what I, the limited information I have between you and your wife, how you found her or she found or God found you both, whatever, to the journey you went on and saying yes and having children and adopting a child. I'm curious, have you talked much about that time when you guys went and you adopted a girl? Yeah, a lot. And it's interesting because, so we had two biological sons together. And that was great. But my wife at one point started having a dream, a recurring dream, about a little girl abandoned in a park in China.

Like, what the heck? Right? And at the time, I was actually doing research on charitable giving, on charitable behavior. And I found this really weird thing, which is that when people give in a particular way, it has catalytic impact on their life. So it's very easy to kind of sprinkle dollars out of a helicopter, right?

I mean, but it's fundamentally different in how it affects you and others when you try to change the whole dial for one person, right? And there's an ancient Talmudic saying from the book of the Sanhedron, a man who changes one person's life changes the whole world. Because each of us encapsulates the world, right? That's the union of the one and the all,

which is a weird thing, right? I mean, it's mathematically impossible, and yet spiritually all things are possible in this way. And I kept finding that when people did this, really changed, whole dial for a whole person, that life was different for everybody. And I was telling my wife about this while she's having this dream. She said, you know, I think we should adopt a baby. And I'm like, it's only a book. Like, Father of the Year. And so we started the process because she had me

dead to rights because she's spiritually a droid. And I'm just a guy. And we started through an adoption agency in Denver called Chinese Children Adoption International, which is a, you know, it's a great organization, the founder of which wound up being coming one of my students in my nonprofit management class at Harvard, of all things, by weird coincidence. And a great couple that does this. And the Chinese government at the time was doing a lot of these. There's 26,000 foreign adoptions in the year 2004, when we adopted our daughter. And they match, the government matches you up. It's like this completely murky. Nobody knows how this in numerology or computer algorithm, nobody knows how.

And the little girl, they tell you just a little bit about her. She was abandoned at 12 years old, 12 months old, 12, not 12 hours old. I'm getting, I mean, you know it wrong. She was abandoned at 12 hours old in a park in Southern China. It was my wife's dream. It was weird. And we went through the process, and about a year later, we got to go pick her up. She was 15 months old.

And my wife couldn't go because she was not a citizen. So she couldn't execute an adoption. We had two little kids at home. Somebody had to stay home with our boys who were at the time three and five. And so I went by myself. And they'd never seen a guy alone, right? It's like, what'd your wife die? No, she's dead to me.

And it was the most magical experience. It was like, it was weird because she was very shy. They said she's a shy baby. And she's never been around men. And so that's going to scare her. She freaks out when somebody takes her way from her nannies. There's nine nannies for 100 babies. babies. She hadn't been picked up very much. They mostly just sort of spend all day lying in a crib

15 months old, understimulated, et cetera. They did the best they could. And so I was really, really, really, really nervous. And they bring you into a room. And they, they, and they, they, my little baby, and they, she's like, grabs me like, like a monkey. And she looks up at me with her little eyes, a little like, cold eyes. And she would like, go. And I had to sign some papers. And so three minutes later, her nanny, she'd know the only person she knew, tried to take her back. She screamed bloody murder because she knew. The link was there. The cosmic link was there.

And ever since then, it's like, my baby, my baby, it's my baby. She's my baby. Every time she comes home, it's like that first day in the orphanage. She's 22. Wow. She's a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Wow. She's a badass.

Wow. And she comes home, and she's tough as nails, man. Four foot 11. And she's still my baby in the orphanage. I mean, it's without question what that's done for her and her life. What has that done for you in your life? I try to meditate so I can lift up the rest of the world. You know, the whole point is that what it's done for me

has helped me understand that what my life is really all about. Of course, it's been great for me. Of course it's been great for me. But I didn't do it so I could feel like a good person. I did it because I believe that this person was placed in my life, was placed in our life, and the knowledge was given to my wife, and I respect that. And it turns out it was this catalytic experience.

They really glued our family together, and now we're very close. My kids are all really different from each other, but, you know, we live near each other. I live in the same house with one of my sons and his wife and their kids. I live with my grandsons. The others are right up the street. But the whole point is it's been this experience of, you know, bringing home this baby and bringing us all together

and through the hard times and through the easy times, love is actually what keeps you together is what it comes down to. But you have to have a physical demonstration of that sometimes. We're dense, right? And you have to see the model of it. And a lot of us, when we see her, we still see the model of the person that was brought to us

that wasn't the product of genetics. It was the product of nothing more than a dream and a message from God and a decision, and all of these things are actually even more important than the flesh and the blood and the genetic similarity that we have. What does that taught you about the role of suffering in life? Yeah, you write extensively around that,

and I think suffering is something we're unknowingly, knowingly avoiding any second of every moment, you know, of every day, right? And it changes the script when you turn it on its head and put it into its proper place. I'm a big fan of suffering, you know. And part of the reason for that is that, I mean, just neurophysiologically, there's a guy at University of Wisconsin-Madison named Richard Davidson.

He also has worked a lot with the Dalai Lama, actually. Great neuroscientist. And he's found that the right hemisphere of the brain is way more active when you're suffering, when you're experiencing negative emotions, aversive emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. That's when you're right brain. And the way that you've, they test this, by the way, is you look at the musculature of the face. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the face, the left side of the body. When you involuntarily, you use muscles in the left side of your face.

It means your right side is more active and that's more common when you're suffering. It's what it comes down to. So we know that. Now, the right side of the brain is also implicated in understanding meaning. And so not coincidentally, almost certainly. And this is only plausible. There's been no tests of this, but it makes perfect sense. that that's why when you ask people,

when they really experience their life's deepest meaning, that I was talk about something painful, that they talk about my mom died, my business went bankrupt, I got fired, I went to jail, really, really painful times in their life, and they'll say, and that's when I had acute understanding of something.

I understood meaning in that particular way. The problem is that we have a tendency to want to avoid it because we hate pain. We're aversive to pain because of our, evolutionary biology. You know, pain means that there's a threat. And so we avoid it. We try to avoid pain. This is the great insight that the karmic religions have brought to us is that suffering is not the same thing as pain. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain. And that means we get two options. You can try to lower your pain or you can lower your

resistance to the pain. When pain is inconvenient and utterly avoidable, you might want to take a Tylenol when your back is hurting. But when pain is unavoidable, like by the way, most back pain, the way to deal with it is to accept it. That's the best way to live your life so that even when your pain is high, your suffering isn't. And in that lowering a resistance, you inevitably find more meaning in your life. And that's hard. How does one lower resistance in that equation? Generally speaking, it has to do with acceptance, understanding and acceptance. And there are many good traditions in Western therapy, psychotherapy, talk therapy to do that.

Jung talks about that a lot. I mean, there's a lot of therapeutic practices that talk about finding, that lowering your resistance to pain by understanding it, using metacognitive practices to sit with insight into the nature of your suffering without trying to lower it. And that's the way that we do that.

You know, every religious tradition talks about non-resistance. non-resistance. What does it come down to? You mean the Christian religion, my own religion, worships a guy hanging from a device of torture in the act of physical pain. Why? Because that's a metaphor for life itself and a metaphor for the ultimate meaning of life in the Christian religion. It's not coincidental that his suffering on the cross is emblematic of the meaning of life and that he's God. That's the ultimate solidarity that actually comes to us. The paradox of suffering is that when we try to avoid suffering, especially when we try

to avoid pain, we accidentally avoid meaning, and that leads to avoiding happiness. What's the link between that and beauty? Beauty is another way that you illuminate right hemispheric experiences. So the experience of beauty is beyond, is ineffable, fundamentally ineffable. And that comes in natural beauty, artistic beauty, or moral beauty. They're all ineffable experiences. Anything that's so beautiful that it makes you want to cry and you don't know why, that's because your language centers are not implicated.

That means you're having a right hemispheric experience. So you see that. You never look at somebody that you're attracted to sexually, and they're so beautiful that you want to cry. That's because it's a different kind of beauty, right? That's not what we're talking about. But you hear, I get really emotional. My favorite composer is Bach,

Johann Sebastian Bach, some greatest composer ever lived. Hugely spiritual guy, by the way. He said that aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the enjoyment of the soul. That's what he believed, right? And he would put to the glory of God

at the end of every manuscript, right? And, you know, he had 20 kids. Wow. This is, like, I was productive. And, you know, I listen to Bach, man. It's just hugely emotional. When I talk about, when there's certain things that I see in natural beauty,

when I see examples of moral beauty, there's a great psychologist named Rhett Deezner. who's the world's leading expert on moral beauties. He'd be good to have on the show, as a matter of fact. He's Rain Wilson's uncle. Oh, wow. Of all things. Isn't that weird?

We love Rayne. We were just talking about before. Yeah, yeah. He's fantastic. He's a great friend. And I just knew his uncle's work. I didn't know he was his uncle. That's weird, isn't it?

And he talks about moral elevation, what it makes you feel physiologically. But these are the things to go look for. One of the things that I recommend to almost everybody who's struggling with the meaning of life is to experience more beauty. And I mean, go for a hike. I mean, I look out the window of your house.

It's like stunningly beautiful, California hills and mountains. Incredible. Listen to the work of Bach or whatever actually does bring you to tears in beauty. Experience the moral beauty of people that are exemplars. Read the life of Mother Teresa. Somebody who really is a deep moral exemplar. This will illuminate the right hemisphere. This will give you the complex experience of life's meaning.

fully agree and I think for me like how viewing myself as like reflecting in my ability to craft an environment that reavokes that sense of beauty

for me has been one of the most I think fundamental aspects of bringing more beauty into myself and in the world it's been absolutely huge for sure for sure and you become an integrated person the technologized life is not beautiful

there are a lot of people whose greatest exposure to nature is what they see through the screen. You know, a picture of Lake Louise is not the same thing as Lake Louise. It affects your brain differently. It's filtered through the left hemispheric concept of a complicated simulacrum for the true thing. Well, you know, I go to Lake Louise. Exactly right. And it's all choked up.

And, you know, it was, life is beautiful, but it's got to be real life. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. you know, not a fake, you know, tell ChatGBT, GPT to give me an example of moral beauty. No. Real person. Go figure. The real world.

IRL. Yeah. That's the only place for you going to find the beauty. I mean, life is strikingly less beautiful. There's some pretty good analysis that suggests that music is getting less beautiful. And the experiences that people have as filtered through the screens are less beautiful. And God knows on the Internet, there's not that much moral beauty out there. your show is an exception,

which is why you do it, right? Thank you. Thank you, man. Your work is, man, I'm all in perfect timing, but I'm very happy at this moment that we were able to get connected and have you come on. Me too, thank you. You know, I live for these kind of conversations.

It gives me so much life, and likewise for you. I see you come online and you're so passionate. And do you have any last words on that aspect? How when you, like there's a level of intelligence and impact that becomes possible, like the capacity for that becomes possible when you're in alignment with what you truly love to be doing. Like there's another gear that kicks into place. You don't get burned out as easily because your fuel source is fundamentally different. Any words there?

Yeah. I mean, we talked a little bit about, you know, being needed by earning. your success and serving other people, and that does not depend on the exact activity, even over the course of a single person's life, to be sure. But it also requires that you be in equilibrium that you have, let me see if I can put it into a formula, right? I'm kind of about formulas at the end of the day. When you're not feeling it, when things are out of alignment,

even if you're successful, it almost always means you're following a particular worldly formula. And, and here's what it is. You are loving things. You're using people and you're worshipping yourself. That's the, the dark formula. There's darkness in the world. And that's the dark formula. Now, how does darkness work? It takes the light and changes it a little, right? And the reason that people fall for this is not because it's so outlandish. There's nothing outlandish about what I said. It sounds a little right. And the reason it sounds a little right is because it's just off. Just off.

Here's the formula that if we can correct and live according to it, it will bring us the meaning that we seek and thus the happiness that we crave in greater abundance. Use things. It's great. It's a world of abundance. It's so beautiful. Use them. Enjoy them. Right?

And like, seriously, I mean, it's great. I mean, people who are trying to be so acetic all the time and feel. guilty about eating that wonderful dinner or having a watch that you think is nice and reading the time off it. Use things with joy, but don't love them. Don't let them use you. No, and because love is only designed for people. Love is for people and worship is only for the divine. Use things, love people, worship the divine, and all will be well. Don't love. things, use people, and worship yourself. Yeah.

Because the best news of the day is you're not God. Great news. You're not God. Because that would be a pretty grim in the universe, right? Oh, man. So good. So good. Any last words for the whole context of this conversation?

If you had like one last message to give to our listeners, what comes to mine? Yeah. I mean, it's funny because, you know, the formula I just gave is sort of is, it's not reductive, but it does reduce things to things that you can actually remember. In, you know, in, it's, in the Bible, there's the 10 commandments. And the 10 commandments are summarized in Deuteronomy 6, which in Hebrew is called the Shema. And the Shema is love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all

your means, right? And then Jesus is asked in the new. Testament to sum that up. He says, I mean, because, you know, the Ten Command says, a lot to remember. He said, don't worry about it. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself, right? And that's all you need to remember. Okay. So then St. Augustine and, you know, three centuries later, it's like, that's kind of a lot to remember. So then he says, here's what you remember. Love and do what you will. St. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 in the Summa Theologia then defines love to will the good of the other as other.

That's what it comes down to. So if you don't know what to do, right, and you can't remember the formula we talked about a minute ago, notwithstanding your feelings because Aquinas says, it's not a feeling. Love isn't a feeling. It's an act. It's a commitment, right? It's not to, Jesus didn't say to like your enemies. You said to love your enemies, notwithstanding your feelings, that's power.

Love and do what you will. Love and do what you will. Make the conscious decision to love and do what you will. And that's where you'll find happiness. And that's where you'll find meaning. And that's what to do today, no matter how dark things feel. Thank you. Mike drop.

I appreciate it a lot. Yeah, we'll leave links down where people can stay connected with you and your work in your book. You're just a fire hose of wisdom and love and passion. And I appreciate you and the force you are in the world. my friend. I'm really grateful to be with you. I'm really grateful for what you're doing. You're putting something out there in the world that the world really, really needs. And by the way, using the means that are so often misused and using it as a force for good shows that the problem

isn't the means. The problem is actually how we use them. Your show is an example of the fact that we can turn anything to love. Oh, good. Thank you. I appreciate you. It means a lot. And yeah, I feel so complete and fulfilled after these conversations, man. Yeah, walking each other to heaven. Right on, man. You, you, your wife, and me. Let's do it. Let's do it.

I'll see you there. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody who's been tuning. God bless you. Yeah, God bless.

And I love your tea. Oh, yeah. It's good stuff, eh? All right. Until next time, everyone, be well.