Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1495 The Science of Happiness With Arthur C. Brooks

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

In this episode, Sal speaks with Arthur C. Brooks about the science of being happy. How do we define happiness? (4:15) The barriers holding you back from full enjoyment of your life. (6:48) The concept of the treadmill of satisfaction. (8:03) Why true happiness requires unhappiness. (11:05) The concept of the 4 Idols of Worship and why you should have a reverse bucket list. (13:05) Why social comparison is the thief of joy.  (21:45) The art of balance. (30:47) How to change your relationship with pain. (32:28) As a society, are we experiencing a happiness problem? (36:20) The epidemic of fear. (43:24) What drove him to the science of happiness? (46:32) How to build your happiness portfolio. (49:42) His outlook for the future. (53:00) How politicians are people too. (55:54) Featured Guest/People Mentioned  Arthur Brooks (@arthurcbrooks)  Instagram Arthur Brooks Website Arthur Brooks Art of Happiness Podcast Ryan Holiday (@ryanholiday)  Instagram Jon Haidt (@jonhaidt)  Twitter Related Links/Products Mentioned February Promotion: Phase II Bundle Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Watch The Pursuit | Prime Video Hedonic Treadmill | Psychology Today Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative? When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists. Mind Pump #1422: How To Build A Sexy Dad Bod What You Gain When You Give Things Up – Arthur C. Brooks An Epidemic of Loneliness - The Art of Happiness Podcast Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You are listening to the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is MindPump. Now, today's episode, I interview one of my favorite people in the world, Arthur Brooks. He is a behavioral scientist, a professor at Harvard University. He's also put together a great documentary called The

Pursuit. It was on Netflix before. Not sure if it's still there, but it's a great documentary. Very, very smart, smart man. And he understands the science of happiness. There is a science, in fact, to helping yourself or others become more happy and he breaks it all down this episode and he literally blows my mind several times in this entire podcast. So if you wanna learn how to get yourself to be more happy, improve the quality of your life,

and help others be more happy, you're gonna love this episode. Now you can find him on his podcast, the art of happiness, it's a great podcast. Oh, the pursuit is available on Amazon, Doug just told me so you can go check that out on Amazon. But yeah, go check out Arthur Brooks podcast. The guy again is one of my favorite people to talk to

and listen to. Again, I know you're gonna love this episode. Now this podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. They make some of the best performance enhancing supplements you'll find anywhere. Pre-workout supplements, protein powders, supplements that help suppress your appetite, multivitamins, fish oil, great company, quality products,

everything is lab tested. We wouldn't work with anybody that isn't high quality, but Legion is one of the best. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. Go check them out. Go to buy legion.com. That's B-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash Mind Pump. Use the code Mind Pump for 20% off your first order if you're returning customer, you get double rewards points. Also before the episode starts, reminder, we are still running the Phase 2 bundle. This includes maps, performance, and maps aesthetic. Both our great workout programs,

both about three to four months long. Maps performance is athletic-minded. Maps aesthetic is body builder-minded. So performance for athletic training, aesthetic for body builder-training. Combine the two, you get the best of both worlds. Normally, if you buy both at retail, cost you almost 300 bucks,

but right now you can get them both in the Phase II bundle for $79.99 plus a 30-day money back guarantee. Go check them out, go to mapsfebuary.com. That's M-A-P-S-F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y.com. Arther, it's great to have you on. You're one of my favorite people, well, favorite people in the world.

You're just such a positive wise individual. You communicate so well, but I really consider you to be one of my go-to people on the subject of happiness, you know, an expert on happiness. So, thank you, Sal. And by the way, before you continue, you've done so much for me too.

I mean, your guests probably don't know, but you know, you and I met, I met you long before you met me because I'm a mind-pump listener for years now. And you know, I was wondering at some point how many of the Harvard faculty are mind-pump listeners. I'm kind of wondering that, but I bet you there's more than just me, and you've been so helpful. You're attitude about self-improvement, about how each of us is responsible for

through personal responsibility, but more than anything else, that we have this accomplishment mentality that you guys at MindPump are serving people. The reason it's the most popular fitness health and entertainment podcasts in the world, by the way, is not just because you're giving great fitness tips. It's because you're helping people to better, happier lives. And me, as a guy who does work as a scholar on happiness and on the side trying to stay in really good shape because of you. You know, this is a natural synergy I have to say, but you've done a lot more for me than

I've ever been able to do for you. Well, I really appreciate that. So let's talk about happiness. Let's talk a little bit about, first off, how do we define it? You know, sometimes I'll read articles and studies and they'll say things like people in Denmark are the happiest in the world, or people over here happier than over there. Is it just simply asking people if they're happy? articles and studies and they'll say things like people in Denmark are the happiest in the world or people over here happier than over there. Is it just simply asking people if they're happy? How do we define it? Is it the good feeling of joy that I'll get if I,

you know, drink a nice bottle of wine or hang out with my kids? Like how do we define it first off? So a lot of people, a lot of different scholars and ordinary people define find it in different ways. Happiness means everything and nothing. It's one of these contentless words.

It gets people's attention because the one thing that we know is we all want it. The trouble is when you ask people to define it. Most people, particularly Americans and people in the West, will say, well, I feel good. They'll talk about their feelings. And that's actually not very helpful because feelings are really transitory. The way that we measure it in the social science business, so I'm a behavioral social scientist. The way that we measure it is we ask people

to assess their own level of general wellbeing. And that mixes a whole bunch of stuff together I'll talk about. But basically you'll say, all things considered, life has got ups and downs. How happy would you say you are about your life? And they give you these incredibly stable and honest answers as long as they're answering anonymously. You don't ask that, you don't answer that in front of your wife. For example, you've got to do that in the constants of your own heart. But the way that people actually answer that question is that they're thinking about three different dimensions. And this

is what the science has uncovered. They're thinking about that they're thinking about three different dimensions. This is what the sciences has uncovered. They're thinking about enjoyment of their life. They're thinking about satisfaction or fulfillment with their life. And they're thinking about purpose and meaning in their life. All kind of a glomerated together. So you kind of mush those three concepts together. And if you've got all of one and none of the other, you won't feel very happy. So if you're all enjoyment and no purpose, let's call that, you know, college life.

Then you're basically partying and drinking and hanging out and, you know, meeting girls and fantastic, right? But you won't actually call yourself happy at current of the data. Or if you're all purpose and no enjoyment, it's kind of grim, you know, it's like American Gothic. It's just not that fun. So you've got to have those three and satisfaction is in the middle. It's kind of grim, you know, it's like American Gothic. It's just not that fun. So you've got to have those three

and satisfaction is in the middle. And if you've got this balance between, it gets this golden mean between those three dimensions, you're gonna say you're a happy person. Oh, very interesting. So, because I have always, that's what what confused me is that, you know, I thought of as a feeling, a feeling of enjoyment,

but that makes perfect sense. That's one dimension. So how do you, okay, let's talk about each one and the things that we can do, or that you've seen in the studies and the work that you've done that help contribute to each of those. You said satisfaction, enjoyment, and then purpose and meaning.

Yeah, yeah. So the first one is enjoyment, and enjoyment means actually trying to be fully present in your life. The main reason that people don't enjoy their lives, they can have something chronically wrong, like major depressive disorder or health problems or one of the things that you talk about an awful lot on the show is the fact that people just aren't happy enough when they, back in the old days, when you were actually coaching people, when you were keeping your head clients that you

were training, they would come to you and they wouldn't be happy because they didn't feel good. And you know, they're making these these unforced errors about their life. They weren't enjoying their lives enough. So when people are, you know, morbidly obese or where they're suffering from diabetes or they're they're just too sedentary and have the cold morbidities of sedentary behavior, then then they're just not going to enjoy their life very much. So that's one of the things where you have particular expertise. So being fully present and ready to enjoy what life has to offer is number one. And so the one thing that I you know, I talk about is we go through an inventory of you know, they're what's going on in your life. You know, one of the things that really the barriers from holding you back to full enjoyment of your life.

The second is satisfaction and And satisfaction is really, really hard. There's this one concept that we talked about in off a lot of my business called the Hedonic treadmill. Hedonic means feelings. And the Hedonic treadmill is basically the problem with satisfaction where you run, you run, you run, you run, you run, and you don't actually get any more satisfaction. So something good happens to you, you earn a bunch of money, and the next day you feel like you were before, you buy a $2 million house and you're actually not happier. You get that car you've always wanted. And as you're driving it off the lot, you're dreaming about the next better model. That's the treadmill. The reason is because your brain processes

your emotions in a way that don't let you have very much satisfaction from worldly things. That's a process that's called homeostasis, in which you'll always return to an equilibrium, because your brain has to be ready for the next circumstance to keep you alive. You have to be ready all the time. So if you're like elated because something happened to you for weeks and weeks and weeks, you would not be prepared for what was going to about to hit you next. And you know, back in the old days, you probably, you know, I love that meal so much and you're beaming about it and you're not paying attention to saber-to-tiger eats you and you don't pass on your genes. So there's an evolutionary reason why this would

be the case, but it's super frustrating because you can't get satisfaction. So that's the satisfaction problem. And the answer to that is, you know, this is, by the way, Mick Jagger saying that song, I can't get a satisfaction. That that the answer to that is you know this by the way Mick Jagger saying that song I can't get a satisfaction that's the biggest rolling stones hit ever not because it's a good song It isn't it's because it speaks to the human condition. It's like oh, yeah, man Mick says I can't get a satisfaction and you can I wow so so that's important So the way but there is a way to short circuit it and the way to short circuit it is to remember that satisfaction is not a product of what you have. That's what we think. All be satisfied.

If all the stuff that I want I have, right? The car, the job, the money, the success, the relationships, the fun, right? Satisfaction is actually what you have divided by what you want. It's your halves divided by your wants. Everybody remembers enough their high school math that when you've got a fraction,

you can lower the value by increasing the denominator. When the denominator gets bigger, the whole fraction falls. So your satisfaction falls when your wants go up. So one of the things that I counsel people on, and I'm working with executives, and I'm working with people, is that I say, you know, you feel dissatisfied even though you're rich, how come?

It's because you haven't been managing your wants and you know that denominator has been sprawling like the suburbs of San Jose. It's just like, it's going freaking crazy and you haven't been paying attention to it. So what you need to do is get a reverse bucket list where you look at all that stuff and you're, I mean, the bucket list is the dumbest idea for happiness ever. You should look in that bucket of all your wants that you've been worshiping and craving and desiring and just pull out a handful of wants and say, I'm going to get rid of this one and that one and that one. I'm going to detach myself. If I get that stuff great, but these aren't my wants anymore, It can be free. The last one is purpose.

And purpose is tricky because purpose, and this is the part of happiness that people don't usually understand. True happiness requires unhappiness. Why? Because purpose requires pain. To find meaning in your life, and your pain is just incredibly sacred. If we miss out on pain, we miss out on post-traumatic growth, we miss out on experiences, we miss out on learning.

And you and I have in our personal eyes, I've talked about these experiences that have been painful for us, for you and for me. And you know, when we talk about the things that we know would make us the men that we are, it's never like, oh, into this party, when I was 18, it was so awesome. You don't even remember that You remember the bad thing that happened to you the painful thing the less than that you had to learn and that's where you actually get your Your purpose and meaning in life So the key thing that I ask people to do if they don't have enough purpose if they need to be more fully alive and take more risk

They need to fail more they need to learn more. They need to ask for they need to ask for for to say they're sorry They need to ask for, they need to ask for, to say they're sorry, they need to make amends more, they need to be fully engaged in their life and stop. Usually if you don't have purpose, it means you're running away from pain. This is why I love talking to you. Every time I talk to you, you end up blowing my mind and I'm thinking of a few different things. You were talking about satisfaction. I thought that was so, so awesome to talk about changing your wants. And it reminds me of the conversations that I've had many times with my father.

My dad is a, he was a poor Sicilian immigrant, okay. He was a one of many children. They lived in a small, you know, concrete house. And he looks back on, he talks about how happy he was, how he was so happy when he had an extra, you know, quarter to get some ice cream because he was so poor, that was such a big deal. I think, you know, to myself as I get more things

and I want more, it's like this never ending well. So changing your wants, that's so absolutely brilliant and I'd never even considered sitting down and taking those things down. Have you done that with yourself? Have you sat down with your... What are the things in inventory? What are some of the things that you've had to remove

that you wanted in the past that you've taken out? Well, there's a whole set of categories of things that are chronic wants that never brings satisfaction that always sprawl. So, for example, the great philosopher at theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote in 1265, this tom, the sumitheologic gut, it's one of the most important books in Western philosophy as a matter of fact, it reintroduced Aristotle over the West among other things.

And the sumitheologic gut, he talks about these four idols that everybody has, and it's incredible, it's like it was written yesterday, the four idols that everybody has. And it's incredible. It's like it was written yesterday. The four idols that we all worship, usually inadvertently, are money, power, pleasure, and fame. And fame, for most people, is not like, your fame is because mind-pump is such a big deal, but most people it's prestige, like to be well regarded in your community.

So money, power, pleasure, and prestige. And these are the four eyewitnesses. I quite as call some of the four substitutes for God where people really, really want God, but God's very inconvenient because a lot of one side of conversations and misunderstandings and a lot of work and a lot of rules,

is it like, now forget that. So I'm gonna go for four things that have kind of a God-like appearance to them, money, power, pleasure, and fame. But they're all wants that never brings that as faction. And so when I go through my reverse bucket list, I'm looking in there for the cravings that I have in money, power, pleasure, and fame. What am I doing?

Am I going around the horn all the time, looking for more dough? And furthermore, this is a good party game, by the way, is to ask people what their idol is and put them in reverse order. So I'll do it with you, Sal, so money, power, pleasure, and fame. Tell me the thing that least motivates you that you care the least about. Out of those four.

Yeah, yeah, because those are the four. Oh, these are the idols in life. Oh, fame has gotta be the bottom one, and then problem. You don't care. So, it's like, it's people that sell the stuff in notes. I don't know. Who's that? Some guy.

No, I could care less. I thought I'd told you this, definitely from Sicily, right? That's the good job. The next one might be, what was the pleasure? I enjoy feeling good, but I've done a good job, I think, of trying to kind of separate myself from that. So, it's not super high on my list. Money and power, I would say, you know, money might be next power, might be next. I think mainly because both of those make me feel like I have more control over my life. So, money and

power give me more control over the things that I can do I would say. Yeah, so knowing that is super important. Okay. That's incredibly important self-knowledge because then you can manage your reverse bucket by knowing that. Now, the key thing is putting stuff into your basket that you should be going. So there's the bad for money power pleasure and fame. And a lot of people will feel kind of prideful because of the worldly rewards that they don't care about. Not paying attention to the fact that they're being completely controlled on some of the dimension. I see this constantly. It's like,

yeah, yeah, I don't care about money. That's like great, but you're a freak for power. Right. All right. You know, you're like addicted to drugs because you're a pleasure guy. So that's really important for people to keep in mind that, you know, just because you're a pleasure guy. So that's really important for people to keep in mind, that just because you're good on one dimension, this is probably following that on another, the big four that you should have, and this is the second part of this exercise, and these are the things that truly

and durably bring happiness. So actually, let me back up from that a little bit. People will say, what are the sources of happiness? So one thing is like those are the ingredients, which is enjoyment satisfaction and purpose. If I'm in a measure, your number. So let me start by asking your number. So it's like, we always do it on a 1 to 7 scales called a Lycric scale, where one is complete misery. And 7 is total bliss, the happiest person you could possibly be. What's your, and I'm talking about across sort of the cadence of your life in general. So look at them past the cup, past couple of years. What's your and I'm talking about across sort of the cadence of your life in general So look at him pass the cup pass couple years. What's cell stuff in those number?

I'd say I'm probably close to a five so I'm not a seven and I'm closer to the middle Maybe a little better than the middle what would Jessica say about you? She would probably put me She might put me at a six maybe a little higher She put your little six. Okay, now that's interesting because what that suggests, that minor mismatch, you'd probably be surprised. She's probably closer to your number than you think if she were astronomically about you. But if she's a little bit higher, that means that she actually might be a better judge

of your true happiness because sometimes people who are close to us are actually better at that than we are. Okay, now when I've got a whole sample of people across the population, and by the way, us because sometimes people who are close to us are actually better at that than we are. Okay. Now, when I've got a whole sample of people across the population, and by the way, your partners at Mind Pump, you're a really good judge of their number, too. Okay. Right? And so, and so if I got a whole sample across the population, I want to disaggregate the

parts of that number. You know, what what goes into that? I've got three, I've got three parts, three components that go into it. One is your genes, one is your circumstances, and another is your habits. So this is super important, right? I mean, a lot of people think that genes don't really matter, that it's all nature, not nature.

But the truth is, about 48% of your happiness is genetic. This is super important to keep in mind, because if you, you know, if your dad was gloomy, you're gonna have gloomy genes. That doesn't mean you're, that doesn't mean you get it all. I mean, some people look more like their parents, some people look less like their parents,

but you're gonna have across the population, more of a proclivity, you're gonna kind of tend toward that half of your happiness coming from your parents. If you got really bubbly, happy, a boolean parents, you know, lucky you. But, you know, my parents were pretty dark. And so my mother was an artist.

My dad was a college professor. And they lived in Seattle. I was gloomy all the time. So I got gloomy juice. The half of the other half, 25% is circumstantial. And that's what everybody's going for. That's what I think is really going to ratchet their happiness, is that 25% because it's like, yeah, if I win the lottery, I'll be happier.

If I get into a bad accident, I'll be unhappy, but that's completely wrong because circumstances are transitory. There's a study on paraplegics and lottery winners and it turns out that six months after the big event, whether it's tragic or victorious and happy, then people have returned basically to their old happiness levels six months after the big event, whether it's tragic or, or, or, you know, victorious and happy, then people have returned basically to their old happiness levels six months later. You're not a product that you're happy. You're happy. Your happiness is produced inside your head, not outside your body. Wow. Is the bottom line. And so never chase circumstances. That's the reason that

money, power, pleasure, and fame. Don't give you satisfaction and put you on this treadmill of frustration. Is that so what's left is the 25 you can control your genes. You shouldn't try to control your circumstances. It's your habits that really matter and that's 25%. So I'm so Sally, I'm going to give you your whole 25% under your control. And this is the big four. There are only four things in your happiness portfolio. Faith, faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the

four. And so, and you got to put a deposit in each one of those accounts. By faith, by the way, I don't mean a traditional religious faith necessarily. I mean, I recommend my Catholic faith to everybody who will listen, but the truth is I got the data and anything that gets you out of your head and brings you to 40,000 feet about the nature of existence. I mean, for example, you're super into all different sorts of stuff. You named your son after the Marcus Aurelius, the great stoic philosopher and emperor studying stoicism.

I mean, I had Ryan Holiday, the guy who does the daily stoic on my podcast last week, and we were talking about, he was just wonken out on the stoic philosophers. And people who are super in the Stoicism, they get the faith bonus. But if you're only ever thinking about yourself and not about the bigger transcendental things,

that's like involuntarily watching the same TV show over and over and over again until you wanna die. So that's why faith, family itself explanatory, friendship is super important and then always neglected. And work is very simple. Work, it doesn't matter what job you do, whether you're a professional podcaster or professor at Harvard University or whatever, or driving a bus or, you know, you know, laying bricks in Sicily, as long as you believe that you're earning your success and

you're serving others, then it will be meaningful and then you're going to get the gusto from it. So the big mistake that people make is they're chasing money, power, pleasure, and fame. And what they should be doing is working on their happiness, they're cultivating their diversified happiness portfolio, which is faith, family, friends, and meaning for work. Oh, that's, that's very powerful. So I have a question around this is I noticed, so I read an article, Scientific American, put out an article. I think it was either this morning or yesterday, and in the title of it was, why bronze medalists are happier than

gold medalists? Yeah, that's a great study. I love this study. Okay, so very fascinating. So essentially it's saying something like along the lines of, you know, the bronze medalist, it's essentially what you're comparing yourself to. I could have not gotten a medal, but I did versus a silver medalist who's like, I could have got gold, but I only got silver. What role does how we compare ourselves to others play in all of this?

And I can't help but think of, in my space and fitness, the social media space on how people are just, they can accomplish incredible accomplishments with their fitness and their physics, but then they look at these pictures of other people and just these impossible comparisons, and they just end up feeling terrible.

Yeah, so that's an old study of the Olympic medalist, and it shows that, for example, silver medalists die significantly earlier than both gold and bronze medalists. Gold and bronze medalists die about on average four years later than silver medalists do. And in the meantime, silver medalists are less happy. And the reason exactly is who suggests the silver medalists go through the rest of their life saying it could have been me, whereas bronze medalists are comparing themselves to the rest of the world that didn't win any medals. That's actually how it works. Now, you

can be the recipient of positive social comparison, but as a general rule, Teddy Roosevelt, President of the theater Roosevelt was right when he said that comparison, social comparison is the thief of joy. You know, if you want to ruin an experience, compare yourself to other people, it should be intrinsically satisfying if you're actually getting in shape and feeling good, but put yourself on Instagram, you can't win. You're going to lose because there's somebody else. I mean, this is, by the way, one of the reasons that literature on social media

is so alarming. I mean, we're finding out that increasingly, social media is a public bad and brings people down in almost any dose. Anything, any amount of time, over half an hour a day, you're spending on social media, you literally get more and more depressed. And it has everything to do in the fact that you're crowding out in-person relationships for happiness is love full stop. I remember faith, family, and friends are all love categories. And if you do anything, it's a

substitute for love, you lose. Everything you should do, anything you should do technologically, should be a complement to your relationships, never a substitute for your relationships. And it's even worse, it's metastatically dangerous. If you're actually, if you're substituting for your human relationships and comparing yourself to everybody else's fake life. You know, Instagram influencers, especially in the fitness space, they don't actually look like that.

Are you kidding me? It looks like that one day, and they're so completely desiccated and miserable and food obsessed, and you're yelling at everybody. And it's like, I finally got to my, you know, I'm finally, you know, 4.5% body fat, get the camera quick before I kill everybody.

It's like, we all know what's going on. A lot of what I know from this is because I'm a fan of yours. One of the most inflecting things that you taught me when you were on my podcast, but also just because on your show, when you talked about the cosmic beauty of the dad bod. It was really helpful for me to have have to say because you know, during coronavirus, there's everybody, it doesn't matter, you know, if you study happiness or not, there's only four strategies for life in coronavirus,

you know, during lockdowns, which is like, drunk, chunk, hunk or monk, right? And, and, and, and, and, and, right? And so, you know, I was like, I don't know, I'm gonna get in the best shape of my life and I was getting more and more and more and more miserable. And I heard you talking about, you know, that don't do that. That's crazy. Don't never, don't become food obsessed. Don't be stupid. But a lot of people will become unhappy because they're trying to be perfect. And then,

and then put up this, this facade of perfection and happiness on social media. And in so doing, they're lying and they're making everybody else miserable through social comparisons. So the one way that we can completely defend ourselves is to get off all of those sites and ration all of our social media consumption to 30 minutes a day or less with the rule that it's only to get information that we need

and to communicate with people we love. That, I think that's excellent advice. You know, I have a, so I have a way of explaining it. I would love your opinion because this is your expertise. But I think it's natural for us to kind of rank ourselves socially to see where we are. I mean, it's part of our evolution. And when you're on social media,

you just turn your tribe into this much bigger tribe, but the people that tend to pop up on social media are anomalies. They just, for example, I read this statistic that six-pack abs are more rare than millionaires. I mean, I manage gyms for decades, and so this is already a selection bias where you already have people who work out,

and nobody in there was super ripped in the gyms. It was actually quite rare in the gyms that I managed to see that, but when you're on social media, it looks like it's everywhere. And so then naturally, you're just like, wow, I'm not only am I not in the middle, I'm so far, far down at the bottom, I look terrible.

Is that, am I explaining kind of what's happening? Yeah, okay. That's exactly right. So you get people who are complete outliers, or actually who depict themselves as outliers because this is what you want. It's like nobody puts on social media. My kid just flunked math, brutal. I was like, little Johnny is super outstanding yet again today. Or like, my girlfriend screamed at me and told me I was a complete loser. I should get off the

couch and go get a job. No, they're like out hiking today, beautiful, and no way California. And so you want to look like an outlier on the positive side. You don't want to look like you have a normal life. That's the point of actually broadcasting yourself. That's the way that you actually climb the social hierarchies that are part of the human condition. The problem is that there's a lot of research that shows

that we're incredibly bad at discerning that when we're looking at social media. We have a tendency to believe the things that people depict in the positive way and make a negative comparison of ourselves. This is a very normal thing to do. We're strivers, is the bottom line. So you see somebody's got six back abs, you're like, yeah, every dude's got six back abs. Well, you realize how hard it is to get six back abs. I mean, it's like, you really know what it means to get to 8% body fat. That is, you're giving up a lot of life. It's really hard. It hurts, especially trust me, cell, when you're 56 like me. It's really hard. And frankly, as you will often say, it's not worth it. It's not worth it to feel good. It's not worth it to be healthy. It's not worth it to

sacrifice your relationships. And by the way, you shouldn't be looking at the mirror that much anyway. So because it's natural for us to compare, I think this is kind of part of being a human, what would be, I guess, a fair person to compare yourself with, would it be just yourself? I guess who you were yesterday? Well, the pursuit of excellence means continuous improvement. I mean, that's really what we're talking about. And it's improving to, across to your own set of goals toward, and making progress in a positive way.

The key thing that I often talk about is not confusing goals that will impress others with those that will bring you to higher levels of moral perfection. So this is, you know, I've written about this and there's a very tenuous link between fitness and happiness. And it's a very interesting set of papers. I mean, I'm very, very big into fitness, as you know. I mean, I really believe in it. The problem is that if you do it because you think when you get more beautiful that you'll be happier, your sadly mistake can on the cost and benefits. So you'll find, for example, if you move from

about the 50th percentile of beauty, that's right in the middle of the population. You're neither ugly nor beautiful. And you move to that 85th percentile, which is like, you gotta go on. I mean, you're more beautiful than 85% of the population, right? That will move you from the 50th to the 51st percentile

in happiness. It's just totally not worth it, because you got to have surgery for that. You got to spend three hours a day in the gym for that. You need a divinely inspired miracle for that, in many cases. It's just not worth it. You need to do these things for intrinsic reasons. I wanna challenge myself.

I owe it to my family to become healthier and to live longer, to be able to, you know, dandle my granddaughter on my knee. That's what I want, because you remember faith, family, friends, and work, baby, that's what actually is gonna make you happier. And so these goals that we have should be personal improvement goals toward those so these goals that we have should be personal improvement goals

toward those more cosmic goals that we have. And then these things you were doing. Yeah, I'll echo that. I mean, as a trained people for years and years and years, and I would always get that, I want to lose weight so I can be happy. And I would have to eventually, I'd have to work with them and train them

and show them, we've got to be happy before you lose the weight because it's never going to work out. Earlier, you were talking about enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Enjoinment is about feeling good. Purpose is about pain. It's like they're contradicting. How do we reconcile that? Yeah, so the key thing is balance.

And everything in life is balance. It's balance between the time you spend in the gym and the time you don't spend in the gym. It's balance between the days that you eat free and the days that you're on a diet. This kind of moderation is a matter of a potential judgment. The happiest people actually find this balance in their life. The unhappiest people, the people who suffer from addiction, for example, they really have a hard time with balance.

It's like if that feels good, a little, they really have a hard time with balance. If that feels good, a little, then a lot is going to feel great. That's wrong in almost every case. You can get into these addictive behaviors. And by the way, there's brain chemistry that aids in a bet's this mistake. There's a neurotransmitter, neuromodulator called dopamine. And everybody at this point knows what dopamine is. It's implicated in all addictive substances and processes.

So you can get addicted to, and I know a ton of people in my world who are addicted to success. People are addicted to work, their workaholics, but also people would get addicted to drugs and alcohol and gambling and pornography and bad stuff. The reason is because your brain, your dopamine signals, they say like,

I like that, give me more. I want more right now. And then you start responding to your brain, your brain chemistry starts pulling you. And you need to retrain your brain in the way that you do that as you become a master. And the master is one who actually finds balance. So that's the key. Everything in balance. If I'm basically looking for pure enjoyment, I'm not going to be happy. If I'm so stoic that I'm willing to put up with any amount of pain, then I don't have the balance either. I see.

You're a fitness fanatic, so you work out all the time. So you feel the physical pain of squats or barbell rows or dead lifts. Have you changed your relationship with pain to make it something that you then can, I mean, it's not enjoyable, the sensation, but rather you have a different relationship to it, is part of the key because I'm using fitness because I notice

I do that with fitness but with other things that have I have a tough time with it. Yeah for sure you know when you actually see when you start to associate the you know the progress toward your goals and and ultimately the person that you want to be with the pain itself, and the pain becomes not just more bearable, but it becomes more sanctified. It's interesting that we do this all the time, the monks during the Middle Ages. We laugh at them because they were doing things like using a quartz and whipping themselves or wearing hair shirts or something like that.

Yet we're working out. the whole point was they were looking for spiritual perfection through mortification. And there's a form of mortification that we're actually getting. And I love it. I mean, I just, you know, I jump out of bed every morning and I have a gym and my basement and I just love it. It's not because squats feel good.

Squats are gonna feel bad every day for the rest of my life. You remember Jack LaLane? Of course. Absolutely. He was the fitness guru when I was a kid. My mom had his records. She put on her record.

It's like music and leg lifts and the whole thing in the living room. And she was because my mom was in shape before being in shape was cool. And Jack LaLane, I started following when when he was old. He died when he was late 90s, because he was so healthy. And on his 90th birthday, he pulled a tugboat in his teeth across San Francisco, May, or some crazy thing. And he said, he had these funny sayings. He would say, for example, if it tastes good, spit it out. And he said that he hated every minute of every workout his whole life.

And he wasn't a masochist. The point was you hate the pain, but you don't. You have a relationship with something that actually mortifies you for your own positive good. It's like, you know, they got describing tomorrow Saturday and you got me doing full body workouts as opposed to, you know, it's like, you know, they got describing tomorrow Saturday and you know, you got me doing full body workouts as opposed to you know It's like funny for the for our listeners. I was I met you in person. I was 55 and I was still doing it like a stupid Bro split and wondering why my back hurt. Yeah, yeah, it's like yeah get a clue, man It's like doctor PhD can't even figure that one out. You're like dude

I've got to full body three times a week. And so anyway, so tomorrow I'm gonna start off and it's gonna be like five o'clock in the morning and it's gonna be down there. You know what, it feels like you do. Five o'clock in the morning doing squats, but it's good. It's good because it's good for me

and it's kind of good for my soul in a way and all of these things that we do. All the sacrifices that we make, the most sanctified kind of suffering, by the way. And I've got my column in the Atlantic that's coming out the day after it lent starts in February this year, and it's a couple of weeks from now. The reason that sacrifice for other people is so pleasurable is because of this sanctification, because of the sacredness that actually comes. And so you find, for example,

that when you sacrifice your sacrifice for your baby's son, and it's, it's, it's good. You know, it's good. It's like, you don't want to wake up at three o'clock in the morning, but when you do, and it's dark, and you're tired, and your son's, and you're giving him a bottle, and he's sitting in your lap, and you're like, thank you, Lord. This is a beautiful thank you for making it possible for me to do this for my son and and that's the way to live That's the way to live. I'm doing it for people that I love I'm doing it for reasons that matter and then Pain is different Yeah, it's again, that's great. So okay, so we're looking I read these poles and these statistics and

It seems like people are more anxious, more polarized. We hear that all the time. People seem to be more unhappy materially up until recently, people were doing better in America. So we had more stuff, we had more money, we had less crime, but people are not as happy. And, you know, from your perspective, what do you think is causing this?

Of all those things you've talked about, what do you think is the reason why people seem to be less happy today than they were 20 years ago, or 30 years ago? Yeah, so it's true. And so I've got data on the percentage of people that say that they're thriving. And I can look at it, don't look at it during the coronavirus epidemic because you get these radical dips and happiness given the fact that people are living under unusual circumstances.

So that's an outlier. So don't even put that in. But if you look at just, you know, for right before the financial crisis until, you know, a year or two ago, you'll find a secular decline in the percentage of people that say that they're thriving, which is a good way Gallup does this to measure how happy people are. And the same time, every income group has been increasing in purchasing power, which is the way you want to look at it. People want to cook the data. A lot of people out there that want to say that rich are getting rich and the poor are getting poor. It's a lie. It's completely not true. And so you look at purchasing

power and it's been radically increasing. So for example, the person in the 10th income percentile in America today has the same living space as a person in the 50th percentile in 1980. I mean, you were alive in 1980. It wasn't that long ago. And so that's the 50th percentile has gone to the 10th percentile. That's in living space. Not to mention all the conveniences of life and they're very, very few calorie deficits. Just all this stuff about life and yet thriving has been decreasing.

So the key thing to look at and the diagnostic mechanism is to look at the portfolio of happiness and what's going on. Faith, family, friends will work. We have all kinds of, we know, we basically, we have made it harder. The number of people who say that they have no religion at all has gone from about 6% to 36% since the 1970s. Again, maybe they're substituting stoic philosophy for it or something that is a good substitute, but for a lot of people, which you find is there's a zombie, there's this kind of sense of emptiness that when you're talking to people that they

have because they don't have this, this transcendental sense, whether it's prayer, meditation, or philosophy, there's just less of that for young people. That's number one, family, more and more people are estranged from their families. Today, 44% of people are completely estranged from a family member, 17% from a direct family member, which means a sister or brother, a child or a parent. I mean, literally not talking, 70%, one in six Americans has stopped talking to a family member because of politics and how it's insanity. So that's a big source of unhappiness.

Friendship, you find that we have this epidemic of loneliness. I just have my podcast, a woman named Norena Hertz, who's got this new book out to Big Best Seller, our cross-Europe, into many of the states now. She talks about the data that show that people are lo andeer than they've ever been. There's a bunch of reasons for it. She sort of thinks that the government should be building more parks or something. But now, I think that social media is fueling a lot of our loneliness. I think there's a whole bunch of interpersonal reasons that modern life is doing this and then work.

People are not thinking about their work in the right way. They're not thinking vocationally about serving other people and work. So when all these dimensions are going the wrong direction, you're actually going to see prosperity increasing and happiness declining. Do you think this is connected to materialism? Because I know, I mean, obviously in this country, in many democratic free countries, we have this great markets that produce what we want. We can get more and more of it. And of course, it's part of sales and marketing

to tell you you need this product, you need this thing, it's gonna make you happy. We've been told this now for decades. And so do you think it's part of materialism where we're just so obsessed with more stuff because that's what we think is gonna do it and so we're forgetting everything else? Yeah, I mean, it's a get it goes back to Aquinas.

Money Power Pleasure Fane. It's basically instead of a faith family friends and work, it's Money Power Pleasure Fane. You know, people are looking for the easy fix and going for the idols. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that we're really due for a big spiritual renewal in this country. And it happens, I mean, we go through these cycles, there's nothing new under the sun. You know, people say that we're a secular decline in America,

it's got as worst years ahead, as best years behind us. I don't believe it because I've actually seen these cycles where people go into kind of a spiritual funk where they, you know, they're happiness to thriving declines. They're at each other's throats. You get a lot of this crazy political populism from both sides, where we're encouraged by leaders to hate each other and be afraid of each other. And then you get this backlash where people like,

no, I refuse to be unhappy. And that's when you get people where you get more interested in religion, people get more when they start falling in love more. I mean, so consider this. People in their 20s today are a third less likely to be in love than people were when I was that age. I mean, you basically have people that are they're they're shutting themselves off from the the most important single source of human happiness, which

is long-term, romantic love. I don't think I have to tell you you're a happy, married man and me for 30 years. And the idea that I would be in my 20s and not dating and not in the market and not trying to lock down is just, it's really, really unthinkable. But that's kind of what we've got going on. Our values are ready for a complete disruption. And we need spiritual, we need happiness entrepreneurs. And that's what you are, by the way. The nice thing about it is people come, I've talked to people who listen to

Mind Pump, they, why did I go to Mind Pump? Because I wanted to be, I wanted my fitness routines to get better, and you guys had a really good reputation. And I stayed with it because I felt happier when I was listening to you guys. You know, when you were talking about, you know, just the, you know, the banter for the first 45 minutes of the show is like, yeah, I tried this thing and I got, what about, did you see that movie? Actually, it was weird. You know, the craziest thing was I was listening to Wine Pump in the gym back in the old days when we get all the way to the gym before I met you, about three months before I met you, four months before I met you for the first time. And you were

talking about my movie. That really made me happy. But you're a happiness entrepreneur. I mean, you're a guy who is going in through the back door of fitness to help people understand that they can have a better, more fulfilling life. And that's why the first 45 minutes are stuff like, you know, transcendental things and family and you're talking about your friends and it's good. There's a reason it works. Awesome. Thank you. Great, by the way, the pursuit, great movie, I think everybody should watch it. I think it's absolutely phenomenal. You know, I know that growth comes from being uncomfortable or from pain.

I wonder if it's a blessing that we're all getting what we think we want. Like we're gonna get everything that we think we want and then we're gonna realize this is not giving me what I want and maybe that's what it's gonna take to do what you're talking about. Get this kind of this upheaval, the spiritual transformation. So maybe we're heading there.

I think so. And you know, this is also a pair of key things for parents. You know, there are a lot of people listening to us who have kids or who gunna have kids. I hope we all have tons of kids. And you know, it's, I mean, I, my time has passed. I hope I have lots of grandkids at some point, not too soon. And you know, but this is the thing that parents do wrong is they try to shield their kids from

a discomfort and pain. And we've gotten so good at it because we've gotten so rich that our kids are, it's like they're getting the measles because they're not getting their vaccine at this point. They're, you know, one of the things that's really interesting, you find that their parents helicopter parent their kids and give them everything they need and drive them around. The little Johnny's got to go to soccer practice and he got into a tiff with some kid and it's like

I'm going to call a coach and it's really, really bad because they get to college and then the kids demand you know safe spaces and and and they they protest and do cancel culture this because of fear. Like there's only two modes of culture. It's love and fear. And if it's not a love based polarity, you're gonna get a fear based polarity, which is all over college campuses. So they go through and then the college is protect them. And then guess what?

They get out in their 20s and they're ill prepared for any sort of conflict, any sort of pain, any sort of rejection. And they're walking around really, really fearful and they're getting lonely. You know, that's like, that this is guy named John Hyatt, John Huffinghyatt, he teaches, he's a psychology teacher at NYU, visionary guy. And he's talking about how everybody's afraid, this, you know, epidemic of fear among people

in the 20s and he's, I said, who, who's responsible for that? He's like, you are. Like, what are you talking about? I, what I do. He said, well, he says, how old were you the first time that you went out on your own, like for running errand for your mom all alone? I'm like, I don't know, five. He says, how old was your daughter? I was like, I don't know, 14. He said, that's it. He said, you have not, you're not exposing

your kid. That really, really changed my perspective. And, you know, I, it changed my parenting a little bit, I have to say. And the result has been really, really good because I'm, you know, I'm willing to, you know, my daughter, I'm not going to, I'm not going to check in every second. My son, you know, I've told you about my son, Carlos, he, you know, he said, Dad, I'm not going to go to college. And I didn't fight him. I said, make your business plan. I'm your venture capitalist, make your business plan. He became a farmer. Now he's like, you know, shooting bad guys. He's in the Marine Corps.

And you know, forward deployed member of the infantry. He's protecting America. That, that I'm proud of because he built his life. That's excellent. Yeah, that's tough too, as a parent, because you just want to shield your kid as much as possible. I have challenges with that myself all the time.

That's something I'm constantly, constantly battling with. You know, the thing that drove me so hard to learn so much about fitness actually came from a dark place. I was very insecure about my body. I've talked about this on the podcast as a kid as a 14 year old. Were you driven by something darker as well to become this expert on happiness?

I mean, you know so much about it. You study it so much. You're so good at communicating it. Did you struggle with it with yourself? Is that what made you so interested in learning about it? Yeah, my happiness levels are low. I am not a... I mean, and again, I have gluiperns, I had gluiperns, they

died young. My circumstances have been really, really good, but my baseline isn't very good, you know, and you know, you don't study air when you've got a lot of it, it's funny, you know, you know really well that people become super interested in something that scares. So, one of the reasons that you've talked about this in the show, and I've talked about this like taught this concept, the reason that 95% of diets fail, which is to say people gain back all the way and then some after a year, is because when it scares you become food obsessed, you do weird stuff. You think about it all the time. You would never eat a whole cake on ordinary circumstances, but you would when you're starving. Right. And so when somebody is really, really missing something, I mean, you were, you

were, you had a really bad body image, you were skinny kid and you felt bad about it and all that. You were thinking about an awful lot and you remediated it and, and, and I'm going to guess I'm going to go out on a limb that you didn't remediate it. It always in a healthy way. Right. You know, you went too far and then you actually had to dial back and now you're in a really healthy space.

For happiness for me, it was just elusive. You know, my wife, I'm married for a super long time and kind of one to seven scales. She's like a 6.8. And she would never study happiness because that's a, why would you study air? There's lots of air out there. What a weird thing to study. It's like, you know, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't even make sense.

So that's the main reason that I really got into it. The other thing is that, you know, early on, this is a complete like fourth career for me. I started out, I was a professional classical musician. From the time I got kicked out of college when I was 19, for dropping all my required classes goofing off and you know taking Indonesian dance and you know North Indian drumming and all this thing. Anyway, they're in lies another dubious tale of my past and I spent my entire 20s traveling as a professional classical musician. That's

super, super taxing. That's many hours a day. It's like a it's like you know bodybuilding. It's like a bodybuilding. It never stops. It's completely relentless. It's totally self-driven. It's all about the validation that comes from excellence all the time. And so I kind of got to do this groove. When you do something, you do it all in super effectively as much as you possibly can. So then I went to college when I was 30,

and then I got my PhD and became an academic. And I treated my academic work the same way that I was, like, when to college when I was 30 and then I got my PhD and became an academic, and I treated my academic work the same way that I treated classical music, which is just you, you get gas pedal all the way down, and then it made it possible to do something like this. I thought, okay, what do I need? Happiness, how am I gonna do it? Like a classical musician, boom.

Great, that's great. So, those four things you talked about, which were family, friends, work, what was the fourth one again? Faith, faith, there's great. So those four things you talked about, which were family, friends, work, what was the fourth one again? Faith, faith, there you go. So those four things, how would somebody, let's say somebody's listening right now, cause I like to give people takeaways, right?

Let's say somebody's listening, they're like, you know what, I wanna construct a, for lack of a better term in a routine. I wanna be able to put those things together so that I can control the 25% I think you said of my happiness through habits, through those four things. What would that look like in a day or a week?

So the key thing is to do a serious inventory, a self-examination. Whenever it's convenient, I would say, some Sunday afternoon, you've got a little bit of time and say, okay, where am I? Where am I realistically in these dimensions? Most likely you have goals that are unmet in these dimensions. Most people are like, yeah, I really want to have a better relationship with my parents

and I really should call my mom more. Or, you know, why don't I have any friends? Or, you know, I've always wanted to read more wisdom literature. Those are basically goals in the faith family and you know friends categories. Most people are not we're listening to you because people who are listening to you are excellent. I mean they're people who are achievers that's because you have a culture of high achievement and high effectiveness.

So most people are listening to us right now are, you know, they're already good on the work dimension. And this is interesting because a diversified portfolio is every bit as important as, you know, getting the parts right. I mean, diversification, only paying attention to work is like putting your entire pension into Greek bonds. It's like, right, I mean, you can do it, but I recommend it. And if I work out, but probably not. So what I recommend

is like just really doing a serious inventory of this and saying, where do I need to make a, where do I need to make gains, where do I need to make progress? And then at the end of the day, do a little examination of conscience at the end of each day and say, did I put a deposit into each one of these accounts or did I not? And if you didn't, you got to make a resolution that you're going to do it tomorrow. Because any thing you did or you didn't, right? I mean, it's not like, oh, I forgot to go to work today. No, you didn't.

You didn't forget to go to work today. You got up because it was part of a routine. The same thing is true with respect to your faith and your family and your friends. And so what I recommend is that you actually put it into your schedule. So every day when I wake up in the morning, I set, I like pen and paper because it's this role and I put my thing together and I have time for prayer. I start off, I go to Mass with my wife every morning and then we come back and we eat breakfast together. We're called to make our marriage and our faith and I make sure that I call family members and I have time, you know, in my day, it'll say what I'm going to call

one of my friends. And in a remember, people I'm actually going to talk to because, you know, this is serious business. You're happiness portfolio is a serious business. At the end of the day, I'll say, I felt down on the friends category and make that call. I'm not going to do that tomorrow. So do the four buckets and put something into each one of the buckets and each Sunday, assess the extent to which you're you're going toward your happiness goal. And if you do that boy oh boy, you're gonna feel you know better. That is that is a very powerful take away. I'm actually gonna implement that. I appreciate that. Okay, honest opinion, looking at the state of things and the way things are right now and a lot of people would say they're kind of gloomy.

Do you think we're going to change? Do you think we're going to improve? Do you think it's going to get better before it gets worse? Or worse before it gets better, say? I think it's, well, I mean, that's what we in my business called a stochastic process, which is like a random walk. You can't say it's going to get better or worse, but one thing you can say is not going to stay the same. And I do believe strongly that before too long, we will see significant improvement. And the reason is because things that can't stay the way they are won't. People don't like it. 93% of Americans hate how divided we've become as a country. And when you see that, that's a huge opportunity. I mean, that's like people you know, people walking around going,

I can't believe there's no restaurants in this town. That's a huge opportunity, you know, open a restaurant, man, you'll make a boat, let a money. And so politicians, I was just talking to a big group of politicians in Washington today, as a matter of fact. And I said, look guys, you want to get rich and famous. Now is your up, you're opening, people are sick of what's going on in this country.

It doesn't matter if you're conservative or a liberal, you voted for Biden or Trump. You don't like it. And for the more, you love somebody who disagrees with you politically and you're tired of having people on your own side, trashing the people that you love. That's a big opportunity. So I think that the bitterness that we see in our country, the polarization, is actually people are going to jump on that. And we're going to see kind of a populism of virtue coming along. That's traditionally what's

happened to, as an historical matter, we've been like this a bunch of times. It's not, it's been worse than this, and we've seen dips in the amount of our ability as a country to actually get along and love each other, and that's when people pick up the ball. So we're due for something like that. When it comes to the happiness revolution, I think that we're actually due for some spiritual entrepreneurship where people are going to be, and I don't just mean religious, where people are going to be thinking about matters of the soul, a love revolution is going to come along. My parents were super freaked out because in the late 60s or 70s, I was a really little kid. I barely remember this, but they're like, oh, these filthy hippies, you know, they're having sex,

all over the place, and they don't understand the nature of love. And it's like, okay, now it's exactly the opposite problem. It's everybody's grim and nobody loves each other. And, you know, I realized that, you know, the Woodstock was a nightmare, but give me Woodstock over an unhappy college campus any day. And so I think that there's gonna be, that tendency coming as well. And these are welcome things. I mean, we have to, we have to, hit the brakes on ourselves so that we don't fall

prey to our appetites. But man, I think that a spiritual revolution, a love revolution, a revolution in which where the polarity goes from fear to love in our politics. I think that sooner or later we are going to see these things. And I just hope I can be part of me in it happen. That's great. That makes me feel good. You talk to a lot of very influential, powerful people. You talk about politicians. I know you have lunch with ex-presidents and senators.

When you talk to them about this stuff, are they receptive? Are they receptive to hearing what you have to say about happiness and helping other people become happy? Yeah, they are. And part of the reason is, well, part of it is the people I have lunch with are generally the good ones. But it's also their people, their people too. They might lack ambition to do the right thing. And they might, and they face a ton of risks too. I mean, you can basically say, stop being a hater, and say, if I'm not a hater, I'm going to get, you know, primary and vote it at office. That's true. And there's these, you know, these political realities that they

face. But, you know, you got to say at some point, what are you willing to go down for, man? I mean, you know, you're willing to say things that you don't believe, and they know, they're eager for this progress as much as you and I are, actually. You know, this, it was funny, you know, and I moved to Washington, because I was the president of a think tank in DC. It really big, think tank in DC for 11 years.

And when I first got to Washington, I was very cynical about politicians. I was like, ah, you know, political pros, they'll say anything, they're really shallow. And that's actually, I was very cynical about politicians. I was like, ah, political pros, they'll say anything, they're really shallow. And that's actually, I was wrong. I was really impressed at the quality of the people and the dedication to service and how much they suffer

when people attack them. And I'm less cynical than most of the people that I know. But that doesn't mean they're perfect and they can actually use coaching. And you know what else they need friends. You know, I've gotten, I got a text from a senator while you and I were taping this. He's my friend and I like him and he's a good person.

And there's gonna be, you know, I think, if I do my job and you do your job and in a fake, they do better for all of us in the mind pump, by the way, that we can all make a better world, but we have to nudge our friends to do the right thing. Arthur, thank you so much for coming on the show. You make me feel good every time I talk to you.

And I encourage everybody, listen to this guys podcast, find anything he has on YouTube because you do. You just feel good and empowered after watching you. So I appreciate, I really appreciate your friendship and I appreciate you coming on. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it a lot. I think of you and, you know, we text pretty regularly,

but you've helped me so much and you're helping so many people around the world. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than the fact that mind pump is going from strength to strength. So thank you. Thank you again. Thank you for listening to mind pump.

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