The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - No. 1 Happiness Expert: If Your Friends Get Divorced So Will You! Single Friends Will Keep You Single! Obesity Is Contagious

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Everyone is constantly looking for happiness, but maybe real happiness can be found where we least expect it. Arthur C. Brooks is a bestselling author of 13 books and Harvard professor where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He is the columnist of the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic. In this interview, Steven and Arthur discuss everything from why Arthur studies the science of happiness, the crucial importance of meaning and agency, why society is wrong at saying what causes happiness and why happiness is infectious. You can purchase Arthur’s most recent book, ‘Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier’, here: https://amzn.to/3O89WXf Follow Arthur: Twitter - https://bit.ly/3HnHLje Instagram - https://bit.ly/47CYaeq Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I take the same tests year by year, and I am 60% happier than I was five years ago, because I finally cracked the code. Okay, so, Arthur Brooks. The world-renowned social scientist. Harvard professor. Best-selling author. Who teaches people how to live a better, happier life. I've studied the science of happiness, and I found that most of what society tells us is wrong.

And we will go into all of this. For example, they found that happiness is about 50% genetic. Introverts tend to have more long-term happiness. And happiness is a mind virus. It will transmit from one person to another person to another person. Really? Yeah. They were looking at the trajectory of people's lives,

measuring everything for many years, and they found obesity is contagious. When your friends get divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. But also, when your friends get happy, you're more likely to get happy. The problem is happiness has been in decline since about 1990. One of the reasons is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek. But we know that, for example, 95% of diets fail is the most unsuccessful industry in the world because the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going

to have a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. You actually get more satisfaction from the progress. Okay, so if not a weight number or a financial number, what's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success to being happier? There are goals that actually do lead to the happiest life and the more you have, the better off you are. The four goals that really matter are... Arthur. Steve. What do you do? I am dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together using the science and ideas around human happiness. Where do you teach? I teach at Harvard

University. You're a professor of happiness. Yeah, I'm a professor of leadership technically at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School. But my area is leadership and happiness. So I've studied the science of happiness, which is a huge growing field, multidimensional field across social psychology and neuroscience, behavioral economics, philosophy for a long time. And what I try to do is I bring it to future leaders in politics and policy, and especially business, and help them understand themselves as happiness teachers so they can be happier and they can be more successful and bring more happiness to the people they lead. What is the state of happiness? Can we quantify that where we are in terms of,

are we getting happier as a people or more unhappy as a people? We can, we can't. So the United Nations and a lot of other places try to see the happiest country. You've seen those data a lot. The happiest country, it's always Denmark. It's always the Nordic countries. You can't do that. And that's like, the way that that happens is they go to 100 countries and they survey 1,000 people in each of 100 countries and say, how do you evaluate your life? That's like asking people in every country how much you like the music in your country. And on the basis of the highest rankings internally, you say, who has the best music? It doesn't really make sense. It's bad methodology.

You can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience. So inside countries, inside communities over time, I'm willing to look at that. And that shows

that in most of the OECD countries, including the United States and UK, our countries, happiness has been in decline since about 1990. Since about 1990? Yeah. Is that when you were born? Yeah, 92. It's not you. It's us. I always think when people commit their lives largely to a topic, that must have very personal roots with that individual. What are your personal roots with the subject of happiness? It's hard for me. It's hard for me. I'm not a naturally happy person. I'm way below average in happiness. And at least 50% of

that is genetic, by the way. So there's a lot of research looking at identical twins. There's a whole database of identical twins born between the mid-1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at birth, then reunited as adults. This was not an experiment that was cooked up by some diabolical Harvard social scientist like me. It happened naturally just over the course of events. And when they were reunited, they were given personality tests. You can see some of these meetings where they were reunited on YouTube and they're wonderful. They're joyful and funny. You find that you have an identical twin you didn't know about and say, finding all these commonalities. But of course, there's always a bunch of social scientists,

you know, with clipboards, you know, annoying them like me, you me, taking data. And so the personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your personality is genetic and the rest is environmental and experiential and circumstantial. But 80%, up to 80%, that's a lot. And that means your openness to experience, your conscientiousness as a person, your extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and happiness is about 50% genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy, Steve. Or happy. Your results may vary. Was your household a happy place? It was a complicated place, but it wasn't terrible because my parents were good parents, and they loved each other other and they loved us.

But my relationship by the time I was a young adult was cordial because they were busy with their issues. And this is one of the things that I talk about with a lot of people. Nobody has a perfect childhood. And a lot of people are troubled by their childhood and they feel doomed to repeat the circumstances of their childhoods, but they're not. You can rewrite your own past history by looking back at what happened and deciding to change certain variables in the way that you're going to live your adult life. So Steve, you're going to get married and you're going to have children. And then you need to look at your own childhood and say, what are the things that I want to be the same? And what are the things that I want to be different? I'm designing my life right now,

not just on the basis of the things that went right, but on the basis of the things that went wrong. You know, I wasn't close to my parents. They never lived close to me. My children, who are now growing up, never had an intense experience of a relationship with any of their grandparents. One side lived in Barcelona, the other side lived in Seattle. We were in New York and Washington, D.C. And so now, no, I'm going to live near my kids and I'm a grandfather now. All three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime, whether they want to or not. I see my grandson as much as I can. Next week, I turn down a whole bunch of work because I get to babysit my grandson. Is there any research that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival, whether it's when they're suffering with illnesses? I often think about this sort of

stereotype that when someone retires, or when they stop working, or when their partner dies in old age, so both of them might be 90 years old, when one of the partners dies, it seems that the remaining, the surviving partner, has months left sometimes. That's mostly true. When it's not true, this is depressing, that statistic, which is that if the husband dies, the wife is going to be fine.

Really? Yeah. Widows are way happier than widowers. I told that to my wife and she's like, huh? Widowers do really poorly, generally. Men do very poorly. And part of the reason is because these data are disputed, but more or less they're directionally correct. 60% of 60-year-old men say their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Women have more relationships. They have closer, deeper love relationships

with non-related kin and with the adult children, typically, than the husband does. The husband's most intense companion or relationship, typically, is with the wife. And that's why that's an asymmetric stat. That's what the data say. But yeah, for sure. I mean, back to the main point, hope is super critical. On illness? On everything. I mean, hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes. And we know

that when people lose hope, they give up. And when they give up, they don't take care of themselves. They don't do what they need to do. They don't exercise like they should. They're not as active. They're not talking to other people. Their minds are not stimulated. They don't eat right. They might use substances in ways that they shouldn't. And all of those things compound. And so just at the physiological level, you'd see that you'd have degradation when there is no hope. And when you're 90, you can't afford it. Actually, I'm 59. I can't afford it either. And neither can you at 31. We all need hope. And when you're 90, you can't afford it. Actually, I'm 59. I can't afford it either. And neither can you at 31. We all need hope. This is huge. To the extent that you can actually bring hope to people by showing them they can do something as an agent in their own future,

that's just giving them a longer, better, more successful life. That's what I want to do with my work. You know, because I've seen so much. I mean, since I've actually dedicated myself to this, I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being and I don't game the numbers. I mean, I have, there's macronutrients to your happiness. You have to take the different elements. It's not a single measure thing. And there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up to it. And I follow this very carefully month by month by month, semester by semester, year by year. And I take the same tests as my students do every year. And I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work. Because of the work that you've done on yourself or because of your work as a...

Both, because here's the deal. If you want want to be happier you need to understand the science you need to apply it to your life you need to share it with others because you won't remember it and hold yourself accountable unless you're teaching it that's why i teach people to be happiness teachers interesting yeah yeah so so my guess is how long you've been in the podcast? Two years? We launched on YouTube three years ago. Yeah. It's probably having a big effect on your life. Huge. Because you're talking about these ideas. And my guess is that you're in your private life,

you're talking about the ideas that you learned with other people. And every time you share these ideas, you imprint them. They're not just limbic phantasms. you use them with the executive centers of your brain. The more that you learn, the more you talk about what you learn, the better off you get. You're only talking about things that empower people and lift them up and make their lives better. These are the topics of what you do, right?

Because you want people to be happier and more successful. That's the point of the show, right? And that's how you're getting happier and more successful. Is there research that shows this point of agency correlates to happiness and survival? Yes. Like longevity. Yeah.

And so agency essentially means that the belief that you have control over your life and your future in essence. Yeah. And that there are things that you can do so that you're not helpless. Helplessness is the problem. This gets back to the work of Marty Seligman

in the late 60s and early 1970s. He's the father of positive psychology. He created the whole field of positive psychology. He's a great mentor and hero to me. He's done so much for me intellectually and in my career and as a friend and just as a person. And when he was doing his early work, he was doing animal studies and work on human beings to take away their agency. So he would do things like people would be, you know, putting nickels into a slot machine and they would figure out along the way that it didn't matter if they pulled the handle or not,

that they were getting the same outcomes. That he took away just little tiny bits of agency. He had dogs in boxes where they would shock the floors of the boxes. This is hard to get through internal review boards now, but they would, because it seems cruel. It wasn't big shocks, but the whole point was that the dogs would, you know would step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them.

But when they couldn't do that anymore, they would just like lie down and whimper on the shocking floor. They would give up. This is called learned helplessness. People will learn their helplessness when they realize that, or they figure out, or they conclude, or they're told by politicians and media and activists and everybody else that there's nothing that they can do and they're a victim. When you take on the identity of victim, you learn your helplessness. And that will degrade your quality of life, make you less successful, less happy. And a lot of studies say that you won't even live as long. This point of agency is so interesting.

I had someone on the show at the very beginning of the show, and he said that he basically crowdsources his book, a guy called Mo Gordat. You might know the guy. He says he crowdsources his book, and he gets 500 people to read his book before it comes out. And he goes, when we got down to the part in my book about personal responsibility, he goes,

8% of people drop off the Google Docu Google document because they don't want to read it. No, this is spinach. And it's interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday morning in the Atlantic, 12 or 1300 words on the science of happiness. And about once every two or three months, I have a spinach column, which says, you want to be happy? Be humble. You want to be happy? Change your mind. You want to be happy? Don't tell somebody that if they disagree with you, that they're stupid and evil. Listen, listen more than you talk. You know, just what your grandmother told you, right? About how to be a successful person. But it's all about humanity, about humility. But these are hard

things in a society where all of our biases are, I'm right, you're wrong. I don't want to listen. La, la, la, la, la. If it goes against my, my whatever ideological biases that I happen to have. And I'll write a spinach column. And those are the ones that get way less, way fewer readers. Do you know what's interesting? As you're speaking, I was thinking that nobody thinks they're a victim. They can spot victimhood in other people very successfully, but there's no one listening to this right now that would say, I am a victim. So how does one know if they're a victim? Well, I mean, a lot of people will say, I am a victim of these institutional biases. A lot of

people will, a lot of people really will say that. I mean, they will say that I'm a victim of capitalism, or I'm a victim of powerful people. I'm a victim of conspiracies that are happening, the deep state, whatever it happens to be. A lot of people really will talk about it in that particular power. And the really interesting thing in life is to show people the levels of power that they have, the levers of power that they have, that don't start with trying to change the outside world, that start with the inside of their heads. That's what I'm dedicated to doing, is showing people that the hope that they should have comes from the leverage they have over their circumstances, which starts with what they thought they had the least control over, their emotions, their happiness, their well-being, the love that they experience because the commitments that they make. If you really want to have power, start with managing yourself, not trying to manage the outside world. Is happiness a choice?

Happiness is unattainable because it's a direction, not a destination. Is being happier a choice? Yes. Being happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment that you are going to make in your life and in your relationships, in the way that you manage yourself. Absolutely. Do you think there is a starting point to being happier? Yeah, it actually starts with recognizing that most of what society tells us about happiness is wrong. What's wrong?

It's not a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling. On my first day of class, I have two sections of 90 MBA students at the Harvard Business School. They're taking this science of happiness seminar. I've got 400 on the waiting list. There's an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about. It's the happiness class. It's super fun.

I love it. I love my students. They're terrific. And I cold call them on the first day by saying, you know, what's happiness? And I pick one, two, three, 10. What's happiness? And they always say, it's the feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love, or it's how I feel when I'm doing what I enjoy. Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings. I say, wrong. The biggest barrier to actually getting happier is believing that happiness is a feeling. It's not. It's happiness is evidence or feelings are evidence of happiness.

Like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. That's how to understand feelings. Now, feelings are really, really important. Your affect, your mood is critically important, but happiness is something a lot more tangible. You start getting happier, the beginning of happiness, of getting happier, because true happiness is not the goal, because you have to have negative emotions. Negative emotions keep you alive. Negative experiences make you learn and grow. So you don't want pure happiness, the sight of heaven. Dangerous. You'd be dead quickly without a lot of unhappiness. But getting happier starts with this understanding that really what it is, is the pursuit of three things, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

Those are the three macronutrients. So you and I are nutrition nerds, right? And what we all know, and I've heard people say on your show, is that most people get insufficient protein. And when you come to America, everybody eats way too many highly glycemic carbohydrates, right? Happiness is the same thing. We get the macronutrient profile wrong. We need more enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We have to know how to get them in efficient and healthy ways, and we need them in balance. Can you define enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning for me? Yeah. See, this is the problem because a lot of people think they know what these things are,

but they aren't. But this is the adventure because once you kind of get into the details of this, then you've got real strategies for getting happier. The definition provides strategies. Let's start with enjoyment. Most people think it's the same as pleasure, but that's wrong. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Now, of course, you know this because you've had plenty of guests who've talked about the limbic system of the brain. That's the console of tissue deep inside the brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years. It takes signals from the brainstem and other parts, rudimentary structures in the brain. It takes those signals about what's going on in the outside. In the limbic system, it translates them into information. All your emotions are is information.

There's no such thing as good and bad feelings. Bad feelings, good feelings. No, they're all good. They might be maladapted, but the point is positive and negative emotions keep you alive. You need, especially the negative emotions. I talk about negative emotions all the time because survival is critical. And so anger and sadness and fear and disgust, which are the big four negative emotions, these have kept you alive thousands and thousands and thousands of times. Really important. That information then is relayed on to the neocortex of the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead, where you can figure out what are these emotions, what do they mean, and how am I going to react according to them. Now, a lot of times these signals are all

goofed up and we're very reactive, which means that we're not letting our prefrontal cortex catch up with our limbic system. And that's a lot of the work that I do. But back to enjoyment. Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure because pleasure is limbic. It's nothing more than a signal where the ventral stratum, the reward center of your brain is getting tapped in the limbic system saying that thing is going to be good for survival and passing on your genes. That's why it feels good. Go do it. Sex and sugar. Sex and sugar. Sex and sugar and a lot, and gambling, which social media has a lot in common with slot machines and all these little things that get back to your primordial evolutionary past. I know you love the evolutionary biology and psychology because this gives us so

much information about who we are today. Look at the place to see and see yourself, kind of. And all of these things that give us pleasure, it's because they went back to survival and propagation of the species so importantly. All those pleasure-filled things, if you pursue them, you're just sitting in your limbic system. And modern technology and society will engorge these things into incredibly unhealthy practices. So you get, you know, we have natural endorphins that make us feel good and help us when we actually get hurt so that we can get back to our cave. And of course, we've chemically altered them into fentanyl, which feels great until you die. Fentanyl is not a big thing in the UK, but it's a huge thing here. It's huge.

I mean, we have 100,000 drug overdose deaths every year in the United States, mostly because of fentanyl. It's unbelievable. But we have other versions of that, you know, we can have stochastic experiences, you know, things that, that, that happen occasionally and give us a reward when we, when something happens not in predictably, but unpredictably. And so we make slot machines and they give us all this, that, you know, tap into that, that brain chemistry, or we want to propagate the species. And so we turn it into pornography, which is unbelievably powerful and dangerous for the brain because it captures the brain and destroys relationships along the way. It's just fentanyl in its way. But all of these

things are just pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Anything that can be addictive, which pleasure filled things typically can, if you do them compulsively over and over and over again, it will make you less happy. But here's when people ask me, so does that mean I should never drink alcohol? I should never gamble? No, no, no. You need to add two things to turn them into enjoyment. You need to add people in memory. Because if you add people in memory to something, then you're moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex. That's when it's fully human. That's when it's not an animal experience. It's a human experience. And that is a very important part of your happiness. And so the big question is if something's addictive, if you're doing it

alone, you're probably doing it wrong. What about sex? That's pornography and masturbation is alone. And that's not good for you, is the whole point. That's, I mean, again, reasonable people disagree. And some people will be like, what's this guy talking about? But the whole point is that the data on pornography or that it captures the brain, and ultimately it doesn't, on average, lead to happier lives. Because it truncates the reproductive experience at the level of pleasure and doesn't take it all the way to enjoyment. Interesting. Yeah. Have you studied porn much as a subject? Sort of everybody in my field winds up there. It's not something that I focus that much on because, you know, it's

focusing on the research on pornography makes you look a little creepy at age 59. It's not a good look. It's like, so what do you study? It's like, yeah. Interesting. So people in memory turn pleasure into... Enjoyment. To enjoyment. That's right. So alcohol, add people in memory. You know, the Anheuser-Busch Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of, you know, a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. That's how a lot of people use the product.

But everybody knows that's an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism. What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends clinking bottles together, having a great time. That is pleasure, alcohol, plus people, plus memory equals enjoyment, and that leads to happiness. Because they want to join their brand to happiness, just to pure pleasure and certainly not to addiction same with like coca-cola all the coca-cola ads are like the world cup with your friends and yeah in summer with your friends yeah and that's actually less addictive i mean there are certain

you know the sugar and and caffeine are certainly addictive but they don't have the same properties of of brain capture in the same way for sure because they don't they don't have the same properties of brain capture in the same way for sure, because they don't stimulate as much dopamine as something like alcohol does. And so they're less likely to make you really addicted. But the whole point is that it does give you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment. And you only get that when you're doing it with people. Satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You're an entrepreneur. You understand this one really well.

You're good at deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs are good. Successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification, which means I'm going to do this hard thing, and it's going to get a big payoff, and that payoff is going to be sweet. That's satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering

for us to actually get the joy that we seek. And that's a really important part of our happiness. So you find the people who are better at deferring their gratification, get more satisfaction and they're happier. There's a lot of that. Remember, you've heard about the marshmallow experiment. Yeah. And people have debunked it, but they actually haven't. So the marshmallow experiment was taken place, it took place in the late 60s, where Walter Mischel was a psychologist at Stanford out in Palo Alto. He had a little laboratory setup where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table. And there was a kid on the other side of the table between four

and eight years old. And in front of the kid was a marshmallow. And so he says to the kid, you want the marshmallow? The kid's like, yeah. He says, I'll tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back here. But when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you another one. Can you wait? Every kid's like, yeah, totally, totally, totally worth it. He comes back five minutes later or so, 80% of the kids had eaten the marshmallow. 20% of the kids hadn't. Now that's a lot. 80% of the kids could not defer the gratification. So the real question is who's the 20%? It's Steve Bartlett. These are the people that went on to do distinguished things. They did better in

school. They got better grades. They went on to have more job success. They had better relationships. That's what they found, that the most successful kids. Now, what people fight about now is why, whether it's nature or nurture, it's probably 50-50. Like everything else in life, it's both nature and nurture. But the bigger point is good things come to those who wait. And when you wait, you suffer. And you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience. Now, the bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother Nature has a big lie at the end of it. Mother Nature says, if you get it, you're going to love it forever. And that's not true.

See, the brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline physiologically and emotionally because you can't stay in an unusual physiological state. Unusual states are a reaction. You need to be ready to react. And so, you know, you step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated, your heart goes back to where it was so you're not dead in a week. The same thing is true for you emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you, you think it's going to last forever so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing, but it doesn't last forever, does it? That's the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it's going to be really great. And the first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her himself is, I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis. And that puts you on

something called the hedonic treadmill. More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. So that's the great conundrum of the striver is that there's never enough, never enough, never enough. I deal with people all day long. I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful, but not happy. And a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that, but also gives you the solution, which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have. So have more is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want. Halves divided by wants. Successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their halves.

They need to want less. And that's a whole kettle of fish. That's spirituality. That's discipline. That's fitness. That's diet. That's a whole lot of things that go into that. And that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction.

Sounds like a contradiction though, doesn't it? It sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is going to make me happy, but I should want less. Yeah. What people actually who crack this code, and a lot of, you know, Eastern traditions actually get into this, is not that striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it. That the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not arrival. What you wanted was progress. And then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There's a funny thing in the research on dieting. We all know that it's the most expensive, unsuccessful industry in the world, right? 95% of diets fail, which means within a year, people have gained back all

the weight that they've lost. But they're successful insofar as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here's the thing about diets. Every day, you're willing to forego the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down. When you hit your goal, it's going to be so great. It's going to be so great. You know what the reward is, Dave? You never again get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Once you've got there. That's why you fail. And the arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it's going to be sweet when I get to the goal.

It isn't. What you're going to have is homeostasis when you get to your goal, frustration and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less. You need to think less about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey. That's really what it comes down to. And people who crack that code over the course of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management, they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama, I've been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years. And I asked him this question, how can I get lasting satisfaction?

And he said, you need to want what you have not to have what you want. And that's what it comes down to. It's the management of my wants, not my haves. On that point, we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that there. So for those people that are approaching that moment and that, you know, they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things. What is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success? Yeah. It's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homeostatically

return us to the baseline, that won't throw us onto this hedonic treadmill over and over and over again. Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life. And the more you have, the better off you are, where more actually is better. But they don't fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and fame, which are the typical kind of goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or whatever it happens to be. The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have. Now, there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame. There's nothing wrong with those things, but only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life. I'm not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily. Better family relationships,

which are very mystical, poorly understood, even in neuroscience in a lot of ways. Friendship, deep friendship, hard for a lot of people, especially successful people, and work that where you earn your success and serve other people. That's what it comes down to. So those are the right New Year's goals that we need. This year, what am I going to do? How am I going to grow closer to the divine? How am I going to do that? This year, what am I going to do to draw closer to my family and to have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year? And how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people? How am I going to do that? We haven't gotten to meaning yet. Yeah, we haven't got to meaning yet. You said the word

there, but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go, listen, I get it. I believe it. But I hate this belly fat. Yeah, I got it. And this belly fat yo-yos every year. No, I get it. So those are intermediate goals. And there's nothing wrong with those things. The problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the final goal. Because by the time you get there, you think, why? Why? That wasn't as meaningful as I thought. That wasn't as good as I thought. That's the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly

fat, then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. The reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and dandle your 11 grandchildren on your knee. That's the reason you want to do this because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason as opposed to an extrinsic reason having to do with people will love me more. I mean, it's amazing to me because I do a lot of wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness. I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community because I have sort of the happiness console, the science of the happiness console that I put into those things. And so I meet a lot of people that are really into the fitness part. And what a lot of guys will tell me is that

they'll have these fitness goals. Like I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing. And if they stick to it by September or October, what they're finding is that they you know, they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women, but a lot of dudes are going, looking good, dude. And they're like, that's not what I wanted. And part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what will actually come from the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals. These aren't the right final goals you got to have the right final goals and then set some intermediate goals along the way

but not let's not kid ourselves and when you think carefully about that that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs which by the way is not necessarily that healthy is going to materially improve your life and your relationships. It's not. It just isn't. What's a better end goal then as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health? Yeah, it is. It's something that's actually sustainable and having to do with health. Also with happiness is the way that this works. So I work out 60 minutes a day. It's not because I'm vain. Look, I got a face for radio, Steve. You look good. I don't know what you're talking about. I know, but age adjusted, I look good. I think vain. Look, I got a face for radio, Steve. You look good. I don't know what you're talking about. I know, but it's age adjusted.

I look good. I think you look good, period. I'm not, you know, I've got a girlfriend, but credit where credit's due. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. But you made my week. See, this was my goal.

Yeah. The reason that I do this is because I find that for me, that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can. Right? Yeah. And practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient. Eating healthfully is much easier when I do it every day. And so the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life and I'm a much happier guy. Look, it lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high. I'm a very anxious person. And I understand anxiety. I understand

the cortisol production. I understand how to manage it. And this is one of my management techniques. Thing about fitness to understand is when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn't. It lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness, largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they're produced in different parts of the limbic system. So you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that that I put my students through. You're probably somebody who experiences both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We've only met, but my guess is that you're a mad

scientist. That's the profile. And so what that means is you've got two strategies. You want to keep your positive affect high and you want to manage your negative affect. And one of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous physical exercise. Today, today for me was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now. Okay. That makes sense. I've got an answer there that I, that I'm super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short-term things that are measurements of my progress

towards the bigger goal. And the real key here is consistency. This was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing because I was that person, which will be 90% of people listening now, that made the goal every year that I was going to go to, you know, change my life every year, never worked. Because I was aiming at getting a six pack for summer.

So when I arrived with the six pack. And it worked. Awesome. It was great. I look great. I got, I actually got, I think I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished or the six pack arrived, I could not find for the life of me the motivation. So I'd go into winter and I'd become like- There's no willpower that can, like you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life. Consistency, making my goal consistency.

Habits, habits. Was the big unlock for me. For sure. Because then, okay, the goal becomes, if I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I'm going to be healthier, happier, better at my job. Fucking, is there anything more important? Is that less important than a six pack?

And that mindset shift changed my life. For sure. Meaning then. Meaning was the last of the three. Yeah. Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. This is really, really hard. So meaning is really a combination of three things. It's coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. And so meaning in your life means you got to have a theory about why things happen. Like it's one damn thing after another. I mean, you got to have some concept of why things happen. Purpose is my life has direction and has goals. That's what purpose really is. I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. And the last but not least is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't here.

I'm significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people's lives, according to philosophers and social psychologists. So there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompass these three ideas so you can remember them into two questions. And you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe. And there's no right answers. You've got to have your answers. You want to play? Yeah. Here's the quiz. Question number one. Why are you alive? You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on earth to do. Yeah. Okay. So why am I alive? That's something that I get to answer

every single day. I get to define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up. What was it? I went to the gym. I was on the running machine because I know I'm not going to be able to today. And then I came here and had this conversation with you. Yeah. But why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve? The Ikigai theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is, it's incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation. And I know that it pays it forward to other people who are going to learn from it as well. And that makes it feel worthwhile. So you said two things, fun and service.

Yeah. Right? Which is more important to you? Transcendently, which is more important to you? It's the service part. Yeah. Okay, good. We're getting someplace.

That gives me all my worth, right? The more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So now thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, does it serve? Is that guest going to serve? Is this question going to serve? Is this show going to serve? Is this sponsor going to serve the people who are watching this podcast? Then suddenly, meaning starts to go, it starts to really spread out of the soil because you, we got to that. If it's like, is it fun? Yeah, good. So look, my, my whole, I have a company

and that, that, that rides alongside what I do academically and everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations and the order of operations are, these are the four goals, but they have to be in this order. You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That's what you basically said. It's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure. That's probably an intellectual adventure, right? But the order of operations has to be right. If you're having fun more than you're serving other people, you're not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question. So you see where we're going with that, right? So the second question is harder. For what are you willing to die today? There's a couple of people in my life

that I'd die for. I'd die for my romantic partner. I'd die for my brothers and sisters, any of them. Interestingly, I don't know if I'd die for my parents, which is interesting. Would you die for an idea? I'd die for my parents, which is interesting. Would you die for an idea? Would you die for your country? I would die... When you say for my country, do you mean to save the country? I don't know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous,

even if you thought it were ridiculous, would you die? Because you love your country. It depends what you mean by that what's the cost if i die what's the cost if i stay alive no i know and i and it's it everything is context specific to a certain extent but really what i'm trying to see is what's your what's your kind of reaction is to this you know to see what the there are good things in there you are willing to die for your girlfriend yeah you are willing to die for your brothers and sisters yeah mom and dad that's like the jury's kind of your mom listen to this podcast they do but i'm just being honest

because i think i think i don't know why i said that but i just i don't know for sure this is good this is really important right this is worth thinking about right now. The worst answer is, I don't know, or nothing. Those are the worst answers. And that doesn't mean it's a problem. On the contrary, it's a huge opportunity, huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions because you don't have to go to, you know, get your PhD in philosophy. You don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with a guru someplace in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions. That's it. That's the quest. That's the vision quest. And when you see somebody find these things, like a lot of young adults, they're nowhere near you where you are on your journey. You're solid, Steve. I mean,

this is good stuff. But I meet a lot of people like, why am I alive? Because of egg metasperm. Really? Yeah. And what are you willing to die for? Nothing really, or I don't know. A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don't have a why, is what it comes down to. Repeat the questions again. Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die this very day? There's no wrong answers. I have so many young kids in particular messaging me on Instagram with the same question, which is, I think society, Instagram quotes, all of that stuff, has told them that they need to find their purpose. And it seems that they're in hunt of their purpose, like it's some Easter egg. And you think about that phrase itself, find your purpose. It

comes loaded with two assumptions. Find, which means you've got to go search for it. And purpose, which is a singular word, means there's one of them somewhere. And the unhappiness that I sense because they were unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they've been searching for, causes them to feel all kinds of inadequacy. What do you say to that? Yeah, well, part of it is because that's what we call in business the go find a rock theory of leadership, where the CEO says to an employee, go give me a rock. Like what? Go give me a rock. Okay, so you go outside and you bring a rock back in. The boss says, wrong rock. That's not helpful, right? That's go find your purpose. That's the go find a rock theory of leadership. It's like, what rock?

Where do I look? The world is full of rocks. That's where you need to be a lot more specific in figuring out deeply why you believe you're walking the earth, why you actually are alive. Besides just the mechanical explanation for what we understand in 10th grade biology, the real why, the deep why you're alive. And think, really, I mean, if push came to shove, I would die for this. I actually would die for this thing. That's when you understand what your deepest values are. That's when you can actually write your mission statement. That's what it comes down to. And that's how people actually find, as opposed to just platitudes on the internet of go find your purpose. I mean, I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. This is where the Dalai Lama lives in Northern India. And Dharamsala was a little village until the

Dalai Lama went there about 1960 when he was exiled from China, when he was kicked out of Tibet. And now it's not a metropolis, but there's tons of people there. And there's, I mean, a lot of Westerners there. They're seekers. I'm a seeker, man. Gosh, yeah. Yeah, I'm a seeker. So I'm going to go to a place where I feel like there's a lot of positive spiritual energy.

And don't get me wrong. I mean, I've studied meditation with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhist monks. I mean, I'm a much better Catholic on the basis of this. I feel like I'm a deeper Christian on the basis of this. But the idea of just going someplace and randomly looking, hoping that your purpose just hunts you down is misguided. You have to have a much better, more specific sense of what you're looking for. And these things, coherence, significance, and purpose as part of meaning are the way to do it. And those two questions are a good way at least to get started. There's going to be a huge group of people that are listening to this and thinking, do you know what? I don't have anything that I would die for. And I don't really know why I'm alive.

Yeah. And that's just made me feel like- It's hugely good news. It's incredibly good news because that's the basis of your adventure is to find those things. Because in point of fact, there are things out there.

You just don't know them yet and you haven't been looking for them. Who knows what you've been looking for? Like maybe even looking for what I like knows what you've been looking for? Maybe you've been looking for what I like, right? Why is that wrong? There's nothing wrong, but it's just not going to be the secret to finding your meaning. What I enjoy is a different pillar of happiness. A lot of people will say, if I figure out what I enjoy, then I'll find my meaning. No, those are different. It's different.

You're over on that branch of the tree. You're trying to get over on this branch of the tree. Different questions. So I'm that person, say I'm that person now, and I don't have answers to either. You tell me it's, that's a great place to be because it means the start of my adventure. What do I do? Put my shoes on and leave the house? Joe, so there's a lot of different protocols you can actually start depending on where you're on your life. One of the things that I actually recommend is reading more, not reading garbage and dumb stuff and not even reading the news. I put people on a protocol of 15 minutes a day of real reading. Actually, there's a three-part plan. You want to hear the three-part plan to actually start figuring out the answers to these questions? You don't have to answer the questions directly, but number one is start thinking to yourself, what do I think is right and wrong? What are my moral principles?

What are my moral non-negotiables? That's the moral basis of living. It's the foundation of actually figuring out the answers to your questions. So for me, that might be, I think, like free speech is important, for example. Treating people with dignity. Equality. Yeah. Right. And this is going to change over the course of your life too. So, you know, you're 28 years younger than me. When you're my age, it's going to be different. And saying to yourself, that's good. I want to change. I want to change.

I want to change. And that means that one of your non-negotiables is moral flexibility, perhaps. Really important that you're able to evolve, right? The world doesn't want you to evolve. The world wants you to be rigid because you're a better soldier in the culture war when you're not able to say, huh, what I thought actually probably isn't right. Huh, weird, right? Okay. So that's number one is the moral foundations and thinking about that. I ask my students to take out a piece of paper and start writing things down that they think. Here are the things that I actually think are right and wrong. Here are the

basis of the way that I want to live right and wrong. Here are the basis of the way that I want to live. Now, this is a very Jungian idea. Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe and acting according to it, living according to it. That the basis of unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals. In other words, I believe these things are right and wrong, I'm systematically violating there was it's so incredibly empowering when I talk to a young woman or man and I say for example what do you think is a decent way to treat a member of the opposite sex when you're on a date and they'll tell me and I say are you acting according to that and like no I said that's why you're unhappy according to Carl Jung but also according to common sense. Once you know what that is and say, I'm going to start acting and living according to my own principles, your life starts to change.

Why is that? So say someone right now is, for example, cheating on their partner. But they know. And they're against cheating. They're against cheating. They know it's bad. Because everybody's against cheating, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Betraying somebody you love. Everybody's against betraying somebody you love. Yeah, yeah. Right? That's actually natural law, if you believe there's any natural law. Why is that making them unhappy? That's making them unhappy because that's doing violence to their own sense of propriety. You're hurting yourself.

You know, the most ancient wisdom traditions and religious traditions, when they talk about sin, you know, in Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism, name the religion. There's a concept of sin, right? Sin in almost every religious tradition is not offending God. It's hurting yourself. It's self-destructive behavior. You're doing something not in accord with the way that you want to live. And in so doing, you're weakening yourself. You're making it harder for you to understand yourself as a good person, as a person of integrity, as an upright person, which we actually need. And again, there's a lot of, go back to the social psychology research on this.

We need to see ourselves as good people. It goes back to your point as well about helplessness and agency. Because if I know that that is bad, but I can't seem to stop myself doing it, I'm telling myself that I'm low agency and I'm helpless. I'm a victim of my own sin. I'm a victim of my own weakness. I'm a victim of my own impulses. And so this is one of the reasons that people will be like, I hate how I eat.

What are they actually saying? They're not saying that I hate, you know, I mean, like I'm a sugar fiend. I love, I just can't get enough of it. I don't drink alcohol, but I drink, I eat tons of sugar. I eat lots of sugar. I shouldn't do it. Now, it doesn't offend my sense of propriety to be sure, right? But I could get to the point where I'm so unhealthy that I hate that about myself because I'm actually hurting myself, but I'm being controlled by my impulses. This getting in line with your own views and making a plan, and this is where the New

Year's resolution's about taking off the weight actually makes sense, because it's not about the ab veins. It's about being morally consistent with your own view of the person that you want to be, is when this comes down. But you can't do it until you lay it out, until you actually put it in black and white. Write down your moral philosophy. I don't care how dumb it is. Write down your moral philosophy and say, make a plan to start living according to it. That's the base of the pyramid. There's two other parts, okay? The second part is a contemplative tradition, is contemplation. You need more contemplation so that you can experience transcendence. Now, there's a bunch of different ways to do this, right? This is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation.

That's all that is, is basically is sitting still without your phone and focusing on being alive. So there are a lot of ways to do it. There's informal ways to do it. My colleague, Ellen Langer, if you had her on the show? No. Super interesting person. She actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about 30 years ago. She wrote a book called Mindfulness. She was the first woman tenured in the psychology department

at Harvard. She's phenomenal. And she's just absolutely first rate. And she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you're sitting on the train by putting away your phone, putting your hands in your lap and looking out the window. Can they listen to this podcast while they do that? No. You should listen to the podcast, but not during those periods. And start with five minutes of just simple contemplation of life. Now, there are other ways to do it. Prayer is a really good way to do it too. Religious traditions are excellent at doing it, but people in a distracted world don't do that at all. You need to be in your head. You need to stop distracting yourself and systematically stop distracting yourself.

Because in your default mode network, you'll actually start to think about things that actually matter, including the things that are in the fundamental moral basis that you've started to formulate. You need contemplation. I was thinking about this last night. I don't know why I was thinking about this, but that's how weird I am. I was thinking about why I don't pray anymore, because I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about 18. Are you still a Christian? No. And every time we had dinner for my whole childhood, family sat around the table, one of us would pray. And we'd just basically give thanks for things we're grateful for. And I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith. But I was thinking last night,

it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer, which is just an exercise in gratitude to be thankful for the nature of my life. And that would serve, and I don't have to pray to something. I can just pray for gratitude. Well, you can contemplate. You can contemplate the source of your gratitude.

So gratitude listing is a really important way for you to focus on the... We're resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias. We have a tendency to pay attention to the negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival. You pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner, not the best thing that happened to the dinner, for a reason. I mean, we've evolved to the snap of the twig behind you does not make you think, oh, Beth, that's my friend. So that's just how we're evolved.

And the way to not let that become maladapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude, which are incredibly abundant. Now, the reason you stop praying is because you don't believe there's anybody on the other end of the line. Listening, yeah. Yeah, you think that it's like the ghost phone in Japan. After the tsunami, the earthquake and tsunami, a guy set up a telephone booth that's not connected, where the phone is not connected. And 30,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talked to their dead relatives. That's the ghost phone. And that's not satisfying for you with respect to prayer, because your kid version of religion was the reason you're doing that is

because you're talking to God. You've got a direct transmission mechanism to God, and now you don't think that's actually the case, so you stop doing the contemplation right now. It's probably worth rethinking an adult version of your faith, as opposed to being put off by the... A lot of people are really put off by the kid version of their faith. It's like, really? Yeah, like the burning and fire and stuff. All the weird stuff. It doesn't make sense.

But most likely, according to the data, you're going to start becoming interested in your Christian faith again as you get older. It doesn't mean you're going to have the same faith that you had. On the contrary, you probably won't. But you'll start being like, you know, there's certain things I miss about that. And life actually is messy. And there is suffering that's hard to explain, but there's lots of things in life that are hard to explain. And maybe there's something in there that I didn't understand before. So openness to that. I'm not saying for sure, but I'm saying just be open to it. And then the very top is wisdom. And that requires reading or the accumulation of knowledge. Not everybody's a

big reader. And there's so many different ways to get good information at this point. Podcasts. Podcasts, for example. But the whole point is reading or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition. So, you know, read the Stoic philosophers, read the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle, read the Bhagavad Gita, read the Quran, read the Bible, read, read, read, and start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading, which you can go years saying, I wish I read it. You don't, right? I mean, it's crazy. We'll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we can spend just 15 minutes a day reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the letters of Seneca, and they're incredibly enriching, right? It's like, whoa, boom, starting at 15 minutes a day. So do the work. What do I believe? Spend some time in contemplation

and do the reading. Your life's about to change. That's the protocol. That's the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for actually finding, starting to find meaning in your life. But I've prescribed this to others and I've done it myself. And this really works. It helps you find on the path to the answers to those questions. Build the life you want. It's a book. It's a book sat in front of me here that has your name on it. And who's this? Oprah Winfrey. I like to give young authors a leg up.

How did you, so you co-wrote this book with Oprah? Yeah, yeah. How did you meet Oprah? She called me. It turns out she's a, I know, it's a, she said, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman. I mean, it was Oprah Winfrey. It's the voice. She's iconic all over the world for sure. And it turns out that she was a regular reader of my column in the Atlantic on Thursday mornings, how to build a life, which is a different area of the science of happiness every week that I cover. And she read my last book, which is called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

So that was a book she read on the first day it came out, and then went on her Super Soul podcast, and we were thick as thieves just immediately. Because we have the same goals, is lift people up and bring them together in the spirit of happiness and love. She does it differently because she's not an academic. She has an incredible platform. I've never seen a platform like she has where, you know, she says one thing and people are like, oh, that's a good thing to do. But she's always looking for, it's interesting because she has the money and power and fame and she uses them. She's cracked the code. She uses them in service of other people. And that's her whole goal. From the very beginning, she's never said anything to disabuse me of the idea that that's how she lives. And we started doing some things together and

some podcasts together. And she called up and she said, you know, if I had my show still, for 25 years, she had this iconic show on television in the United States called the Oprah Winfrey Show. And millions and millions of people watched it every day. It went off the air in about 2014 or something. She says, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times. And then you'd have your show. She said, but I don't have the show anymore. So let's do kind of a version of that. And let me host a book. And so we wrote the book together all over the last winter, in the winter of 2022, 2023. I went away to, she lives in Montecito, California. I went and got a house in San Clemente, California. And we structured the thing at her place. And we went back and forth on it. And it was just a blast. It was about how to manage yourself. And once you're able to manage your

own feelings and emotions like a pro, then you'll no longer be distracted and you can focus on the things that actually matter for your life. And that's how you build your life. And you, you called me a mad scientist earlier. I'd have to take the test. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it. Most likely, yeah. Which appears in your book in the section about the unique mix of happiness and happiness. And you talk about this PANAS score system. What are these categories? And why did you call me a mad scientist? So the PANAS test is in the book, and it's actually on the website at arthurbrooks.com, where anybody can take it for free.

It's a personality test based on the intensity of your positive and negative affect, aka mood. Everybody's got more or less the same emotions. Everybody feels joy and interest and surprise and anger and sadness and disgust and fear. But we have them in different intensities, depending on who we are. And there's really four kinds of people with these different intensities. There's some people that have very high affect, high positive affect. They have high highs and high negative affect, low lows. These are mad scientists. That's a quarter of the population. Now by construction is the quarter of the population because it's above average on both. Then there are people who are high highs and low lows. I mean, I should say that they have intense positive

emotion, but weak negative emotion, right? These are cheerleaders. Okay. So they have... They feel their positive affect very intensely and their negative affect very weakly. Oh, okay. So they're like always happy. They're not always happy, but they tend to be in a better mood and see the brighter side of things. They tend to downgrade threats

and think everything is going to be okay. Okay. That's a quarter of the population. And everybody wants to be that, by the way. But that's not necessarily the best way to be. And they don't make the best CEOs because they have a hard time paying attention to threats. They don't want bad news and they have a terrible time giving bad news or giving people bad evaluations. So working for a CEO who's a cheerleader is great for a minute,

but then it starts to become very frustrating because you hear him telling the incompetent idiot in the cubicle next to you that she's doing an unbelievably good job. Okay. Those types. I mean, you got to be realistic to be a good... I mean, you're an entrepreneur, you know, perfectly. There's lots of threats out there. You got to take them seriously. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So then there are people who are high negative, low positive. These are poets. These are people who generally speaking, there's a place in the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's the part that makes you a ruminator. Ruminators are people who this part of the brain is dedicated to making a rrrrr on problems and negative things and regret. I can't believe that I said that thing. I feel so stupid for saying that thing. And what does she really think of me, et cetera, et cetera. It's also the part of the brain that you use when you're highly creative. Comedians? Yeah, well, for sure. For sure. I pal around with a guy named Rainn Wilson, who was in the American version of The Office. He played Dwight. And Rainn told me that comedians tend to be depressed. But the reason is because

they find out that they're funny and they can substitute humor for sadness. It's a substitute emotion. It's called a metacognitive technique. We talk a lot about that in the book. So then poets, they tend to be high ruminators, so high negative affect. They focus a lot of negative things because of this hyperdeveloped part of their brains. They also tend to be really creative because it's the same part of your brain that when you're working on a business plan or a symphony. And they also tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person. That's kind of the poet profile, right? And then last but not least, there's low-low, people who are low-affect people. These are judges. These are people who, they're happy

and unhappy, but they feel their moods less intensely than other people. And so they don't freak out. These are really good surgeons. These are really good judges. They're very good secret service agents. You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh my God, you don't want your surgeon to be like that. And so there's a gift and a role for all four of these quadrants. Most great entrepreneurs are mad scientists because the reason that they're entrepreneurs is because they want to feel things intensely because everything is intense and they do everything intensely.

You don't have that many people who are just like super chill. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. That's why just having a deep conversation with you, I can see that you have a lot of mad scientific characteristics to you. You feel things deeply. Is that fair? It is fair. Yeah. I mean, that's the one I resonate

with the most. And I do describe myself as being a bit intense. My team know me. I think I come across as a bit intense. What's your girlfriend? I'm going to say that she is a cheerleader. Ah, I'm married to a cheerleader. Oh, really? really yeah and what you find is that cheerleaders they can they can have the best of times but cheerleaders tend to be struggle with the mad scientist yeah right it's like like quite like everything's so great for you why are you gloomy yeah you know it's like why can't you look at the bright side of things like why are you grouchy all the time what's wrong with you like there? There's a spelling mistake. I know. It's like, why is that bothering you? So that's a classic thing. Everybody can be with everybody else, but the compliments are really important. The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their

doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone. You should look for your compliment. Why? Because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and extrovert if they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not hammer and tongs all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people satisfactory dating experiences, people have more and more and more choice,

but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating. It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way. I like this music. I live here. I like these things.

I want somebody with these preferences. And they get somebody who's their sibling, which is, as my adult children will remind me, is not hot. Difference is hot. It's so true because I never would have said I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality

and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she just believes in it all. And it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted, but I absolutely love it. And that means that she's actually pulled me into her world she's made me more spiritual she's made me believe in things I never would have believed before and she's completing me in that regard it's really great it's really great I mean you've cracked the code in that way

and finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a to a good relationship and not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important that this is a relationship killer is that wishing that your partner were more like you is just a form of egotism. Everyone tries to change their partner though, don't they? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. There's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't. And husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change and they do. I don't know. There is truth in that. Relationships and love. How important is this as a subject for happiness?

It's the number one area of interest of my students. Really? My average student is 28 years old. So they're MBA students, they're master's students. They've all gone through college, they've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School where you have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree. And this is the number one thing they want to talk about, they want to learn about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the

business school about CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates. I mean, it's a classic theme. And the last line of the case study is always the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, I don't know what happened. And so we look at brain scans and say, this is what happened. And you can see it in the brain? Kind of. I mean, somebody who's really in love has brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict's brain scan. I mean, if you're at a certain point in the falling in love process, your brain is captured. So I mean, at the beginning when people meet, there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone

and estrogen, which are sex hormones, obviously. And when people see somebody who's really attractive, that's why they want to look attractive because that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that, you see a big increase in noradrenaline, aka epinephrine and dopamine level. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade that's going on when you're falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is really interesting. So serotonin, we think about as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when they feel it's an imbalance.

So people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin. And that's all really controversial still, I mean, because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination? It'll be more active when serotonin is low. And so serotonin will be low, so you start ruminating on the other person. That's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in. And then you get to the point of attachment, which involves oxytocin, which is a

neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attached to the other person, very profoundly attached to the other person. That's intensely pleasurable. So it's like, and the longer you let it go, the harder it is for your brain not to be really, really captured. You wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say, why did you buy methamphetamine? That's illegal. They'll be like, duh, I'm an addict. I'm a junkie. It's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate. Are people that are in love and in relationships happier statistically? No, on the contrary, because being in love, especially in the early stages of being in love is not associated with what we would associate with actual happiness because it has jealousy,

tons of jealousy, which is, you know, the rumination part. When your serotonin levels are really low, it's hard for you to say, ah, I feel so great. You feel euphoric and you like it in its own way. But if you kept that, if you stayed in that stage, you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable. Because there's jealousy, there's surveillance behaviors are really common. Nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner, that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes that. But people tend to do that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes that, but people tend to do that because a lot of your brain is basically saying, I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me. Back to evolution. Is this somebody who's going

to wander off and raise somebody else's kids? Is this somebody who's going to be, when I don't know it, carrying somebody else's baby? Which is how men and women actually, they tend to express their sexual jealousy in those two. Interesting, there's a guy at University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy. The most jealousy-provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else. For women, it's an image of their intimate partner saying, I love you to somebody else. And the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily, women have to be worried that their partner is going to go take care of somebody else's children. And men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children,

which according to some estimates is 15% of paternity, which is misattributed worldwide. Makes sense. It's a lot. Yeah, it makes sense. Fortunately, my kids look like me. One is adopted. She doesn't look like me. This idea in chapter four of your book of focusing less on yourself leads to happiness. How can you prove that's the case? So there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects. And so one of the classic experiments, there's these guys at Northwestern, there's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam Waits. I don't know if you've had him on your show before. He's a really impressive and innovative

social psychologist. And he did an experiment where he took the undergraduate students. You always use the undergraduate pool at your university because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks. And he put them into three groups. One had to do moral deeds. They had to do random acts of kindness. One had to do moral thoughts. They had to sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people. And one had to do self-focused, sort of self-care things. Go do something that really makes you feel good. And they looked at their happiness over a series of weeks with these interventions. And they found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts, and moral thoughts were happier than self-care. That's what they found. In other words, and again, this is basically showing the same thing that, you know, I did research for years and years and

years about happiness and charitable giving. If you're lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer. It just is. If you give money away, statistically, you're more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. And the reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You're empowered when you're helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That's the bottom line is what it comes down to. And so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing. If you put two groups randomly selected of people, one group is playing board games and the other is helping sixth graders with their math,

the ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward. I mean, this is just helping other people. It helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside Steve's head, and it makes it so that life actually has a transcendent aspect to it. You get perspective, you get peace. And furthermore, you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be. Is happiness or negativity contagious? Yes, that's emotional contagion. There's a lot of literature on emotional contagion. It's a virus. It's a mind virus. Negativity is a virus. Negativity is a virus, but so is positivity that you can actually, so you find that, you know, when I go into companies, which I do a lot these

days, I do a lot of happiness teaching inside, you know, executive teams and corporations. And when I walk into a company, I can, I can, I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around. You know, this is why the mood and emotional wellbeing and emotional self-management of CEOs is so critically important because, you know because everybody's like, oh, the boss is having a hard time today. I think a boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast or whatever it happens to be because they can see it. And the result is the virus tends to pass around. A this sucks attitude is horrible inside families. And we see it. And it will transmit from one person to one person, to another person, to another person. That's why it's hard to live with a high negative affect person. That's why, because high negative affect people will spread a negativity virus.

Even if you live down the street? Well, it depends on how much contact you have with that person. And so, you know, that's why you want your kids to hang out with positive friends. That's why you'll see when you have your kids. And when my kids were little, they would have that one friend who's like happy all the time. You love that kid. You have the one kid who's just bummed out all the time. You're like, I don't want my kid to be around that because that infects the attitudes of your children. In the book, you say living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25% likelier to become happier too.

If you have contact with that person, obviously it is, it's not going to transmit just through the air. It's not, you know, it's not the coronavirus, but, uh, but you have to have contact with the person, but, you know, and the way that they, they measured that that's called the Framingham heart study, which was out in, it's a suburb of Boston, but for many, many, many years, they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives to look at heart issues. But then they started measuring everything else. And they found, for example, that obesity is very easy to catch. When your friends become obese, you become more obese. That when your friends get divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. That when your

friends get happy, you're more likely to get happy, is what we see. And the more proximity that they have to you, measured geographically or in terms of the intimacy of the relationship, the stronger the transmission mechanism. I think a lot about that and how we take on other people's problems when we're friends and family. What do you say to that? And does it matter that we take on other people's problems? Sort of. I mean, there's a big distinction between empathy and compassion. So the best way to be a parent or a partner or a friend is to be compassionate. And that's not the same thing as empathy. Our society overvalues empathy. Empathy is feeling somebody else's pain. That's taking on their problems. The worst parents of teenagers are empathetic or highly empathetic people. It's like, yeah, I feel your pain. Why? Because you're not actually helping.

You got to do things that, you know, I may feel your pain, but I can't be paralyzed by that. On the contrary, I got to do hard things you're not going to like, son. That's the reason that we always say, you're not his friend, you're his dad. And that means be compassionate, don't be empathetic. The same thing is true with the big level. I mean, I would argue that our welfare systems in our countries need to be more compassionate as opposed to simply empathetic. And that we could actually help people a lot more too. Being compassionate means being hard as steel and doing the things that people actually need because you love them, not just because you're actually feeling their pain. So in our families, we need to say, what does this person that I love actually need, not withstanding the feelings that they're transmitting to me? And sometimes that means you got to care for your own happiness.

Like they say on the plane, put on your own oxygen mask first. Take care of your own happiness so you're not getting this negativity virus all the time being paralyzed by somebody else's pain. You're not going to help them enough. It's almost never, well, I mean, there are cases when somebody is just a schism, but I only recommend particularly in family schism when there's abuse. And, you know, somebody being unhappy is not abuse. Political differences, really not abuse. Those are, that's like, it's like one in six Americans in this country is not speaking to a family member

because of political differences. That's insane. That's simply insane. That does not count as any good reason to do that unless there's actual abuse. Who's happier, introverts or extroverts? Yes. So extroverts is the classic finding. Tons of studies find that extroverts have more positive affect. They tend to have higher mood, but introverts have special gifts. They have closer relationships. They have deeper emotional connections to other people. And the result of that is that they have long-term friendship and marriage partners that sustain them in a way that extroverts don't. Extroverts often can get really lonely because they... Are you an extrovert? It's such an interesting question.

Because you might not be, even though you're a mad scientist. I don't think I am. Do you get, when you're at a party, do you find that you get exhausted? I looked at Jackie's name many, many years, five years. I'm an introvert. I just want to be alone. So when you're at a party,

do you find that it sucks energy out of you? I don't go to the party. Certainly your baseline is introversion, but you have extroverted characteristics because you're able to do, good entrepreneurs know how to be extroverts when they need to be, which is important. And you run a a podcast if you're a true introvert it's like i gotta meet arthur brooks what a pain no i like deep conversations i don't like small talk yeah

you do have close friends oh yeah the same five guys i've known for 10 years yeah you've known since college yeah basically no others other than this like here who i consider friends but yeah the same five that i've known for 12 12. They're real friends, not deal friends. No, they're real friends. They were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself. Same five guys. So that's interesting. So extroverts, they tend to get more short-term happiness, and introverts tend to have more long-term happiness. So what you find is that extroverts, they tend to get more enjoyment, and introverts tend to get more meaning. Metacognition. You used this word

earlier on when we were talking about happiness. It sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness in some respects. What is metacognition? Explain this like I'm a 10-year-old. Yeah, okay. So metacognition simply means thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions. That's what metacognition is all about. So the emotions are produced in the limbic system of the brain, an ancient part of the brain. You react to them and decide what they mean in the prefrontal cortex, the C-suite of your head. That takes time.

Those are not the same place. You need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain. Which is the part of the front. The part of the front, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. So when your kids are little, when your kids are 10 and they're freaking out about something, you don't say, don't be so limbic. You say, use your words. What you're saying is be

metacognitive. Allow yourself to explain this thing that you're feeling. And in so doing, you're using your prefrontal cortex as opposed to relying on the limbic tissue of your brain. So write it down would be an example. Writing, journaling is phenomenal classic case. So you're anxious. Yeah. Anxiety is unfocused fear. That's what it is. Fear was adapted in the human species to be episodic and intense. The way that fear is supposed to work is that something happens, it alarms you, it illuminates the amygdala of your brain. That sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, which then signals the adrenal gland sitting above the kidneys to spit out stress hormones.

This happens in 74 milliseconds of the perception of a threat in the occipital lobe of your brain where your visual cortex exists. Boom, this thing happens really, really quick. This has saved your life many, many times, thousands of times, because you live in London and you can get run over at any given second. It's crazy. Well, actually, because I'm looking the wrong direction for

oncoming traffic. That's my problem there. So that's how that works is the whole point. So fear is supposed to work that way. Very episodic, very occasional. The problem in modern life is that we have all of these vague threats that are happening that are kind of half illuminating our amygdala, which is giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time. And that's unfocused and freaking us out. So the way to actually solve that problem of metacognitivity is to say, okay, okay, I got to focus it. I got a piece of paper. Number one, number one thing that I'm afraid of right now, that's actually giving me this anxiety is giving me this discomfort.

Write it down. Why is it happening? What's the worst thing that can happen? And what would I do if that happened? And you're literally moving the experience from the amygdala, which is the emotional center to the prefrontal cortex, which is the emotional center to the prefrontal cortex, which is the logical. Which is, that's your C-suite. And that should kill the anxiety. It will greatly attenuate the anxiety. It will turn it into a logical kind of fear. That's the right reaction to these threats. And it will change your life. So if you do that, if you're experiencing a lot of anxiety, you know, unfocused fear, focus it every day for 10 minutes.

Write it down. I have a, I have a, I'm a very anxious person. I have a running list of the things that I'm afraid of. A running list. I have lots and lots of lists. I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critically important. I also have a failure list. What are you afraid of?

I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of failing. I'm a total striver from the very beginning. Failing? What does failure look like? I know. That's the thing. It's an unfocused fear. And so when I write it down and I focus it, I go, oh yeah, it's true. That's the point. So failure is a specter for strivers. It's a kind of a, when you look at it, it goes away. But when you're not looking at it, it's there. And part of the reason is because your self-image is one of somebody who's successful. So you're self-objectifying as a successful person. You're success addicted, meaning the ventral striatum of your brain gets tapped

every time somebody says, Steve, you got another 7 million downloads or something that is not inherently meaningful in that particular way, because the metric is actually what taps your ventral striatum again and again and again. And so then if that's going in the wrong direction and you're not making progress, then that sort of feels somehow not successful, which means that things are going in the wrong direction. And that's just like this phantasm, right? And so, okay, focus it, focus it, look at it, poof, right? It disappears. It doesn't entirely disappear. It turns into what it really is, which is a mouse, not a lion. Arthur, your book is fantastic.

I mean, we could talk for so long because there's so much more in it. There's some of the unbelievable stats that I was reading about around social media. And this one stat about a study showing that teens who texted more often than their peers experienced more depression, anxiety, and poorer relationships. There are things about laughter and that you can feel 35% happier using some humor therapy. All of these things, gratitude, all of these things that we haven't covered, but they're all in this fantastic, fantastic book, which is so unbelievably accessible for someone that's as smart as you.

Oprah had to okay it. Oh, okay, right. So she didn't go. Yeah. And I thank you for that because happiness is a complex thing and i think there's an industry out there that are trying to simplify it and put it down to three steps to happiness or one this one secret to happiness one weird trick don't eat grapes you know whatever but your approach provides the nuance and the complexity that the subject matter

deserves and i think that offers us a path towards being happier as you talk about in the book. Thank you. That's why I wrote it. I wrote it for you. Oh, well, it actually reads like you wrote it for me. That's the kind of, but I imagine everyone that reads it's going to feel that way.

I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book, ASAP. It's a really, really beautiful book as well. It's so beautiful. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. What are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control? What is your opinion on this? The things that we can't control are virtually all outside ourselves. We have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where there are many things that we can't control and focus on the things that we can. How do we deal with things

we can't control? By refocusing our attention on the parts of our life that we actually can, thus giving us agency and giving us a sense of peace and perspective about the truly uncontrollable. Arthur, thank you so much. So wonderful to meet you. You've energized me this morning and we started pretty early for me. This is super early. Yeah, no, I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Steve. It's wonderful to be with you. I've admired you for such a long time. I get to meet you in person. It's been a joy. That means the world to me. Someone as profound and as smart as you to say that to me means a ton. So thank you so much, Arthur, from the bottom of my heart. Really, really appreciate it.

Thank you. You too. Thank you. Do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done

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