Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out - 195. Arthur Brooks: The Science of Happiness and Humor

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Arthur Brooks might be the only Working It Out guest who's crossed paths with Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. He’s a professor and bestselling author, whose books include The Happiness Files, From Strength to Strength, and Build the Life You Want, which he co-authored with Oprah. Mike sits down with Arthur, whose speciality is the science of happiness, to explore what goes on in the brains of comedians and audiences at comedy shows. They discuss creative productivity, how Arthur prepares his lectures, and the benefits of gratitude.Please consider donating to Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steve Martin wrote about this once where he said, as comedians, people typically get less funny as they get older because the dark things that we joke about when we're younger happen to people you know or happen to you. Yeah, well, part of it is, and it was okay. And it was okay. And it was okay part is really the salient part of us. Right.

If the bad thing happened to me and I was always worried about, it was worse than I thought. That's still funny. That's still funny, man. You're going to still be able to find plenty of humor in that. But the whole thing happened to me. I got sick and I got through it. There's nothing funny about that.

Right. About getting, it's like, yeah, this really, it's like my spouse had a huge affair and broke up with me and humiliated me publicly. And I survived. Right. Great punchline, man. Great punchline, man. That is the voice of the great Arthur Brooks. This is a fascinating episode today.

Arthur Brooks, someone I've been following for a while. He's an author. He's a professor. He's a scientist. His specialty is in the science of happiness. He's written many, many books. He and I crossed paths a few months ago, and we were in touch about something,

and then we thought, oh, it might be interesting to talk about the interrelationship between happy, and comedy and laughter. And it ended up being a fascinating conversation. He's at a really interesting life. He was a professional musician in Spain. He teaches at Harvard.

He co-authored a book with Oprah. We don't usually get the chance to dive into this sort of like brain science of humor and laughter. So I was glad to have the opportunity to talk to him about that kind of stuff today. By the way, thanks everybody who has listened to the premium episode that we just dropped with Pete Holmes. We had the regular Pete Holmes episode. and then we had the premium feed episode with me and Pete Holmes punching up your jokes that you sent in

and if you sign up for the premium feed, we really appreciate it. You get no ads in any of the episodes and then you get these bonus episodes seemingly about once a month. I think we're working on another one for December. So make sure to go on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to working it out premium

to hear those episodes and get the ad-free version. And also if you don't, that's fine too. We have 200 episodes all free. I wanted to announce on here that I will be appearing in the Broadway show All Out from January 13th through 18th alongside Cessly Strong, Wayne Brady, and others All Out. It is of course written by the great Simon Rich who wrote for S&L and has written for The New Yorker and has written a bunch of really funny books. Just a very funny person. He wrote a show called All In last year that it was John Malaney and Fred Armisen and all these great people.

and this one is a sequel. It's called All Out. And you can get tickets at all-outbroadway.com. I love this conversation with Arthur Brooks. I can say, with some certainty, he's the only guest on the podcast who knows Oprah and Jerry Seinfeld and the Dalai Lama. Enjoying my conversation with the great Arthur Brooks.

Comedians are. especially good at reading rooms are incredibly good at reading rooms and part of the reason is because there are so many different ways that we express positive and negative emotion but people go into a comedy club for example ready to express a lot of positive emotion and you need the truth yeah especially when you're working it out yeah you need the truth and so you have you get really good filter yes about when somebody's laughing politely 85% of laughter is social lubricant not based on humor for 85% yeah you know you see somebody that you like you grew up with you're like laughing the whole time there's no jokes going on right it's true it's absolutely true and 15 because you want it to go well yeah yeah totally and this is

actually you want and you want to fire the mere neurons in your friend's brain and the way that you do that is by expressing positive emotion yeah and so that's 85 percent and so if you're a comedian and every time somebody laughs you're like hey that joke killed it's like 85 percent of the time you're wrong yeah and so you get super good and at that sussing out that 15 percent for yourself and for other people. You're naturally super good behavioral scientist. Right. I get that. And Chris Rock, of course, is the greatest at this

because before his specials, he'll come into the comedy cellar, which is 150 people in a basement in New York City, and he will do his jokes with no inflection. Yeah. Because he wants to know that... Does it work? Will these words at neutral, with no affect, with no, that's Chris Rock,

with no, he's doing something exciting. Right. Do the words, are the words themselves funny? And is the cadence of the word. So it's really super interesting when you study this stuff, which is important for me because I'm, you know, I'm standing in front of audiences all the time. Yeah.

I need to understand how this stuff works, but studying comedy is incredibly good for actually talking about science in front of popular audiences who are not scientists, right? Part of the reason is because telling a joke at the six to eight minute cadence is super, important for actually resetting the attention of the audience. When you say six to eight minute cadence once every six minutes, tell a joke.

So every six to eight minutes, your natural attention span is six to eight minutes. And if you're an academic and you try to go 15 minutes, you're going to lose them and they're not going to understand what you're talking about. So every six to eight minutes, you need to reset, let them get off the bike. Yeah. And then do something fun for 60 seconds, 60 to 90 seconds, and then put them back on the bike and they start back up the hill again. Yeah. But the best way to do that is to give them a little surprise.

So there's a little part of your brain, the Olympic system of your brain, called a parahippocampal gyrus. When you flick it. Rolls off the tongue. When you flick it a little bit, that's what surprise and the surprise is met with amusement laughter.

And so comedians like you are super good at in these great Netflix specials, congratulations in the news one, love it. The great thing about it is that you know just the right amount of flick. yeah naturally too much of a flick and people are like you know he dropped an f-bomb in front of kids right that's too much of a flick on the peri hippocampal gyrus or people or you like make a joke about a hurricane that just went through and people lost their loved ones sure or if it's like not enough

of a flick it's what your daughter thinks is funny because she's 10 that's a dad joke right not enough of a flick and people are of course all right we get it's not enough of a flick yeah but there's right in the middle there where really really good comedians can actually do that and then extremely efficiently, that changes the attention and then you're able to reset them. And it's interesting because that's hard for us civilians.

It's a hard thing to do. Then I can give examples to my class of I can flick their parahippocampal gyrus with kind of a dumb joke and they'll laugh. Naturally, even at a dumb joke, if you do it right. Like, you know, I want, you know, the old joke. I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather,

not screaming in terror like his passengers. That's funny. And that what happened was, it's, I mean, but you just laugh politely because... No, no, I followed the logic of it and I enjoyed it. At the end was that, that was that neurocognitive thing. But actually, the one who, somebody who gave me really great advice

on how to tailor the joke in the right way, not neurocognitively, was Jerry Seinfeld. Huh. Who came to a talk, I gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Yeah. And I was in the middle of an hour-long lecture on the science of love. Yeah.

And in the middle, I knew I was at the six to eight-minute mark because I'd been working it out. Mm-hmm. And I stopped. Thank you. Thank you. Uh-huh. And during, I stopped because I had this, like, 90-second little riff. I knew it was going to talk about.

It was a thing about how parents and their kids, they interact with each other in a very different way. We're way, way, way too protective today of kids. And they were way underprotective when I was growing up in the 70s. Yeah. So I said, when I was a kid, for example, you know, I had a paper route. I was going up in Seattle.

4 o'clock in the morning all by myself and it was the neighborhood that Ted Bundy had been marauding through right and then and in the same era it was about

he was in the late 60s and I was in the mid-70s but there was this mania about serial killers everybody was talking about serial killers and my mom read a newspaper story about serial killers and that Ted Bundy had been in our neighborhood

and she said to my dad we had to let little Arthur has to stop doing this paper route. Yeah. And my dad, who was on my side, he wanted me to be able to keep the route. He had a PhD in biostatistics, and he made a statistical argument to my mother

saying, actually, I've been looking at the data and Arthur doesn't fit the core demographic of a serial killer, so he should be able to keep the route. That's really funny. And so, okay, so that, and I told the joke, and they're kind of, it got kind of a laugh. And then afterward, Jerry Seinfeld was in the audience, and I'm thinking, that guy looks like Jerry Seinfeld.

Turns out it was. And it comes up later and he says, you know how to make that joke really kill? And I said, how? And he said, don't say Ted Bundy because you just personalize the serial killer. Just say serial killer. And then it's a general concept

and people have permission to laugh. And I tried it the next night and it just killed. Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's a great tweak. But the whole point is that he knew how much to flick their parahippocampal gyrus. I do the inverse of what you're describing

in the sense that I do joke, joke, joke, in every six or eight minutes, there's a truism. Yeah, yeah. An unfunny truism. Well, there's a thing in there that makes people go, huh, that's my life too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's how you're actually letting them off the bike. Well, it's the thing that, like an example of this, and I've seen you talk about this exact topic, is there's a moment in my show, The Good Life, where I say, kids don't know anything, but they absorb everything. And the audience goes, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

and that's the flick in the other direction because they've been seeing joke, joke, joke, joke. And then they're like, oh, fuck, that's actually true. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because we all kind of know that's true. That's right. That's right. And it's really interesting how you do this.

I've watched it and I've sort of diagramed as you've done these specials. Because it's super interesting to me as a behavioral scientist to see people who are at the top of their trade. Oh, thanks. At the top of their trade actually talking in front of audiences. Because that's what I do, right? Yeah, yeah. And I want to see people who are super good at it doing it in a very intuitive way. And their job is not the science.

it's actually the humor. So you really are doing the mirror image of the kind of thing that I'm doing. And what you're doing is you're making sure that people actually trust you as a comedian by saying true things about their lives. And that's not just... I mean, you can do it in kind of a, you know,

cheesy way which is just pure observational humor. What's up with Starbucks? Or it's like, who cares? Right. But if you actually say, you want your kid to grow up and go to church? Right. She needs to see you on your knees, man.

Right. Because that's going to have a cognitive impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny because that is one of the things I've heard you say. And I'm at a personal, I would say inflection point with this because I am not religious. I don't practice, but raised religious, raised Catholic. And when I see you talk about religion and your faith and others talk about their faith,

I have complete and total respect for it. Yeah. But I'm somewhat ambivalent about it. You don't feel it. Yeah, and so what am I going to fake it? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sounds good.

Yeah, and part of the issue is done. Well, you know, life, the things that we care about the most are not feelings. You know, the truth of the matter is that your marriage is not about your feelings. Your marriage is about your commitments. That's the man that you are. Mike Priviglia is about commitments and decisions. True. Not about temporary feelings.

True. I mean, if you, look, I'm married 34 years. If it were about my feeling, I'm married to a Spaniard. I mean, fighting in anger are part of the daily vernacular of life. It's like mother's milk. If it were about my feelings, I wouldn't have been married 34 minutes. Right.

You know, the truth of the matter is, I've decided that she's my Dulcinea and I'm Don Quixote and that she's the last person on which I'm going to take my last gaze as I take my dying breath. Wow. Because that's my decision. Yeah.

You know, and that's where that's the life and life. Right. That's where we're living in the space of our moral aspiration as opposed to our animal impulse. Yeah. And that's a really, really, important thing and that's true for all of the things that really matter the most so you think i should fake it yeah should just go to church well i don't think you should just go to church i think that you should

basically say i'm i've decided to have an open heart i've decided i'm going to open my mind to this interesting and and you know there's a bunch of different ways to do that that might mean i've decided i'm going to pray every day yeah i've decided i'm going to read as literature the gospel of luke and the acts of the apostles right and because that's one quarter of the new testament that's kind of read it. It's just like, wow, it's blowing my mind. Yeah. I'm going to read the Proverbs. I'm going to read it. Yeah. I'm going to read it. And then, you know, once on a Wednesday, I'm going to go down to the local parish and on, you know, the 830 master's, I'm going to sit in the back and go, huh, as if it were the first time. Yeah. That's what I'm, I'm just going to make a

decision to do that. See, there's a, there's, religious belief or religious, religiosity has three parts to it. It has feelings, beliefs, and practices. And we often think, because society tells us incorrectly, that for you to practice something, you've got to believe it, and for you to believe it, you have to feel it. That's exactly wrong. That's exactly the wrong thing. On the contrary, you should practice, and then sometimes you'll believe, and occasionally you'll feel it. And that's the story of all of your love relationships. Well, it's funny, because that was my relationship of me to stand-up comedy, I think. Oh, tell me more. This is interesting. Well, I think, like, when I was in college, I had a sense of, like,

of like, okay, this is something. I want to be a comedy writer. I want to write for Conan O'Brien's Late Night Joe. It was in the 90s. And then there was the funniest person on campus contest. And I was like, oh, let me write something for that. I performed it and I won and I got the chance to perform in a club nearby. And I read an article in the New Yorker about Richard Pryor's writing process, how he would go up on stage and he would essentially bomb and then come back

the next week and bomb with the new 10 minutes and then bomb with a new 10 minutes. And I was like, let me try that. And I went to like a series of open mics that summer in Virginia. And I would say like I was not, I was mostly bombing and I don't think anyone really enjoyed it, but I got a lot better at it. And eventually I understood the value of it. It's all reps. Yeah. It's really all reps. And then you also have to learn from the reps. Yeah. And people, and I always do that. I was like, I hope it goes better tomorrow night. No, no, no, no, no.

As soon as you're off stage, the notebook is out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This didn't work. The timing was off on this. So I'll do, when I have a new talk, you know, usually my talks are 40 minutes long. That's the typical length. And it has a whole bunch.

There's the neuroscience section, and there's the how-to section, and here's the, you know, the feng shui of a speech is the three things that you should actually do so that you can absorb the science into your life. Here's how you go teach it to your family. You know, that also sort of the same structure. But the first 25 times that I do it,

the first thing that I'm doing when I get off the stage is I'm taking notes on what went wrong and how I can, that part doesn't work. It's like, I've tried that five times that's still not working. And so it's a large part of the same process. If you're not, if you're not bombing, you're not learning.

Yes. It's really, it's a, because you're not trying anything new. That's right. You have this thing you reference about performance, which I think is just so true, which is this magician from the 1920s who... Howard Thurston.

Howard Thurston. Yeah. Who, when someone asked him how he keeps it fresh, he said, before I go on, I express gratitude for the audience. And I think that that is something I do and it's something that took,

but it took me a long time to get there. In my 20s, I thought it was all about me in my 30s and 40s. I've come to realize, no, no, no, it's all about them. So my question to you is, like, how do you teach that when a kid in their 20s, in some ways, maybe can't learn that? Right, right. So everybody can't. But first, let's recognize why it's hard.

We are not evolved to be grateful. We are ungrateful wretches by evolution. And the reason for that is that Homo sapiens, during the Pleistocene, very dangerous time, you know, 200,000 years ago. Sure. I mean, there was a tiger ready to gobble you up at any single second, which means that if you're, you need to be ungrateful. and suspicious and hostile and sad and anxious all the time, or you're gonna die. That's the reason that there's literally more tissue

dedicated in your limbic system of your brain to negative emotions and positive emotions. We're made to be bummed. That's the bottom line. And so you need to manually override this consciously so that you can supersede negative emotionality with positive emotionality, but it doesn't come naturally. So gratitude is something you have to manually use

to override your ingratitude. And the problem is, we're not taught to do that. And there's a bunch of techniques for doing that in the behavioral science literature that are really, really useful and interesting. The first is gratitude lists. And this comes from Robert Emmons, who's this great social psychologist, who's sort of the godfather of gratitude studies. Yeah. I have a column coming out. I used to joke about this, which is I started a gratitude journal. So far, it's empty, but I'm hopeful. But it really was, it is hard to keep up with the gratitude journal. You have to routinize it. The same way you routinize your workouts.

Okay. You have to do something that doesn't feel natural, but it's a lot. It's that is something you want to do, and then when you can override the conscious decision to do it by making it automatic, which then you stop using your prefrontal cortex, which is where you make your executive decisions, and you start using your nucleus accumbens, which is your habitual behavior going around your prefrontal cortex. That's when you get up and do a thing,

even though it used to be unpleasant and now it's automatic. That's why your life gets better. That's good habits. That's also why it's so hard to quit smoking. That's why it's so hard to quit cussing when you have kids is because your nucleus accumbens is cussing, not your prefrontal cortex. And so habitual behavior is hard to break.

These brain terms are challenging. I know. Psychology actually sort of is biology. And so, it also just makes me look smart and I'm just trying to like impress you. Yeah, no, I'm impressed, I'm impressed. Thanks, I appreciate that. Our version of it in our house is Rosebud Thorn.

That's a gratitude journal of sorts. You know that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jenny Noon and I'll do, what was your rose today? Yeah, exactly. What was your thorn? And then what's your bud for tomorrow.

And that's a gratitude journal Yeah, for sure. And all that is is making gratitude salient. Yeah. And making it conscious. And then it becomes more automatic after that. So I recommend a gratitude journal where you're writing down five things you're really grateful for on Sundays and then looking at it each day for a couple of minutes and updating it on Sundays. And the data show that you can raise your actual life satisfaction, subjective life well-being by between 6% and 12% by about 10 weeks.

But just that exercise. Second way to do that is to be overtly great. to somebody in sort of an on-purpose way, relatively. In a lascivious way and obnoxious and overbearing. Overbearing. It's like making it really comfortable. Oh my God, thank you so much. Truly, you go up to the suck-up zone immediately.

Very affected. So Monday mornings write two texts to people that you're actually grateful to you. So that's the second way. The third way is public gratitude towards somebody whether you know them or not and say, this is somebody's work who's really, really helping me and you put it on social media. Use social media for gratitude more. Yeah.

Without getting into the suck-up land. Yeah. Right? And then the last place is just meditating thoughts about gratitude, sort of loving kindness meditation. Yeah. But gratitude meditation toward other people. And if you have a protocol of those four things,

your life really changes a lot. You start to override the natural and gratitude from your ancestral environment. As a comedian, people expect me to be funny. Yeah. As someone who's written about happiness, do people expect you to be happy. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Yeah, they do. And that's actually not the way it works at all. Of course. Because I study happiness because I want it. Yeah, and I want it for a reason. Right. Because it doesn't come easily to me. Because it's not easy.

Yeah, no, no. I mean, it's like I'm, I come from gloomy stock, man. Half of your happiness is genetic. You know, your mother literally made you unhappy. What do you mean by gloomy stock? That means that you're, if your parents are on the lower end of positive affect, you'll tend to be more on the lower end of positive affect. Yeah.

is the intensity of your positive emotions. Your positive and negative emotionality are produced in different parts, different hemispheres of the brain, but also in different parts of the limbic system. Yeah. Every one of your emotions has a specific evolutionary reason for existing.

Yeah. We sort of regret fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, which are the four negative emotions. They kept you alive. Yeah. You should be, like, down on your knees, grateful for your fear. I am, I am.

You know, it's like, because you didn't get run over today. And, you know, you jump out of the way of a car because your limbic system says that's a predator, you know, jump is kind of how that works. And so the intensity of those emotions, however, can make your life really uncomfortable, and a lot of that is actually genetic.

Right. If you have a genetic proclivity towards sadness and anxiety, you need better habits. And better habits actually start with knowledge. The reason I study and talk about happiness is because I'm sad and anxious a lot. Yeah. And I want to manage it.

I don't want it to manage me. That's kind of what it comes down to. And by the way, I know a lot of comedians and comedians are funny. Oh, don't get me started. Oh, yeah, you know more comedians than I do. No, but I know exactly what you're going to say. Comedians are, we have a depressive streak.

Yeah. And also, by the way, it's the thing, like you're saying, it's your limbic system that keeps you alive. It's your understanding as a comedian of sadness that allows you to make jokes about things that are sad. And that's a particular neurocognitive ability is to flick the parahepicampal gyrus of people around you and you don't know why you're able to do it you just know that people laugh

and when you say something it makes people laugh you're less sad and so this turns out to be an emotional substitution technique that people are naturally funny who are also often naturally sad that they start doing and they get better and better and better at comedy even though they know they don't know it right and so that's what a lot of comedians have and that's why you've got the sort of the the sad clown thing jimmy car describes it as to you know at when you talk to a comedian, ask them which one of your parents was sick? Yeah. Because it's like a, it's a mechanism that you're able to help people.

Yeah, it's emotional substitution. You're also helping yourself. Because when you say something and other people laugh, it's a reward to you. Yeah. And that redirects your limbic system. You redirect yourself. What you're doing is you're inviting other people to redirect you. Yeah.

It's a kind of a complicated and indirect mechanism. Yeah. But that's what's going on. Like, lots of comedians watch this show. And my guess is that they never actually thought about what's going on in their brains. Uh-huh. And I hope I didn't ruin anybody's act.

No, I think that's... Because I don't think... Well, this is where it becomes this question about art. And if you get happy, does the art go away? And that's a big question. It's a big question. If you're in peace, that's actually more... When you're at peace, what happens?

You notice that a lot of people that they become less funny when they get older? Sure. You notice that a lot of people, that songwriters have less good songs, so they're older. Yeah. Poets. Now, part of that is this migration from what's called fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence. You're just less innovative as you get older, but you have more wisdom.

And so if you become more synthetic, you know, I went from writing mathematical treatises that were read by 14 people as an academic to now I write for the Atlantic and I have a big audience, but I'm retailing ideas. Because my crystallized intelligence brain is the teacher brain, as opposed to to the intellectual innovator brain. And so that's really important. I know comedians who actually get more synthetic in what they do as opposed to,

but they wanna be original. The whole point is, however, when you're older and you're more at peace, because most people are more at peace when they get older. Neuroticism drops a lot as you get older. Generally speaking, your personality gets better as you get older. You become more conscientious,

you become more agreeable, you become less neurotic. Those are the three dimensions of personality, three of the five dimensions of personality. So when you're more at peace, you're less, there's less tension. When there's less tension, you're less funny. Right. Because you're pursuing less emotional substitution.

That's interesting. Steve Martin wrote about this once where he said, as comedians, people typically get less funny as they get older because the dark things that we joke about when we're younger happen to people you know or happen to you. Yeah, well, part of it is, and it was okay. And it was okay. And it was okay.

And it was okay part is really the salient part of us. Right. If it, that bad thing happened to me and I was always worried about, it was worse than I thought. That's still funny. That's still funny, man. You're going to still be able to find plenty of humor in that.

But the whole thing happened to me. I got sick and, and I got through it. There's nothing funny about that. Right. About getting, it's like, yeah, it's really, it's like my,

my spouse had a huge affair and broke up with me and humiliated me publicly. survived. Right. Great punchline, man. Great punchline, man. something about procrastination. Yeah. Sorry, you write about procrastination in your book The Happiness Files.

Right. Which is something I think about all the time, which is the Hemingway quote, which is leave ink in the well. Right. And, you know, finish, you know, leave your work when it's at the 90% mark so that when you come back, you have essentially

like inertia coming into it. Can you talk about why that's true? Because I feel like it is true, and I live it all the time, but I don't even understand what's happening. So you probably have noticed, are you a morning person or night person? I write well in the morning. Okay. There's a reason for that. That's because your dopamine is highest in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Okay. So if you're diagnosed as a kid with ADHD,

you'll be given a psychostimulant that vacuums dopamine in your prefrontal cortex. Dopamine, we think of it as kind of a reward chemical. It's really focus creativity. That's what it does. It makes you able to focus on things. And when you're, if you take a psychostimulant that does that, you're able to focus on your work. And so you can actually focus on boring things. You need that as a creative to the max and you're going to get it the most for about. So Hemingley said he had two good hours of writing a day.

Now, he didn't have enough because he was an alcoholic. And that meant he was spending his dopamine and he was probably in a trough in the morning. So that's one of the reasons if you're creative, don't drink at night. Don't drink at night because you're going to have a dopamine trough and it's going to hurt your creativity in your best creative hours.

Wow. So that's really important. And you can optimize your dopamine levels by postponing your caffeine consumption for the first couple hours after you wake up and then having your caffeine right before you work. Don't use it to wake up, use it to focus. Use it as an ADHD drug, as it's like a stimulant.

For example, getting up early before the dawn is really good for you for doing that. For example, not drinking the night before. These are the protocols for creative productivity is how this actually works. So you're going to get, if you do everything right, you'll get maximum really creative four hours a day. You're not going to get more than that.

So leave all of your Zoom meetings and leave all that stuff for the afternoon. Never don't take anything anymore. This is exactly what I do. And you've done it naturally. You've done it organically. Yeah. Is this your workspace that we're in right now?

As a matter of fact, and I see that because it's like it says, you know, joke ideas on this board back here. It's like holes in planes. And what could be funnier than that? Yeah, hold in planes. There was a period last year. Remember two years ago?

People were getting sucked out. Yeah. Yeah, holes in planes. Yeah, holes in planes. I can't wait for that one. That's going to be your next Netflix special called Holes and Plains with Mike Burr Bigley. Comedy Strategy Plus Time. That'll come out in about five years.

So, you know, what you want to do is to structure your day around this. So anybody who, then tons of creators are watching the show. Yeah. And so restructure your day and make sure that you fix your habits that are obstructing that. Yes. So that's why, you know, what Hemingwood would get up pretty late in the morning because he was drunk. and he would get up too late and then he would probably at 10 o'clock in the morning

he would open his closet as his typewriter in his closet and to keep focused he'd look at the back wall of the closet and he would write for two hours and that was it and that was back to the bottle that's the way that works. That's a huge waste but it's directionally correct.

Get up earlier, go to bed the night before, don't use alcohol the night before, get up before the sun comes up. I recommend exercising without any psychostimulants. I recommend prayer meditation. then a huge hit of coffee and a bolus of protein and boom, you're going to get four hours

of maximum creativity because your brain is optimized for that. Now, here's the thing. As you go through that four hours, you have less and less and less dopamine and your prevalent cortex, which means that you're able to work but your creativity is waning.

You're focusing creativity and you're as good as they were, and that means the end of it is going to be worse than the beginning. You want the end of what you write to be even better than the beginning of what you wrote. So leave the last 10,

for the next day's dopamine. There you go. That's how it works. You know that I've never talked about this. I changed, you asked whether I'm a morning person or a night person for creativity. I changed it because I had this radical thing occur in my life where I sleep walked out through a second story window. That's a famous story because you actually, you know, you're all of Washington.

It's a true story. And I had to change. Yeah. Because I was writing into the night. You're a sinamist. Yeah. I was diagnosed with RBD, REM sleep behavior disorder. and had to change to save my life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I basically had to, and whenever people ask me this, I'm going to say this on the air today because I get endless questions about sleep because I have sleepwalking disorder. And people call me, I have to go. You should either see a doctor about this

and or just read a book, read the promise of sleep. There's another book called sleep. There's a lot of books on sleep hygiene, but you can change your habits so that you're not, this is the analogy is not mine, but I think it's the best way to put it. You're not crashing into sleep,

but you're landing into sleep. And it's like a really crucial thing for sleep health. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So you talk about how for you being happy is waking up at 4.30? 4.30? 5.30? I get up at 530. I mean, on the weekends, I'm with my wife,

and I often get up at 5.30. Because, you know, I'm living large. Yeah, yeah. eat protein, you don't drink coffee right away. I mean, there's a whole thing. Usually two to two and a half hours. And there's a whole neuroscience on coffee consumption. Andrew Huberman's great on this.

Yeah. Andrew Huberman has changed the behavior of a lot of people because he's explained how coffee actually works at the molecular level. Yeah. And once you actually kind of visualize what coffee's doing, you're like, oh, I want to use it in the right way. Right.

I want to use it in a way that helps me. Right. As opposed to just chasing away last night's beer. but that's but that's happiness for you but when i when i view that or that's part of your formula what it is i'm it helps me to be the person that i want to be okay which helps me to become less unhappy right it's a it's a little more complicated than you know then yeah a lot of greek yogurt in the morning makes me happy on the contrary right right you're right you're strategizing on your own inherent in unhappiness high negative affect yeah really

intense negative affect. Because for me, I look at that, I go, well, that would make me miserable. Waking up at 4.30 in the morning, it seems like it would be making me miserable. For a minute, for a minute. Right, but you think I get over it? I don't like it.

It's not like, you know, I'm not naturally. For the longest time, I just thought it was a night owl. Yeah. And I was just a hard drinking musician. And that's different. And I was able to shift my chronotype, but it took habitual behavior. Part of your chronotype is genetic, to be sure.

And I still don't get up without an alarm clock. I still need an alarm clock. right and but but it's so worth it to shift your chronotype because the benefit is so much higher than the cost the Dalai Lama blurbed your book and that happened the Dalai Lama blurbed your book and that happened did you consider retiring I've been working with Dalai Lama pretty closely for about 12 years now. Oh, yeah, me too. How similar is the Dalai Lama to Oprah?

Nice transition. I love a connective tissue here. It's like... Your next level name dropper. You're like, I know Oprah, I know the Dalai Lama. I didn't drop that name. No, no, I'm just saying, because she blurbed your book and you've worked on some stuff together.

We co-authored a book together. So my last book was called Build a Life You Want and came out in 2023, and she and I co-authored it. What are three things people don't know about Oprah? Because we know everything. Yeah, no, I mean, because she's been an intensely public person for decades. She's a legend. She's probably one of the five most famous people in the world.

The important thing to understand about Oprah is because as a behavioral scientist, I'm really interested in people in public life. And it's not natural to be in public life. No. It's not, it's being famous is one of the weirdest things that can happen to somebody. 100%. It's, and part of the reason. is because your brain can't accommodate fame.

We want to rise in a social hierarchy, but we're built for bands of 30 to 50 individuals. And so if, you know, in 1650, the Pope could walk down the street in Paris and go unnoticed. Right, because there's no photos, videos. And so more and more and more, we're in a state of unbelievable cognitive dissonance

because we want this rising to the top of our band of 30 to 50, but doing so means becoming internet famous, which is disequalibrating and makes you intensely unhappy. That's a really interesting thing. So you find that people who are in public life have a drive for it, but they have a resistance toward at the same time.

And that creates a lot of trouble in a lot of people's lives, which is why so many famous people are publicly happy and privately unhappy. That's one of the reasons that you actually see this. Oprah's the exception. And she's cracked the code. To crack the code on how to be happy

and famous at the same time. And here's how you do it. Okay. You recognize that the reason for your fame is to serve others. Yeah. you recognize that this is not about you, that you are here to refract the attention of others

to things that matter the most that can actually improve their lives. Maybe it's religion, maybe it's goodness, maybe it's generosity, maybe it's justice. But if it's about you and you take the rays of a thousand sons into yourself, you burn to a crisp. If you refract them to other people and create warmth in their lives, you can accommodate that.

The most important thing to understand about Oprah Winfrey, she's intensely mentally healthy. Yeah. Because she understands that that source of energy was given to her by God. Wow. And it was given to her by God because she is on earth to lift other people up. Yeah. And she's in person when we're eating dinner

at her, just the two of us at her table in Montecito, California, exactly the same as when she's on TV. Same person. She's changed a lot of people's lives. Yeah, totally. My wife learned English watching the Oprah Winfrey show. I think my mom was deeply affected by the Oprah Winfrey show when I was growing

up i think it opened her eyes to a lot of things she's a she's a a phenom she's an incredible person can i ask you a question yeah please on the board over here is prayers the saint anthony yeah that's one of the jokes from the good life because it's like i don't remember it's a bum deal it's a bum deal as a saint you know you get canonized you perform miracles they verify the miracles you know a lot of dark money in that space and and then and then they're like one last thing you got to find everybody's keys he's like what's that last thing You've got to find everybody's keys, you know. It's just like, I do remember that.

I mean, like, St. Anthony. It's like, what? It's going to be great. He's the only, he's the only same way as responsibilities. Yeah, what's the catch? I know, it's the catch. There's one part of the job I didn't tell you about. It's like the last part of the interview.

Because that was my whole thing when I was a kid, my dad would be, where are that goddamn keys? My mom would be like, I'm going to say a prayer to St. Anthony. I'm like, I was not going to work. I always doubted that. It could be worse. You'd be St. Joseph you've got to sell everybody's house oh right that's another thing yeah you got to my mom used to do that

we were trying to sell our house and she buried st joseph yeah upside down um and and there's some people think it should be pointed toward the house some people facing away from the house yeah bury a statue of st joseph upside down i'm not a superstitious catholic you were saying you're working out stuff on chore right now which i thought was interesting because you know cedaris does that sedaris will take david sadares will take essays out and he'll read them and he'll understand what's working what's not working what is the stuff you're working out right now so i have a usually every three years have a big book that comes out it's a big it's a big book it's a big idea book and it's usually something i've been working on for more than those three years and i've got a book coming out in the end of march called the meaning of

your life finding purpose in an age of emptiness it's the scientific explanation for the crisis of meaninglessness if you look at the explosion of depression and anxiety it's explained by not being able to articulate the meaning of your life, not knowing the why of your life. That's really what explains it, right? I mean, there's a lot of things to go along with it, you know, misuse of technology. And, you know, John, have you had John Hyde on the show?

He's the great social scientist of our time. Yeah, yeah, I read it. And, you know, the anxious generation talks about misuse of technology and how it's associated with, it's correlated with this causal to depression and anxiety. The question is, when people are scrolling away their days and hours and years,

what is it that they really wanted that they're missing? And the answer is a sense of their life's meaning. Yeah. So that's a hard book to write. And that's a hard thesis to talk about. And I'm going to get a half hour, 45 minutes in front of audiences plenty soon and a lot of media about how to explain very quickly what's going on with the human brain and what you can do to get your brain back. Yeah. It's not just about technology. It's about culture and economics. And the whole point is that we're being forced into the left hemisphere of our brain, which is the things part. And all the mystery and meaning is in the right hemisphere. And it's becoming inaccessible to us. So people say, where to I go to find meaning? Italy, church, home? No, the right side of your head. That's where you need to go. So the book is about where do you go

and what do you do to rediscover the right hemisphere of your own brain? Yeah. Which used to be like, I mean, you're the great-grandpa, Barbiglia, I guarantee you he never came home and said to great-grandma, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Because it wasn't a thing.

And the reason is because he was, living in the right hemisphere of his brain, the way his brain was intended to function. And now, ordinary would have been extraordinary then. And to be extraordinary is to be ordinary the way the great-grandpa lived in a highly post-industrial technological society. So what I'm working out right now is how to describe, how to explain, this is the problem, here's why it's happening, here's what you do with yourself and your kids. And I got 40 minutes to do it. That's what I'm working out. And I got to do the six to eight minutes segments. I got to figure out what do I do to disequalibrate the brains in the audience so I can keep them on track. And by the end, they're going to

say, I feel truly empowered to change my life. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, that's a show I'm working on right now. So part of the tactics is what we were talking about earlier, where every six or eight minutes so that you don't lose them, you do a joke of some kind. Or you say, oh, by the way, I just saw this study. It's blowing my mind. It's not exactly on this topic, but I got to tell you about it. That's a pretext or you tell a story about your kid that's a pretext or you go into the crowd yeah well i break the fourth wall that yeah yeah you can do that that's actually kind of harder in a lot of the audiences that i do because it's like a big house well it'll be well if it's a 5,000 people right yeah then you actually is that the kind of places you're playing some wow i mean i'll

do some i did i did the uh conference day before yesterday yeah for 5,000 or wow 5300 people or Something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sometimes it'll be more. It's usually more like a few hundred people. Yeah. But it's not that culture. It's not a fourth wall breaking culture. Yeah. You know, they want to learn something. Yeah. And with my classes, I'm super interactive. Right. Right. Because, you know, they're learning. 100 people. 200 people. Yeah. And it'll be all hands up by about the third class. Right. Because they want to, and they'll punctuate the equilibrium of the class. And it's an entirely different rhythm where I'm co-creating the material with them. But that's different than when you're actually doing this. It's usually lecture and then Q&A. Right. That's kind of how it works. So you better keep it on the tracks. Right. You better, like, you better be interesting. Right.

Don't be boring. Don't confuse them. Yeah, yeah. And ideally, a little funny. Right. I'm not going to be funny like you're funny because you're, I mean, funny is the stock and and trade. Yeah, that's all I have. And it's not all you have. I actually learned stuff from from the good life. Oh, really? For sure. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I learned some things. It reminded me of a lot. I mean, you're good as a social scientist. Oh, thanks. Because your stuff is correct. And it's meaningful. Huh. And it's based on truth. I try to do that. That's definitely the goal. Is there a nonprofit that you like to promote and we will contribute to them and link to them in the show notes? Oh, that's terrific. Yeah. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education.

is one that's trying, is a great organization trying to bring as much free speech as possible to campuses in terms of intellectual ideas, in terms of comedy, in terms of all different ways where we can go from safe spaces to the, the beautiful, enriching, unsafe spaces that college is supposed to be. Great. Well, we'll contribute to them. We'll link in the show notes. And Arthur, this is fantastic. I could talk to you for 10 hours. You're just like a fascinating, fascinating person. I hope this is the first time. And we actually can get to goof around in part two. All right. That was great. Thank you so much. because it's not done.

We're working it out because there's no one. That's going to do it for another episode of Working It Out. You can follow Arthur Brooks on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks. You can get his book The Happiness Files at your local bookstore.

Check out berbiggs.com to sign up for my mailing list and it'd be the first to know about my upcoming shows. You can watch the full video of this episode on our YouTube channel at Mike Berbiglia. Please subscribe because we're posting

more and more videos. Our producers of working it out or myself along with Peter Salomon, Joseph Barbiglia, Mabel Lewis, and Gary Simons, sound mixed by Ben Cruz, supervising engineer Kate Balinski's special thanks to Jack Antonoff and bleachers for their music. Special thanks, as always, to my wife, the poet, J. Hope Stein, and our daughter, Una, who built the original radio fort made of pillows. Thanks most of all to you who are listening. If you enjoy the show, please rate us and review us on Apple Podcast. It actually helps. People don't even know

where to begin with 200 episodes of a podcast. And so you can just write in a bunch of stars and and what you like about the show, if you like it, and your favorite episode. And then people know where to start. There are 200 episodes, all free, no paywall. Check them out. Thanks most of all to you who listen to this show. We appreciate it so much.

Tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell the Dalai Lama. Next time you bump into His Holiness, just say, hey, I know you probably spend a lot of time in silence, thinking, meditating. And I'm just saying, if you ever want a short break from the silence, try a podcast. It's called Mike Barbiglia is working it out.

It's where a comedian named Mike Barbiglia talks to other comedians and sometimes talks to personal friends of yours, like Arthur Brooks. Thanks, everybody. We're working it out. We'll see you next time.