The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Shocking Lessons He Teaches His Harvard Students | Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

Click here to see the day in the life guide of using Microsoft Dragon Copilot: http://aka.ms/clinicdayI'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Arthur Brooks new book "The Meaning Of Your Life: Finding Purpose In An Age Of Emptiness" is available for preorder now: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/books/the-meaning-of-your-life00:00 Intro01:08 Successful Enough08:50 Workaholism & Participation Trophies14:30 Happy Heavy Men19:56 Political Tribalism25:35 What Is Love?33:40 Does Love Exist?39:20 Religion51:19 Billionaires In The Jungle54:20 Microsoft56:03 Marijuana & Creatine59:55 Social Media & AI1:07:30 Jubilee1:15:40 Ketamine / Anxiety1:24:55 Happy Conservatives1:30:45 Male Loneliness1:39:25 Your Feelings Are Liars1:43:58 Nihilism1:49:08 PsychologyHelp us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today:https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today, and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life.

Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. People ask all the time about AI. You know, how will AI affect happiness? And the answer is, well, a lot of people are using it as their friend, lover, or therapist, which is exactly wrong. Look, there's one thing in life you can't simulate, which is meaning. Welcome back to the Checkup podcast. Today's guest is Arthur Brooks, behavioral scientist, Harvard Business School Professor,

and one of the sharpest minds on what actually makes people happy. He's also the author of a new book called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding, purpose in an age of emptiness. Which is available for pre-order now. This guy is a quote machine. For example, did you know that heavier men are happier on average? It's not because of the food gentlemanly paunch. How about that liberal woman tend to be sadder

than their conservative counterparts? Why is that? We cover it and so much more, including whether I should keep participating in these Jubilee debates, the male loneliness epidemic, and how to treat my teenage patients who believe in nihilism. There's seriously something in this episode for everyone. Huge thanks to Microsoft Dragon co-pilot for sponsoring this video. You spent a lot of time talking to people who are brilliant, successful, wealthy. What's been your take on their mental health state in terms of

happiness and negative feelings perhaps? It's mixed. Okay. And it's one of the things I tell my students. My students are master's students at the Harvard Business School. they start with a misapprehension about happiness, about well-being. They think that if they achieve worldly success, then happiness comes from free, that it comes automatically. And I tell them on the first day of class, here's how it works. Shoot for happiness. And by the way, this is going to create panic for all strivers watching us.

Shoot for happiness. And then you will be successful enough. And they go, because of that last word. Because of that last word. Because enough is antithetical to what we're trying to do in the hustle culture, in the culture of pure work excellence. And so the result of it is that many of my students do fine, but the ones who do find are the ones that actually do shoot for happiness

and the ones who don't do well, not just my students, but strivers in general, the ultra-successful people, they are looking for happiness as a result of worldly success, and that's a mistake. Yeah. You know what I see even with podcast guests that I've spoken with who are incredibly wealthy?

I remember you probably don't know the name, KSI is a famous YouTuber in the UK, boxer, part owner of prime energy drink and hydrating drink. And we're talking about financial success and explaining how that ultimately does not make you happier. And he made a good point that it's always the wealthy people complaining about money not making them happier. So it comes off disingenuous to the general public.

Is there some hypocrisy there? you have it, you don't care about it, but you don't have it, you want it. Yeah, well, there's the general reaction as, let me try. Right. Yeah. And, you know, it's, there's something to that, to be sure. There's this assumption that if you have more resources, because Mother Nature endows you with this tendency to want resources.

We want resources because Mother Nature wants us to be able to pass on our genes and not starve, survive another season. But Mother Nature doesn't care about our happiness. We have this kind of cross-circuit in our happiness. We have these animal impulses, and we think if we meet all these animal impulses, then the thing that we really want, which is happiness, will actually come to us.

That's not right. What will come to us is, indeed, more mating partners and more stuff and more hierarchy, more place in the hierarchy, but we won't actually get happier. And so the result is that we assume that we just needed more.

That's called the hedonic treadmill, the more, more, more. You homeostatically go back to your emotional baseline very quickly. And that is to say you get you're happy because something good happens to you in worldly terms. But your emotions don't exist

to give you a permanent good day. They're an alarm system to tell you that certain things are happening around you. And they set. That's how homestasis is supposed to work. And I mean, you're the expert of this because you're an actual physician.

But in behavioral science, it's the same thing. It's the same actual process. And then when your emotions reset and you realize that you can't, as Mick Jagger almost saying, you can't keep no satisfaction. then you assume that you needed more,

and it's more, more, more, more, more, all the way to the moon. The first thing that a billionaire says, after the glow from that first billion wears off, which is like a week, is I guess I needed another billion to get that feeling to last forever. And that's a real problem, and that's something you have to sort out. So rich people say, yeah, it's not that great.

And poor people say, yeah, well, let me try. But the people who are experiencing that, number one, they're right. And number two is they actually didn't figure out how to use resources in a way that does bring lasting happiness. And there are ways to do it. They're just not the ways that you think of. Yeah. I see so much similarity in the mental health space

as I do in the physical health space. Jonathan Haidt and I actually talked about how in order to build muscle, you need to create inflammation in the muscle. In order to keep healthy bone into later ages of your life, you need to stress the bone, but weight on the bone. much in the same way we need emotional challenges in order for us to do well.

Same thing with our immune system. Now you're talking about the same with our happiness. So this idea of homeostasis of never going out of balance, what is the correct way to set our homeostasis balance in a way where we're being as effective as possible in managing the highs and lows? Yeah.

So the way to understand it is to start by understanding what happiness actually is. and the problem that people start with is that they make a bunch of mistakes. Number one, they think they can be happy. And you can't be happy. And the reason you can't be cosmically happy. You can't, that would require a complete absence of negative emotions,

which exists. So you survive, Mike, I mean, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are the basic negative emotions.

They exist and they're produced in the limbic system of the brain for a reason. They're an alarm system. And if you didn't have them, you'd be dead in a week. If you never felt me fear, I mean, you'd be run over by a car. If you didn't feel any sadness, you'd have no relationships at all, no friends, no employer, no nothing. If you feel no pain, you will keep touching the hot stove.

It'd be a problem. You know, it'd actually be a problem. And you're not going to avoid negative experiences because that's part of life on earth. If you're not having negative experiences, it means you're dead, which is not the greatest alternative, I suppose. And so the result is that we have to recognize that happiness isn't the goal. Happiness is a direction, not a destination. The second thing to keep in mind is it's not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, and positive emotions are evidence of having a lot of happiness. The way to understand happiness is kind of take it

like we take the macro nutrients in our diet. So if I said, what's Thanksgiving dinner? You wouldn't say the smell of the turkey. But that's feelings compared to happiness. The smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, or a list of ingredients or a list of dishes, depending on how scientific you are.

Our background says, yeah, it's like past the protein month or whatever. So when you think happiness, do you think neurotransmitters? Well, neurotransmitters play into it, as does basic neurophysiology. But I think more in terms of the macronutrients as in the component parts, the things that you need in balance and abundance, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning. Those are the three big parts of it. And I actually have tests that I've able to administer that I've had, have validated, have really high construct validity to show. that you're probably, I mean, all of us can get better at one or more of those macronutrients. Learn more about it, get better skill, understand it, change our habits, share the idea with other

people and actually get happier. So all diagnostically look at people and say, yeah, you're real high on satisfaction because you're a striver and an achiever. Satisfaction is the joy you get in an accomplishment after struggle. So you're super high in satisfaction because you're doing all these things. things that are awesome and you struggled a lot to get them. I mean, you actually made sacrifices for them. But you might be, I don't know, but you might be lower an enjoyment of your life. And enjoyment is, it's not the same thing as pleasure. Or you might struggle with meaning. What's the meaning of

my life? Which is very, very common among strivers to have a real trouble with meaning. And, you know, so I'll use a battery of assessments to figure out where people need work. And then we'll talk about putting a scientific plan together in their life to get more of it. And so that's the That's how I think about this whole basic idea. Matthew Walker, who is a sleep expert I've had as a guest on the show, he talks about chronotypes, how perhaps there's a genetic distribution of people who prefer to go to sleep really late or perhaps wake up really early and perhaps nature created us in this way so that someone is always keeping an eye out.

It's interesting, at least as a theory. Is there some sort of genetic distribution that could be happening here in terms of strivers versus people who are happy with low levels of success. It's very possible. It's very possible. One of the things that I find is that strivers, real strivers, like Uber successful people, they're all a little crazy. And by that I don't mean that clinically.

There's not some clinical insignias. It's not, no, I don't mean psychosis. I don't mean that actually something diagnosable that needs clinical attention. But what they are doing, generally speaking, is that they're doing something that doesn't pass personal cost-benefit calculus. They're doing something that systematically has very, very, very costly. And the reason for that, generally speaking, is that there's a little bit of a pathology

in the mentality of a lot of really, really successful people. And a lot of them have this sort of this same story. Super strivers are deeply afraid of failure, and they're deeply addicted to winning. And it usually starts when they're kids. They're little kids. They come from immigrant families, not always, but from pretty exigent parents. and the parents administer, it can be great parents.

It's not to cast aspersions, but they only really get attention and affection from their parents when they do extraordinary things. Like all A's on the report card. Like you made the baseball team, first chair in the orchestra. And their little brains wire

in this period of unbelievably high synaptic plasticity when you're a kid. That love is earned. Love is earned. From the people who matter the most, your love is earned. And so that gets into this whole, the idea of you're not a human being, you're a human doing. This leads, if they're very gifted, into this success addiction, where probably they get more dopamine from doing something that's extraordinary and getting the rewards, getting that sense of being admired, that sense of affirmation from people, just like other people do when they use drugs and alcohol or certain rewarding behaviors.

And that becomes pathological. That turns into success addiction, a secondary manifestation of which is workaholism. So when I'm meeting somebody in my own age, I'm in my early 60s, I meet somebody in my age. I can't stop. I can't stop. I work 80 hours a week. And my employees, they don't love me. They're afraid of me.

And I'm alienating my family. My wife and I are roommates. I have a cordial relationship with my children. I don't even love my job, but I can't stop. It's classic workaholic behavior. I dig into the success addiction that's behind that, the self-objectification, the fear of failure that comes along. And there's almost always a kind of insanity behind that.

There's a craziness, the sort of same kind of pathology as I would see was somebody who abuses drugs or alcohol. Do you see the pendulum, if it was to swing to the other side, is the participation trophy of it all, where there is no success, but let's celebrate you just being you? Yeah. I mean, that's a different kind of problem that we see. But I would, in a way, the people who,

who are just you being you, they tend to be happier than people who are not anything unless they're winning. Now, to be sure, Mike, if it weren't for the pathological success addicts, we'd be living in caves. I mean, capitalism wouldn't exist. And so there's a certain sort of meritoriousness,

there's a certain gratitude I have toward the crazy people. Because that's really what, you know what, the people who can't stop, can't stop, can't stop are making life really, really good in a certain way, except their own. It's interesting how there's pros and cons, but not just pros and cons for the individual. There's also pros and cons to society at large for both of these scenarios that play out. Oh, absolutely. No, for sure, the happiest people, they don't scale up into a prosperous, secure society.

Yeah, you know, I frequently talk about on the show about how the poorest in our nation get the worst quality of medical care because they can't have access, they don't have insurance, they can't have insurance, they can't. can't afford medications, et cetera. But then also, now when we're entering the ultra-rich sphere, I see this biohacking protocolized life that they're living, also now go into bad medical care, where they think they could solve every problem. And to me, the reason this happens, and correct my logic if you think it's flawed,

is that they've solved the issue of finances, they can take care of their family themselves, they bought themselves all the toys and they're bored of it. The next thing is immortality. Yeah. Is that the one problem that they're all just looking to solve? Yeah, well, that's certainly a plausible hypothesis.

But there's also this, there's a, it's a funny thing when it comes to health. There's a balance in everything. There's a kind of an aristotelian golden mean. And look, I fall prey to this a lot too, right? Because I have a lot of information as a behavioral scientist, but any more to be behavioral scientist,

you have to have a lot of information about neuroscience. And then you're in biology. and then when you're in the world of health and wellness and public education in the space of podcasting and everything else, you're bombarded with data and studies. And I'm reading 15, 20 papers a week just to kind of keep up with my columns and my books

and all this kind of stuff. And so it's very interesting how I can, I even wind up protocolizing my own life as well. I mean, you fall into these particular patterns and that in and of itself lowers quality of life. I mean, you can easily have too much health care. It's crazy, but it's true. I mean, if you're going to the doctor,

every single day and all you're thinking about is your health and yourself and your body and your abs, you're going to be miserable. You're going to be looking at a mirror all day long. You're not going to have normal relationships. There's a funny stat. This is a weird one that the happiest men are happiest men over 40. You're not over 40 yet. So it'll happen. It'll happen. It says to happen. I'm four years away. Yeah, I feel like I'm 36 too, you know, but the happiest men over 40 are 25 pounds overweight. And I don't want that to be true. It's not because of the gentlemanly punch.

It's because they're relaxed about their lives. It's because if you're 61, like me, and you've got washboard abs, you're making a big sacrifice for that. And that sacrifice might not be a healthy sacrifice for you. And that's actually worth keeping in mind because it's more important for you to actually, you know, eat a slice of pizza with your wife.

Yeah, how do we reconcile the fact that being the happiest can sometimes mean not being the most optimally healthy version of yourself? Well, so you remember when you studied math and college, right? You have to optimize across more than one variable. That means that not everything is that it's individual optimization. So if you've got your abs, right, or you know, it's subcutaneous abdominal fat, right? And you've got joy in your relationships, and you've got spiritual transcendence. and you've got the way that you serve your community, and you've got how you're dealing with your children, all these things are different variables in which you're trying to optimize simultaneously. And that means none of them is just for that.

Because when you go on just one, this is the problem that we have with a lot of sort of influencers. It's as if you do this one thing, your whole life is going to fall into place. Wrong. There's tradeoffs and everything. Everybody knows there's tradeoffs. and everything is what it comes down to.

You want to do the best you can across five variables or 10 variables or whatever it happens to be. I talk an awful lot about the elements of the happiest life, and it's really four dimensions. Your faith and your family and your friendship and your work, and by faith I mean philosophy too. And when you're thinking across all those four things, none of them is being exclusively optimized.

You need to be thinking about all four kind of at the same time, and the balance per se is part of the beauty of having the best life. In getting my education, med school residency, especially being in family medicine, I have so many patients that are coming in with a psychological, psychiatric ailment, even though they're not presenting that way initially. It's my back hurts or I'm having chest pain.

My education didn't prepare me to think about psychology in this way. We don't think about it from, let's build people up to have a positive life. We want to build people to the neutral. Right. Is that a flaw in our health care, mental health care system, or is that ideal? And we shouldn't try and instill positivity.

Yeah. So it's a problem. It's a huge problem, as a matter of fact. So mental health would be kind of like physical health where you only have physical therapy and you never have the gym. So the reason that people go to the gym is not because they have a problem they're trying to solve, but because they want to be better. You know, they want more excellence in their life.

And that's great. They're healthy, but they want to be better. Whereas physical therapy generally means you're solving a problem. You're trying to get back to the line of scrimmage. Most of what we do with our, you know, this is how our mutual friend Peter Atia talks about healthcare 3.0 versus healthcare 2.0. Healthcare 2.0 is you got a problem. Let's try to solve it.

Let's get us back to the line of scrimmage. And with the way that we think about psychology and the way that we think about happiness, per se, is that people are just trying to solve their depression and anxiety, as opposed to they don't necessarily have depression and anxiety, but they want more joy, they want more love, they want more meaning, they want more fulfillment and satisfaction in their lives. They want to get down the field. And there's so much of the world of positive psychology, but now positive psychiatry, positive philosophy that we can actually add in to the healthcare system, actually.

Do you think we've been ultra-focused on just the negative aspects, so much so that we've neglected this, where now patients won't buy into the notion of positive psychology? Because when I mention it in passing, because I'm not their mental health specialist, I met with a lot of scrutiny and cynicism even. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, for sure. They're at the, part of it is that they're at the doctor because something hurts. You know, I don't, it's interesting because I have a, I have a physician who does, who follows you, he follows Peter Atia, you know, and, you know, almost every time I go to the doctor, it's like, feeling great, keep me feeling great. I'm feeling great.

Keep you feeling great. Make me feel better. And we talk for an hour and a half about the latest studies and I'm passing my doctor papers and that's really good, but that's not typical at all. You don't go to your cardiologist

and say, I think the old ticker's doing better, never. That's not why you're at the cardiologist in the first place. And so when you're trying to take this different approach with respect to their mental well-being, you know, I don't have a problem,

so let's not even talk about it. And yet, that's a quality of life issue. Yeah, it's a huge quality of life issue. And I see that quality of life dwindling in society these days. I'm curious what role you think our political disagreements and our social media tribalism perhaps has fueled the unhappiness, dare I say, epidemic that we face. So yeah, so happiness has been going in the wrong direction for about 30 years. Since about 1990, if you look at the general social survey or, you know, any of these really good, big sources of well-being,

we find that a higher and higher percentage of people say they're not very happy about their lives. And there's two big reasons. There's sort of a climate problem and there's a weather problem. I don't mean that literally. The climate problem is that the climate of happiness comes from what I just talked about, you know, faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work. And all four of those things have been getting more and more dysfunctional in the minds of ordinary Americans. They're less and less likely to practice a religion or even of a coherent sense of their life philosophy.

They're less and less and less likely to get married enough kids. They're less and less likely to have people who know them well, especially in the era of social media. where that's crowding out in-person relationships, and they're less likely to say that their work is a source of meaning. So that's the climate of happiness. That sort of ticks us down by a half a percentage point a year, and the percentage is to say I'm very happy about my life. Then the weather problems, there's three big weather systems that have come through,

especially since the beginning of the 21st century. The first is when everybody put, you know, started looking at little screens and got apps on their phone. That greatly attenuated relationships. And it changed, I mean, I have a new book coming out. this book coming out coming in March called The Meaning of Your Life that talks about hemispheric lateralization. And that just simply means the two sides of the brain

do slightly different things. The big theory, the big new cutting edge theory in neuroscience these days is that the right side of the brain is mystery and meaning, the why questions of life. The left hemisphere of the brain is more how to and what, which is the technical things in life, the task part of life. What the screens are doing is pushing us into the left

hemisphere of our brain is slamming the door shut to the right side of our brain so that we don't know the meaning of our lives. And guess what? Depression and anxiety assume. My belief is that the big problem with depression and anxiety, especially for people under 30 today, is they don't know the meaning of life. And they don't even know where to look. What is the meaning of life? Yeah. Well, the meaning of life is defined as a combination of why things happen the way they do. That's coherence. Why you're doing what you're doing, which is your purpose, and why your life matters, which is significance. And they don't even know how to address those issues in the first place because you only take on those big philosophical questions in the right hemisphere of your brain. And all the time

you're spending on your devices, not to mention the hustle culture and the grind and the, you know, the technical culture that we live in, is just pushing us to live exclusively on the left hemisphere of our brain. We're living in the matrix, Mike. Why are they doing that? They're doing that because that's what's on offer, number one. That's how we work and how we're educated. That's number two. Number three is we're addicted because the technologies that we use are highly addictive. And number four is that we've learned how to solve the life's biggest problem, which is boredom. And we need to be bored. And probably because they could sell you something. Well, yeah, for sure. That's why they do it. That's why time and

app is the number one metric when you're developing a technology. When you want somebody to download your app, time and app is how you monetize everything. But the truth is this is highly, highly, highly addictive. And it keeps us doing this all the time. And you don't even know. It's funny because people ask all the time about AI. You know, how will AI affect happiness? And the answer is, well, somebody might use it to do left brain tasks and free up their time to go spend it and their relationships and the right side of their brain.

But a lot of people are using it as their friend, lover, a therapist, which is exactly wrong. Look, there's one thing in life you can't simulate, which is meaning. That's what this whole new book is about, is actually how to live in a way that you open up the right hemisphere of your brain. so you can actually get that back. But as far as I'm concerned, that's the big happiness crisis of our time. Why does using AI as a friend, as a lover, as a therapist,

backfire in activating the right side of your brain? It does because your brain knows the difference. The right side of your brain is what we use for the fundamental questions, the most mysterious questions in life. So think about it this way. The left side of your brain deals with complications, which are things that are hard to figure out. But once you do, they're static. The right side of your brain is complex issues, which is things that are pretty easy to understand, but you can't solve the problems. You can only live with them. My marriage is unbelievably complex, not complicated. There's no, there's no hack. There's no solution to my marriage. I mean, I've been married 34 years, Mike. I'm in love, brother. But my wife might just be like

weirdly mad at me. You know, after we're done, I'm going to call her up and say, honey. She says, I just talked to Dr. Mike. She says, yeah, well, the dishwasher was still full when I, when you left this. Or it won't be bad because we're not, you know, we're past that. But the whole point is it's complex, which is why I love my marriage. And so all these complexities, they exist with, you know, and there are a lot of different theories in neuroscience about what part of the brain is governing, how, why the differences in the hemispheres exist to govern a complex versus complicated.

But the fact remains that religious experiences largely right hemispheric, romantic love, right hemispheric, nature, beauty, right hemispheric, suffering, largely right hemispheric. And when we get away from our ability to cope with these things, to experience these things, we don't experience the richness in life, the mystery in life. So as a person who's been married for 34 years, a master of psychology in every way, what is love? I'm not a master of psychology in every way. I'm just getting through the day, man. Well, tell me, what is love? Yeah, what is love? The love according to, this is an Aristotelian definition, which is the best, sort of through the great medieval philosophers who are Aristotelians,

they defined love. And this would be Mimonides, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, the great Southern European Abrahamic philosophers at the time. They defined love is to will the good of the other, which is really interesting because it doesn't have anything to do with feelings, does it? Or a romance. Yeah, to will the good of the other. And that means that's all different kinds of love. English is horrible for love. Because we've got one word. In Spanish, we have, have two, Amar and Kare. Right? How many, in Russian, how many words are there for love?

I think one, Blue, Blue. Maybe I don't know the complexity of the Russian language because I'm on age six of still learning it. Age six, Brooklyn, Russian. But yeah, it's, in Greek, there's seven words, you know, for different kinds of love. I mean, there is Eros, there's Philos, I mean, philotia, you know,

which is brotherly love, there's Agape, which is love of the divine. There's all these different versions of, you know, what love, because love is such a very thing. What they all have in common is a will to will the good of the other as other. That's what it comes down to. And that's what a successful marriage, what a successful relationship is all about. So how does the brain understand love? The brain, it's an issue, that's a, that's one of the great mysteries that we actually have. Because we've been trying to hack love for a long time. We're trying to solve love. constantly as well. One of the ways we try to solve love is with apps, is with dating apps,

for example. People meet on dating apps all the time by trying to curate their dating profile and their desires. So I can get it just exactly right. I can really get myself down and then I can find another person who algorithmically is matched to me perfectly, then I will have solved love. But you can't do it that way. You actually can't do it that way because there's a complex, none. That would be like saying, I'm going to simulate the jets versus the dolphins so perfectly that I know exactly that the score is going to be and who's going to win beforehand.

Like you can't do it. It can't be doing it. You can't simulate your cat. What's my cat going to do? And that's the reason that you love watching the jets and the dolphins game is because you can't be simulated because it's complex, not complicated. That's the reason you love your cat

more than you love your toaster is because your cat is not solvable. Your cat is alive. And that's the reason you care more about your relationship with your significant other than you do about most other things. That's why it occupies so much because that mystery, that uncertainty, that, that complexity, that right hemisphere murkiness, that dark consciousness is what governs it. That's the fun part of life.

Is that why some of these relationships that are so tumultuous with lots of arguing sometimes are the most meaningful to people? You've been watching my marriage for the past 34 years? I'm married to a Spaniard, which is an addition. level of complexity. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's... Why is that? Why is there... Oh, just because it's like fighting

is a basic form of communication. You know, it's just, it's, you know, boisterous and loud and... In Russian culture, the same thing. Sometimes people hear me and my dad talking, my staff. They'll say, oh my God, you're arguing with your father. What's going on?

I said, oh, no, we're making dinner plans. You're making dinner plans. He's just asking about the traffic on the West Side Highway. Literally, yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's interesting stat, I've seen this from a number of different sources that I haven't done this research myself,

but that anger and divorce are uncorrelated. What's correlated with divorce is contempt, which is a complex emotion that mixes anger and anger and disgust. And so when you have anger and disgust, it's an ice cold, very complex emotion where you treat somebody as if they were worthless. That's all that John Gottman stuff. You know, the Gottman Marriage Lab at University of Washington, where he, if you're, if you're,

you and your girlfriend are having a big argument, you and your wife, whatever, having a big argument. And she rolls her eyes at something you say. That's a huge predictor of dissolution of the relationship because that expresses contempt. Anger's no problem. Anger says, I care what you think and I want it to change. It's passion.

Yeah, there's a lot to it. Why do some cultures do it more than others? Because some cultures, they tend to be more expressive. They tend to also, there's a lot of the salience of negative versus positive emotions. The intensity depends on the individual, and it's almost certainly highly genetic. So you're going to see it in particular cultures more than others.

You're going to see more intense emotionality, more intense affect. And that's, I do have a whole test I give on that about the emotional affect profile that people have. There's some people who are high negative intensity and low positive intensity. There's vice versa. There's high negative and positive and there's low positive and negative. And those are the four profiles that people actually have. And so what you find is in Spain, for example, or I presume Russia, certainly if you go to Israel, all over South America, people are high intensity positive and high intensity negative. It's a culture of mad scientists effectively, right? And so it's just like daggers drawn all the time and fuse is blown at the slightest provocation.

Whereas you go to other places where they're very low affect cultures where there's not very much yelling and there's not that much arguing in relationships. Those are low low. Those are called judge cultures, whereas low, positive. and low negative affect cultures. It's what you find. Surgeons tend to be really good judges make good surgeons, for example, because you don't want really, really high-effect surgeons. You don't want somebody to cut you open and go,

oh my God, there's blood. That's right. You want somebody to be like, I can take that out. So then when you have a patient coming in that's perhaps suffering at the expense of having these high level of emotions, is the treatment to try and bring them

to some sort of middle ground? Yeah, it's certainly not to eliminate emotions. You should never eliminate emotions. emotions because they all exist for a reason is to manage your emotions. And that's a whole field of self-management called metacognition, where you want to move the experience of your emotions from the limbic system into the prefrontal cortex by being aware of them. That's what Vapasana meditation is intended to do. That's what prayer or petition. That's what journaling is supposed to do. That's what good therapy is supposed to do is to make you aware of yourself and your emotions such that when you're

feeling very intense emotions, you say, oh, oh, that's it. Yeah, oh yeah, Mike is feeling kind of pretty ticked off right now. And why is that? That's usually because of this. And, you know, good cognitive behavioral therapy is supposed to do exactly that. So you don't want less emotionality. You want more emotional control through understanding. Which is how I describe, for example, SSRIs to my patients. They say, I don't want to become numb. And my answer is, if these medications are making you numb, that's a side effect that I don't want. I want you to have control over the emotions that make you successful. Yeah. Which is really interesting. I mean, there's a new research. Have you seen that stuff on how rumination and serotonin work?

Have you seen some of that stuff? About receptor modulation? Yeah, or about, actually, even more, about the ventralateral prefrontal cortex. So basically, it's highly engaged in the process of depressive rumination. And it's associated with low, with high serotonin in high levels of serotonin. And wait a bit, high levels of serotonin. No, low dips in serotonin levels.

And so when you get more serotonin in the synapse, you're going to get less of the this ruminative activity in this part of the brain. And this is also associated with being in love and associated with creative output. Which is why people who have the poetic temperament, they tend to be depressive, creative, and romantic. Because it's all rumination because of really low serotonin levels. And so when people take selected serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,

there's more serotonin in the synapse. They'll say, I'm ruminating less in sadness. But they'll also often say, I feel less creative and I have a harder time falling in love. That's so interesting. Yeah. The other day, I was having a glass of wine with a gentleman who was asking me a lot of questions about life. And because of the glass of wine, I was starting to speak outside of my area of expertise,

which I try not to do, especially on podcasts. But I'll tell you what I said, and I'm curious how it leads to you. And I do that too. And it's, yeah, it's like, I just talking about the ventralateral prefolded cortex. Wait till we see the comment section. So he asked, based on the fact that I'm studying medicine, I'm so evidence-based, I want to see evidence for everything. He said, what evidence do we have that love exists? And given that I'm not an expert in this space, I said, we don't have randomized controlled data for love,

but we have enough observational data that we believe it exists, much like we don't need randomized controlled trials to say smoking is harmful. There's so much power in the observational data that we say it's harmful, even without the randomness control data. So I feel the same is true for love. And again, perhaps it was the wine talking, but I'm curious what you say. No, that's completely legitimate.

So people will often ask, so I'm a traditionally religious person, which is kind of unusual for a behavioral scientist. You know, they don't typically think of religion as a social construct. But, you know, I have a personal experience of, you know, encounters with the divine. And so do most people.

As a matter of fact, there are no documented civilizations that don't have the phenomenon of worship. in the worship of the divine. Any, any, it doesn't mean that all individuals do, but societies in general. And people often say, so as a science base, as an evidence-based guy,

what's, how do you deal with, you know, the existence of God, for example? And the analogy is there's lots of things that exist, that we know exist,

that we have personal experience of, but that we have to only look at secondary evidence. Besides God, can you give me another example of? Love. Okay. Because,

and that's why I brought that up. That's why love. It's like, how do you know, how do you know there's love? I feel it. I'm experiencing it. There's no functional MRI imaging that's been shown to light up in areas where you see a loving picture. Well, I mean, no, that's not true.

I mean, there's all kinds of things. I don't know. No, no, no, there actually are. I mean, for example, you'll see oxytocin release. And so there are some neuropeptides that are associated with the experience of love that people actually have. And, you know, Lisa Miller up at Columbia. She does all this stuff on the, on the experiences of God and the parts of the brain

they're illuminated, then that experiences he only get with religion or love. But that's not evidence of love. That just means that when you experience something that you feel is love, that your brain is looking in a particular way. It's not, it's just not, you can't identify it. It's not hemoglobin A1C for love. There's nothing that we know like that. Imagine we have that.

Babe, our love is pre-love. We're not love yet. I know. I know. Or I just got my test, honey. We're in love. It's positive. It's positive.

This is it. You know, this is. And, you know, it's actually, I mean, there's things that you can do. You can see the intensity of, or the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the oxytocin release when you lay eyes on your beloved and how intense it actually is. Oh my God.

That's the new lie detector YouTube video. Uh-huh. What is your oxytocin release when your loved one comes into the room? Uh-huh. I know. I know. I know. I know.

That's my reality show. Let's do that, dude. It's just like, it sounds awful. It's like a surefire, morey springer. I know. I know. It just sounds so bad. I know it's like, I knew you didn't love me.

Zero oxytocin release. So, yeah, I mean, so there are neurobiological correlates to it, but the experience is fundamentally complex. And by that, it means it's really, really hard to define, easy to understand, impossible to solve, and super mat multifactorial, unbelievably multifactorial. And yet, it's the most real thing in life. Yeah, you mentioned some personal experiences with these divine situations. Can you share some of them?

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a really, really, very much. family. And so there's probably a genetic component to religious experience. It's probably the case. I mean, psychology is biology in a very real way. And so we experience, which does not, by the way, does not rule out the authenticity of religious experience. Why wouldn't God put a receptor in your head? I mean, for example, or, you know, there's, if you believe in God, God created your brain, you know. And so I'm completely comfortable with the idea of a science-based and a faith-based world. I think that iron sharpens iron in this way. Creator in creation are understood in different ways,

but they make each other better as far as I'm concerned. So for me, as fundamentally a science-based person, I occasionally have emotional experiences of the divine, but I don't rely on that a lot. For me, the most important thing with religious experiences, with metaphysics, is a practice where you open the door to them, a belief that structures them and an occasional feeling of them.

Most people think about it in the other way. Most people who wish they had religion in their lives, but don't. They think they need to feel it and then adopt a belief and then practice it. And only when they feel it and have a belief, then practicing is authentic.

That's exactly the opposite of the way that it's like how people want motivation before action, but it's usually action that creates motivation. For sure. That's the, yeah. I mean, that's the reverse causation that actually happens in real life. But that in relationships,

is the same thing. People want to feel in love all the time, and then they believe in it, and then they practice it. But you need to practice it every single day. If you want to be married for your whole life, the way to do it is to be married, and then you'll believe in it most of the time,

and then occasionally you'll feel it. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, so it's the same thing. I mean, love and faith, love and faith and divine are very, very similar in lots and lots of ways. There's creators who have gone and had debates about religious experience,

both for and against. Right. The people who are on team science like to argue the hypocrisies of religious organizations or... Of which they're manifold. I mean, it's easy to find. It's easy to find.

Really? Science? How dare you, sir? So when they, if you were presented with these issues, how do they land in your mind? Yeah, I mean, I'm not super, I mean, I'm a Catholic, right? And it takes two seconds to come up with a problem. with the Catholic Church. I mean, and scandals in the Catholic Church. I mean, they're just all around. These are people. These are people that are that are, that are, are, are, are administering an institution.

And you're going to find problems with that. But the whole idea that you would like, I'm never going to a doctor because I heard about this doctor and he was, you know, on the take, or he was incompetent or he was faking his degree or, you know, he, he would inappropriately touch a patient or something. So I'm not going to go to the doctor. Well, it's nuts. Why would you do that? These are people and people are really, really imperfect. It's the underlying concept that we're trying to get at through the imperfect vessel of an institution that's built by people and doing the best that we actually can.

That's how I think about it. The other thing that I often consider about this is that my dad was a PhD biostat, and he was the most brilliant man I knew personally. He was also deeply, deeply religious. And I asked him about this early on. And maybe this will actually, maybe this will be familiar to you. I grew up to Seattle.

And two years before I was born, Seattle had the World's Fair, which was, and in 1962, I was born in 1964. 1962, the World's Fair was there. And the theme was man in space. So there was this total science craze all around the world. And the Space Needle, famous Space Needle in Seattle is named that because it was built for the World's Fair

for the theme, Man in Space. So the biggest celebrity in space travel that year was a cosmonaut, a Russian cosmonaut named Germonti. He was the first guy to actually go into orbit. And so he was in Seattle for this whole thing. It was like press all over the place. And my dad was told tells me about this. So Garment Titov is asked by a journalist, you know, so would you see?

Because he was looking at space. So would you see? He did this. Well, that wasn't the question, but he answered it like this. He was a good Soviet, right? A good Soviet atheist. He said, I put my, I pointed my, my, my telescope out into space. And I saw neither God nor angels.

It's like proof they don't exist. And my dad said, that's as idiotic as saying. I looked at Picasso's painting all day long and didn't find evidence of Picasso. So the truth is, creator and creation, they work in harmony with each other. And just because your science-based doesn't mean you shouldn't also be faith-based. And if you stand in awe of the creation, you got to wonder about the creator. and if you really love the creator, you better be interested in the creation.

So what I have trouble with a lot are really, really religious people that are interested in science. Are you kidding me? That aren't interested in art, aren't interested in literature, aren't interested in the genius of the economy. I mean, it's just so interesting.

It's just so amazing, actually, how it works. Yeah, I've had patients in the ER when I was a resident come in and refuse blood transfusions for their children because of their, I believe there were Jehovah's Witnesses. And they said, no, no, no, no. Like using blood products from another person will make my child have a worse eternity moving forward.

And as a science-based person who's not religious, I didn't even know how to accept that notion where this child could die. So how does those... I don't know how to square that, actually, because that's a specific religious belief. And there are certain... You're saying it more holistic.

And there are certain science-based beliefs that purport to... rule out. So I look at it in the other way. So I talk to a lot of neuroscientists, for example, who truly don't believe in free will. They don't believe in free will. And the evidence they have for the non-existence of free will is there's a lot of actual evidence that when you think you're about, like you think you're about to ask me a question. By the time you make the decision to ask me the question, it's actually already started, which means that it's not really free will, that there's something is, you know, before that. Yeah, I've heard Sam Harris talk about this and

I just get so lost in the conversation that I... Yeah, but we'll think about it this way. You're going to pick up a cookie. By the time you've decided to pick up the cookie, your hand has already started going toward the cookie. This is true. This is actually true. And so for them, it says there's no such thing as free will.

Well, free will is fundamental to, you know, who we are as people made by our creator and making decisions about right and wrong is what it comes down to. And so they'll use that as evidence. They'll use that as scientific evidence that rules out the existence of God, a whole area of belief in their lives. Yet those things are completely compatible.

They're totally compatible. That God makes us to have free will and not free will at the same time. It's okay. I mean, it just means thinking a little bit outside the lines. Yeah, what, I'm curious to you as someone who straddles both of these worlds.

What does God mean to you? Because to people, it means a person who's in the sky, et cetera. So God is outside of the creation. God is outside of the creation. God is, you know, in the Hebrew Bible, God is I am. It's the fundamental I am. It's the fundamental is. It's God pre-exist before everything. This is the, you know, the Jewish God. This is the fundamental monotheistic God. That was this, by the way, this was a big idea that there was an I am. There was a force behind all of that, a nebulous force. that we can't really understand. And then we anthropomorphize at our peril. Sure.

You know, it's like, the guy with a beard, the guy in the sky with the beard, who gets mad. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. There's definitely some value in saying there are things that are completely outside of our knowledge and even perhaps capacity to gain knowledge on. Of course. But then how it creates a characterization, a personalization.

You have to understand it somehow, but it's nothing more than a metaphor. So that's in the Jewish and Christian, and Muslim faiths, the understanding of God is metaphoric in much the same way that we have to use metaphors for all sorts of other things like love and other things that we can't quite, almost all of the right brain concepts we actually describe metaphorically. So for example, you want to write, you want to tell somebody you're in love with that you're in love with her, that you write something down and it's inadequate to the actual feelings

that you have. And it's not just because you're not Pablo Neruda. It's not just because you're not William Shakespeare. The reason is because the words, your language centers are probably in the left cortex. And there's a complicated simulacrum for the complex right brain phenomenon. And that's a lot of what's actually going on when you have a sense of the I am. You have the sense of the fundamental creator. And by the way, it's not just Abrahamic religions. The karmic religions do this too. So the Hindus who believe that the godhead is the ultimate force, it's pure love. And that the soul is kind of a chip of that that comes into existence past on toward enlightenment, which is perfection and then reabsorbed back into the godhead. It's all metaphors, like a little piece of a soul

and a dun-th-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-and. And it's impossible for us to actually understand that. And yet understanding can come beyond the way that, and this is hard for you and me, because we have a science background. It's like if I can't describe it, it doesn't exist. We know that's not right. Yeah, that's really interesting. How would you, if you had to debate like a Bill Nye in a scenario like this, because he, as a person who has taken the stance of atheism and very much in the science world, would disagree with this notion. Why do you think he disagrees or where do you think his flaw in his logic? I don't know Bill Nye's argument. Okay. But I've talked to a lot of... Well, he argues against creationism and talks about... Yeah, yeah.

A big bang. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I would argue against creationism, too. You know? No, I mean, it's like all kinds of different ways that, you know, that the ultimate I am, the ultimate creator can create. And the great thing about science is that it unfolds the information about how the creation, what the truth about the creation, which should make us more amazed, not less amazed, you know, this sort of cosmic intelligence if we believe in it. Now, first thing to point out, the atheist might be right.

You know, I might be completely wrong. In a regard. that God exists. I mean, I don't know. I can't know. It's unknowable. That's the point. So then isn't agnostic

the correct choice? Well, it might be. It might be. Except that, you know, you're not agnostic about a lot of things that you don't know. You have an opinion about a lot of things that you don't know.

I mean, you don't know, for example. There's a difference between having immense faith and having an opinion. Yeah, for sure. But for example, and there's faith in a public policy that you think is a better public policy, even though you don't know for sure

if it's going to work. That's a little metaphor. I mean, this is a lot, the stakes are a lot higher with what we're talking about here. And there's something to the idea of the Kierkegaardian idea. So Saurin Kierkegaard was an existentialist. He was a Danish existentialist, but he was profoundly Christian in his worldview. And his whole point was, make a choice, man. Make a choice. Throw in. Why wouldn't you throw in? If you think that the weight of the evidence and the evidence is not the scientific evidence only, it's also the evidence from the experience of

your life and the way you want to live your life, is to relax and actually have an opinion while not blowing up somebody who doesn't have your opinion, it's a pretty good way to live, as opposed to, I don't know, I can't know I'm not gonna deal with it ever. Yeah. Do you see patterns emerge?

I mean, you talk about faith as being one of the pillars in... Yeah, faith or life philosophy. It's a concept of why. Yeah, having that meaning. Yeah, and transcendence, which is to transcend yourself and stand in awe of something bigger than yourself. So are there, perhaps, Perhaps this was done as a study looking at groups of people who were from different religions,

perhaps even agnostic, atheists, and seeing patterns emerge in those groups of people in terms of psychology? Yeah. So what you find is that my path, my way of getting transcendence is not the only way to get the happiness benefits. It's a coherent life philosophy is great. It really works well, as long as there's something bigger than you. You need something bigger than you. You need transcendence. one of the most popular undergraduate classes

at most universities is astronomy one. And it's really interesting when you talk to students. Like, why do you love that astronomy course? You're not an astronomy, you're only an English major. It's like you're postmodern puppetry or whatever you're studying, right? It's not, it's not. And they'll be like, they always say the same thing.

It's like, I go Thursday morning, I go into my astronomy class. I'm super stressed out because I had a big argument with my mom and I got to be in a class and I think I'm breaking up with my boyfriend. And I come out and I come out an hour and a half later and I realize I'm a speck on a speck. I'm a speck. Sure. And that's standing and on that's really, really important because mother nature wants us to focus on ourselves all the

time. That's pure misery. That's just pure on misery. When you can actually get a break from yourself, you're going to feel a lot better is what it comes down to. Religion is a very good way to do that. So is studying music seriously. So is walking before dawn without devices. So is studying the stoic philosophers. There's lots and lots of ways to do that. My way is not the only way. I'm not going to make a metaphysical assertion about who's right, but I will make an assertion

with respect to the happiest lives because that's work I've done myself. Yeah. Is that why, or perhaps you could tell me, why are so many rich people going to the Amazonian rainforest and doing DMT or wherever they're going? Yeah, well, that's a do.

I have a hypothesis about that. I actually haven't done any randomized controlled. I doubt there is any to do here. I know. It's like I've got six billionaires and it's like, that sample's not big. 60 billionaires who stayed home and 60 billionaires who took, you know, ayahuasca. My view is in a highly technocratic society like we have today that people who are in that, the billionaire club, they're disproportionately entirely working in the left hemispheres of their brain. And they get to the highest, the crowning heights of the economy and success and find that their life has no meaning because they've been looking for it in the wrong place.

And by the way, going to the Amazonian rainforest, is in the wrong place too. They need to go to the right hemisphere of their brains. They need to move to the right. I don't mean that politically necessarily. You know, it's moving to the right inside their own heads. And there's lots of ways you can do that

besides taking ayahuasca in the Amazonian rainforest. This new book tells sort of the six canonical ways that you can do that, as a matter of fact. And are people overusing these medications as a way of seeking happiness? I think they're looking for, they're mostly looking for a way to alleviate unhappiness.

is what they're doing. They're not seeking happiness. They're trying to alleviate misery. And the misery is actually coming from the lack of the lack of meaning that they're sensing in their lives. And they're hoping that this will open up some door. And in some people, I mean, there's some,

I think preliminary evidence, there's not enough evidence for me yet to actually go try, you know, ayahuasca on the floor of a hut. Well, I mean, there's psychedelics that are getting some medical promise and people are. Yeah, we just don't know the risks yet. The risk profile is still pretty high.

If you have psychosis in your face, family, yada, yada, yada. I say to my students, they say, should I take hallucinators? I say, you do you, but I would wait five years until there's actually a lot more good evidence on the downside. Because also like marijuana has been used for chronic medical uses, all sorts of types.

But the evidence on it is still not even great and there's risks all sorts that we're kind of ignoring. We don't know about the risks. Well, we know some of the risks with schizophrenia coming up and all these issues. and people don't seem to take that as seriously. I don't know what me, because it's a natural fallacy or something.

Well, part of it is that we never did any RCTs because it was a scheduled substance. That's true. And so the result was we couldn't actually figure out the risks with large populations. We would have said, okay, oh, it turns out that if you have any psychosis in your family, use cannabis, it's a really dangerous thing.

We don't know. What we do know is that people just casually using it, they have alleviation of some symptoms of, you know, to, they don't have any, they need to increase, their hunger when they're on chemotherapy or whatever it happens to be. So we're just learning about the downside. And my guess is in five years, states will have recriminalized as a result of it.

Because we're running the largest scale human trials. Yeah, exactly. By making it legal for everybody. Yeah, that's scary. Back to the interview in just a second. But first, I want to tell you about Microsoft Dragon co-pilot. An AI clinical assistant build to simplify and transform the way care teams work. It streamlines documentation, services to right information.

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there below. All right, let's get back to the interview. What do you tell your patients about pot? So there's some providers in my practice that are actually given the prescription abilities to prescribe marijuana because I practice in New Jersey. I don't know what the rules are in New York. And you have to take special certifications in order to be able to prescribe it.

And they do in patients who have pain syndromes that warrant it that are trying to come off opioids as an adjunct there. I obviously discourage it in every way as much as possible just because I don't have the data. Right, exactly. But some people love like the CBD ointments and I'm like, look, that seems pretty mild.

That seems pretty innocuous and maybe... And if that's keeping you away from abusing insides and destroying the lining of your stomach, I'm kind of on your team on that. I agree on that. But it's, you know, the truth, a lot of these things is that when my students ask me, for example, about these things, I say, look, here's a deal.

Anything is euphoric is probably neurotoxic. There's a neurotoxic element to euphoric. But that's not dispositive. I don't drive the safest car. I don't drive the world's safest car. Yeah, everyone has their own risk tolerance. Yeah, you have a risk tolerance and all kinds of things that you actually do.

So what that means is you're trying to find a golden mean anything that you use. I mean, I would never judge you for having a glass of wine. I would say, man, we got to talk. If you're having 10 glasses of wine a day, you know, that's what it comes down to with anything else is how that works.

But the idea, a big problem that we have in our society is we want costless things. And there's not very much in life that's costless, including anything, it's euphoric. Well, I love when people tell me, oh, it's a supplement has no side effects. I'm like, well, if it has no side effects, has no effects, because every effect is some kind of reverse effect.

No side effects. I love that, no side effects. But you don't hear that from a supplement? Of course. This is so safe, this is natural. Completely safe. Completely safe. Now, safe enough, yeah.

I'm willing to listen. Well, there's a judge of course. For each individual. For exactly right. I mean, it's see, multivitamins are probably safe enough. Yeah. I've been taking it for a lot. Cratein monohydrate.

probably safe enough. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Especially that being one of the most studied sports supplements. Exactly. Even though in most of my patients, I discourage juice. Do you?

Well, actually, Sanjay Gupta asked me this a couple of weeks ago. I said that unless someone has become dedicated in fitness and is going regularly for a period of time, then I say, okay, maybe you can consider taking it. But for the person who's like, oh, I'm going to start going to the gym,

do I need creatine? No, you don't need creatine. You don't need creatine. Yeah, yeah. So I've been going to the gym almost every day for 30 years. Sure. It's great. Yeah, yeah.

A little bit of volumization of muscles. Yeah, to get five to 10% of benefit where you otherwise didn't have it. Or if you're professional athlete or something it matters to you. The neurocognitive stuff is kind of interesting that's coming out in the new literature on that. Again, everyone's getting really excited about that stuff where it's, oh my God, you're not recommending this to your patients for its neuroprotective effects. They're going to all get Alzheimer's, Mike. That's literally how they frame it.

I know, I know. This is how American culture works, by the way. It's propelled by fads and panics. Cultural fads and moral panics. So you see everybody freaking out for or against something, that's kind of how American culture works. Well, it's because I think it's their minds playing out the perfect survival mechanism.

If you think of what capitalism is, it's creating a problem and then selling a solution over and over and over again. So their minds are just predicting that pattern. So they're freaking out, and they're like, we've got to create the solution. There's money to be had there. Or I want to be ahead of it

and be better than everyone else. It's not even selling. It's a lot of it's also popularity. It's also power. And so what activists do as a general rule, like political activists, is they create moral panics. And the reason for that is when you activate

the limbic system of people's brains to produce negative emotionality, negative affect, they're going to do what you want. Yeah, totally. If you freak out, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, they're putting in your hands. Yeah.

That's why social media has become so toxic. I'm curious where you land on that Yeah, well, social media is, I mean, I land pretty much where you'd expect me to land. I'm an old colleague in front of John Haidt and his work on this. I'm not an absolutist. I think social media can be really good. I think we will wind up having it as something that's as beneficial for us, the telephones. I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, when telephones started to become ubiquitous,

people were abusing them all over the place and not going out of the house. And, you know, even when I was a kid in the, you know, the 80s or 70s, and my mom would say, It's a beautiful day. Hang up the phone and go outside. You know, and because the result, the technology, technology, it tends to be, it's amazing and then harmful and then just okay. And then we go back to who we are as people living and loving and learning and eating and dying and doing what we do.

What's your take on height saying that because the change is happening much quicker than it has with the telephone, typewriter, or printing press, that we can't have that period of adjustment. we will have that period of adjustment. It's just there's going to be more casualties during that period. And so the period of adjustment is more harmful to certain people that are in the breach. But I see young Gen Zs already that are getting better at how they use social media. My kids, for example, I mean, my kids are 27, 25, and 22.

And they're doing, I mean, two of them are military. So, you know, there are certain limits on what they can do. Like, hey, on a deployment. That's happened before, though. I know, I know. I realize that. You know, hey everybody, watch me kicking a door. Oh, we're laughing about them.

That's so bad. I know, I know. I got two Marines, and so they'll be laughing when they see this. But it's, so that's helpful. But the truth is that they just have kind of a healthy, a healthy relationship. What is the how do they develop that? What's your strategy? The strategy is basically this with any technology.

If it complements your in real life relationships, it's good. And if it substitutes for your in real life relationships is going to make you less, less well off. That's what it is. You'll be more, you'll have more of an oxytocin deficit. You'll have more depression. You'll have more anxiety. You'll have more loneliness if it's substituting for your in real life personal relationships.

That we are evolved as a creature to have in real life love. That's what we're made for. That's the fuel. That's what it comes in. We don't get us, no virtual friends. And there's no hack for it. There's no hack for it that we know. Look, we've been looking for the hack.

I mean, it's all those studies. What if the robot looks really real? I know. See, the thing is that it'll pass the Turing test in the left hemisphere. your brain, but not on the right hemisphere, which is why you know, and it's like, at first, you're like, this is awesome, this relationship with this person. And then when you figure out it's AI and you're super bummed and you don't like it, you actually kind of hate it, as a matter of fact. That's because your right hemisphere desired real authentic human connection.

And, you know, we get promised this all the time with people who only live in the left hemispheres of their brains. We don't want it. We don't want it. And we're not going to put up with it. Yeah, it seems you and I see quite eye to eye on this AI subject. I'm curious because I had disagreement actually last week with Zeke Emanuel. Yeah, sure, sure. Sure, sure. It's all Manuel's brother. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, he was a doctor wants to die at 75. He was pointing out how he thinks doctors are going to be replaced by AI and to some degree at least, and that people will trust AI as their doctors. I sort of, uh, maybe using your same right brain philosophy, disagree that folks will be to buy into that notion. What do you feel? I think you're right. But here's, I think,

how it will work. AI will ultimately be a huge tool for the medical profession and for science. I mean, already, I use consensus.a.I, which is unbelievable. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. I'm just a customer. And it's unbelievable how good they are at helping me in my research. It's just extremely helpful. Open evidence up-to-date AI. There's great ones that are coming out. But it doesn't give the talk that I'm giving to groups of people. It doesn't teach my classes. It doesn't do my office hours. It doesn't connect with people.

What I'm doing doesn't matter to people unless my heart is that. His argument against that was when they gave in research the same patient, standardized patients, and they had AI answers versus human answers, the AI was scoring higher on empathy. And I said, well, that's because they're reading responses and they're just grading the responses as opposed to having the human experience. Yeah, that's right. And again, I don't know if I'm just arguing for my own self-survival at that point.

No, no, but also, I mean, what this, I think what's ultimately gonna happen is gonna be really good. I mean, I'm a real techno-optimist on this. That doesn't mean I'm a short-term, I'm a techno-pessimist in the short term and a techno-optimist in the long-term. At the end of the day,

what this is going to be able to do is to facilitate real human beings, making real human contact in the doctor-patient relationship, where we have the highest standards of, of tech and knowledge. and knowledge that's actually behind it, algorithmic knowledge behind it.

And we can really, really, really count on it. And this is kind of what we want. We want the best of all possible worlds. But that's going to mean that we're going to have to have higher standards of empathy among physicians, which we don't. I mean, a lot of the reason that people

have trouble with their doctors is their doctors treat them like a number. And I just happen to be lucky, economically lucky enough to have a physician that doesn't have a billion patients. And so I can text him. And he answers me.

me. And when I see him, I talk to him for an hour and a half if I want to and he's interested in my research or whatever. But I have a relationship with a guy. That's so valuable. Totally, totally. But I realize that most people don't actually have that. Yeah, I don't think doctors are suddenly gaslighting their patients more often. But I do think the health care system as it exists in the United States sets up doctors to let patients feel like they've been gaslit more often. Because we get less time with patients. There's administrative burdens that have skyrocketed. So, there's a disaster on that front. To me, the earliest evidence of humans not trusting AI for health information comes from the billionaires that we've talked about several times. Elon Musk created his own

AI, LLM, or at least he owns it. What, Brock. Yeah, Greg. Pretty cool. Very cool. So it gives accurate information a lot of the time. And you could ask it such a simple question, what percentage of health claims made by Secretary Kennedy are accurate? and he'll honestly say the majority are inaccurate. Yet Elon Musk, who owns this platform, doesn't take that into account and supports Secretary Kennedy. So if they're not taking advice on this scale,

are they going to take advice about their cholesterol, about antidepressants? I think no, because the evidence is showing no. It's a problem, for sure, it's a problem. Plus, you know, like, you know, there's all kinds of, there's too many cases where, I mean, doctors are people too. And doctors have, can be, can be, get a different, to fads and panics too.

I mean, this whole idea that we hold doctors up to be outside the culture, that's insane. Well, it's insane. It's like, well, the doctor, even if there's a fad and a panic, about something about the coronavirus epidemic or about anything that's going around about medicine,

that doctors fall into particular modes of thinking that might or might not be correct, just like the rest of us do because we're open to these fads and panics, but to hold doctors up as being beyond that as somehow not being, beholden to these cultural trends. That's an unreasonable thing.

That means we need to be discerning when we're dealing with our doctors as well and not put faith in them as if they were faith healers. I started doing this thing, at least I've done it twice, where I went surrounded by a group of people who disagree with me.

The first time I did it was versus anti-vaxxers or at least vaccine skeptics. Recently I did it against Secretary Kennedy supporters or Maha supporters. And there's people in the scientific community that say that I'm doing a disservice. because I'm holding up science and conspiracy theorists as if they're one.

I don't think that is the case for the human mind. I think we can hold two contradicting opinions at the same time and understand the balance, seek to understand better. Where do you land on that? I'm more on the free speech side. A lot more on the free speech side. I'm like a center-right capitalist

and teaches at Harvard. You know, it's like full of conservatives up there. You know, it's like that's, you know, and the truth is that I think that we can hand all kinds of information. And the answer to speech that's incorrect is not banning it. It's more speech is what we need.

We need more information. I think we can actually handle that. And the problem with the whole cancel culture that we have that was originally very much of a left-wing phenomenon. And now, of course, it's a right-wing phenomenon, too, because everybody's got to get into the party of cancel culture,

is the whole idea is that when something there's good and there's evil, there's right and there's wrong, it's binary thinking. It's religious thinking about scientific or political things, which is always a mistake. and the way that you deal with it.

Well, it's cognitive distortion at scale. You throw out the heretics. And don't throw out the heretics. It's like beat the heretics in their game, man. It's like be an actual expert. And the trouble is that when you don't expose yourself to people with whom you disagree, you become kind of intellectually flaccid.

You're not good. You're not able to make these arguments. Unsharpened sword. Yeah. I mean, the whole, you asked me a bunch of questions about atheism and God. And if I actually didn't listen to the smartest atheists in the world

and take them seriously and treat their arguments with respect. And the possibility that they might be right, there's no answer. There's no conversation. There's nothing I can do except repent or die, Mike. Which is pretty ineffective. In the science world, that is what is said so often.

I know. I mean, I see public health communicators that go on the same three channels. I'm sure you know what they are, where people agree with them. And then when I go on Fox and Friends and people say, how dare you go on a platform that spreads misinformation, that's their opinion.

And I say, well, if I'm saying accurate things, why are you upset at me for going to a group where they've largely been misled or perhaps been misled? Why are you upset at that? And yet people will be upset at me. And you want to hear, by the way, you want to hear. I mean, you need to hear what people think if you think it's incorrect.

You need to actually hear it in their words. Debate is the oldest form of science improvement. The enlightenment, the fruit of the enlightenment, is persuasion too. I mean, before the Enlightenment, it was coercion, it was might makes right. And the whole idea of the Enlightenment is I bring my ideas and you bring your ideas. And then my job is to persuade you. And if I'm successful, we both win because you now have a better way of thinking.

And if you're successful, you persuade me and we both walk away a little bit better than we were before. But you can't do that unless in a spirit of openness and love, you go to a place where people with whom you disagree and listen to what they have to say, even if you think it's completely wrong. Yeah. That's actually profoundly scientific. Yeah. We lost that. Well, I mean, you know, humans aren't so good at that. Yeah.

Just in general, it's not that, you know, America is uniquely become ill-suited to those conversations. And the contrary, there are places all over the world where it's never been the case. God bless America, by the way. I mean, your family bailed on a country, on a dictatorial society, that didn't allow any sort of conversation about differing points of view. and thank God that we actually have this. Yeah, when I say that to people, they don't believe it.

Yeah. Well, because to them, it's unfathomable that that exists. It must be social media twisting the truth. Oh, I know, but think about this, Mike. I mean, you can say the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the United States, Bobby Kennedy, is you could say he's a fraud. You probably have. And he's wrong.

And there's no knock in the night and there's no jackbooted thug. And there's nobody at your front door. For now, I hope. Let's watch the comments. it happens. Please save me. Right now. But God bless America, man.

I mean, so we have to keep in perspective of the fact that we've got these bitter arguments, but we're having arguments. That's a great thing. Well, that's what I always think about when people say, you know, China's doing so well. China's doing so well. They're going to overtake the U.S. I'm like, well, when are they going to start dealing with the problems of progress that we've been struggling with for the last hundred years?

Forget about it. Because that problem of progress is very unique and unexpected, although if you're, social sciences, perhaps it is expected. Anytime you have a layer of safety, the anxiety starts getting out of control because things that you were once worried about are no longer a threat, you have to find a new one. Right.

So how do we deal with problems of progress? Problem like affluenza, as they call it. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one for it. Like, you know, there's a whole book called affluenza, which is pretty interesting. And, you know, the fact is that mental health has gotten worse as we've gotten richer. Yeah.

The fact that happiness has gone down as we've gotten better off. I mean, remarkably better off. It's the funniest thing today that I hear from sort of this Gen Z that, you know, the world is so much worse or people who are like, America's crummy and everything sucks. Are you kidding? During my debate, they were pointing out how bad our chronic health conditions have become.

And there's no doubt there's problems there. But also think about how many acute problems we've solved. Someone has a heart attack stroke. We keep them alive where they become a chronic health statistic where otherwise they would have died. Totally. I mean, the whole idea that our health system is so much worse than it was before, that's insane. When they say make America healthy again,

I want to know what's the again. Where's the time frame? 1920 was great when you get like a blister and die. It's like, let's go back there. That would be my first question if I ever had a chance to interview Kennedy. I mean, look, I understand things that could be better. I get it.

I wish there weren't microplastics or whatever we're freaking out about this week. I wish. Yes, but firing the entire scientific branch of the EPA is not the way to solve that problem. Which is factually what happened. But the truth is that here's, you asked about progress and the problem of progress. Here's the basic problem.

We are designed to be skeptical, angry, suspicious, and ungrateful. That's how homo sapiens are, we have literally more brain tissue dedicated to negative emotions than positive emotions. And that's why we have this negativity bias. And the reason is because, you know, the, you know, Dr. Mike's ancestors

passed on their genes, not because they were like, it's a great day in the place to see. No. They were like, this is like, I might get eaten any single second. I mean,

it's like we're made, I mean, we're ungrateful wretches. We just are. I mean, I found myself two weeks ago. Here's what I felt myself saying. You know,

first class of United Airlines has really gone downhill. You're like, where's my life last seat? That's right. It's like, you know, it's like, it's like, and that's how we're,

made. And we're made because the negativity bias is highly, highly protective. Gratitude is something that we have to use to override our negativity bias. In gratitude is the norm. And that's why we're always looking for the next crisis. That's why everything's always got to suck. Life is objectively better. Look, politicians are objectively less corrupt than they were 50 years ago. And yet we think they're more corrupt because we have to think everything sucks. That's the problem with homo sapiens. Yeah. It's like the survival thing is being anti our enjoyment now. A lot.

A lot. That's right. And so if you're a countercultural, the way to be countercultural is to systematically override your negativity bias. To bring love where there is suspicion, fear, and hate. To bring gratitude where you see ingratitude. To do that in your own life and to do that in the life of other people is truly the most transgressive countercultural thing you can do. How do we balance validating these emotions when we have them?

because ideally you don't want to repress any negative emotion you have when you know it's something silly. But at the same time, realize that, okay, what I'm complaining about is silly and there are bigger problems. Because I also see in the flip side of this where people have something terrible happen to them and they say, well, at least you're not starving in a third world country.

And it's like, well, that's not a very valuable thing to say. So how do we balance those two worlds? Yeah, so the most important management job is self-management. I teach managers. I teach future managers. I teach MBA students who want to go run big companies. They all want to be CEO. They want to be founder. And they have to be great managers and great leaders. But good management and leadership starts with managing yourself. I mean, that's the most important thing. And what does it mean to manage yourself? It means to, quite frankly, it means to manage your limbic system. It means to, so it's not managing you. I mean, lots of things that you should manage so they don't manage you.

You want to manage your pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you. pleasure doesn't lead to happiness, unbridled pleasure leads to rehab because it's managing you. And in much the same way, when your anger, your fear, your disgust, your sadness are managing you, then you're going to become a highly reactive person and you're not going to have any enjoyment over your life. And that's a really, really big problem. And that's why all of the techniques that I teach of metacognition, everything from journaling to, my students keep an anxiety journal, for example. And it's a hugely metacognitive way so that their prefrontal cortex, you know, the C-suite of their head is actually managing their, managing the company,

as opposed to the company managing the executive director. So you're forcing the engagement there's some pre-planned exercise. And that's you're moving the experience of your emotions into your executive center. And there are lots of ways to actually do that. Exxiety is a perfect example. Anxiety is, I mean, they've defined it all sorts of different ways, is defined clinically in one way. But a lot of the ways that we in the behavioral science world talk about is unfocused fear. So fear is a very specific limbic phenomenon involving the amygdala, obviously,

and something actually will stimulate the amygdala, to the hypothalamus to the pituitary glands, to the adrenal glands, and in 74 milliseconds, you're getting stress hormones in your system, right? Only three or four seconds later your prefrontal cortex catches up. You've already jumped out of the way the car,

is the whole thing. That's the way your brain is supposed to work. But in modern life, that's not how it works at all, you know, where you open up social media and your chest tightens and you're starting to get this little scratch on your amygdala and a little drip of the adrenaline and then the little cortisol comes in behind it. And pretty soon your life is a mess.

This unfocused fear, this slight unfocused fear all the time. I have my students, I have them keep a journal of anxiety by turning it into fear. as opposed to trying to get rid of the anxiety. Don't get rid of your anxiety. Turn it into what's supposed to be, which is fear. And the way that you do that is metacognitively, write it down and say, okay, I'm anxious about this thing.

Okay, no, no, what am I actually afraid of? I'm anxious because I went to the doctor and I'm getting some tests and, you know, the tests are going to come back in two weeks. So what am I afraid of? Well, actually, I'm afraid that I have cancer. Okay, now, what do I think are the odds? You know, this is an imperfect model.

What do I think of the odds? Probably 5%. Okay, good. What would I do? Like a CBT journal, basically. Yeah, totally. What would I do? Exactly what would I do?

And when you've actually named it, claimed it, turned it into fear, the actual fear that's lurking behind it, it's no longer something going to be scratching at your amygdala. And you can dispose of that and get a good night's sleep by doing that. And that's a highly metacognitive way to understand emotional self-management. Have a whole suite of techniques like that. Yeah. A book that I was recommended by one of our behavioral specialists in the hospital during residency is Feeling Good, Burns. And since then, it's been part of my bibliology.

I mean, there's feeling great now, whatever. There's new versions. It's good. You've got to have a cottage industry of feeling. I got to give a recommendation to a patient when they're coming in and they're new to the cognitive behavioral therapy world. And perhaps they're hesitant or they don't have access, especially with our health care system. It takes forever to get care. I encourage them to do that as a form of bibliotherapy.

Do you think that there's actual evidence to see that impacts from doing these types of... From cognitive behavioral therapy kinds of techniques, self-management techniques, yeah, for sure, it's huge. It's unbelievable. I mean, you can... How is that different from the metacognition that you're talking about?

It's not. I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy is just an area of metacognit. Fundamentally, it's a kind of metacognition. And there are metacognitive techniques that are not in... I mean, prayer isn't part of cognitive behavioral therapy, but prayer of petition does the same thing

when you say, Lord, I'm feeling really angry right now. What you've done is you've moved the experience of your anger from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex because you can't talk about it when it's still limbic. I see. Because it's an inchoate, right? You can't, or when you write things down. So journaling, for example.

I mean, it's a different suite of things where you make things explicit. You make things real as opposed to pushing them away so they're less real. Make them more real. And that's the same thing as any sort of exposure. anything that you're finding uncomfortable. If you said, hey, man, I'm afraid of snakes. How do you get rid of that? Well, we start exposing you little by little of snakes because we want to make it ordinary. You know, if you're afraid of death, it's interesting because everybody has a death fear. It's just

usually not physical death. It's whatever attacks their sense of self, their sense of who they are in the integrity of who they are as a person. Most strivers that you and I deal with, or maybe you and me, it's failure because you're somebody who doesn't fail, right? You're a winner, you know. And so I have my students actually expose themselves to, I take them through a Maran Asati death, Theravada Buddhist death meditation. They're going to say, ask 10 people out or whatever to get rejected a bunch. Well, that's the same idea. That's exposure therapy. But I ask my students to imagine their own catastrophic career failure and lean into it and feel it and write it down. down in a very, very deep way.

And this is the same basic idea. This is how you can manage yourself, manage your emotions, and understand yourself, which is so critical. By the way, it's an incredible adventure. It's super fun and interesting. Yeah, that's something I wanna do. The notion of having your self-identity. Yeah.

These days, it feels like people are reaching to have a lot of identities, which opens up them to getting hurt more often. Do you see that? Yeah, I mean, Identity, there's a couple of different ways to define it. Of course, your identity is how you understand yourself, but people use it in terms of a demographic characteristic a lot. That's kind of the campus definition of identity is, I'm this, I'm Democrat, you know, I'm, you know, whatever,

a racial group or a religious group or whatever, that sort of identity. And that's a very brittle way to understand yourself because you reduce your dimensionality. The way that people actually connect with each other and get happier is by thinking about shared story. about what you and I have in common. And that's what the most effective advocates actually have in common is they look for shared story. I've seen these tests,

and I've actually done some of these experiments where you get people who can't agree on anything politically. I mean, it's like, I voted for Bernie Sanders. I voted for Donald Trump. Turns out there's a lot of the same people. But imagine.

And if you tell them to think about their identity who they voted for and then have a conversation about politics that will be daggers drawn, but you start the conversation between them by saying tell each other about your kids. They can't get to hate. They can't.

It's like there's no road from there back to political hatred. Because, you know, they're talking like, you how old's your son, 16? See a nightmare? Oh my God, my too. Yeah, for different reasons. They take out of the car.

Like shared enemy. And or it's so beautiful and tell me about your grandchildren and it's your laughing. And you know each other because you see each other's soul. So shared story, this is the essence of humanity.

That's really what it's all about as far as I'm concerned. If you want to, if you want to replace fear with love, because fear and love are fundamentally cognitive opposites. Fear and hatred, hatred is very downstream from fear. And if you want to, if you want that there's fear, which is actually leading to these implacable hostilities

that are being fomented by activists and productized by media and politics today, if you want to get beyond that, shared story will bring out love. Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading a book, How to Have Impossible Conversations,

and it was always about not putting a stone in between you at the beginnings of a conversation, be like creating a data point that you disagree upon because that serves nobody. You're never going to win that conversation. And when I say win, mutually see some sort of eye-to-eye picture. Yeah, yeah. Or even get to the point where persuasion is possible where you can say, oh, I disagree with that, but maybe if you saw it, my, tell me more.

That's so interesting that you think about it differently than me. Yeah, we lost that. Well, everyone assumes the worst intentions instead of charitable thinking these days. That's right. And, you know, the interesting thing is that most people are able to, to do that with their neighbors and friends. Most people still are able to do that. And even that's being lost.

I see friendships being cut left and right and center based on left, right and center. Yeah. I mean, one in six Americans is not talking to a family member or a close personal friend today because of politics, which is just insane. It's just insane.

And speaking of personal politics between left, right or center, do you see happiness variations? Oh, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, you do. I don't want this to be true. I don't want this to be true.

I would like to be like, Mike, no, no, there's no difference. It's like, but you know, the data to the data. This is John Heights data. Okay. John Heights data, say that or Brad Wilcox actually at University of Virginia, who's a phenomenal sociologist, does this stuff too. So if you break down by sort of the gender and politics, so female left, female right, male left, male right,

female left by far the unhappiness, unhappiest. And female right, by far the happiest. And men are in the middle. And so what you see is from happy to unhappiest is, is conservative women, conservative men, liberal men, liberal women. And what do you think drives that? That's a huge area of speculation. And there's no way to actually explain that completely.

Except what you find is that conservative women, they tend to be more religious. And religion, actually, people who are more religious, they tend to be happier. That's one thing. The other thing is that the, for whatever reason, John Hyde is, found that progressive women have really been victims in the mental health crisis in a disproportionate way. So his data show that if I'm getting this right, if I get this right, it'll show up in the notes for sure real fast. But his stuff, if I remember correctly, white liberal women under 30, 56% have been diagnosed with at least one mood disorder,

which is a lot, which is really, really, really a lot. Are they, see, that's tough to figure out because are they going to see, They're physicians more. They're more like they talk about it. That's the whole thing. But the view is from a lot of the people on that. Because it's easy to take that talking point and do a lot with that. For social media.

It's also, it's easy to be a triumphalist about that if you're a conservative, which is hugely misguided because misery is misery. And if you love people, which you actually should, you should want less misery is what it comes down to. So, I mean, it's a really, as they say, there's no settled science on this one.

Yeah, because you're not going to do a randomized control trial and say, okay, you used to be left. Now be right, and let's see if you become happier. That's right. And I know you're an atheist, but really, I want you, you're going to do a mass every day now. It's like, it's going to come down to.

You can't do RCTs on most of this stuff. And so, yeah. And the observational stuff is difficult to generalize across different populations. Oh, totally. And, you know, you've got good, we have good econometric techniques for doing most of this, but still it's inadequate.

Yeah. That's right when people look at a health system or just a society, at large somewhere in Norway and they say, why don't we have that in the US? I'm like, do you understand you're comparing Apple's Orange? There's like five people there.

Exactly. And they all agree with each other. They all agree with each other. They all kind of look alike. And they all sort of vote alike. I mean, it's not true. Sorry, we didn't just lose our whole Norwegian audience. We love you too.

But still, yeah, no, it's the homogeneity is a real thing. Yeah. It's really tough. Why do you think there's a loneliness epidemic that has particularly targeted young men? Yeah. So it hasn't particularly targeted young men. What it is manifests itself differently in young men

that it does for young women. Is this much in the same way how depressive symptoms manifest differently in men? Men get angry when it gets sad. Yeah. And so it's one of the things. Gambling, substance abuse, gambling, substance abuse, violence. Yeah.

And that's one of the reasons, for example, that single life is so hard on people. You find that everybody knows that single men, violence and crime pathologies are highest among single men. they're lonely people, among other things, and depression manifests itself and lashing out in aggressive behavior. I mean, all this stuff is really linked is how it comes about. And so you think, well, this guy's not depressed. He's not, he's not crying. It's not how they,

like, women, they find out, you know, men, many men get very depressed in their 40s for all sorts of reasons. I write about this a lot, about how transitions happen in strivers lives, for example. and they say, I had no idea, my husband was so depressed. I just noticed he was grumpy all the time. That's actually how, you know, if your husband starts getting really, really grumpy, that probably means your husband's depressed. I've ever saw him cry once. Nope, that's not how it works.

That's not part of our criteria when we make the diagnosis. It isn't. It actually isn't, and that's a really a weird thing. And so when it comes to loneliness, it's going to be manifest in different ways as well. And so the loneliness for women in particular, if they're highly, highly online, and they're more likely to be depressed and anxious. And that's a real manifestation of loneliness is how it comes about.

And deep, deep enduring love-based relationships are kind of the cure. It's weird. I mean, love is the balm of Gilead. It just really, really helps.

Love is like, we just became a 70s podcast. I know. I feel like I'm singing some song or something, but it's just kind of, it's like, you as a clinician or me as a researcher, is kind of true.

Kind of true. If you could prescribe one thing to a lot of your patients we're coming in manifesting with back pain. Support. But even that sort of we reduce it to support systems. Like no love. It's like you need somebody who just loves you

and takes care of you and nurtures you and cares about you. And it's just so unbelievably important. And that's in decline. That's actually in decline. I mean, we find that all over the place. You've talked about individual ways we can improve this.

Is there anything on a societal level that we can do to cultivate that? Yeah. So I've thought about this an awful lot. I was the president of a big public policy think tank for 10 and a half years in Washington, D.C. So public policy, public policy. And I'm a happiness guy, I'm a behavioral scientist.

And so it's like, what are the happiness policies? Well, what's that one nation that factors in, not GDP, but global happiness? Yeah, that's gross national happiness. Yeah, Bhutan. Bhutan. Yeah, Bhutan. Yeah, and public policy and politics can't make people happier.

but it can eliminate the sources of unhappiness, which is really important. And unhappiness and happiness are different. I mean, Richard Davidson at UW Madison, he's done all that work on how different parts of the limbic system process, negative emotions and positive emotions differently, which is sort of common sense.

And so he does all this stuff that shows that the left side of the face, musculature is more activated when you're having negative emotions, which is why when you kind of scowl, it's always the left side of your face. That's easier to do it. You can kind of clench you to the left teeth, molars more.

And that's because we're not just because of this hemispheric lateralization, but because this negative and positive emotionality, they're biological. So given the fact that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites from one another, you want to know what you should be paying more attention to and what's more effective. Some people don't have a happiness problem. They have an unhappiness problem. Some people don't have an unhappiness problem. They're perfectly good on the unhappiness.

side, but they need to have more joy in their lives, what it comes down to. And you need to know the right remedy. It turns out that you can personally lower your unhappiness or raise your happiness. Public policy doesn't raise happiness. Public policy eliminates sources of unhappiness. Well, can it create opportunities for happiness much in the same way that government can't force you to exercise, but they can create parks and lit pathways at night, et cetera. And so one of the great sources of unhappiness is barriers to be coming to having more well being, the barriers to faith, to family, to friendship, to work. And what are those barriers? Well, those barriers to, you know, religious life, for example, would be, you know, where your family comes

from, where it was illegal to practice your faith openly. That's like the most unhappiness provoking policy you can get because it's such a barrier to what a lot of people actually find is really important of their life. Barriers to family life are where we create disincentives for people to get married and have children. You know, we're fine that fewer and fewer people are getting married and having children. And those are wonderful things. I mean, there's all kinds of cultural nonsense out there that if you get happier, you'll be subjugated and tied down and all that. If you have kids, you'll be more miserable. That's all nonsense. Where are they getting that from? They're getting that from a lot of the popular culture. They're getting that from sort of wishful thinking. You know,

the whole idea that freedom is the, that, you know, without restriction, that a libertine lifestyle is always always and everywhere better. And a lot of that comes from kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, from the sexual revolution that, you know, getting tied down in traditional relationships is somehow old school and restrictive and will make your life a lot worse. No, it won't. No, I got the data. Look, if you're an unhappy marriage, but, you know, fair enough. Sure, yeah. But, you know, no one's advocating for abusive IPV relationship. Of course not. But a good marriage is literally the number one source of happiness in people's lives. And when we have cultural barriers, but even political and policy barriers that make it harder, you know, when you make it

so you lose your welfare benefits if you have a partner in the home, that's insanity. That's craziness. That's a bad policy is what it comes down to. Friendship, you know, when we're fragmenting friendship by with the propagation of the way that we're spreading the use of social media to people under 13 years old, that's a big problem for happiness because it's a barrier of friendship, in-person friendship. So do you support Australia with what they're doing right now? I support, you know, age, you know, restrictions for sure. And I think it's a reasonable thing to do.

And I think that most of the people that I talk to in the social media world, executives and social media, they agree. Yeah. They just don't know how to do it yet. But, you know, that's a solvable problem. Well, that's why first step, I just worked with Kathy Hockel about getting the word out in removing phones from schools, period. Like, you just don't need them.

There's no state. Why is the 27 states still don't do that? It's so insane. It's like, there's some kind of lobbyist force behind it, I think. I think, well, it's actually, it might be more insidious than that, because you can do that by executive order in almost every state. And then it goes, it flows downstream to the superintendents and then to the principals. But what happens is that the kids don't like it. And so the parents freak out. And so there's all kinds of pressure, you know, to not do that. The data show, however, that after two weeks, the kids like you love it. Yeah, exactly. And so you got to get through, it's like you got to get the monkey off your back. I mean, this is, look, these are addictive things. These are addictive behaviors. And the period when you're taking away an addictive behavior or substance is hard is the way it comes down. But that's what leadership is all about is actually doing that. I think it's just a kind of a lack of political will.

There might be some money behind this as well. But we've got the technology. I think what we don't actually have is the will or the interest in actually doing something like this. And it's very important. Yeah, I'm curious, given that social media, and I know there's some kind of paradox there, it was meant to connect us and then it ended up disconnecting us, when there are so many ways to connect with another human now. whether it's through social media, playing online video games together. Why are we more disconnected and have less friends when there are more options in doing it?

Part of the reason is because we make human connection in real life. We just don't make human connection in virtual life. And again, you can talk about the neurobiology that actually is behind this. I mean, you and I are talking right now. We're having a way better conversation in person than we'd have on Zoom. And the reason is because we're actually talking to each other. getting oxytocin and so are you. So I'm understanding you at a deeper level. And I'm more sympathetic and interested in you. But you wouldn't get that if we were on a Zoom? It's, well, that's what the

interesting experiments during coronavirus, because that gave us this natural experimental, not actually quasi-experimental conditions to actually look at what was going on. And we had great hope, but we don't even have direct eye contact with Zoom. Plus, I know you're a thousand miles away and on the other side of a screen. You can't simulate the in real life experience. And, you know, humans are evolved to be in real life sitting around the campfire, putting a piece of yak meat in their mouths while they're talking to each other about their day. This is how we're evolved. And given the fact that we have evolved to adapt to all sorts of technologies, is there a time where we might evolve to the point where a Zoom conversation might give us the same level of it? It's going to be a million years.

I love that. There's going to be a little while. It's going to be a little while. So I'm willing to wait. I'm I'm willing to wait it out. So you're on team Brian Johnson. Yeah, I don't think it's sexual selection. I think it's natural selection. I think it's going to take a lot longer. I think that this is just not how we're wired.

And by the way, I think we're going to solve the problem in the not too distant future. Because I think people are going to rebel against the efficiency culture that says that work should be online. And now more and more people are demanding to actually be with others when they do their work. Yeah. And that's a very encouraging thing because people will only be miserable for long enough. It's funny because, you know, people are, they always go toward their joy, which is a lot of how they're wired, that they want, they want to be better.

And so, for example, you can have all these social, these weird social trends that talk about how, you know, men shouldn't be masculine and women shouldn't be feminine and the whole thing on campuses and the whole thing. But, but in the end, the rebellion is kind of a silent rebellion that goes back to, you know, some pretty traditional roles that people have. And then they kind of fall in love and it's kind of nice. Well, it's funny because in so many ways, people want to go against the grain. But then the pendulum can swing too far the other way, where there's a movement against hustle culture right now that I think is positive because hustle culture can be problematic. But then it's going so much to the other side with it like, no struggle is good for you. You should never be struggling. You should retire in 27.

Exactly. That's like the surefire way of being unhappy. Yeah, no, that's like, what is that Portland, Oregon? Where they had early retirement? Where 27-year-olds go to retire. Oh, I didn't know about that. I should go. That show, you remember that show, Portlandia?

No, no, no. Where young people go to retire? No. Yeah, that's a funny show. Wow. It's a Fred Armistons show. Yeah. Well, I have two more questions for you.

Question one is, what bit of misinformation do you think in this space is impacting your students the most? There's a lot. There's a lot. Number one, that your happiness is a feeling. And so therefore, you have to actually chase a feeling to become happier. And that's wrong. Your feelings, once again, are evidence of your happiness and that you need to manage your feelings and actually be more and more comfortable with the fact that a lot of your feelings are unpleasant.

And that's actually part of the process of getting happier and being a happier person. Furthermore, happiness requires unhappiness. And the more that you try to eliminate your discomfort, the more you're actually going to eliminate your happiness itself, which is critically important. And again, there's all that study on all those studies on back pain, for example, the more that you try to baby your back, the more back pain you're going to wind up having. Big time. But people do it all the time.

It's just they make that mistake constantly. It's like, I'm going to sit here because my back hurts forever and my back gets weaker. The same thing is true with your emotions. This is a term that chat GPT taught me. So I'm going to give credit to where credits do. That is logically coherent,

but factually inaccurate. Yeah, I know. Because logically makes sense. My back is hurt. I'm going to protect it. But factually, if you protect it too much, it actually becomes problematic. Well, it's also five minutes

versus five years. Yeah. And which is short term versus long term. There's all kinds of things like that, the fallacy of composition that we commit constantly. That's number one is your feelings are liars.

Your feelings are there, they should be under your managerial control as opposed to managing you. Second. You should have a book, feelings under supervision only. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

And again, I fall prey to this a lot. You're human. I teach this and I'm 61 and I still like, I'm grumpy with my wife. And she's like, do you read your books? That's great. Yeah. Yeah, thanks.

How do you deal with people weaponized that it gets? Because people do say stuff to me like, oh, you're not being healthy. You're hypocrite. Well, part of it is I recognize the truth. I study happiness because happiness is hard for me, not because it's easy for me. If it were easy for me, I wouldn't write about it. My wife is like a 9.5 on a 0 to 10 cantral ladder of well-being. I'm like 3.5.

You're rushing. You're like, I'm struggling to get to 5. Chronic dissatisfaction. Yeah, but yeah, for sure. And I come from, and half of your happiness is genetic according to the identical twin studies. And, you know, I come from gloomy, gloomy stuff.

Yeah, or baseline disnymic at this point. Pretty much, yeah. Do we say dysthymia? I don't think we'd talk about that anymore. What do we call that? I know, we still call it dysthymic disorder. Yeah, which is basically just low-level depression, which is melancholia, you know, back in the day.

That I think we got rid of. I know, but that's the best word. Yeah, it's a good word. There's some poetic. It's like, it's Shakespeare. Shakespeare said it. So it must be good. The second big one that I feel that they're getting wrong is they think that that happiness

is their birthright, that Mother Nature wants them to be happy. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature wants you to pass on your jeans and survive a second day. That's what she wants. And if you're a miserable mess, but you're passing on your jeans, then she's like totally digging it. And that's a problem. That means, and human beings with this unbelievable prefrontal cortex allows us to choose

not our animal impulses, but our moral aspirations. This is the most amazing thing about being human. You can choose not to eat that piece of cake. You can choose not to be unfaithful to your spouse. You can choose not to cheat on your taxes because you realize a better life is in your moral aspirations, not in your animal impulses. choose your animal impulses Sorry, man, you're not going to be happy

Choose things that go against your animal impulses Be at war with them You know, which most... No, every good philosopher is taught Every serious religion is taught. Then you can have a life under your own management is what it comes about. Whether or not the religions are right or not.

They're teaching you something about what human life actually is To be freed from this notion that if I just do the thing that I want to do that feels good, then I'll actually get happier. I mean, clinicians are coping with all the time. It's like, yeah, but I wanted to smoke. Right.

I wanted to drink. It felt good to do all this stuff, but the argument is you're going to be more fully alive if you don't do that thing. And that's a choice that we can actually make. That's a big, big truth that's important that I teach my students. A pattern that I'm seeing in my young patients

that scares me a bit because I don't know how to address it. When I speak to someone who is struggling with major depressive disorder and they have a cognitive distortion, I introduce the concept, all the workarounds that we have, perhaps medication as an option. But when I have a teenager who somehow found their way to nihilism and is reading about books where nothing matters, I have no idea what to do. Yeah. That's a form of control.

And the reason for that is because nihilism, so they're reading Nietzsche. They're reading Alzo Spraq Zarathustra. They're reading the gay science. They're reading, you know, this classic God is dead kind of stuff that gives them a huge sense of power, a huge sense of philosophical power.

There's basically three ways of understanding human life. We have an essence. We have existence. We exist. I mean, you and I are sitting here. Maybe Elon is right and we're living in a simulation, but okay, you know, let's just assume that's not right. We actually exist. And everybody watching us exists. We have an essence, which is sort of the meaning of our life. There's two major schools that have traditionally existed. The ancient school, which says that essence precedes existence.

The meaning of Mike's life existed before Mike was born, and your job is to find it and live up to it. And that's most philosophies, too. I mean, certainly Aristotle and Socrates and Plato believe that. and all, you know, most of, even most contemporary philosophers would believe that. Then there's this sort of the existentialist school, which says that existence precedes essence. So Sartra said that you exist and you have to invent your essence and live according to it, invent your meaning, yourself, yourself inventing in this way. That's very, very powerful too. There's a third option, which is that life has no essence, that is just existence.

and being free of that is like just to laugh at it all, just laugh at all. And that gives a tremendous sense of power because it has a descriptive quality to it. And when, to get back to the neurobiology of this, when young men in particular are being forced to live exclusively in the left hemisphere of their brains, when they don't even know all this right hemispheric activity

that their grandparents just routinely felt through their boredom and through their heartbreak and through their suffering and through the complete lack of a technologized existence. They don't know that. They've never experienced meaning. They can come to the conclusion that there is no meaning. And finally, they read a philosopher who said in 1890, there is no essence. And they're like, aha.

That's the truth. And that's a bracing truth. That's an empowering truth. Unfortunately, there's no good that comes from that. There's nothing beautiful that comes from that. There's no relationships that come from that. Even, by the way, even Nietzsche didn't believe that. Nietzsche proposed marriage to the same woman over and over and over again his whole life.

And she always said no, and he went insane. And the reason is because he, why was he proposing marriage to her? Because there was an essence that was in human love. There was essence. The reason he said that life, he probably went home and wrote another chapter that life has no meaning every time she said no. Yeah, exactly. So in those people, is it working to instill that essence or prove the essence?

Or point out the direct fact that this could be giving them power and allow them to come to that conclusion? Again, it's hard with kids. It is. It's to encourage them to live in such a way that not that they find their meaning, but their meaning finds them. And the way to do that is to take them out of the overly technologized culture of accomplishment, merit. hustle, grind, and especially machines. And that's how do you do that? The best way that you can do, the easiest way to do that is take your kid camping

without devices for a week, is to actually listen to music together with your child, to talk to your child about actual human relationships, to actually put boundaries around their basic technology. To be alive, to be fully alive is what comes about. It's funny when applicants to medical schools or residency ask me for advice, I just say be normal.

And what my answer is, is experience life, share something that you've experienced what it meant to you. Because then I know I'm getting a human that can be in the embrace of another human and understand what that means. When you're mad, be mad,

when you're sad, be sad, don't be inappropriate. And that's as best advice as you can give, generally speaking. Yeah, don't be a machine. Don't try to be a machine is what it comes about. And if we can help young people today live in the experience of actual human life

with all of the, it's weird mysteries and its vicissitudes and risks and scary things and the terror and the mystery and the love and the meaning, then then this is a problem that largely solves itself. The scary things, that's harder and harder to do. And there are fewer and fewer people who are willing to take on that challenge. Speaking of scary things and given my baseline dysdymia, it's appropriate to end the conference. We should make that the diagnosis of Russian dystimic disorder. We get a trouble for that. RDD.

It sounds good. It sounds great. Let's write a paper together. In terms of psychology, what keeps you up at night? Yeah, about psychology, what keeps me up at night. About the profession of the research of psychology. Anything. Right now, as a behavioral scientist, and I'm trained as a behavioral economist.

I'm not on the psychology side is how I came about this. But behavioral science in general, we have an incredible lack of replicability in the research. in the research that's actually going on, which is wasting time and making it, so people aren't asking the questions that actually could make human life better. We're not trying to connect with people in a way that's gonna make life better.

We're doing, you know, do go gougas and here's an amazing finding. Conjugal infidelity leads to greater happiness. Or it's like, because I faked an experiment or had a non-run replica sample or I p hacked my way to it. So in my research, field, that's a real problem, I have to say, because behavioral science has a huge role to play and making life better for you as a clinician, making life better for everybody. And that's why I'm in the

world of public education as opposed to, I mean, I spent many, many years in the salt mines of academic journal article publishing. And the reason I'm doing what I'm doing now is because I think time is short. And that's what really keeps me awake. Yeah, the replication crisis is so real. And I've seen it happen sometimes too far. I've heard you talk about the marshmallow experiment. And how some people say it's been debunked, but really it's talking about the why as opposed to what was actually going on,

where the outcomes of it. So what about our society is leading us to not want to replicate good quality research to make sure it's legitimate about creating new landmark trials that we can build off of? Is it a funding issue? Is it a people don't believe in behavior?

behavioral sciences anymore? What's the issue? Well, part of it is just the way that academia works and academic research works. You don't get papers published and get promotion and tenure by replicating somebody else's research. You get it by doing something new and amazing. But you think at this day and age, we would see the value. You'd think, although it's much easier to just say, you know, the marshmallow test is amazing or the marshmallow test is crap, as opposed to actually digging in to actually see, you know, what part of it is still valid? What part can we actually get meaning from and find useful results from that?

Is that driven by media, you think? Yeah, yeah. Well, part of it's driven by media, but it's also just by the infrastructure of how we work in. Well, the universities are just responding to the capitalist media that want an aggressive top-end story. Kind of, although I think that also

it's just that we don't have a good way of judging quality in universities. And so it's peer review. You know, it's peer review is everything, peer review research is everything. And so university's like, how do I know that this guy is doing, you know, particle physics is doing good research? Well, he got into these apex journals. And I can't read the research. I'm the provost. You know, I'm the, I'm the dean of arts and sciences. How am I going to, you know, I got my degrees in English literature. How am I going to actually get that? There's a bunch

of things that are wrong with that. And part of it is kind of a culture that doesn't, that doesn't value ethics as much as it actually should. And, you know, that's one of the things that, I guess that's, maybe that keeps me up at night even more about the behavioral sciences. We don't have a sense of what's good and right. We don't have a sense of actually using science for what really matters, which is bringing more love and goodness into the world. It's more about how can this actually feather mine asked. Yeah, I mean, pairing that with our current breakthroughs in gene editing and CRISPR,

that's a scary world to be in with low ethics and abilities to edit genomes. That's scary where we all end up. Make a buck, get famous, have more power. That's not great. That's really not great at all. I mean, my guess is that's not why you got into medicine. Absolutely. You got into medicine to care for patients.

And you're in public education on topics of health and wellness because you want people to be better off, right? And that's, by the way, that's the meaning of life. What is? Making people. Well, it's love. Yeah. Oh, look, we're ending on a non-desdemic note.

It's kind of nice. The two disdiamic guys. Well, you know what they say about two negatives, right? That's right. Love and dysdemeania makes the world go around. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know what's funny, in my world of practicing medicine for more than a decade at these community health centers, being inner city, Brooklyn,

some of the meanest people that I've met are actually the kindness most supportive. It's such a weird paradox in that way. where you have the nurse who everyone's like, don't, don't talk to them because they're gonna be mean, they're gonna snap at you. And then you get to know them and they're this wonderful person that goes to bat for their patients

that wants the highest caliber care. And yet they come off as mean. Yeah. And part of it is that is the personality. And that's the affect profile I was talking about before. That these, some of the kindest, you know, most beautiful people of all

that have a poetic temperament. And so it makes it such that it's hard to deal with him on the surface, but deep down they got a hard to go. New Yorkers, baby. there's something to that actually. Well, that's why, what is the line that if, like, you're having a hard attack, they'll say, get the hell out of my way when they realize you're having a heart attack, they'll help you.

Yeah. But in other cities, they'll be like, oh, please. Well, that's kind versus nice. So in L.A., if you have a, if you have a flat, people would be like, dude, that's, that sucks. That sucks. I'm sorry. Bye. And in New York, it's like, and in New York, it's like, you idiot, you were driving on Baltimore.

Okay, give me the jack. Let's like, let's get this thing fixed. Yeah, very New York person. So it's kind versus nice and nice versus kind. So which one is nice and which one's kind? Kind is the nurse with the heart of gold who's going to snap at you. And nice is the one who's like really sweet to you on the service, but actually won't go to bat for you at all.

Interesting. Yeah. You want, obviously, I would like people who are nice and kind. Why can't I have both? What that is, that's the Midwest. Yeah. Okay, that's fair. Yeah.

I could see that. I'm a West Coast guy. You're an East Coast guy. So neither of us are getting this right. Well, the idea is that we find the middle and the Midwest. That's what we're trying to find ourselves too. Well, thank you so much for a great conversation. Thank you, Mike.

Thanks for the work that you're doing. You're making the world better. Great teamwork here. Right on, man. Where can people follow along your journey? Arthurbricks.com. Like everybody else, I have a website. It's got my columns on it.

No one else took it. Exactly. It turns out there's no Arthur. That's because most parents don't name their kid. Arthur. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Oh, no, it's falling in popularity? Well, it was popular in the 90s.

The 1890s. I was going to say there's kings galore. I know. There's like, but and and then my podcast is office hours called office hours and and I talk about all things love and happiness. How did you name it? How did office hours? Because I'm an academic. I'm just an old school academic and I'm talking about the things that people ask me about in my office hours. Okay. And then I talk about, you know, the studies behind it. And a lot of it is, you know,

me talking to the camera, but I also have some pretty interesting guests. And there's always kind of cool stuff on my website. Who's your favorite guest? Who's my favorite guest? Who stands out when you think of, I've had great guests. I've had a, this show is only 20 episodes in, but I had a great conversation with somebody, a really, a friend of mine I've only had for the past three years, but I really love him. Do you know Rain Wilson?

I just had him on the podcast last month? He's wonderful. So boom. He's wonderful. And he and I grew up about five miles apart in Seattle. We were about the same age. I didn't know when we were kids. We just bonded over that.

And we had, every time I talked to him, it's just so wonderful. I took him with me to see the Dalai Lama in India last year. Wow. So we're having all these like meaningful things. Nice. Bros. That's cool.

Yeah, he was really fun. He's a great guy. He just did a great movie about Code 3. The plight that is the EMT. So that's what we were talking about. Yeah.

Yeah. Minimum wage for the most important job. Isn't that a while? Do you see it? Yeah. Of course I saw it. I thought it was surprisingly funny for how dark it was.

Because I thought, oh wow, this is dark. There's no way this is going to be funny. and I laughed the whole time. Yeah. And it's funny because I've talked to him about the fact that comedians and comedic actors often suffer from depression.

And one of the things that they learn, this is something called emotional substitution. Or as children, they learn early on that when they're feeling really dark and that they're funny and they make a joke and everybody laughs, it changes their mood. And what that does, of course,

is it diverts their attention. So this is an adaptation. Yeah, it's an adaptation that a lot of comics and a lot of comedians actually have. Oh, he's really, really good in a dark role, actually making it weirdly funny. Wow. Yeah.

And the human mind is scary. It's so awesome. The human mind and the human brain, which I believe are different, but that's not the point. It's just such a wonderful thing. My last guest would disagree with you. Yeah.

The mind-brained dichotomy and all that stuff, that's that area of consciousness. That's a huge area of research. Was it a philosopher or a neuroscientist? A psychiatrist. A psychiatrist. Yeah. He's a radical physicalist.

Brain. No mental. All brain. Amen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I believe there's a soul. Well, I don't know if he disagrees because he's very faith-based himself. Yeah. And Rain would say that there's a soul too. But his whole thing is soul. His soul network. That's his podcast network. Yeah. Yeah. And Soul Pancake was his old company. And Soul boom is, yeah, yeah, for sure. But the whole point is who knows who's right. The whole point is that we have this wild experience and that we can't quite get to the bottom of it. We're just trying to live it as opposed to trying to solve it. And that's the best adventure we can possibly all be in. Well, thank you for lighting up my neurons today.

Thanks, man. Appreciate you. Right on. Thank you. Huge thanks to Arthur for coming on to the pod. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life is available for pre-order now. Link in the description. If you enjoyed this conversation, you might also enjoy my chat with Dr. Ali Matu, a clinical

psychologist from San Francisco. He and I went nearly three hours on some really in-depth topics. So if a nitty-gritty pod about psychology appeals to you, scroll back and find that one. It would also mean a lot to me if you could throw us a five-star review and drop a positive comment or review as it's the best way to help us find new listeners. And as always, stay happy and healthy.