The Jefferson Fisher Podcast - Harvard Happiness Professor: Do You Know the Meaning of Your Life?

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Have you ever felt like life is moving fast, you’re doing everything right, but something still feels off? In this episode, I sit down with Arthur Brooks, a behavioral scientist at Harvard University, to talk about why achievement doesn’t always bring fulfillment, how busyness can pull you away from the people you love, and why meaning usually shows up through struggle. We talk about marriage, faith, ambition, and the habits that actually lead to happiness. This conversation made me rethink what success really is—and what kind of life is actually worth building. Visit his website where you can take the tests we talked about in this episode, https://www.arthurbrooks.com/  Check out Arthur’s new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness Order The Next Conversation Workbook: https://www.jeffersonfisher.com/workbook Thank you to our sponsors: Cozy Earth. Upgrade Your Every Day. Get 20% off at cozyearth.com/jefferson or use code JEFFERSON at check out. Mill. Try risk-free for 90 days and get $75 off at https://www.mill.com/jefferson  and use code JEFFERSON at checkout. ZocDoc. https://zocdoc.com/jefferson to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. BetterHelp. Click https://betterhelp.com/jeffersonfisher for a discount on your first month of therapy. Order my book, The Next Conversation, or listen to the full audiobook today. Like what you hear? Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review! Suggest a topic or ask a question for me to answer on the show!  Want a FREE communication tip each week? Click here to join my newsletter.  Join My School of Communication Watch my podcast on YouTube  Follow me on Instagram  Follow me on TikTok Follow me on LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever questioned the meaning of your life? Well, today I am talking with none other than Arthur Brooks. You know him as the happiness expert. He is a behavioral scientist at the Harvard University, has his own lab. He is one of the best people I've ever met, and this is only the beginning of the year. He has a book called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. You'll find the links down in the show notes. This book is releasing very soon.

It's already on sale. I can tell you one of these, this conversation is probably one of the most meaningful I've had because of the topics we went into. He's somebody that's most double my age. And so we get to dive into topics and lessons about marriage and faith and family and imposter syndrome and why you should be bored. Why boredom is a good thing. You should be probably bored more often. We dive into these things. And what's best is he gets to use a lot of the science and research that he already used. And this is a conversation that you're really going to get a whole lot of value from. You're going to want to make sure and listen. This is the Jefferson Fisher podcast where I'm on a mission to make your next conversation, the one that changes everything. Wherever you're listening, same as always. I'm going to ask right now that you find wherever you're listening and press the button,

subscribe. If you're watching it, listening to it, it's totally for free. And what it does is it really helps me and my family. And it tells the platform that what you're listening to is good stuff. And that's my promise. If you listen and subscribe to these podcast episodes, I'm going to make you a better communicator. And in turn, hopefully have a better life. My conversation with Arthur was deep and way more than I ever expected.

I know you're really going to like it. So enjoy the conversation. But have you always been in, lived in Virginia area? No, no. I grew up in Seattle. I was saying, I thought you were in Seattle area. You grew up Seattle. I've moved 20 times in the past 30.

I've been married 34 years. We moved 20 times together. every place man we live in Atlanta we live in LA we lived in Syracuse for seven years 20 times 20 times we lived in Barcelona off and on for years and years

yeah we can't I'm in the witness protection program yeah you might as well be so with that like you moving all these other places and here you've been married we'd say 34 years yeah so then what's what's what motivates that what wisdom you want actually we're recording

you want to talk about how to follow in love and stay in love? No, no. It's, it's, I'm, you know, we move, oddly enough, we move like every three years. Yeah. And so, and we've been married, it'll be 15 years. This, you know, so still less than a half of years. Underway. Once you pass five. Yeah. Five is the, is the witching year. Five is the witching year. Yeah, the discontent. I thought it was seven. Was it seven? Nah, that's the old seven-year-rich, but it's actually the day to say five. Really? Yeah. And that's a discontent peaks at five and then declines. And the reason is because the couples of stay together,

they learn how to stay together. They learn actually how to make each other better and not how to make each other worse. You're making each other worse for the first five years, typically. Yeah. Because you're just like daggers drawn, this competition, and the kids are getting between you. Oh, right?

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And then after that, it's the couples to stay together. They're like, look, they look into the kids and they're like, it's us against them. Exactly. I feel like it gets to a point where it's like,

hey, look, okay, I'm not that. great. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Now what happens is the couples that really stay together after about five years, typically the reason they start getting a lot happier after five years is number one that they bring more positivity to each other as opposed to bring you more negativity to each other. Number one. And number two is they tend to get more religious together. And so couples that get more religious at the same time, they get happier and happier and happier. I've seen that about people, couples who pray together. Yeah. So I can give you the, if you want, we can do it on a show. But the sort of... We're just rolling. We're already going to be.

going. Are we doing? Yeah. The four secrets to, don't even worry about like having to saving, to either saving your marriage or actually having a happier marriage and based on neuroscience. So number one is when you're, so you've been married 15 years. It's very easy because you're distracted. I mean, it's like, it's like your life is changing really fast. You're like, I don't know what's going on, man. Like I blew up on Instagram. It was not on my bingo card. But you're distracted and you're a lawyer and you're doing a podcast. You have like nine jobs. Yeah. And your wife's super busy because she's practicing law. on how many children do you have?

We have two. And you're raising two kids. Yeah. And it feels there in a certain age, so it feels like 20. Yeah, it feels like you have five kids. Yeah. So the first thing that the first bad habit you get into is that, believe it or not, it's simple.

You stop looking at each other in the eyes when you're talking. The number one way to rekindle your marriage is every time you're looking at her, you're staring at her in the eyes. Now, women have three times as much oxytocin as men, which is a neuropeptide in the brain of human bonding. And the reason is because they bond to an infant with eye contact while nursing. And so when a baby is nursing with his mom, her mom, the baby is staring into the mother's eyes and they're both, this bonding neuropeptide that functions as a hormone and oxytocin. But the whole point is that you get that with anybody who you love when you're, when you're your friends,

your parents, your kids, and especially your soulmate, this is how you take somebody who you're not related to and make them into kin. Women need more than you. men. And so men, they forget to look at their wives in the eyes when they talk to them. Now, when you first were falling in love with her, you're like, staring into her eyes, right? And you stop doing that. And that's what a lot of couples do. And so you basically, I'm going to make a note that every time I'm talking to her, which is every day, and before we go to bed at night, I'm just going to look at her in the eyes. That's all I'm going to do. She's going to be like, I don't know why, but I feel so much closer to you. That's why. Yeah. Because you're creating the

neurochemical milieu for her to feel the love that she needs. That's number one. Yeah. All right. Number one. I'm just soaking it up. You don't even have to tell her. Yeah. Number two is something that it's actually more important for women, but for men too, is always be touching. Is ABT. The ABT rules always be touching.

That's more important for women to spontaneously touch their husbands. I'm not talking about sexual touch. Right. I'm talking about just touch. So when you're in church, she's holding your hand. When you're watching TV, she's holding your hand. She's always touching you. And men really, really, really need that a lot.

Yes. Men need the touch. Men need the physical touch. When you're walking together, she slips her hand through your arm like that and you feel like you're seven feet tall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why. That's actually you're getting some of the neuropeptide called vasopressin. That gives it like, I'm the defender.

Yeah, yeah. But also, I'm, I'm, she loves me. She loves me. She depends on me. She's, she's holding on to me. And so that's number two. Always be touching ABT. And couples, you know, they're married for a long time.

They stop touching. You know, they're like walking together, their hands in their pockets. Right. You know, they're watching TV on opposite sides of the couch. Nope. And when you're in bed together before you go to sleep and you're talking, looking at each other in the eyes, just hold hands. Just hold hands. Number three is stop rehearsing your grievances, which of course there's plenty because you're living in captivity with another person. It's hard. And start having more fun. Because fun will outrank grievance

almost every time. And there could be grievances like, my husband is a flanderer. That's not what I'm talking about. Yeah. I'm talking about not abuse or disloyalty or abandonment. but ordinary things of annoyance that come into a relationship. That's like the stuff that's on the beach that you can't see when the tide is in. And then when the tide goes out, that's all you can see. And so you've got to make the tide come back in again. That's fun, having more fun, more positive emotion as opposed to rehearsing negative emotion. That's so we're going on bike rides together.

We do stuff with what do we like to do together? You know, telling more jokes to each other. Actually doing more stuff together. That's why date night is so critically important, especially when you've got kids, doing more stuff together that you both like. And sometimes it'll be like, she likes it and he doesn't. Like one thing that all wives don't know is that their husbands don't want to go apple picking. Yeah, right.

It's like no more apple picking. But there is stuff that you do like to do together. And every couple does that. Do more of that. And the last is praying together. Praying together is super important. Not everybody's religious. And so, you know, maybe it's meditating together.

Another way that you can do this is like reading to each other. So read to each other at night, like in bed. So you're reading to her and she's reading to you. you. It has a really very strong brain-to-brain coupling effect. But praying together is the single most intimate thing you can actually do together is talking to God. And the reason is because what you're saying is we are united with the divine. The divine is our uniting force. It's like two keys on a nuclear sub to launch the missiles. Yeah. That's like your marriage becomes an antenna to the divine when you do that. I can tell when in my own marriage, it's here, it feels way more connected

when we share, we might be on a walk after dropping off the kids or something. And I share what God's doing in my life. And she shares what God's doing in her life. She's reading. And like that. Super good. Oh, my goodness. It like draws a different kind of connection in a way that just watching like a show together could never.

Nothing. There's nothing like it. And, you know, it's a very important thing that people in a religious marriage, they will acknowledge that what makes their marriage stronger is that their spouse is not number one. Yeah. That God is number one. God is number one. And you bring me to my number one.

Right. And my best way to get to my number one is you. And when you're not giving me my love, when you're not giving me your love, I'm not feeling God's love. See, this is the reason that in every religion, marriage is divine. Marriage is considered to be a divine institution. Because for the vast majority of people, the way they understand God is through. through the love of their spouse. And so then you realize it's like,

this is a big obligation to be married. When I'm not loving her actively, I'm denying her the experience of God's love. And that's not right. Right. That's not right. The best way to experience that every day is actually praying and seeing your spouse talking to her number one is super heavy.

Oh yeah. It's super deep. And it's like way more intimate than like sex. Yeah. I mean, people will sleep with strangers, but they won't pray in front of their spouse. Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny?

And that's because prayer is more intimate and sex. I also find that there will be, when you have these kind of conversations, you realize that there are thoughts, like I'll speak for me. There are thoughts that she's having that are way deeper than my thoughts. And so sometimes I'm like, I got to get my stuff together. Like she's thinking deep and I'm thinking only two layers. I know. It's funny because part of it is that one of the things that women don't understand about, you know,

men, because you'll be silent and in thought. And she'll be like, what's he thinking about? he's probably thinking about some other woman. He's probably thinking he doesn't love me so much. And you're thinking about how big would a bear have for me to beat that bear? Yeah, I'm serious. She'll ask me. She'll go, what are you thinking about while we were driving?

And I was like, honestly, I was looking at that sign. And I thought that L kind of looked a little funny. And I was like, I wouldn't have that L on that logo. Like, and she's, what's wrong? I was like, I was thinking about if I got a racing stripe on the car, you know, what would it actually look at? Something completely trivial. Yeah. We're very simple. Men are actually emotionally simpler as a general role than women are.

And so when they talk deeply about things like, you know, what we're talking about, here's the meaning of life. Women are actually, they have more talent at understanding the meaning of life than men do. And part of that is just the way that their brains work differently. Women have more developed right hemispheres of the brains. The right hemisphere is the hemisphere where you apprehend meaning and mystery. The left hemisphere is where you think about how big the bear would have to be. Right. Or how to actually, you know, create an app.

that will find you the closest pizza at 10 p.m. The distraction. Technical problems. Yeah. How to and what? How to and what questions are the left hemisphere? Why questions are the right hemisphere? The deep why questions.

And women have generally, I mean, not all. I mean, your results may differ. This is the general cost of population. That women have a more developed right hemisphere. And so it's really interesting. They're like, why aren't you thinking about this? Why aren't you thinking about these emotionally important things? Like, I don't know.

Right. And how old are your kids? They're six and eight. Is there six and eight? Boys? So my boys eight, girls, six. Okay. So when you're going to see this in, let's say, in about seven years.

So you'll ask your daughter. And it's like, honey, how do you feel about that thing that happened at school today? Buckle up because you're going to get an hour long discussion. Right, right. If you ask your son about his emotions, he'll be like, what do you, I don't know. He'll be like eyeing the exits. Not because he didn't want to talk about it, but because you asked him an unanswerable question. Because he's sitting on the left.

and she's sitting in the right hemisphere. Yeah. It was, I saw this, I forgot which comedian I saw do this, but it was a story about he had just got a text from a friend and he said, oh, hey, you know, Rob's been in an accident. And his daughter's like, oh, is he okay? And he's like, well, I don't know. I just got, he got.

Yeah. Is it Foxworthy or was on that tour? I think it was. And, you know, he talks. Yeah. She's been in a big accident and keep him in your prayers. That's right. That's right.

the whole text that she wants to know. Exactly. It's true. And he's like, is he okay? Or are they all right? Do you know what hospital is in? He's like, I don't know. I guess you're like every.

I know. The same answer again and again and again. Yeah, yeah. It's like men are simple in this way. But the whole point is that we complete each other. Yeah. We complete each other hemispherically is the whole point. And that's a very, that's a very beautiful thing.

Yeah. I don't, we'd be in a bad state without it. I really do. Without, without women? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think as it, like you said, it's not a good. It's not a good thing for men to be alone.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Men who, there's one statistic that often comes up in my business, which is that men over 30 who have never been either married or partnered seriously have a one in three chance of substance use disorder. Really? Yeah. And men just can't, they don't do very well out.

You know, they don't do very well alone. It's like in the Bible says in Genesis, man is not meant to be alone. Yeah. That's what I was saying. I mean, it's like, it's going to blow himself up or drive off. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I'm like, it makes me laugh every time because I read it and I'm like, I think that's the only time I've seen in the Bible where guys like, you know what? Not the best idea for this guy to not be alone. This is going to end poorly.

We need to get him something. I know. It's like get him somebody who's going to get him and get him and get him to get his act together. Right. And I mean, Sierra is she thinks so much more depth and also can show emotion a lot better. And I find there are times in conflict and arguments. I have a hard. hard time showing emotion, even if I'm feeling it. I have a hard time expressing it. So it's like this, you know, this limited affectivity. Right. I'm, uh, where it's like, I have thoughts, but all she's seeing is stoic. Yeah. Yeah. What's actually happening is you're thinking more analytically because you're dealing with problems on the what and how to side, which is the left side of your brain. And she's deep thinking about the deep why. And the deep why has a level of emotional depth. And, And again, you need both. You actually need both. That's why couples are such a great team when they're working together.

Yeah. And when they don't work together because they're competing as opposed to collaborating, that's when things fall apart. And that's why divorces start to peak at five years. Do you think that who you're married to also affects your career? A lot. Yeah, a lot. I mean, one of the things that's really bad is when couples are competing professionally with each other. And the way that you compete is you'll say something like, I took care of the kids yesterday. Today is your turn. It's like, no, that's the wrong way of seeing things, obviously. And, you know, the truth is that the couples that are that are the strongest are when you win, she wins, and when she wins, you win. Yes. As opposed to when he won, that means, you know, I didn't. And that's not, that's obviously the wrong vantage that you want for you. You need a collaborative relationship. You want a team mentality.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I can definitely see where at times where it's whose job is more important. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, I have this on tomorrow night and you have that. Well, look, my stuff and you start competing in a way.

way that's going to. Yeah, that's problematic. It's a really, really problematic thing for sure. And, you know, the truth is that there are issues like that and fairness is really important. Respect is really important to be sure. But, you know, also men and women do best when they recognize that they have significant differences that are evolved differences. You know, we're, our brains are in the current state as of about 250,000 years ago at the beginning of the late Pleistocene period. And, you know, that's when human beings lived in bands of, of 30 to 50 individuals that were kin-based and hierarchical. That's how all human beings lived.

And our brains are intrinsically, they're built to live under those circumstances, which explains a lot of the weird things that people actually do. It's like, why do we care so much about social comparison? Well, because we want to rise hierarchically in the band. Why do we go insane on social media? Why would you check your mentions and drive yourself completely crazy? Because you're trying to rise in a band of 30 people, but you've expanded that to 300 million people.

or something, and you can't cope with that cognitively. But there are other things as well. So, for example, biological females are, they have a big investment in rearing children that we, we don't have. Men don't have, at least not biologically. You know, the deed is done in a couple of minutes, as opposed to it takes nine months and then you're, you know, you have to be responsible for the kid and child. So the result of it is that women are a lot more interested in the resource cues and the commitment cues of a mate. That's why when women are interested in men, fundamentally they're most

attracted toward resource cues. Now, if you don't have any resources because you're young and poor, that means potential resources. This is why it's good to have muscles. Yeah. That's the reason that young guys want to have a lot of muscles is because what they're showing is that they'll be able to kill an animal and push a plow. Yeah. When they get old. They don't know why they want to have muscles at the whole point is, and then later on, they peacock with a, you know, a rented Ferrari driving down the, you know, the boulevard in Miami Beach. Yeah. Because they want to attract girls.

But they don't know exactly why they do that because they want to show their resources. And that's the reason that pathologies go into these relationships too, or you're 58 years old. And you're still trying to bring home as much money as possible because you're showing resource cues to your wife. And your wife is 58 years old and getting a lot of cosmetic surgery. So she'll show fitness cues. She'll show fertility cues. So that's what men are attracted to is fertility cues. Fertility cues are hips to waist ratio,

which actually shows how fit you are to have babies and whether or not you're pregnant. That is like the length of the hair and whether it's shiny, because that shows whether or not that you're healthy, the whiteness of the teeth and the whiteness of the eyes. Men notice this without noticing it. They don't know they notice this,

but these are fitness or these are fertility cues. How interesting. Yeah, yeah. And so that's what happens. And so the result of that is that you can use this in a very good and holy way without being like, okay, I'm just, you know, look, I'm just an animal. Right. I got to go for the youngest possible girl.

That's stupid. You're going to be married to your wife forever. But giving her, not inducing her to try to exhibit fertility cues forever, that's unhealthy. And her not to force you toward resource cues. On the contrary, just give her what she needs and have her give you what you need, what she needs to be adored. Yes. Adore her and what you need is to be admired. Yeah.

Now, respect, of course. course, there's table stakes. Love, respect. These are table stakes. But the whole point is the happiest marriages are the ones where you would fight a tiger for her with your hands and only her. And she is amazed that that is the biggest gazelle that anybody's ever dragged into the cave. Right. Yeah. You're so big and strong. It's going to feed our family for two weeks. Right. And that's, those are the happiest marriages. I'll tell her typical. I was like, look, if you just touch me and tell me I'm awesome, like that's really how amazing I am. That's all I really need. Because you know it's true.

Yeah. You know it's true. We say that as a joke, but it's always like, hey, look, that's all you can make me super happy by just saying that. So for dudes, I mean, who can't quite figure out relationships. And my average student is 28 years old. I mean, I've got MBA students at Harvard. They're, you know, they've mastered business. They're going to make a lot of money.

They're going to be really successful. But romance can be utterly baffling because nobody teaches you about that. There's some simple rules. number one is adore her. I don't care how you feel right now. Adore her. Number two is be admirable. And because it's hard for her to admire you

when you're not admirable. When you're looking at pornography or you're gaming all night or you're smoking weed, that's not admirable. And everybody knows that. That might be fun for some people, but it's not admirable.

When you're not true to your word, when you're just loyal, when you're unkind to other people, not admirable. And so what does it mean to be admirable? and say, it's like, who would I admire? How would I admire my dad? For example, I'm going to be that.

And so be, adore her, no matter how you feel, adore her. Because that's an action and decision and be admirable, and you'll be fine. Is that how you said you've been married 34 years, moved 20 times? Yeah. Would you say the adoration being admirable? Is that the constant, you know, no matter where you're moving? Yeah. And when I'm screwing up because I'm too busy, because I'm preoccupied, I do adore her.

her, but she doesn't see it, that's the problem. The number one way she's going to feel it is when I stare into her eyes. And that's how it ties back to the four fundamental rules of how to save the protocols for saving relationships is that the act of adoration is like when you adore somebody, you're staring into their eyes. I mean, it's like, it's like, she's awesome. And, and, you know, that shows you're everything, baby. Yeah, you're everything. Right. So that's actually how she sees it. And how she perceives it neurochemically. You said, something a second go that got my attention. You said that when you're, when you mess up and you're busy. Yeah. So how does busyness kill connection, especially in communication? It distracts you

from the more important things. So that's the whole thing. Stephen Covey used to talk about urgency and importance. So he would say that you, you tend to the urgent, but you neglect the important. And we all have urgent and important things in life. And urgent things distract you. And the important things must get done, but you can actually put them off. And, you know, it's like your soulmate. not going to, like you'd screw up and you come home a little bit late or you're a little bit snippy with her or, you know, you're kind of a grump. She's not going to divorce you for that. Right. It's your marriage is way more important than your job. I mean, I know I can do, I know you agree. It's way more important, right? But it's not more urgent than your job

sometimes. And so urgent things are like pecking at you and they're harassing you all the time. And when your whole life is a series of urgent things, you're going to neglect the important things. And that's why we actually do the things that we don't want to do. We get into trouble. I find that when I have some of the hardest conversations with people, and my community is really around communication and conversations. The harder? You're good at it too. Same for you. I mean, you're, I mean, that's, that's, you didn't know you're going to be on the map of popular culture by doing what you do really, really well. Thank you. No, you have no talking and arguing and helping people understand and being persuasive. No clue. And I still want to talk to you about imposter syndrome.

when we can get there. In the age of the internet. Exactly, yeah. It's that I find that usually the, it corresponds at the harder the conversation about to have with somebody, the deeper we seem to connect. Right.

In other words, if I'm going through something really hard with somebody, that we come out of it somehow closer when I wasn't expecting that. And I was curious if there was any science of what you do at Harvard and happiness that might lead to say, hey, these are some things that unlock, you know, that depth of connection when you choose to say the hard thing.

Yeah, it can. And part of the reason is because you're actually digging into these big, more meaningful things. So, for example, one of the best ways for you to make friends quickly when you move to a new place. And you and I have some experience in this. It's hard to make friends as an adult. pretend you've been there for 10 years.

Pretend you've already been there for 10 years. And that means two weeks after you get there, you start inviting people over to your house. Don't wait for them to invite them. And that's after one month sort of Bible study. At your house. Yeah. Start a book club, whatever your thing is, do that.

Right. And when you have people over, don't waste time on the nonsense. Go straight to the, go deeper, go home. Right? And so ask questions like when you're having dinner with somebody and you're always like, what are you most afraid of?

Yeah. That kind of stuff. That kind of stuff. You know, it's what it comes. And some people can't handle it. I mean, it's like, this is one of the things that I'm married to a Spaniard. Yeah. And so they're not afraid of deep conversations.

It's Barcelona, right? Yeah. From Barcelona. And a lot of Americans, like, it doesn't feel polite in the whole thing. But it's like, you know, if you're uncomfortable, okay, sorry. But, you know, we want it. We don't want shallow connections. We only want deep connections because life is short.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'm five years away from when my dad died. I'm already five years after when my mother became demented. I don't know how long life is going to last. I'm not going to waste any time. I'm going to talk to you. We're going to talk about real things.

We're not going to talk about like, so how many draft picks you think the Seahawks? You know, it's like, no. I mean, like I realize I love the Seahawks, but for sure. No. I find that I absolutely resonate with that, especially at this time of my life where if I can't go deep with you, sorry.

Like I'm, you're nice. I'll give you a hand shake. Go deeper, go home. Yeah, but it's, but that's, You're just not going to be my person. I know. I'm not going to be. And so I find that when I was younger, I wanted as many friends as possible.

Now. Because you're super extrovert, right? Yes, that too. But it's like you, I thought at least the more friends you made, it's, that's a good thing. But I find now I really just want a small collection. And what you said a minute ago struck me because one of the very good friends that I have here, the first time my first conversation with him, we start talking and he was just out of the blue, he's like, so how's your, how's your church life? Like, how's your marriage? And I was like,

who asks me that? Like, I haven't been asked that. And I can't tell you when. Usually it's like, oh, what do you do? Have you, you know, you check the news? And it's like, wait, okay, now I can actually open up and now I can talk. And it's like, you, somehow, the more I, we have self-disclosure. Right. And you disclose and we just close and we can be real now. And now we can actually have bond. And I think a lot of, I think a lot of people struggle with that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly is a form of love is what it comes down to. And again, if there's something you're really ashamed of,

you're probably not going to disclose it. Right? It's like, yeah, can we talk about my shoplifting habit? I mean, it's like that, right? Yeah. On the other hand, look, most of us are married. And guess what? My annoyances at home are the most common things in the world.

Yeah. So it's one of the things I was talking about with my class, I teach this class in the Science of Happiness in the MBA program. And it's super popular because, you know, it's about the business of living your life and living your life in a business-like way. Right. Everybody wants that. Like finding the love of your life with the same seriousness as you would set up a private equity fund or something.

Like, I mean, they'll walk through it. Here's what the science says. And one of the things I was talking about are the things in families that everybody thinks is uniquely unfortunate. And so there's that, you know, the first line of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Happy families are all alike. but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The truth is every unhappy family is alike.

Yeah. We all have the same problems. And I gave an example that 11% of mothers between 65 and 75 is completely estranged with one of their adult children. 11%. Every single one of those mothers feels uniquely unfortunate and doesn't want to talk about it.

In therapy, they say terminally unique. Terminally unique. Yeah. It's like everybody who goes in the therapy, or rehab, it's you think you're terminally unique. Nobody else can be like me and you realize. And if you're not a special, I mean, it's like all your problems are the same as anybody else's problems.

That's AA. I mean, it's getting together. Recovery communities. That's exactly right. You realize, no, you all have the same. Yeah, by the way, it's 26% of fathers. That's crazy. It's 26% of fathers.

38% of adults listening to us right now is completely estranged from one direct family member. That I can attest to. There are lots of people who come into the community and listen to, our content and they are estranged from at least one person in their life. And it's horrible. And they feel like they're the only ones. And so when you're talking to somebody, don't afraid, never be afraid to go deep for precisely the thing that you're talking about because human connection is what it's all about. Now, again, there are certain things you might not want to divulge because they're embarrassing to you or they might incriminate you

in some way. Yeah. Yeah. But the truth of the matter is that there's nothing, there's nothing strange about these unfortunate experiences. I like that. I like asking the the deep question. Yeah. Because it truly is when I choose to say, you know what, I'm going to talk to that person and I'm not going to sugarcoat a thing. When they ask, how are you doing? You know, how's the kids?

You want to know? I'm going to, that's what I say. I start talking and I'll tell them. I'm like, hey, you asked. Yeah, yeah. So your life has changed a lot in the last five years, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's fair to say.

What are you most afraid of? I'm, right now I'm most afraid of that I am not, devoting enough time to making sure that I can be as present as humanly possible. With my kids. With your kids? And your wife? Yeah. And with God?

And God, yeah. There's a lot of time where it's, I read this book. I really like it. It's the ruthless elimination of hurry. Oh, nice. John Mark Cummers is his name. If you read him. I haven't.

Okay. There's him, John Orrberg. These two authors are really like. And it's about how, you know, the instruction is, you the instruction was the light he lays me down in green pastures right it's not he signs me up for a half marathon you know it's not like how do i just rest and not find ways i'm just hurrying all the time and i talked about this you and i were saying how we just you will talk about things that are in your lectures and i talked to alone and myself in my camera and one of the things i was really struggling with

is how much hurry and busy just creep. They creep in everything, and then I get to where it just has a way of shutting me off. If I don't, I know you talk about be bored, you know, finding ways to just sit because it's not enough now. If I'm in a waiting room at a doctor, if I have to wait 10 seconds for a light to change,

or it's constant, you say the left brain, right brain, Yeah, but it's really, it's, yeah. And this is in Buddhists call it the monkey mind. But the whole point is that we've eradicated boredom with anti-bordom devices and has made our brains work wrong. And that's the reason we can't find the meaning of life. Because we've actually induced ourselves to sit permanently in the left hemisphere, which is the how to and what.

That's what technology does. And the why questions become impossible to access. Because we're literally geographically in the wrong part of our brain to address these, to address the big why questions of our lives. And you need more space. You need more time and you need more relationships. That's an interesting thing, however, that you talk about, you're most afraid that by taking all the opportunities that you're taking that are coming at you constantly, that you're neglecting

the things that actually matter the most. Yeah. I get it. I get it. And what that is is that's, you know, Mother Nature, who doesn't care if you're happy, just wants you to be successful. Mother Nature wants you to grab the worldly rewards. Money, power, pleasure, fame.

Mother Nature wants you. And so those proclivities, what they do is they, they. pull you away from, you know you already told me the source of your bliss. The source of your bliss is your faith and your family and your friendship and doing things that actually serve other people. But Mother Nature says money, power, pleasure, fame. And that's a problem because Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. She just wants you to be special. Yeah. Until you're special. And people will, they will sacrifice their happiness to be special all day long. But most people have an advantage over you, however, which is they don't have that many opportunities to be special.

Yeah. And so when you're offered these opportunities, what will happen is that you will walk yourself, you have the danger of walking yourself into deep unhappiness simply by doing what you have the impulse to do, the impulse to do. Like, I got to take that opportunity. It's going to be a pity. I'll regret it if I don't take that opportunity. Right. And living in a mindful way on the basis of what your faith tells you is more important and what your heart says is true. Yeah. It's a real danger. And me too. This podcast is sponsored by, you know it, cozy earth. I love cozy earth because of all of their products are not only soft and feel like a big warm blanket hugging you.

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I've always been the type. I've always been ambitious. Yeah. I wouldn't say I'm a hustle. Val's been special? No. I've always been ambitious. Since you were a kid?

Yeah, since I'm the oldest of four. I probably fallen right into the category. of the oldest. And your parents are life? Yeah. And you have a good relationship with your mom and dad? Yeah. Yeah.

They come on this evening. Oh, that's great. Is your dad a lawyer? Yeah, that's an attorney. No, I didn't say. When you were a kid, did you often feel like you got a lot of attention when you brought him a good report card? Of course.

Yeah, yeah. It was, you were a representative of the whole family. So high achieving kids, their parents are awesome, of course. the problem that a lot of high achieving kids have is that they they deduce something that's not true, which is that love is earned. Yeah. And love isn't earned. Love is a free gift, freely given. It's a grace. You know, you can't earn God's love. You can't earn your wife's love. You can't. And if you try to earn her love, you'll drive her away, which is the paradox of that. And so what's what strivers and super achievers have, they weirdly keep being successful. Like I'm a successful lawyer,

and I don't know, I'm a successful on Instagram, and I was a successful podcast. or what's going on. Right. And the answer is, and to a lot, to a certain extent, that a lot of real strivers, they're trying to earn love. Yeah. They're trying to. It's like, what's enough?

Am I lovable yet? Yeah, what's enough? Yeah. And of course, there is no enough. Do you find that there is a balance or a middle ground for people who are listening right now on this, they're ambitious? Yeah. To say, you can have ambition and be happy versus ambition and be empty.

For sure. You need the ambition for the right thing. And you need to what are your ultimate versus your intermediate? 80 goals. There's nothing wrong with money. I'm a capitalist baby. I believe in the free enterprise system. Look, the free enterprise system is literally what's wiped out poverty around the world. And it's the only force that ever has is people lifting themselves up. 80% of world poverty has been eradicated since I was a kid. Nobody knows that. It's the capitalist system that did that. It's not the UN or the international monetary fund. No, man. It's market spreading

around the world. That's America's gift of the world is the free enterprise system for sure. But you can't be animated by the currency of that system, which is money. The currency of your life that matters is love and happiness. That's what the enterprise, the startup of Jefferson, Inc. is love and happiness. And you have to be able to get those currencies. Now, money, fine. Power, if you're using it for good, ends great. Fame, terrific.

If you're refracting people's admiration for you toward things that matter, like love and God and the things. If they look at your life and they're like, I really admire him. He's awesome. He's awesome. And he's a big Christian. Good. And they go for that and their life gets better. That's terrific.

But those are only ever intermediate goals. If those become your goals per se, you'll never have enough. It'll be like drinking sea water. The more you drink, the thirsty year you get. Those simply have to be intermediate goals to get to the things that matter the most, which are your faith and your family and your friendship and the way that you serve the world through the way that you earn your daily bread. How do you find daily bread?

good. How do you find? Because you've, you've written how many books? It's certainly dependent. Good books or books? I mean, I know, let's just put it this way. Your book is endorsed by Oprah and the Dalai Lama. Let's go with that. Okay. You've, you teach your class at Harvard. There we go. I can't wait. And you teach your class at Harvard on happiness. And so I've always, it's at least true for me. For the people who, find that passion that they like to talk about. And they stuck to it. And yours is happiness.

They either came at it from great personal struggle and personal pain. Or they just made it up. Right. You know? And so I find that with everybody you see on that, it takes nobody. There are people who say therapist things that aren't a therapist. People who talk about legal things that don't. Right.

And so here you are behavioral scientists that talks about happiness. and there's plenty people who are spouting happiness juice and they're not, they don't know anything about it. So like how with your wife, your kids, and I think you have three kids. Three kids and four grandsons. That's awesome. Yeah.

And you've lived all these places and now here you are at a place you probably never thought you'd be when you were back playing the French horn. No. Right? Oh my goodness. Yeah.

And so if you told me that, I would have said you were on drugs. Right. Exactly. And so it's like how, how is that happiness, that journey, got in there. So the reason I study happiness is because it's what I want, and it's not easy for me. It's not the easiest thing.

Now, half of your happiness is genetics. So in other words, your baseline level of well-being, about half of it is your mom's fault. And we know this from identical, and dads and grandma and grandma. Of course. The identical twins separated at birth and adopted into separate families. That's a great natural experiment using pretty easy. statistical methods to find out what part of your personality, including your happiness, your natural happiness level, not just with circumstances, but generally how much of it is in

your genes and how much of it is circumstantial or environmental. And it's about half. And I have gloomy jeans. I got gloomy jeans. You know, I had, you know, my, you know, my parents suffered a lot. They suffered a lot with, you know, problems and issues. And, and, and I got to, I got to a certain point where, you know, my life wasn't where I wanted it to be. You know, and things had gone great because I'm very special. Yeah, very special. You know, I'd run a bit. I've been as chief executive of a company and my academic career had gone well.

Even my musical career went well. Part of that was because I'm a super striver. I want to win. I want to win. I want to win. And I, every 10 years or so, I'd take my career down to the studs and start again on a new thing and see if I could win that. Yeah.

So I didn't, you know, play in the symphony orchestra, do really well. Go back to graduate school. Become an academic. Do that. Go back. Be a CEO. Yeah. And by the end of that last one, my wife said, Esther, she said, because she loves me. I don't know why. And she said, you know, you need to solve your problem.

Like, what are you talking about? She said, you need to, you need to be happier. And I said, what do you suggest? What do you suggest, honey? And she said, don't you have a PhD? Why don't you use it for something useful. And so I actually dedicated myself to cracking the code on this. And cracking the code on anything is basically on any skill is kind of three steps. You know, if you want to become a really good golfer, you better learn about golf. You better golf a lot. And if you really want to be good, you better teach somebody to golf. Let's put it in terms of communication. Someone wants to be a good communicator. Yeah. You want to be a good communicator. Watch a ton of people's speeches, give a ton of speeches and teach people how to be good speakers. That's how you become a great

communicator. If you want to be a surgeon, you watch a bunch of surgeries, you do a bunch of surgeries, and you teach a bunch of surgeries. That's literally the method of the Harvard Medical School for becoming a teacher is watch one, do one, teach one. That's what they call it. That's how you get good at something. And you know, I've seen, you know, my dad was a brilliant mathematician who was a mathematics professor and I saw him, you know, giving these incredible calculus lectures. And I was, how do you know that? He says, because I'd done a lot of problems and I've learned about it. and I've been living with it for 40 years, and I've taught this class a hundred times.

That's how you get really, really good at something. I know that for a fact. I'm an old school educator. And I said happiness works the same way. I know it works the same way. So I dedicated myself full time. I mean, I'd done the behavioral science. I'd written about happiness in the past,

but I said, okay, from now on until I die, I am going to study the science of happiness, including the neuroscience and behavioral correlates and the philosophy, put it all together. I'm going to change the way that I live and I'm going to bring it to as many people as I possibly can because I'm a selfish man. And I want to be happier.

And that was the genesis of this. That's what I, what you said stuck with me. And it was because I needed to get better at it. Yeah. And that right there has so much truth. Were you always a silver tongue devil? Probably not, you know. But I've always, I've always been a talker.

That I know. But I grew up around the quarter. Could have been a carny. You could have been like an auctioneer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I could give you the best stuff toy ever, you know. But I've always grown up around the courtroom. Yeah.

And so that gives you a lot of different elements of how juries react and how courtroom, bailiff, judge, court reporter, everybody. And that's influenced me. But what you said definitely stuck is, you know, why did you go here? It's because I need to get better at it. And so there's so much of that that when we pick these little things that it's, I forget what it is. There's like that saying of those that can't do teach or something like that. It's like if I have a problem with it, you start talking about it. You naturally

start learning. Those who want to do teach. You know, it's the kind of thing where, you know, a lot of people will say, why should I take advice on, on how to drink responsibly from a former alcoholic? That's exactly whose advice you should take. Because he wanted to stop drinking abusively. And so he learned what he needed to do, he practiced it, and now he's sharing it. Yeah. That's expertise. Right. That's how expertise works. You should always go to a former drunk. Yeah. If you don't want to be drunk. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. That's really what, and so that's what everybody's got in common is what they're sharing this thing that they're doing because they want to be better at that thing. Yeah. And I know, I want to bring that back to this

busyness element. If what, things that you want to work on and I like that you talked about, have gloomy genes. Like there are people listening. They might have gloomy genes. There are people who are more predisposed to certain, or is that what you think? Totally. Absolutely. Absolutely. More predisposed to a certain behavior, mentality. Most of most things are genetic. Much of what we do is genetic, right? Exactly. Yeah. I never thought of it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like somebody's more predisposed to be difficult or stubborn. Or, you know, 50% of your tendency to be a drunk is is genetic, 50%. But if you came to me, it's like, Arthur,

I'm in trouble. Both my parents drink too much and all four of my grandparents. They're like my granddad's were bootleggers. I'm doomed. I'll say, no, no, no, no. Because that's only 50%. The other 50% is your habits.

And I've got this super habit that can turn your genetics for drinking down to zero. It's called not drinking. And so if you know yourself, you've got power. You can manage your genetic through your habits. Yes.

It's a beautiful thing. It's an incredible thing. I teach happiness. Because when you have the skills, you can win. And your life is richer and better. And then the best part of all is you become a happiness teacher. This is how we change the world. Right.

I mean, this is why you're doing your stuff because you want people actually to learn how, how, you know, what you teach them can enrich their lives. And you want them to pass it on. Right. Yeah, yeah. I truly believe a better world begins with a better conversation. That's what I say. And I, but I've never thought about it as genes of things you're predisposed to. And so if it's like you're listening, you're going, I don't know.

Do I have my predisposed? I'd say first, look to your parents. Right. Do you have a mom or a dad that seems to be way more difficult in conversation or somebody who's always a victim or like, hello, you are going to have those genes in you? Maybe you're not the victim all the time, but you still have those in you. And the environment matters too. Yeah.

If your parents are really difficult and they're all screaming at each other and you're, or if you're, let's just say that you're struggling with your marriage and you're arguing with your spouse all the time and you're yelling at each other and that kind of stuff. Okay, let's let's figure out how I got into the situation. Part of it is the nature of my marriage that I need to change. But part of it is probably what I saw and part of it is who I am. And none of that can't be changed. All of that, all of that can be changed. But it starts with knowledge and commitment. That's really what it comes down to. And that's what's so beautiful about human existence. You know, we have this thing, the most modern part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex,

which is 30% of our brain by weight, this console of tissue right behind our forehead, that's the supercomputer. That's the C-suite. That's the managing partner is sitting up there. Right there. And that's where you actually get the data

that's coming to like your emotional data. The limbic system, which is ancient, between 2 and 40 million years old, that creates your emotions. And all your emotions are signals about what's going on around you. You perceive a threat, you get negative emotions. You get negative bad feelings,

so-called bad feelings. You perceive a lot. opportunity like mates or calories or something, you get positive emotion, right? And what that does is those positive emotions are signals to you that something's up and that you should act. But your prefrontal cortex, the C-suite is where the CEO of your brain is like, okay, I'm not going to do this. Okay, I'm going to do that. That's what it comes down to. And that's how we need to actually treat our emotional lives and the things that are coming out of us all the time is nothing more than signals and that we get to make decisions. Now, that prefrontal cortex is amazing because your dog can't do

that. Your dog gets the emotional signals and then acts according to animal instinct. Yeah. We have animal instincts too, but because of the complexity and size of our prefrontal cortex, we also have moral aspirations. So we get this like emotional signals. It's like you're mad. So the dog would like bite some, bite the postman or something like that. And you're mad so you're going to yell at your spouse. Yeah. But you can actually do things like wait and think and use technique, such as counting to 10, for example, or 100, depending on how bad the conversation is, you can journal, you can go away and come back later, and you can decide, I'm going to live in the space of my moral aspirations. I'm not going to live in the space of my animal impulses. That's a

miracle. Amen, that is a miracle. I know that often, like I think of my own life, there are things I do and say, I'll be like, dang, that was my dad. Like I just know, as soon as I did it, or my sister, I'll call her and she sounds identical to my mom. And there's so much that is, I know, there'll be times, yeah, well, it's like, is that mom? And I catch myself second guessing. And so I find that so much of how I respond even to my kids, I'll be like, oh my gosh, that was my mom. And so much of it has just passed down. And so we mirror how we saw arguments because I had friends who,

I had a best friend when I was like in first grade, and I'll never forget, I'm eating Cheerios at his house after spending the night, and his parents go at it. I mean, she is screaming, he's screaming, and I am like just mortified. Yeah, because you've never seen. You wouldn't think of these people, adults like that talking to each other. I've never seen that before, and I was mortified. I mean, I was just frozen, and my friend, he didn't even look up from a cereal.

I mean, he's just eating like it was no problem. And so it's just another Saturday morning. It's just another Saturday morning and how many people, and they argue how they saw their parents argue or they experience. Right. There's some people who it's like they can't feel love unless you're in an argument and a fight. Like that's the way that they have to experience that. And so it's just so funny to me, it really struck a core with me of so many times we're

predisposed. Yeah, predisposed to it because of environment or because of genetics, but none of that is deterministic. None of that is path dependent. And we are not path dependent creatures. We're just not. I mean, it might be harder. Yeah.

I mean, you might have a bad temper. I mean, I can actually, you know, there's a lot of research on people who, you know, when they yell when they're angry. Those people have a large, have a physically, many times have a physically larger amygdala. You know what the amygdala is. That's a part of the limbic system. It's shaped like an almond. It's a bilateral organ.

Amygdala means almond in Latin. Okay. And the left and right do slightly different things. It doesn't matter. They're about fear and anger. And it's physically larger. they activate faster and they make you, they make you more reactive.

They make you more emotionally reactive negatively in the case of, of, you know, something makes you angry. You get angry fast. You jump, man. And so if you know that, then you've got to do more work. Right.

But you got to know it. You got to know it. You're not like, that's who I am. No. Yeah. That's what my tendency is to be, but that's not who I want to be.

You put this in your book. This is, in your got to forgive me on the title. You broke down the happy. of these four macronutrients. Yeah. And the three macros. The protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

Yeah, tell me. Yeah, the enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. That's the three macronutrients of happiness. There are the four habits are different. That's faith, family, friends, and work. Yeah, faith family, friends, and work. So those are the habits of the people who have the most happiness. And you, what I liked so much about that book was that you said,

it's happiness is not some feeling. There are things that you have to do as an act of will. Yeah, totally. Like, you have to actually make the decision to step into it. Completely. Rather than just go, well, I hope that this is. And so there's so many things that we chalk up to feelings because we're all about feelings in our culture.

And so people will think, I'll ask my students, what's love? And so it's how we feel about it or no. Yeah. To love, according to Thomas Aquinas, and this is Aristotelian thinking, this goes right back, is to will the good of the other. It has nothing to do with feelings. To like somebody is sentimental, but to love somebody is a decision.

That's what it comes down to. That's how you stay married, by the way, because you love them, notwithstanding your feelings. If love were a feeling, I wouldn't have been married 34 years. I wouldn't have married 34 minutes because that's probably when we had our first big argument. I'm married to a Spaniard. They know how to fight, man. That's like a form of communication in Spain is, you know, all that war. So that's really, really important thing to keep in mind.

And happiness, too, it's not a feeling. happiness has feelings attached to it. It's not like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Your happy feelings are evidence of happiness. And if you want to get happier, you better know what the macronutrients are. Just like if you want to cook dinner,

this can be worth anything. You need to know actually what goes into the dinner, protein, carbohydrates, and fat, plus ingredients and spices and all the different things the way that you know how to cook. And so what I teach my students is how to enjoy their lives,

how to take satisfaction in their accomplishments and activities and how to find the meaning of life. And that's what the new book is about because the big crisis for my students and almost everybody else in America today is that they don't know the meaning of their life. I would probably venture that's something that's been around for a while. But I don't know if it's ever been as bad as it is now. Oh, it's much, much worse. It's much, much worse. I wouldn't have written this book 20 years ago.

I wouldn't have written this book. I started thinking about this subject in about 2015 is when I started seeing the crisis and the data. and then I started interviewing young people in particular. And what you found was after 2008, there was a progressive explosion of people saying, I don't know the meaning of my life. I don't know if my life has meaning. For the first time, for the first time.

There's always been like 5% of the population that would say that. Yeah. I've never seen anything like it. It took off after 2008. I want to, first I want to understand the doom loop that you talk about in your book, which is fantastic. And then the other element of this that I'm going to want to bring it back to

is can somebody, have you seen like the Big Lobowski? Yeah. Okay, like just the dude, he's just, you know, there. The people that seem to not be these big striders. Yeah. Strivers. Yeah. Versus the people that actually are.

Like these people are, don't struggle as much with the meaning of life, I feel like. And the ones that are ambitious, try to be super successful, they're the ones that struggle so much with what's the meaning of it all. That's meaning of life. It's funny, isn't it? Yeah. It's really funny. And you wouldn't think that.

You know, when I do these interviews with young people, you find that college graduates and people who are doing really well, they'll often say, I have everything and I feel nothing. And they're really guilty about it. And what you find is that college graduates have struggled more with meaning than people who didn't go to college. People who are earning more money, struggle more with meaning than people who make less money

that we find. It's an affliction of the privileged. Affliction of the privilege. That's actually the psychogenic epidemic that's you're most likely to catch the disease. when you have this. And the reason for this is actually that our culture of grinding and hustle, and most notably where the tip of the spear is a constant use of technology, it induces strivers to use their brains in exactly the wrong way. So when you think about it, it's like, you know,

your great-grandfather, you know, he was using his brain the way it was supposed to be used. He never came home and where was he in Texas someplace? Yeah. Yeah. He never came home. Was he a farmer? No, he's an attorney. He's a judge. Well, let's go back until there was a farmer who would never have come home and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Oh. And the reason was because his brain was working the way it was supposed to because he wasn't constantly plugged in to the technology and to the technologized culture.

Yeah. We've moved all of our brain activity to, you know, the wonder and the mystery and the meaning and the mind wandering behind the mule. Life was pretty boring from moment to moment. life in general is pretty darn interesting. Today, life from moment to moment is never boring, but life overall is pretty boring for a lot of young people today. You know, you get to the end of the day, and you don't even remember what podcasts you listen to or what YouTube shorts you watched. You were never bored for a single second, but you're like, that was boring. Yeah. And you can get

to the end of a year and go like, I don't know how I spent that year. The time just slipped by. And that's the great irony. The reason is neurophysiological. The reason is biological, is the fact that using our brains in the wrong way. And what we need to do is to get back to the right side of our brain. This book is a six point plan to relearn the meaning of your life in six months. To get out of the doom loop. It's completely science backed. It's like if you do these things, you do six things and six months, you'll know the meaning of your life. And your life will never be the same. The ones that stuck out to me the most was when you look at this element of boredom. Yeah. All right.

Getting bored is one of them. Yeah. It's actually part of the first part about getting clean. Oh, clean. Clean, yeah. Well, but we're deeply, deeply addicted. Detox. Yeah, we need a detox. And so when you talk about a doom loop, all addictions work in the same way, where what you're doing to alleviate a problem is actually creating the problem.

That's a doom loops work. And so alcoholics, for example, you've met a lot of alcoholics in your life, no doubt. We all have. You know, we've all known a lot of drunks. And I don't drink at all, right? Because I got a lot of it in my family. And it's just like, it doesn't, I know where it goes. Yeah.

The pain you want to avoid is the pain that you're causing. Yeah, but the pain you're trying to avoid is either is almost always either boredom or anxiety. So people who are bored make their own party inside their head. People who are anxious, they will actually put out the storm. And alcohol is really interesting as a drug. It's incredibly effective at cutting the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So the amygdala, remember, is the part of the limbic system that gives you fear and anxiety is unfocused fear. So it's activity of the amygdala.

You can't quite, like, ah, right? Right. And then your prefrontal cortex says you're super stressed out. You can cut that connection. So you'll be, you'll be experiencing a lot of anxiety in your limbic system, but you don't know it because the connection has been cut. Alcohol does that. Alcohol just shuts it off. Shuts off the connection, not the anxiety. The trouble is the anxiety still there and comes back to your consciousness with a vengeance the next day. So if you're, and especially if you're bored and anxious, it's a really big problem. But this is one of the reasons, by the way, that people who are above average income have a greater propensity toward alcohol abuse than people who are below average income. People don't know that. The reason is because people were above average,

they're not in a ditch. You know, they can actually have the kind of life where they can hide it better. But the truth is that you're more likely, if you have a higher paying job and you have more education and you're working long hours, you're in danger for alcoholism.

You're as sure as we're sitting here, everybody listening to us that's working 70 hours a week, They're like, no, more, 100 because you're an associated law firm. Like, you're in danger for alcoholism. You are. And so you have to take care of this is what it comes down to. If you treat with alcoholism, if you treat with alcohol, the next day you're going to be more stressed out.

You're going to feel more anxiety the next day. And that's the doom loop. Yeah. You actually alleviated pain and it came back and that's going to lead to escalation. And escalation has to do with, it actually leads to more dependence. And that's even before there's addiction, there's dependence. It's like, I just don't, I can't get through, I can't get through this unless I'm drinking alcohol, that's the whole point, even before physical addiction. And so that's how every doom loop works.

Okay, now back to the current culture, which is a technologized culture and people are very, very addicted to the machines. It's used to the same neurochemical pathways for every addiction. It involves dopamine, which is the neuromodulator of wanting, learning, and liking. And so nature put dopamine in our brain so that we get this little reward when something goes right and we like it, so that we're, we'll do it again. You find berries on a bush, you know, 250,000 years ago and you're like, that's great. The real reward is not the berries. It's how it made you feel. And so you're, you're going to, you induced yourself to go back there the next day. You learned. It's how you learn stuff. That's how you learn to do things that are rewarding. The problem is,

that's also here you learn to go to Vegas and gamble away your paycheck. That's how you learn to actually look compulsively at pornography on the internet. All these things work the same dopamine pathways, alcohol and also the internet. I've always thought that, or let me rephrase that, I know in my own life, I get in the biggest amount of trouble when I'm bored. Yeah. Like it's, and what you're also saying is, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, when I'm alone, when I, I, I have nothing, I'm choosing not to have some kind of positive outlet. Right. Right. And it's, it's going, going back to it's not good for him to be alone. Yeah. And so it, it, it is, to me, what you're saying is, be bored.

Yeah. Because all of these distractions of screens and busyness is keeping you from higher level thinking. Detox yourself from the machines and allow yourself to be bored. That's actually how you start to get clean. Yeah. And then there's the whole set of plans on how you need to live differently. But the very beginning is, you know, I can't tell you to, you know, get new friends and find

a better job if you've been addicted to alcohol. The first thing I have to do is to get you de addicted to alcohol. And so the whole, the two big parts are number one. you need to get mad about the fact that you've been hooked on these technologies and you're frittering away your time and you're distracting yourself from things that really matter and you're hopelessly bored with your life but you can't stop scrolling social media you can't stop and that's because your brain has become dependent on these impulses is what it comes down you should be mad about that yeah you should be because that's the first thing that every former drinker does is

they're like i'm not going to put up with this anymore yeah i will not have this thing enslave me anymore The second thing you need to do is to actually take detox steps. You need protocols for detoxing. And you can't, you're not going to throw your phone in the ocean, but you can use it in a responsible way. And this book lays out the steps on actually how you can detox from your phone in a way where you're using technology responsibly. And it's not managing you anymore. It's just very simple stuff that you can actually do. Once you institute these policies in your life, your relationship with your phone is going to change.

And then last but not least, you need to actually induce boredom so your brain can start working in the right way again. can turn on the default mode network, which is the structures in your brain that illuminate, that let you mind wander, consider questions of meaning that great, great, great, great, grandpa did naturally without even having to think about it. Before we keep going, I want to take a moment to tell you about mill. Now listen to me when I talk to you about this. It has become a staple of our kitchen. We love our mill. My kids love our mill. And I'm going to tell you exactly the reason why. Mill is the odorless effort fully automated food recycler that handles the cleanup after dinner is over. Now, why we love it so

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having the kitchen without it you can try mill risk free for 90 days and get $75 off at mill dot com slash jefferson use co jefferson at check out that's $75 off at mill dot com slash jefferson use code jefferson and now back to the episode There is a part in your book that I really adore. What's that? And that is, you say, never waste your struggle. Yeah. Why should we never waste our struggle?

So there's a basic scientific point, but a lot of it's really, it comes down to a lot of us who have religious convictions, we'll understand naturally as well. So unhappiness, which is different than happiness, it's not the absence of happiness. Happiness than unhappiness, which are usually registered through. the emotions that we feel. All of our emotions exist for a reason. Your negative emotions exist to give

you alarms about what's going on in the outside world. If you didn't have them, you get run over by a car immediately. You need fear. You need angry. You need disgust. You need sadness. You need these negative emotions. But they're largely processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the same part of the brain where you assess mystery and meaning. And that's one of the reasons that people will say, I found the meaning of my life when I had cancer. I found a great deal of the meaning of my life. I understood the meaning of my life more when I lost my mom, when I lost my business. The saddest times, the most difficult times in people's lives is when they learn the most. This is also the reason that you and I as Christian men that we worship a man who's suffering and dying.

Yes. The meaning of my life is my relationship with God. This is the central part of the meaning of my life. And I worship a God made manifest in humanity suffering and dying on a device of torture. that's super heavy. It's very heavy. That's crazy by worldly standards, by human standards. How can I understand the meaning of my life by looking at Jesus hanging on the cross?

We're coming to Easter, maybe. Right, yeah, yeah. We're in Lent right now. But that's what we need to contemplate because suffering, because death, because struggle, because pain, they're central to the experience of understanding who we are as people. And when we try to eradicate those experiences, we'll be unto us. What we will be eradicating is the central component of the health. happiness that we seek. If you try to eliminate your unhappiness, you will accidentally

eliminate your happiness. Oh, that's a good way to put it. I find that when people hit their rock bottom, it's usually the first time they start looking up. I know. And I know, I feel, I've had rock bottom. And I feel almost. Have you? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've had times where I, I don't think I could, could have gone any lower than where I was. And let me tell you that. And you're 38 years old? Yeah. I'm 37. I'll be 38 this year. And there's... So probably...

I'll have another one, I'm sure. Well, probably the worst thing in your life hasn't happened yet. Yeah, I'm probably so. Sorry, no, me to scare you. Can't wait. Can't wait. Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you, it was enough for me.

If it wasn't rock bottom, it was... I've got it hard. Super hard. It was in the bottom third. And what you learned? What you learned? You know? Well, I learned that if my day doesn't start with surrender,

yeah. It's never going to go well. You know, it has to have this daily... So how does that show up? conversation. That means, all right, you want to tell me I'm wrong? All right, that's okay. You know, you want to cut me off and merge right in front of me? You know what? Go right ahead. It's like, and it's not a place of being deferential. Yeah. It's, to me, a higher presence of just being an awe of, I can exist and still feel like I'm every bit as present as I can, as I can be.

Yeah. So there's a formula for what you just said. I hope to you to have one. You spoke it very eloquently. And the formula actually comes from a lot of different philosophical traditions. But here's how the Buddhists put it. But it's completely consistent with our Christian faith too. And any real philosophy. Suffering and pain are not the same thing.

Pain happens to you. Because things happen to you. You know, pain, physical pain, which we call sensory pain, you put your hand on a hot stove, you break your arm. That's inflammation and nerve endings. And it's processed in a certain part of the brain. Affective pain is the second part. really like, I don't like that.

That's a different part of the brain is actually where that happens. It's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in case you're keeping score at home, kids. And so the pain happens to you all the time and you need pain because if you don't have pain, you're in trouble. Pain is a signal that something isn't right and that something is a threat and that something needs to change. That's why you have that signal.

But suffering is not the same thing. Suffering equals pain multiplied by your resistance to the pain. Okay. And so suffering, it isn't optional, but you've got a slider bar. Now, the thing that a lot of people get wrong, especially when they're young, is when they're suffering, they think that they need to lower the pain. And sometimes you can't. The right way to do it is to lower your resistance. Because when you lower the resistance, your suffering goes down even if your pain is high.

When you know you're in the zone of living the way you're supposed to live, when you're getting toward the enlightenment that you actually seek, it's because your pain is sky high, but your suffering isn't. And that means you're actually not afraid of the pain and that you're accepting it a lot. And so something happens to you. And the little tiny thing, which is like, he cuts you off and you're like, okay, that's non-resistance. You just practice non-resistance. So when you go through your lowest time and, you know, in the stock market, it's interesting. You know, what happens when the stock market's really going south, like a bad recession, stock market's going down by 40%.

You know when it's about to turn around again, the tell is what stock market is. traders called a puk. Now the puk is when institutional investors, they can't stand it anymore, and they sell, and they sell. And when the institutional investors, they do the puk, when they sell, it's about to turn back up again traditionally. So what happens is that surrender. That's like stock market surrender. And so when you're at the lowest point in your life and you do the puk, what you do from then on is like, okay. Yeah. Okay. And that's what you learn from pain. What you learn from pain, is how to suffer less because you start working the other lever. And that's a source of meaning.

It doesn't make the pain any less. No, no, because the pain is the pain, man. Well, I agree. And also, when you say you're lowering your resistance, you're accepting more pain. Totally. And there's sometimes, I mean, we're in the series season of Lent, and I'm a Catholic, and we practice Lent.

We know how to do Lent, maybe. And we bring on pain such that we can get better at non-resistance to it. And people think about that, that's crazy. You know, the monks they'll be, you know, flagellating themselves or wearing a hair shirt. But, you know, we do this all the time. You know, I go to the gym every day, so do you. It's not because it feels good. What am I doing?

I'm practicing non-resistance to pain that I myself am inviting. I like the benefit from it, but I'm learning about life. This is one of the reasons that I'll tell young guys. Go to the gym. Yeah. Go to the gym. Because in the gym, in the gym, you will learn about life. In the gym, you will learn about the relationship between pain, which is under

your, I mean, pain which is not under your control, in this case, it actually is invited. Yeah. But through your non-resistance to it, your acceptance of it, your embrace of it, your love of it, then the suffering actually becomes something that you can, that's something that you can live with because it is under your control. That's a very important metaphor for how we're trying to live. It gets much harder when it's like when the pain comes because your wife leaves you or because your bank, you're somebody.

Somebody died. Yeah. Somebody died. Something. You're the victim. of a horrible crime, whatever it happens to be. Yeah. But in point of fact, what you learned from your lowest hour

was the great message of the cross. Yeah. Amen to that. Yeah. I find that it is definitely the more that... That's what the verses like hit me of the less I am, the more he is. Like it's a great way of... Maybe the words humbling.

It's continuing to make sure that you, like it's a daily bread type of mindset to have. No, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, there's an affirmation that I asked my students to recite, which is at the beginning of the day, to say, you know, I'm really grateful for all the beautiful things that are going to happen this day because everybody knows gratitude is good. All the beautiful things, all the fun things, all the flowers, all the butterflies, all the kisses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm also grateful. for the trouble I'm going to face this day, because that's the source of my learning and growth. Bring it on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the way to start the day. It's joy.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And there's a famous book by Alphonsus Ligori, who's a saint in the Catholic Church since 17th century Catholic saint. And he wrote a book called uniformity with God's will. And so the thing about pain is that suffering. Suffering is a mystery, right? There's a mysterious element.

The book of Job is all the, the punchline of the book of Job is that a righteous man suffers and he interrogates God and God says, it's a mystery. It's beyond you. Right. It's actually beyond you. Which is a relief. Yeah, for sure. And you find there's a lot of literature out there about people who've had very deep metanormal experiences, which is, you know, what they would call paranormal, really metanormal experiences where they felt like they were in the presence of God, like near death experiences. What they all say is that they understand suffering for the first time because that's the first time they do the puk on the understanding of the nature of the mystery of their suffering.

I'm like, I don't get it. And I can't get it. But the one thing I know is that God is good. Yeah. Even when things are horrible, God is good. And I can't explain why this. Now, that's a very right hemispheric experience of mystery and meaning. You're not going to get it if you're on the internet.

Right. You're not going to get it if you're on AI. You can't get it if you're on AI. But that's a really important thing to keep in mind is that the deep mystery of this is the essence of actually how we're trying to live our lives is what it comes down to. and life gets more beautiful, not less. Not less. Instead of fighting against your pain,

fighting against your suffering, which people are actually doing all day long, you go to campus counseling service and you say, I'm feeling sad and anxious about school. And you're like, oh, we've got to fix that. Yeah. to find life's deepest meaning. And in point of fact, it would be fully alive.

So this is what Alphonse's LaGuardi talks about, that uniformly with God's will, this is what the elite athletes of meaning actually have in common. They don't just say, I accept this. They say, I want this. See, that's a desire to make your will uniform with the divine will.

It's to say, I'm not just going to accept it. I'm going to love it. And man, I'm still not. there. I'm still not there. Well, I find that in, like Paul says, you know, well, I'm weak. He's strong. And there's this whole thing also in recovery circles of, I mean, that's, that's part of the 12 steps is a higher power. Yeah, that's one of the first things that you do because your best thinking is what got you there, right? It's, you say, you said a minute ago of how you just have to choose not to do that, you know, the other 50%, man, there's so many people. I know listening to

Like, if I could, I would. I know. I know. Sometimes I wish I could just have the, be so noble as to confess all of my problems, but sometimes the secret has to be shown, right? And because... You need stronger, stronger stuff. That's exactly, yeah, that there is something greater than me.

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is to connect you to in-house providers and find you doctors and health professionals that you love, people who take care of you. And best of all, they help you book the actual appointments, which is incredible. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments. That's speaking to me directly. And go to Zock.com.com slash Jefferson to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. That is ZOC, DOC.com slash Jefferson. And now back to the episode. When I'm in some of the best conversations with people, it's when I have surrendered what the outcome will be. Yeah. And knowing that if I can, what you said in a sense of the suffering, of lowering my resistance in conversation to accept it is what it will be.

That doesn't have to affect, you know, my belief. The better I walk away from that conversation. Yeah, I know. I know. That's intention without attachment. That's another Buddhist idea. I quote a lot of Buddhism, even though I'm like a serious Catholic. A lot of Buddhism for a Catholic there, but that's intention without attachment, which means that you have a particular intention. But you don't have an attachment to the outcome. You know, you need a kind of a Euclidean straight line towards something or you can't make an argument. You can't take on a project. You need a goal. You can't go on a voyage. Right. Unless you know in principle where you want to go. But you can't be happy unless you detach yourself from actually attaining that, which is exactly what you just said, right?

I mean, I have a conversation with somebody and are making an argument for something. But, and I have to make it coherent, to make it work, I got to have intention. But you can't be happy if you're attached to actually winning that thing. This is what it comes about. So if you're having an argument with your spouse, then it's a productive argument. It's not a nasty argument with it. You should have intention about the point that you're trying to make, but non-attachment to actually who wins the argument.

When it comes to this extraordinary success that you're having in this moment in time and your own career that you didn't anticipate, you have an intention of reaching more people with a podcast and with social media and with your speaking events, without an attachment to what that actually means. You put a book out into the world. You have an intention to make it popular and have a lot of people read it, but without the attachment of number one in the New York Times bestseller list. And that's, dude, that's hard to do. That's hard to do.

That's because we're better at attachment than we are in. And so the people who are most miserable and can't find meaning, they're super attached to things. But they don't even have an intent to have too much attachment and not enough intention. That's so good. We need more intention and less attachment. That's hard. I want to take us now to this aspect of leaning into imposter syndrome. Yeah.

You got a little of that these days? I don't know who does it. I don't know who does it. Well, as you get older, it's different. You'll see. Tell me. Well. emotional self-management gets much easier and your personality changes as you get older.

And this is not just from experience. This is as a researcher, I say this, but also from experience because I'm not 37 anymore. I remember being 37 feels like nine minutes ago, but I'm 61. What age do you see yourself like when you look in the mirror? When people ask you how old you are, what's the age you first go to? Well, it certainly depends. I'm in better physical shape than when I was in my 20s. So I feel better. Now, it's not because I was horribly out of shape, but I kind of smoked. I drank a lot. and I was a musician and I just didn't take care of myself. And now I take really, really good care of myself.

I'm my emotional acuity and my intellectual acumen are higher in a lot of ways than they were because I'm a more linear thinker. Yeah. I'm also working all day long to get points across in ways that I hope people can understand. Right. You know, even though I'm, you know, I'm an academic. I'm trying not to, you know, bury everybody under a bunch of, you know, incomprehensible science. is how this works.

And so the truth of the matter is that I see myself as a lot younger because I'm better at certain things that I was when I was younger. My dad will always say, I'll look in the mirror and say, who's that old man? I know. And that's when I look in the mirror is when I actually see it because I don't look like I'm 37 anymore.

If I were actually 37 and I looked like this, you'd be like, you've got to go to the doctor. Right. Now, if I told you I was 82 and I looked like this, he'd be like, great. Yeah. So it's all relative is kind of the way that this. this, where I actually, the appreciation that I have for getting older is, number one,

I'm way more emotionally self-managing than I was in the past. And that's actually one of the tricks of happiness of older people. Older people tend to be happier than younger people after the early 50s. So happiness tends to decline through your 30s and 40s. And a little bit, don't worry. It's a little. And then it bottoms out. Yeah.

It's your kids, but also because you're not very self-managing emotionally. And you're experiencing these things. things and you feel like you're like a like a car like a shopping cart in a shopping cart going down a hill a lot of the time yeah in your early 50s things start to turn around not coincidentally is when your kids move out but that's you tend to get much happier from your in your 50s and 60s and part of the reason is because you understand what negative emotion means better so for example you know if somebody you know cusses at you at the window of a car and insults you when you're 30 it's you're like, and you stew on it.

Like you're mad about that. And you don't know that that's not a permanent state of affairs. As far as you know, as far as your limbic system is concerned, you're going to be mad about that in two weeks. Now, you kind of, you sort of intellectually know it won't, but that's kind of how it feels. Yeah. When you're 60, you think to yourself,

you're insulted in the same way, but you think to yourself, I'm completely sure that an hour from now, I'm not going to care about that. So I'm going to get a head start and not care now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why 80-year-olds are much happier than 30-year-olds. 80-year-olds are happier than 30-year-olds. They just are.

The second reason is because your personality gets better. By better, I mean, I'm like, these are claims that are sort of unambiguous. Your personality has five dimensions. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Right? And so the way that you remember that is ocean. Okay.

It's like O-C-E-A-N. Nice. Your openness to experience, it tends to go down and it kind of, it sort of stays where it is. And that's not really a big driver on your happiness. Some people are more open to experience. Some people are less open to experience. But it's not like being more open to experience is going to make you uniformly happier. I'm with you.

Some people are just more conservative than others. And does that have an impact on our kind of the default on imposter syndrome? Not necessarily. What is it, what it does is an effect. your willingness and ability to take on new things. So you're super open to experience. Okay. Your person is very open to experience,

which means that you're going to go from being a lawyer to being, I don't know, what the heck are you? Like an Instagram influencer or something like that at age 37. It's like that's weird. And that's because you're open to experience. You have a high level of openness. Great.

Contcientiousness is correlated with happiness. Agreeableness is correlated with happiness. Neuroticism is inversely correlated with happiness. Okay. And all those personality characteristics, they go in the right direction as you get older. You tend to be more conscientious. You tend to be more assertive. You tend to be more agreeable because, you know, being disagreeable has a terrible cost-benefit ratio.

Right. I mean, it's like being disagreeable to your waiter is so dumb. Right. And it's all, it's just impulse control. Yeah. And your neuroticism goes way down. So people are significantly less depressed than anxious when they're older than they were when they were younger. That's funny because I'll tell you, I know.

some older people who have no problem telling somebody what they think. Well, they're assertive. Yeah, well, they'll also. And they can also be a serious. So imagine how disagreeable they were when they were 30. No joke. Yeah. I mean, I've seen people run somebody up one side and down the other.

Yeah. No, there are certain things that will make people buck these trends. And so certain people that have real personality pathologies can become more like that. Yeah. And they're being old strips off the filters. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah.

And especially if you're old and rich. Yeah. you know, money makes you more of who you are. So if you're a kind and happy person, money will make you kinder and happier. And if you're a gloomy old, you know, miser, it'll make you worse. So there's certain things that come into this, that monkey up the picture. Now, when it comes to imposter syndrome, you become more comfortable with the fact that you're out in front of your headlights.

So here's the thing. When you're sharing ideas on a big public stage, like you, like me, you're out in front of your headlights a lot. A lot. And people don't know it. They're like, oh, Jefferson's, he's like, you know, he's a big lawyer and he knows how to make these incredible arguments. And he knows. But you're like, I kind of know. Yeah.

I kind of know. I mean, it sounds right to me and it's worked for me and I hope it works for you. But it's not like I've got, you know, 500 studies showing this. And even if you did, you still like, I kind of know. Right. There's nothing provable, right? And for me, you know, in my work, I can't just hide behind a bunch of studies because I have to try. I'm trying to take real science and say this study shows this and this study shows that and no study shows the answer to your question, but I'm going to triangulate to it because it makes logical sense based on what we've studied in other areas. I'm best beyond my headlights for sure. And it requires a whole lot of humility, but also it imposes a sense of being an imposter, an intellectual imposter. You don't want to get trouble. You don't want to misguide people, you know? It's what it comes down to. You get more comfortable with the discomfort as you get old.

Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah. And so what it comes down to is like, yeah, I don't know everything. I just, I don't know everything. And I'm probably wrong on certain things. But this is how it seems to me. Yeah. Okay, well, that makes me feel better.

No, no. It's weird and hard to a certain extent, but it's normal and funny. Yeah. You just say lean into it. Yeah. You know, it's like you have to kind of have this. Stay humble. Yeah.

Just stay humble and say, and like you do a YouTube video and somebody points that an error. The first thing you say is good point. Right. Good point. Yeah. You know, one of the, because it is, if it is a good point, you say that's a good, even if they're like, you jerk, you idiot. Yeah. I usually say it's a good take.

It's a good take. I mean, it's like, but people make very good points when I, when there's certain times when I will, because I'm speaking, right, when I'll make a point with a little more force than is warranted by the evidence. You know, that's one of the things that we do. We're not shading the truth at all, but it's basically like, this happens like this. And it's like, this usually happens like this under these circumstances. Ah, okay. And so, but you're too categorical about it. Somebody will point that out.

Yeah, but there was a 19, you know, or a 2013 study that said, and it's like, yeah, good point. Right. Yeah, good point. And I know you've, you talked to about like the dark triad. Oh, yeah. Right. And how that like. They're not good at this.

Right. And so it like. They don't have imposter syndrome. Yeah. And so that's what I, when I came across that body of work of yours, I had to, I had to like go for a walk of like, I want to make sure that you're not. I'm doing everything. If you're worried about it, you're not.

Okay. All right, good. No, there's a test on my website, by the way. I've got a whole battery of tests that people can actually take about their affect profile and their general happiness level. Okay. That's called the happiness scale. But I absolutely have it.

Tell them what's your website? Arthur Brooks.com. Perfect. Yeah. And people can go there and take a test and see, you know, their dark triad characteristics or the person they're dating. Oh. Which is really important, especially for women, because women are magnetized to dark triads.

there's a category of men that's really good at looking like they're falling in love when they're actually not. Can you tell like for I should define dark triad right? Yeah, for the dark triad is a combination of three personality characteristics. Narcissism. It's all about me. Machiavellianism, which is I'm willing to hurt you to serve my ends and psychopathy, psychopathic traits, which is if I hurt you, I don't feel remorse or empathy for you at all. Those are the three traits. And when it's all about me, I'm willing to hurt you and I don't care, that's super dangerous. Now, it can be really mild like you're just above the average across these three. But people who do fulfill these characteristics are one in 14.

It's 7% of the population. It's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot. Everybody who's listening to us right now or watching us right now has encountered a dark triad. And that was a weird thing where somebody became a friend a little too fast and then betrayed you. Yeah. It's a boyfriend that acted like he was like a love bombed you like crazy.

And then he emptied your bank account and used you and abandoned you. you or if you had a bad luck of actually marrying that guy, he cheated on you, you know, over and over and over again. It's everybody's first husband. Yeah, yeah, it's usually their ex. Yeah, exactly. You worked for one who was very abusive and exploitative and took credit for your work. You know, that kind of thing is actually what they do all the time. You see him in certain areas of business. There's a lot of, a lot in politics. You see a lot in show business. No doubt there are plenty of lawyers who are dark triads. Sure.

Right? Not very many CEOs, because CEOs have to do repeat business. I'd say surgeons. Surgeons are funny because they have an affect profile with being very, very low affect. I can see that. Very low affect. So jet pilots and surgeons.

That's true. There could be, I don't know. I've never done dark triad tests on these guys. I've definitely deposed a number of doctors who kind of this God complex. And I don't know if it's because they cut on people or what? It might be. What kind of lawyers do you think are most likely to be dark triads? Do you be a personal injury lawyer?

I would, I'd say personal injury attorneys would probably be one. And then I would also say like the corporate banking is the ones I would do. Because they're most likely to want to really, really get bad guys out of trouble. Yeah, like this is like the white color crime like attorneys. Well, I definitely say that it's somewhere in law all over the place. I want to ask you this last question. And it's one that's personal for me and my family. we're always in this season as young kids

and I know other people listening have young kids or grandparents or grandkids and Sierra, my wife her thing is like she wants to have a routine and we're just in this stage where every week is different and it's she always says

once this happens we're going to settle into a routine once this is over things are going to calm down and my position is this is just life this is this there is no like yeah and so i'm curious what kind of either research or thoughts that has been married for 34

years yeah what have you seen the only thing you can count on is change yeah that's really what it comes down to for sure now routine actually does get easier the older your kids are because you can actually get into a more stable stable routine for sure but one of the things that you find typically in couples is that one partner doesn't want routine one partner is actually incredibly allergic to routine. It's probably you. Yeah. It's probably you.

Probably you, because, you know, you're probably an adventure freak. You're probably somebody who needs a lot of stimulus because you're highly open to experience. And people who are open to experience, they don't like routines that much. Yeah. It's like, you probably like traveling. You probably like seeing things. I mean, I get it.

Yeah. It's just like hotels. I'm just not big on structure. No, yeah. She really likes structure. And I don't find structure to be helpful. And different people like it into, in different amounts. And that's just those are personality differences is what it comes down to.

And so the whole point is you need to be really, really open about that. Such that you're getting what you need and she's getting what she needs and she's not expecting things. So the big danger on this is that you keep making promises you can't keep because you don't want to keep them. So the typical thing where because your life, by the way, I can see the crystal ball. It's going to get crazy or not less crazy. No, it is. I mean, you're going to do one weird thing after another and you're going to be successful at it, right, is what it's going to come down to. And you're going to be saying, honey, no, I promise you, it's just this book release.

Yeah. I promise you. It's just this one speaking to her. And I would love for you to come with me, but I promise you it's not going to be like this. This is an especially busy time. That's what, that's what adventure junkies always tell their spouse. It's an especially busy time. And then we can really, you know, we can settle down to, you know, the life that we've always talked about. We can have more of the structure. We can have more of this routine. And, and you're kind of convincing yourself of something that's not the truth. And she will believe you. And then that thing is was out of reach. Yeah. You can't manage somebody's expectations towards something that's never going to come true. That'll become a constant source of bitterness. And so you, it's worth two things

doing, you as a bunny who's an openness person. Yeah. Is to say, number one, honey, I can't stop. I can't stop. I need to stop more. I need to help me. I need you to help me. I need you to help me to be more like you. And I'm not going to be like you. It's always going to be a little bit crazier. It's always going to be a little bit more. There's a word in statistics called stochastic. That means it's like, you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stochastic process is one that's a lot of randomness in it, right? There's a lot of adventure. I'm not going to be, I don't, but I don't know how to stop and left to my devices. It's going to be a problem for me. It's going to be a problem for you. So I need you to help me. You need to understand me. I need you to help me. Yeah. That's a real

because that's why God put her in your life. Yeah, no doubt. Because we're supposed to complete each other. We're not supposed to copy each other. Yeah, that's the kind of, that's real conversation. Yeah, man. I want to ask you a question. I always ask every, every guest and take all the time you need.

What is one conversation that you can remember that has changed the direction of your life? A conversation that changed the course of my life was not one that I had, but it was one that I witnessed. I wrote this book called From Strength to Strength. And I tell the story at the beginning of that book because it was the reason I wrote that book. And that book was really a turning point in my life based on that conversation. I was on a plane, which I was on a plane.

Flying from L.A. to Washington. And it was nighttime. It wasn't a night flight, but it was like 11 o'clock at night. And it was dark. And I heard a conversation behind me in the row right behind me. me. And I could tell by their voices, it was a man and a woman. I could tell by their voices that they were old, not just elderly, old, 80s. And I figured there were a married couple. And I couldn't quite make out his words. It was kind of mumbling. But her words were really clear and her voice was

penetrating and coming right through the seats. So I heard, and then she said, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And then I heard, yeah. And she says, it's not true that nobody cares about you and nobody loves you anymore, that nobody remembers you. It's not true. And now, I'm a behavioral scientist. So I'm putting, you know, a story together in my head. And I figure this is a guy who's in his 80s and time's almost up. And he didn't have the life that he wanted. He's not you. He didn't take a bite out of life, man. He didn't actually build the career that he wanted. He didn't take every opportunity and now it was too late. And the world has passed him by and forgotten. He probably was never remembered in the first place. And they finished their conversation.

And at the end of the flight, which is an hour later or so, the lights went on and everybody stood up. And I wanted to get a look at the, you know, the old man that his loving wife had just been telling him convenient lies. Yeah. And it was one of the most famous men in the world. No way. This is somebody that everybody watching and listening to us right now knows. Not personally. Yeah. But he's so famous. for what he did. And this guy is not just some actor or politician. This is somebody with a small group of dedicated individuals

in the 1960s, 1970s changed the course of history. Wow. And I heard him telling his wife that he might as well be dead because nobody remembers him because the good days were in the past and they never came back. And at that time, I was the CEO of a company. And I didn't know what my future was. And I went home and I said to my wife, honey, I had this experience and I told her about it.

She said, who was it? And I told her, she says, huh? I said, yeah, huh. And I said, I don't want to be having that conversation with you on a plane in 40 years. Right. I don't want to be having, or 30 years. I guess I was in my early 50s at that time. The guy was probably in his early 80s. I don't want to be having that conversation with you. I need to find a way to structure the rest of my life so that when things actually end, I can be at peace. So I can understand the the structure of what my life is supposed to be. So I can live according to God's will without always wishing that it were something that could be better, it could be bigger, could be more special as opposed to me being happy.

And that's the beginning of why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. That's awesome. I dedicated my life subsequent to that. I wanted a long pilgrimage, a walking pilgrimage across northern Spain to find the answer to the question on how to do it. I'm Catholic. That's what we do. Long walks.

And I decided, I think God told me that I was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bring him together in bonds of happiness and love for his will using science and ideas. And I was subsequent to that conversation on that plane. That's how you know if you're one of his. You love one another. Absolutely. Well, have you enjoyed our conversation? I've loved it. Thank you.

You're good at what you do, man. You are good at what you do. You too. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming here. Thank you.