The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 528. You Get Everything You Want—Then What? | Dr. Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Jordan Peterson sits down with professor, author, and columnist Dr. Arthur Brooks. They discuss the physicality of happiness, how aim sets perception, the paradox of progress, the need for proper discernment, and how sustained maturity sets you up for the adventure of your life. This episode was filmed on January 7th, 2025. Dr. Arthur Brooks began his professional life as a classic French hornist. He left college at age 19, touring and recording with the Annapolis Brass Quintet and, later, the City Orchestra of Barcelona. While still performing in his late 20s he returned to school and achieved a Ph.D. by 34. Brooks is now the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of the Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He is also a columnist at the Atlantic and the author of 14 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier” (2023).  | Links | For Dr. Authur Brooks: On X https://x.com/arthurbrooks/highlights Website https://arthurbrooks.com/ Dr. Brooks’ most recent book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier https://a.co/d/e5fJY2R 

Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning? What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder. There's another weird angle on this, though. I've been trying to think about prayer technically.

That's a complicated topic. Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you. Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden? ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks.

Now, I met Mr. Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And after that, he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the Business School at Harvard. And that's where he is currently. He has a very active public life as well, and it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness. And so we talked about that. That was the focus of our conversation. And part of that was a matter of definitional clarification, which is crucially important because to understand happiness and to pursue it properly means that it has to be defined correctly.

You have to know what it is and what it isn't. And it isn't, for example, in Arthur Brooks' conceptualization, reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification in the moment, right? And so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. And well, understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation.

So pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment. Now the problem with that, a problem with that, for example, is that psychopaths can be pleasure seeking. And if pleasure is regarded as a good in and of itself, then psychopathic pleasure seeking also becomes a good. And that's not tenable, not least because psychopaths don't operate

in their own best interest, because they fail across time, and they're terrible socially, familially, from a community perspective, they're devastating. And so, pleasure itself has to be elevated or sanctified, that's another way of thinking about it. And the terminology that Arthur uses for that is enjoyment.

And enjoyment is the elevation of pleasure, let's say, to something that's iterable, reciprocal, social, future-oriented, permanent, and stable. So you could think about it as the gift that keeps on giving. And that is something that's akin to, what would you say, a combination of wisdom and pleasure. So we talked about many elements of happiness

other than that, but that gives you a flavor of the discussion and hopefully a reason to continue listening. So welcome aboard. All right, Mr. Brooks, I think what we should start with likely is just a brief or lengthy, for that matter, walkthrough of, let's start with your publishing record. Give everybody a sense of what it is that you're doing

and how that came about. Thanks, and thanks for having me on the program. It's a pleasure. I'm delighted. And I write about human happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist by background. My PhD is largely, my work was dedicated to behavioral economics, but it moved much more

toward the behavioral sciences and the psychological angle, and then later more toward neuroscience, because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our PhDs, just because we recognize that psychology is biology, much more than we did in, I guess, the old days, in the 80s and 90s. I came late to what I'm doing right now, however. I've only been writing about human happiness in the way that I am for the past five and a half years,

since I've been a professor at Harvard. I've written two big books since I came to Harvard, one called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. For strivers, we're trying to understand the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence and why they feel like they're burning out

in the middle of their careers, how they can actually get stronger and why they feel like they're burning out in the middle of their careers, how they can actually get stronger and better and happier as they get older. And the second book I actually co-authored with Oprah Winfrey called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just the basic straight up science

of human happiness that I wanted to introduce to large groups of people. That was Oprah Winfrey, she hosted the book, much as she would have hosted somebody on her show when she had a talk show back in the old days. Before I was doing this teaching at Harvard, and I teach a large seminar at the business school, the Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness

that has 180 students, something like 450 on the waiting list and illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of. And that's, before I was doing that, which is fun as an academic, I was actually the president of a think tank in Washington, D.C. I was the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a free market oriented think tank,

which I was the chief executive of for 11 years. Before that I was a behavioral scientist at Syracuse, and before that I was a professional French horn player. From when I was 19 until I was 31. I went to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s, and then left music and went and got my PhD and became a behavioral scientist.

Your PhD is, what was the focus of your PhD? Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis. And my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling. And all I was doing. Right, so that's where you moved from into behavioral psychology. Exactly, exactly right. So I was.

Like lots of economists. Yeah. Right, that's happening more frequently, right? Yeah, I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist. I got a great technical toolkit as an economist, but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria. What I'm really interested in is why people do the weird things that they do.

So motivation and emotion. Exactly right. Now, I was studying things that don't have typical economic rationale, like why do people give to charity? Why do people admire beauty? Why do people love each other? And using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn in an economics milieu

made it possible for me to study these things. And the taproot of all those things turned out to be human happiness. So when I left my think tank and I was trying to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life, I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain, hundreds of kilometers walking across Northern Spain, praying the rosary,

and every day saying, Lord, guide my path. Which is, and a process of discernment is important. You've talked about this an awful lot in your work, and you talk about how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment. I found, I thought it was to go back to my behavioral science roots

and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness. Okay, so let's start with that issue of discernment. So I've been trying to think about prayer technically, let's say. And so that's a complicated topic. But you could imagine this. Imagine that your decision is to aim up, which is the opposite of iniquity, by the way.

I found out the word iniquity means fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at them. Right. Okay, so instead you decide you're fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at them. Okay, so instead you decide you're gonna aim up. Now you can leave that kind of amorphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance. You could say, well, I would like things to be as good as they could be, let's say,

although I'm not sure what that means and I'm not sure how to do it. But you open the door that way to the beginnings of something approximating fantasy. I mean, part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward, right? And so you can set something like an unspecified uphill goal,

and that would be like a meditative or prayer practice. And then you could say, well, my desire, my aim, is to flesh out that conceptualization and to specify a way forward, right? Now, then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on a particular project. The goal is to walk uphill, whatever that means, to clarify the nature of what uphill is

and to discern a strategy, okay? And then you said you walk this route, right? And that gives you time for contemplation. Okay, so walk me through that a little bit. You said you were praying the rosary and you were concentrating on something like upward aim. And then you took time to do that, right? So it's like you give your dreams an opportunity

to make themselves manifest in a situation like that. And that's part of that clarification. So what happened to you when you did that, and why did you do it? Well, as a neurocognitive matter, we actually understand what a discernment process does literally through pilgrimage. So you know, Ian McGilchrist's work, it was phenomenal.

The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, it's a Scottish, he wrote The Master in His Emissary about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the hemispherically lateralized brain, where the right side of the brain asks the big questions but doesn't actually come up with the answers because the biggest questions in life don't have answers, they only have understanding. Now, the left side actually solves complicated problems. The right side deals with complex problems.

Complex and complicated are fundamentally different in so far. As complicated problems, they're hard to find the solutions to, but once you have the solutions, you can replicate them with almost effortless ease. Right, right, right. You can make them into an algorithm. Exactly right. Yeah, and the left hemisphere is actually specialized

for algorithm production. Exactly right, and that's the reason that you use the left side of the brain disproportionately when you're looking at social media or using technology. Engineering solutions are left brain solutions. The right brain problems are those that have very easy answers. We won the football game, they lost the football game.

She fell in love with me, she didn't fall in love with me. I have something I want to do, I don't have something that I want to do, but you can't answer the questions. You can only have an understanding of the questions. And to come to the understanding of those questions, you have to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain. And to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain, you have to be undistracted and let your mind wander to stimulate the default mode network in your brain, which is intensely

uncomfortable because we hate boredom. When you were at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, your colleague, Dan Gilbert, who's a wonderful social psychologist, he did all those experiments about people being bored. So he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except they had a button in front of them. You remember these experiments? No, not specifically. If they touched a button, they'd get a painful electric shock.

Oh, yes, yes. And it turned out that 80% of the participants shock themselves rather than letting their default mode network run free. Even animals will do that. Yeah. Bored animals will shock themselves. Absolutely, and one, they had to throw out this particular guy because he was such an outlier,

shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. We hate boredom. We hate the default mode network, but unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain and the default mode network by purposively just walking and repetitively praying, unless you manually stimulate that part of your brain, you are not gonna come to understanding

about the why of your life. You're gonna be stuck on the how and what, and you're gonna be path dependent, and I knew that. I knew that. Well, probably perhaps part of that discomfort. So Karl Friston, we did some work in this regard too. Karl Friston has associated negative emotion, anxiety more specifically with high entropy state.

So, and you could think about a high entropy state as a state of navigation where a very large number of pathways are potentially open to you. Right, and so if you open Pandora's box, if you move away from a determinant goal and you open Pandora's box, which is what direction should I go, then that is anxiety provoking

because there's a multitude of possibilities that back it. Now, there's opportunity in that, but it can easily overwhelm you, especially if you're tilted more strongly towards negative emotion, let's say. So the problem with opening up a space of contemplation is that open spaces are unprotected and high entropy. And so there's negative emotion.

Well, that's why we know too, that the default emotion associated with right hemisphere activation is negative emotion. It tends to be. Right upper head. High negative affect. And so you're familiar with the PANAS test,

the Positive Affect Negative Affect Sequence, which is I administer it to all my students at Harvard. I make them take this because I put them into four categories. The high positive, high negative category. It's high affect people, that's you and me, which are the mad scientist profile. The high positive, low negative,. It's high affect people. That's you and me, which are the mad scientist profile. The high positive, low negative,

which everybody wants to be, which is actually not great for a lot of things, which is the cheerleader. It makes you impulsive. Yeah, yeah, that's the cheerleader. And they make bad bosses too, by the way, because they can't take criticism or hear bad news. You have people who are high negative and low positive,

which is the poets, and then the people who are low affect, low, low, those are the judges. Very, very low affect, sober. They make good surgeons, right? You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh my God, that's not what you want. And so I actually categorize people and then talk about

the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has. Now the people who are most likely to be able to affect discernment most, at least conventionally, by undertaking these techniques are the mad scientists. Because they have access to very high levels of affect, but they have to understand themselves to do that. This was the thing. I had this background as a behavioral scientist,

and I wanted to know the why of my life, and from that to figure out the direction forward, or uphill, as you say. So I- So that was two questions. Yeah. The why and the direction forward or uphill as you say. So I- So that was two questions. Yeah. The why and the direction. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Why is that two questions rather than one? Well, the why of life is really the meaning, not all. And then once you understand the meaning, then you can figure out what direction you're going in because the direction per se is not meaning. The direction is just a direction. Yeah, okay, fine, fine. So in other words, here's the one thing about it.

That's the difference between strategy and aim. Exactly, and so in sailing, there's a concept called the rum line. Are you familiar with it? No. R-H-U-M line. And it's a very important metaphor in Spanish. It's called el rumbo in Spanish.

And that's something you use a lot, the rum line. What it is, is a direct engagement with the destination. And you have to have it if you're doing navigation and sailing. That doesn't mean you're going to go exactly to that point or you're not going to get blown off course. You can't actually make any progress unless you have a rum line.

And so that's the whole idea. The meaning is the rum line. And then you can start making progress toward the goal, notwithstanding the fact that it's not perfect. So there's an idea in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think the reason for that is that the aim sets the frame, right?

So if you start a new endeavor, which you do sequentially during the day, right? Because your day is composed of a whole variety of journeys, essentially events towards a destination. Right. You set the aim and that sets the frame of perception and it sets, it actually calibrates your emotions, right? Because positive emotion is another thing that Friston established, I think better than

anyone else. This is very cool. So negative emotion indicates a high entropy state. Too many convening rum lines, let's say. Positive emotion makes itself manifest when the entropy in relationship to a goal is decreased. So once you establish the goal, right, there's a certain calculated cost to getting there.

Right. And that cost is going to be indicated in part by anxiety because it indicates, well, what it's going to, the risk for the endeavor. Okay. When you take a step forward to the location, you reduce the entropy because the probability that you'll succeed is now increased. Right. And that decrease in entropy is marked by dopaminergic activation, positive emotion. Yeah. So it's so cool because it means this is so cool. It's one of the things I've been lecturing to people about as I travel.

It's like your aim sets your emotional frame. Like there's almost nothing more important to understand than that. It's like, because your brain can't compute what's positive until it knows what the direction is and it sees you making progress. So no aim, first rule, there is no aim, no positive emotion. And the second rule is progress towards an aim

once specified is positive emotion. And then there's a corollary, which is something like, well, it's like steepness of approach. Let's say you make some approach to a goal, but the goal doesn't really matter. It's like, you're not gonna get a lot of approach. Let's say you make some approach to a goal, but the goal doesn't really matter. It's like you're not going to get a lot of kick. But let's say if you have a really high-order goal, that would be one that would be divinely inspired, let's say. Well, then any progress towards that is going to give you a kick.

And the progress is actually what instantiates the liking, the wanting, liking, learning process that's from dopamine. Yes. That's what it comes from. Humans are made for progress, not for arrival. And so the whole process is, okay, discern the rum line, figure out the instantiation of what that means, practically speaking, and then start making progress toward it.

That's what a leader communicates to people. That's exactly right. That's why people will run through a wall for a great leader, but that's what you must do for yourself. So I got something cool to tell you about that psychobiologically. I learned this from a friend of mine.

I did a podcast with him and he's a deep biological thinker and he was very interested in honeybee communication. So what honeybees do is they go find a flower patch that's a treasure store, let's say, right? So it's a name for the honeybees do is they go find a flower patch that's a treasure store, let's say, right? So it's an aim for the honeybees. And they go back and they communicate about the direction and the distance. So they communicate about the energy

that has to be expended to go to this flower bed. But one question the other bees have, so to speak, is well, is the journey worth the effort? And the way the honeybees communicate that is that the more rich the storehouse, the faster they dance. It's exactly the same thing that enthusiastic leaders do when they're talking about the goal.

It's like, so the way people calibrate that is like, if I can see you enthusiastic and energetic about something, I assume that you truly believe that the goal is worth the effort. Right. Because otherwise you wouldn't risk expending that much energy. Exactly. Well, I think it's so damn comical that it's stable across like honeybees and people. Oh yeah, no, no.

I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that psychology is biology. They just don't know the biology. They just don't understand the biology. Yeah, yeah. Right? And so, but there's another weird angle on this though. See, this is one of the great paradoxes of this. So do you want to have progress in your life?

Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning? Number one, discern. Number two, create a strategy about actually how to arrive at the object of your discernment. And number three, start making progress toward it. Yeah, exactly. This is like one, two, three. This is what I advise.

Behavior therapy 101. This is when I'm talking to young men. Yeah, yes, definitely. Because it's all the email that I get, all the email that you get is from young people in their 20s. How do I fall in love and stand love? How do I find a job that's actually gonna give me

fulfillment? How do I have the life that I wanna have because I have this hollowness in my life? It's like one, two, three. This is what we talk about. Here's the paradox. Here's the hell of it. If you arrive, it's a problem.

Yeah, right. Because that's the arrival fallacy that we come up with. So a lot of people will say, why do all diets fail? Because they basically do. 95% of diets fail in so far as at one year after the inception of a diet, people are way more than they did at the beginning of the diet. This is before the GLP-1 drugs, etc. etc. Why? And the reason is because you will forgo all of the food that you like if you see the scale go down because progress is everything. Because humans are made for progress. All of our utility,

all of our... We get so much dopamine in the wanting, liking, learning process actually from progress. The reward for actually hitting your goal is you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. That's why 30% of stringent diets lead to eating disorders.

Because people are like, I want more progress. And so they keep making progress. And that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much. So the paradox of all this is you better have a rum line and that rum line better be pinned someplace else. So one of the, I've been studying these ancient stories

in the Old Testament a lot. Congratulations on the new book. Oh, thank you. It's phenomenal. Oh, thank you. So one of the things that I really tried to delve into was Jacob's vision. Yeah. It's very cool because Jacob,

when he has the vision of Jacob's ladder, Jacob's a bad guy. Yeah. He's in collusion with his Oedipal mother. His mother, yeah. He's deceived his father, he's betrayed his brother, he's a mama's boy, he's intellectually arrogant, he's a coward, he's a bad guy.

He's a completely unlikable character. Yes, exactly, but then he leaves and he decides that he's gonna be good. He's gonna try to be good. That's when he has that dream. Now the thing that's cool about the dream that's relevant to our discussion is that, so you have this Jacob's ladder, which, what would you say, spirals up into the ineffable,

right? You can't see the pinnacle. The pinnacle is wherever God is, but you can't see that. And the reason I think that that's relevant and important is because of the paradox that you just described. If you reach your goal, you satiate the system, and the motivational framework disappears, right? So that means there's no direction and there's no hope.

That's the problem. It's weird, because you've attained your goal, but now you're directionless, and technically you're hopeless, because hope comes in consequence of positive emotion in relationship to a goal. So actually what you want, you might think that paradise is the land of milk and honey, so to speak,

that it's the land of infinite satiation. But the problem with that is satiation destroys the frame and destroys hope. So actually what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's ladder. It's like, so you climb, this is different than Sisyphus, right?

Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill and then it rolls back down the same hill. It's like, no, what you actually want is a mountain. And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another mountain. And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another one. And that never comes to an end.

So that would be an inexhaustible source of motivation and hope. And it is independent, in a way, it's independent of accomplishment because there is no final goal. But you don't want there to be a final goal because then you run into the problem of, the paradoxical problem of satiation, right?

And it is also strange, and you were touching on this, that one of the really weird things about human beings is that we're far more seeking oriented than satiation oriented. Right, is that we do want the adventure, we want the craving, we want the desire. The progress. Yeah, and the progress.

More than we want the attainment. Absolutely. You know, like I had a client once, I had a funny conversation with him. He had this dream of retiring when he was like 50, you know, and he had a pretty cut and dried, ordinary algorithmic job, you know, and so it was okay, but it wasn't a thrill. It wasn't the meaning of his life. You know, and I said, well, what's your vision for retirement?

And he said, well, I imagine being on a beach in the Caribbean with like a Mai Tai in my hand. And I thought, well, that's a travel poster, not a plan. And so I talked to him about it. I said, well, look, you're like a middle-aged white guy. You're gonna sit on the damn beach for one day and you're gonna be so sunburned, you're gonna have to hide for two weeks.

And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna drink like five Mai Tais a day or 20? For how long? You're gonna drink like five Mai Tais a day or 20? For how long? You're gonna be an alcoholic at no time flat. You've got no orientation or goal. There was nothing to it at all, right? Good luck on your divorce. Well, right, right, right.

And your cirrhosis. These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years. So you can make a bunch of money in finance, of course. If you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out raring to go. By 49, you have $400 million. And I've seen this again and again and again that's what I've worked for, the privilege to work with.

They retire at 49, why? Because they don't like their work. Their work is backbreaking and they can't see their families and they don't have love in their lives, but they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives. And so they retire at 49.

And then they become very good at golf or tennis. And they get a nice dark tan. Pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach and then their life really falls apart. And here's the thing, Jordan. Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true because he will find that he had the wrong dreams.

This is a real problem. Well, that's had the wrong dreams. Yeah, right, exactly. This is a real problem. Well, that's also part and parcel of the call to religious humility. It's like, I wanna get what I want. It's like, what makes you so sure you're right about what you want? So I think that notion of,

this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot because she really learned this in the last few years, is that, so we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal. Okay, so that's sort of predicated in part, you can think about that as a religious relationship with the unknown, it's sort of predicated on part on your a priori presumption that you don't know finally what's good for you.

Now, what you could want is to learn that and discover it, right? But that's like an ongoing relationship. And what that does is it provides a solution to the problem of you getting what you want and finding out that it wasn't the right thing. Because you still want a journey forward, you want to sell it forth, so to speak,

but you have to do that in ignorance and humility. And you have to do that understanding that as you make progress, you're going to shift the goal that you're seeking and that that should happen. Right. Because otherwise you run into exactly the paradox that you described. Exactly right. And you have to recognize that heaven is not on earth.

Heaven isn't heaven. It's fine if there's an end to the rum line, as long as it's unattainable in this particular life because we are not geared toward it. Yeah, well that's a cool observation. That's why heaven is so important. Yeah, well, you know, I've thought about that a lot, this notion of life abundant in eternity. Like that's, we tend to read that concretized and think about that as something like life after death,

but that's not what it is. It's, as far as I can tell, it's something like the state that exists when you posit an amorphous, indefinite goal as your ultimate goal, because that imbues everything local with a kind of global significance, right? I'm pursuing the best, and that's how it's manifesting itself in the moment.

And that's life eternal, because there's an element of it that's timeless. So, you know, in the Serm And that's life eternal because there's an element of it that's timeless. So you know, in the Sermon on the Mount, it's a guide to what you just described. Christ says, it's very specific. He says, first of all, focus your attention on the highest imaginable. Okay, whatever that is. You don't know exactly, right? But it's because it's indefinite and it's ineffable

and it's beyond you, but that's what you want to, that's what you're orienting towards. So you establish your, then pay attention to the moment. Exactly, and let me put one more twist in this as part of discernment. So making progress on the wrong line is practically speaking in worldly terms, having more. Having more of what?

More money, power, pleasure, fame, more family relationships, more prestige, whatever it happens to be. But the real twist is not just having more. Satisfaction that you can actually count on in life is not more having more of the things that you want. It's wanting less. Haves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust. And so the goal should be for all of us,

increasing the numerator, having more with respect to our goals, moving on the run line. Right. And wanting less. Or learning to be, okay, so. Wanting less. My wife just did a talk in Salt Lake City and what she had focused this talk on was gratitude

and she learned this. She started to practice being grateful when she was dying. It's a very strange time to start practicing being grateful but one of the things that you can think through when you're in dire straits, this is what happens in the story of Job by the way, is that, well imagine everything falls apart for you. Right. Okay, now you could ask yourself,

how could I make this worse? And the answer to that is, well, I could be resentful and deceitful and arrogant and unhappy and bitter. Which, by the way, is our psychological baseline from the Pleistocene, we're evolved toward resentment. We're evolved toward anger and fear, because literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative affect.

In the limbic system of the brain as opposed to positive affect because it keeps you alive. Yeah, yeah, well. It's like Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors starting the Pleistocene were resentful. And the result of that is that you're evolved to say,

you know, first class United Airlines has really gone downhill Mm-hmm, right as opposed to I'm getting there safe I'm sitting in the front of the plane. I'm gonna get off early and they're gonna give me something to eat. It's unbelievable That's why they're right dude Gratitude is a is a divine thing. Mm-hmm practice. It's a standing up to your limbic system It's managing your effective your limbic system. It's managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you. Right.

Yeah, so you're well, the presumption would be exactly that is that the default attitude, the default untrained attitude is likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotion and resentful. Right. Right. But that isn't fate. You can train yourself out of that. And part of the way you do that, and I saw her do this when she was dying,

which was really quite something to see. She decided as an act of will to focus on what she was grateful for and to become an expert at that. And that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when an expert at that, right? And that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when they think about expertise, right? Because they think of something like propositional knowledge rather than attitude.

But it's definitely the case that you can, you can what, cultivate wealth, what traditional people, traditional European Christians, for example, knew that you could cultivate virtue. And that's a very specific phrase. It's that cultivation is practice. Yes, absolutely. Now this discernment idea.

By the way, one thing, by the way, when your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference at Salt Lake City, my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness, which is also adapted, which is also standing up to the limit. Right, right, right. See, our wives who are godly Catholic women

will be unto them being married to us. Imagine this. Yeah, no, I don't like to imagine. And they're leading us in paths of righteousness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful parallel. So discernment, that's an archaic phraseology, discernment. And that wasn't something that I saw a psychologist study

when I was in the thick of the research enterprise. And so why discernment specific, like why discernment? Why that terminology? Why happiness? Why did those things, and how was that related? How was your pursuit of those, as an intellectual enterprise, associated with that pilgrimage that you took?

So discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and essence dichotomy. So philosophically, we've been going back and forth forever. What precedes what, essence or existence? That the, of course, in the 19th and 20th century, Sartre and all of the existentialists would say that existence precedes essence. You're born without a meaning.

Meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it, or no, no, until you create it. That's what Sartre said. The ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning. The Christian life. That was Nietzsche's presumption as well. Exactly right. Well, actually, Nietzsche's presumption as well. Exactly right.

Well, actually Nietzsche was stronger. Nietzsche said that there is no essence, so stop looking for all intents and purposes. It's like stop wasting your time for Pete's sake because actually trying to create this illusion of meaning, this illusion of essence, what you're going to be, you're feeding into this global kind of delusion that people have. Now, the ancient Greeks, which of course led to, and the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition

is no, no, no, no, no, essence precedes existence. And that means your job in life is to discover your essence. To discern. To discover, and that's discernment. Okay, okay. And that's what I believe. Okay, it seems to me that in the story of, in the Genesis account, to discover and that's discernment. And that's what I believe. That's why the kids are there. In the story of, in Genesis' account,

God basically tells Adam and Eve that they have unlimited freedom in the garden except for one thing. And I think it's associated with this idea of discernment because they're not supposed to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which I believe means they're not to make the presumption that they can establish the fundamental axioms of the moral order.

They have to discern it. They have to find their way. But that way is implicit in being and reflective of its substructure, something like that. There is truth. There is rightness. Yes. There are things that actually exist. It isn't all subjective.

Edmund Husserl, I mean, in Phenomenology, talks about the essence of reality is what you perceive. That's the beginning of the problem. Right there, that's the beginning of the problem. We believe, you and I believe, I think, that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality and the adventure of life is figuring it out. And so that I want to align my perception with reality,

that's my goal in life. Yeah, well, I think that's also a good definition of mental health. Okay, fine, I understand, yeah. So, well, how did you then come to the conclusion that there was an implicit or an implicate order and that the goal was discernment rather than, because the typical intellectual,

the typical Luciferian intellectual is gonna make the presumption that there is no moral order but that it can be imposed, particularly by a powerful intellect. And that, well, that is the Luciferian temptation and it tends to go very badly wrong. But I'm very curious about why it was that you took the alternative pathway.

Like what clued you into the fact that, well misery can do it if you're wise, but what clued you into the fact that there was an implicate order and that the goal was discernment? That's a, I got lucky. I think I got lucky. I was, my father was a mathematician. And here's the funny thing. There's a lot of social science studies. People ask me all the time, how do I raise

my kids in the church? So the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith. The most important thing in my life. That started when I was a kid. How old? Since before I can remember. Why was it the most important? Because it was just the central thing in my life. And here's probably the reason. So what we find when people ask, how do I raise my kids in the faith, right?

The answer is have them see the most powerful, physical person in their life worshiping. It doesn't matter what you say. You know this about because your dad, your father, like me, it doesn't matter what you say. You know this about because your dad, your father like me, it does not matter what you say. All that matters is what they see. Because that's how they receive information. And there's lots and lots of behavioral science.

Well, that indicates the status hierarchy in a very concrete manner. Exactly right. And my father, who is a scientist, he had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a mathematician by background of what he taught as a university professor. He was a proud man. He would have been on his knees in front of no other man, but on Sundays he was on his

knees. And that had a huge impact on the little guy. That had a huge impact on me. Right. So you respected your father. There was something bigger than my... I mean, I thought my dad was so powerful that he could lift the house.

Right, right, right. He was a math professor. He could not. Right. And I saw my father on his knees and that had this impact. Now, maybe, maybe I have the God gene. You know, maybe what we'll actually find out with, you know, the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science that there's a God center in the brain that

we have particular proclivities for, whatever it happens to be. But I don't think so. I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an honorable, admirable man like my father, and my father stood in awe of the Lord. That's what I wanted to be. Look, I wake up, Jordan, I wake up many days an atheist. I wake up, I don't know, but then I decide to worship,

and I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do. That's the ultimate rum line of my life. And behavioral science notwithstanding, that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious in life. I actually think that we've probably got this relatively well modeled on the neuroscientific front.

It's not completely compiled yet, but proximal goals are nested in distal goals and distal goals are nested in still further distal goals. And some of those are explicit, but then they fade off into implicit, and they're nested in higher order implicit goals, all the way up to the unspeakable, the ineffable. Like one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize conscience, conscience is a very weird phenomenon. I think about it as the voice of... Conscience, not consciousness. Conscience, yeah. It's like the voice of makes not consciousness, conscience. Yeah.

It's like the voice of negative emotion. So conscience is an orienting function that tells you when you've deviated from the path. Right. Okay. What path? Right. Well, okay.

So imagine now you're pursuing a proximal goal, but in that pursuit, you betray a more distal goal. The voice of the more distal goal will appear to you as conscience. And the distal goal has a more distal goal because these things are nested all the way up because we have some relationship with what the future and other people and the infinite.

And so there is a voice of the infinite distal and that's conscience. This is tumistic, this is purely tumistic. And it's, right? I mean, this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until the, ultimately there is a creation of the first goal. It's the first mover, the first teleological mover.

Right, right, which is also operating constantly. Yes. I mean, the operation of the God in Genesis at the beginning of time, it's not the beginning Genesis at the beginning of time, it's not the beginning, exactly the beginning of time. It is that, but it's not just that, it's all beginnings, right, including the beginnings that start now. It's the same process that's operating.

And it is the voice of that process that makes itself manifest as conscience. I think that's literally and neurologically true as well as theologically true. I think that's right. And I think that we could make a very compelling argument that people have in our field that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic. I think that's a totally legitimate argument. Well, you can imagine too, imagine this, is that So imagine this, is that as our cortex evolved, we moved from immediate local gratification to long-term future orientation.

Okay, so the cortex allows for that, and that's what maturation does. But it's not just the future. So now everything that makes itself manifest in the present on the hedonistic front, so the satiation of immediate motivations, has to be construed in relationship to its future consequences. Okay, so that puts... And then the future is, well, what time span? Yeah, this is time travel, which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by way,

called the prefrontal cortex. Yeah, right, exactly. And many people believe, by the way, that Adam and Eve became our ancestors, fully became our ancestors with a knowledge of good and evil because of self-consciousness, which we became, in the moment that the prefrontal cortex allowed that. That's the- Right, right. That's apprehend, okay.

Well, there's a parallel, I think, as well. Like, I don't think there's any difference between inclusion of the future in the purview of your perceptions and inclusion of other people. And it's partly because, so one of the things that I studied psychopaths for a long time,

and you think of psychopaths as selfish, right? Self-centered. But it's weird because psychopaths betrayed themselves all the time because they don't learn from experience. So they get what they want now, but they fail. And so then I thought, oh, well psychopaths don't care about other people. They also don't care about their future selves.

Then I thought, oh, that's the same thing. They don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse. Well, they certainly don't have remorse. Dark triads, or you like to talk about dark tetrads if you're bringing sadism of course, but the characteristic of people above average in psychopathy is the lack of remorse.

Yeah, well that- Lack of remorse is an inability to learn. Yes. You hurt somebody, you did something wrong, it had consequences if you don't feel remorse. That remorse is activating the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain, which is making you feel social pain.

Right. You don't feel that if you have psychopathic tendencies. Yes, and then, well, and if that pain doesn't make itself, like I think that pain is the felt sense of the eradication of a neurological system. So like imagine that you, that a system emerges in this Darwinian sense to dominate. So now you're under its sway.

Okay, now it has a goal in mind, and when it makes itself manifest, it fails. Okay, the consequence of that failure should be the destruction of that system. I think that felt pain is the psychological consequence of the death of a system that failed to meet its goals. Now it's gonna struggle and fight to maintain itself even in the face of failure, right? Which is why it's hard to get rid of a system that failed to meet its goals. Now it's gonna struggle and fight to maintain itself even in the face of failure, right?

Which is why it's hard to get rid of a bad habit, for example. It's a living thing. It's not gonna give up without a struggle. But the corollary of that would be approximately equivalent to what you just said. There's no learning because there's no remorse because there's no difference between remorse and learning.

The first stage of learning is, oh, I was wrong. That has to go. That's a sacrificial offering too, right? That part of me has to go. And it's going, no, no, I wanna live and fair enough. And sometimes like if you're really poorly oriented in your life and you fail cataclysmically, an awful lot of you has to go.

You know, when a dominant- And by the way, this gets back to your wife talking about gratitude, by the way, because the same thing. It's the prefrontal cortex saying, no, no, no, no, no. You limbic system evolved to feel resentment. That's not, that's maladaptive. Yes. And I have decided to reprogram the limbic system,

which tends toward resentment, and I'm going to reprogram it. It's the same basic pattern. This is self-management. This is the essence of self-leadership. Doing what feels good, if it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, avoid it. It's being managed by your ancestors.

Yeah, well the problem with that attitude is, well, in relationship to who and over what time span. And that's a huge problem. If you have a dominant lobster, a lot of investigation into crustacean neurology, because it's well mapped out. If a dominant lobster who ages is defeated in a battle, his brain dissolves and reconstitutes as a subordinate brain.

Right. Exactly the same thing happens to us. Because the neuromodulatory activity in the limbic system of the lobster brain. Once again, because psychology is biology. The lobster can't do anything about that. The big dominant alpha lobster, if there is such a thing, is going to fight to try to maintain that position. Yes. And if it fails, well the lobster brain is so simple that it can't be subordinate sometimes and dominant sometimes. So it's either victor or not. And when it loses, the victor brain is no good,

so it has to go, and so it dissolves. And we can make decisions, and that's the divine in us. That's the difference. And this is the essence of being fully human, fully alive. Saint Irenaeus said, the glory of God is a man fully alive. What does it mean to be a man fully alive? It is managing your limbic system.

It is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people. It is actually, it is getting beyond who you were as a person. It's deciding to worship even though you don't feel a single milligram of faith on a particular day. When everything falls apart for Job,

his wife says, and we presume she loves him and that she knows he's a good man, she says, there's nothing left for you but to curse God and die. Right. And she means it. Yeah, yeah. And his attitude is, no matter what's happening to me

right now, no matter the depth of my suffering, I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness, I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness and I refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being and becoming itself. And that is a decision, right? It's a decision. Right. Right, because it's weird, because the evidence,

and this is what his wife tells him, it's like the evidence is that you're done. You've tried really hard, you were a good person, everyone knows it, even God, and yet everything's been stripped away from you and you're in the most miserable, imaginable position. You should curse God and die. That's what you would do if you were acting

in accordance with the facts. If you're purely limbic, there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely, a logical decision to commit suicide. If they're purely limbic. However, the divine in us, the divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral, our less evolved selves.

Default, default selves. It's the bumper of tissue behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex, which is a miracle. My dog Chucho can't do that. He can't time travel. He can't manage his emotions. The essence of being fully alive is doing exactly that. This is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so desperate.

They don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks. They don't have to go suffer through a PhD. They don't have to become behavioral scientists Peterson and Arthur Brooks. They don't have to go, you know, suffer through a PhD. They don't have to become behavioral scientists. They have to learn to manage themselves. They have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their limbic systems. That's what it... and that takes practice and that takes commitment and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along. It's interesting because the best indicator of somebody being able to manage in a man,

his limbic system, is a good partner. Job's wife is the one who says, curse God and die, right? Interestingly, chapter 38 of Job is where he puts God in the dock and he says, you know, all right, everybody told me to curse you and die and all that all this bad stuff. So what gives? I'm a righteous man, what gives?

And then God actually turns it around and says, what do you know? You're so smart, where were you when I created the stars in the sky? The whole story is not evident to you. And Joel accepts that. He says, look, I can take solace in my ignorance. Exactly right.

Which is very useful, to take solace, because your ignorance is infinite. There's a lot of place for solace in that. Self-management is the essence of, well, humility requires self-management too. We're not evolved to be humble. Yes. We are evolved as tribal societies to be humbled,

but not to be humble. To be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to live our best lives. Right, that's wisdom. And that's the 30th chapter of Job. That's the capstone of that thing. That's the big point at the end of the day where he is victorious but still doesn't understand,

puts God in the dock, and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives. Yeah, okay, so let's go back at happiness. So because what you could say and thrives. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back at happiness. Because what you could say that the folk understanding of happiness is something like the gratification of a toddler's whim. Right. Right, a toddler's having a tantrum in a store and his mother, defeated, gives him the chocolate

bar. And so now the child stops squawking and bitching and being subsumed by negative emotion and maybe smiles. And so you think, well, that's happiness. Okay, but that's not the kind of happiness that you're describing. That's gratification.

Okay. Just gratification, and that's a feeling. Okay, so why, look, if you're hedonistically oriented, why not be skeptical about your proposition that it's something other than immediate hedonistic gratification that constitutes happiness? And certainly Epicurus would have been. And so the whole Epicurean tradition of trying to maintain

positive feelings as much as possible. Yes. And again, he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense. He was actually a highly moral character. But the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who like you and to have non-disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has

as little conflict as possible. Which is catastrophically wrong. Because unless you have sanctified suffering in your life, you will not become strong, you will not learn, you will not grow, and you'll make no progress on your own life. Well, you also won't be able to withstand suffering when it comes, it will. Which is, I mean, it's like, my students ask me,

so professor, are you saying I need to go look for suffering and say don't worry, we'll find you. Yeah, right, you don't need to look for it. Exactly, right, so. Right, so, okay, so, but then why conceptualize it exactly as happiness? Because happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings and happiness are like the smell

of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner. You would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey. The feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible. So we know, I mean, you and I are pretty interested in nutrition, that all food is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. These are the macronutrients of all food, including your Thanksgiving dinner. The macronutrients of happiness, which have residual smells, just emotions from the limbic

system, the constituent parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. These are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that they consider to be the highest levels of wellbeing. Now, enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure. On the contrary, pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area in the ventral striatum of the brain. And you tap it in all sorts of,

you can get pleasure in all sorts of things. If your girlfriend says, I love you, or you have a big bump of cocaine, whatever it happens to be, you'll get the same because we have a thrifty brain. But that's not enjoyment. Enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced

in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In other words, it has pleasure involved, but it adds people in memory, thus making it a permanent experience. And that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I teach my students. Right, so the problem with immediate gratification,

at least in part, is that it lacks the dimension of sustainability. Exactly right. And interability. And self-management. Because once it's in your prefrontal cortex, you can manage your pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you.

So one of the things I'll tell my students is that something that gives you a lot of pleasure, and it can be addictive, which most pleasures can be. Not all, I mean, walking in the woods and saying your prayers, not particularly addictive, but highly glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all that. If you're doing any of those things

and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. Because you're not gonna be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and it won't be a source of happiness. What's the mediating, what mediating role does social engagement, is that something like a precondition for iteration? Yeah, well, it's such that you, part of it is that by adding a human dimension to it,

you're largely mediating the experience using your prefrontal cortex. That's just as an empirical observation when you take... Why? Because it becomes memorable when you add people into it. Pleasure is not memorable. But when you add a relationship... Okay, so let's think about the difference between

pornography and sex with a partner. Right. Because that's a good comparison. Okay, so now the thing about sex with a partner, because that's a good comparison. Okay, so now the thing about sex with a partner is that, especially if you want it to be repeated, you need to take the other person into account. So there's a, you could call that a civilizing factor, right? It's much more complicated activity.

It's a higher level of consciousness. You're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about the physical act. You're thinking about the mediating human experience that you're having. Right, so okay, so you've got- All right, so you're under the thrall of the sexual impulse, right?

Which has a drive-like characteristic and which has a certain set of biological activations. And pornography would only be that. It strips it of everything except for those biological impulses. Right, so it reduces it to the lowest possible common denominator. It reduces dimensionality. Right, okay, the question is why is that not optimal?

Right. Right? Because that's what we're trying to get at. Okay, so now you introduce a partner. The question is why is that not optimal? Right? Because that's what we're trying to get at. Okay, so now you introduce a partner. Well, there's novelty in the partner, so that's dopaminergic kit because you don't know exactly what the partner's going to do. And then it complexifies it in the positive way

because it brings elements of love and relationship and mutual caring. Which are beyond the pure limbic system. Yeah, yeah. So it's not just a purely limbic activity. So the whole problem is when you. That's sanctification in a sense or sacralization. It really is, exactly. Right, which is why it's placed in the context of marriage.

I mean, that's the rule on the moral religious front. There's no sex without marriage, which means something like no sex without commitment and mutuality and long-term relationships. So it's contextualizing it. That makes it more sophisticated. Now you also associate that, but the thing that's interesting about the argument

you're making is that you also associate that with a, what with a deepening and intensification of, you call it enjoyment. Right. Well, I just call it enjoyment. And I'm using that particular term because enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more nuanced, dimensional, and sophisticated than pure pleasure. Now this is a problem with the language, of course, because this is a problem with happiness in general because it has a million different things to say. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Well, that's why we have to get to the definition. So there's not, yeah. Well, so if you're talking to a young person, you would say, a wise man would substitute enjoyment for pleasure. And his logical response to that would be why. Right. Okay, so why? And the reason is because enjoyment is permanent

and pleasure is temporal, automatic, and animal. That's the problem. And as such. Okay, but I say, so, okay, so I get it all. My dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can. My dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can. My dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife that I can

Because my dog's brain is incapable of so is it do you think it's fundamentally? Would you reduce it to the degree that you can reduce it to something like? Predictable interability like is that the payoff probably and I think that that's part of the miracle Reciprocal interability so I can I like that, I want to do that again for these particular reasons. Okay, so that would be the difference. Okay, here's an example. Tell me what you think of this.

This example, people who are watching will be familiar with this story, but it's such a useful story, it doesn't matter. When animal behavior started to study play, they watched rats wrestle. Okay, now the assumption was they noticed that if you take a juvenile rat, male, they like to wrestle. If the one juvenile was 10% bigger than the other, he could reliably win in a single bout. Pretty much every time.

Every time. Every time. He'd pin. And that was the marker. Okay. So then the conclusion from that was that play was a form of dominance behavior and what the victorious rat did was dominate and that that was pleasurable because it was a victory.

But then, but then, Penksep did this. He thought, yeah, but rats live in a social environment, so they don't play once, they play repeatedly. Which is like, he should have got a Nobel Prize for this. It's such a brilliant insight. It's like, well, do the rules for iterable play, are they the same as the rules for one bout play? And the answer was no, because what Panksepp showed

was that if you paired rats together repeatedly, the big rats that didn't let the little rats win 30% of the time didn't get invited to play. Right, so then you could imagine that maybe this is a technical way of thinking about enjoyment instead of pleasure, is that pleasure is a one-off and you could even exploit for pleasure.

But if you want, instead, let's say you want to make an arrangement that's iterable, and if better maybe, one that iterates and improves. Right. Right, because obviously that's better. If it's good once, then it should be good multiple times. And if it's good and could be made better, that would even be better.

Right. Right, so that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within a relationship. Exactly right. Well, so that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within a relationship. Well, you know the people who have the most sex are religious married people, which is hilarious. That's Brad Wilcox's stuff. That's the funniest statistic. I know, and it's like nobody believes that.

I know, it's like so much for the sexual revolution. It's like you want sex? Be religious and married. And be loyal to your wife. That's right. Oh, great. But here's like, you want sex? Be religious and married. And be loyal to your wife. That's right. Oh, great. So, but here's the thing that gets back to the work that you've done over the years.

Who is it who can't learn this? And the answer is dark triads. Who can't learn this? Why? Because narcissism, it's all about me. Machiavellianism, I'm willing to hurt you. Psychopathy, I feel no remorse. Satanism, I enjoy it. I'm not going to learn.

And so the result is that dark triads, they tend to exhibit compulsive, addictive behavior over and over again. They're- It's self-defeating. They don't enjoy their lives because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoyment.

They're incapable of actually- Well, so in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, so Cain is a dark tetrad type, he becomes a murderer, and then his descendants become genocidal. But the end of that story is extremely interesting, because God sentences Cain to wander. So he has to move from place to place,

which is what psychopaths do, by the way, because they can't exploit the same people over and over. They have to move from place to place, which is what psychopaths do, by the way, because they can't exploit the same people over and over. They have to move. But he also wanders in the land of Nod. And the land of Nod is being traditionally associated with sleep and unconsciousness. So the moral of the story is that if you're a psychopathic manipulator,

you end up wandering unconsciously. And your life, Cain says, my life has become a, he says, I can't stand the punishment. I can't tolerate the consequences of my actions. Yeah, we sound just like an addict. We sound just like an alcoholic. It sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or pornography.

Somebody who's subjugated to something, a repetitive behavior that they can't control. That's what that sounds like. And that's the reason, ultimately. And so how do you break out of it? You know, when we talk, I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in addiction communities. And people say, I gotta quit drinking.

No, you need to substitute something better. That's what it comes down to. Because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap. Something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on pleasure. Yeah. That's what, and that requires relationship and that requires love and that requires memory. Why memory? Memory is such that you can actually, enjoyment requires that you can, that it be a permanent experience. Right. But what's the specific rule of memory? Memory is such that you can actually, enjoyment requires that it be a permanent experience.

Right, but what's the specific role of memory? I get the role of permanence, but you've brought up memory a couple of times. It's like, is it that the experience enriches as it's multiplied? It's like listening to a song that you love in many different contexts? When I was a kid, I grew up in a lower middle class home

in Seattle, and we would have Thanksgiving like every other family. And every year, my mother was good cook, and there would be this big turkey, you know how we do it. Yeah, I think you have Thanksgiving in October, but November is such a big deal. Because by November, there's nothing to be thankful for. That's why you're at that point,

you know, north of the border, it's pretty cramped. Exactly. Every year, my mother would make this golden brown, beautiful turkey. And my dad would say, oh, it's so beautiful, honey. My dad loved my mom so much. And he would go and get the Instamatic camera. And he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment, that beautiful moment.

Now, what was he trying to do? He was trying to memorialize something that was gonna be highly pleasurable to eat such that we could enjoy that moment again and again and again. Now we have 30 pictures of identical turkeys in the identical oven. Okay, so memory there is something like a marker for,

a marker, not just a marker for permanence, but an actual indicator of permanence. That's just how I make things permanent. Okay, so basically, tell me if I'm correct about that. You seem to be making the case that, I mean, this is a restatement of something we already discussed, but I wanna get right to the heart of the matter,

is that, well, why would you settle for pleasure? Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be like walking in the eternal garden, so to speak. You're gonna substitute permanence and maybe improving permanence for the momentary pleasure. Right, well, okay, so I've been thinking about this in terms of maturation, because I think a lot of the things

that we see as hedonistic and power-mad pathologies are just sustained immaturity. So, because toddlers are immature and they're whim-driven and they're not social. They can't truly play, not until they're about three. That's when they start to unify. A three-year-old begins to be able to adopt a shared mutual goal, and that's the basis

of mutual understanding and friendship. And true friendship emerges when that process of establishing a mutual goal iterates across playabouts. Okay, and so you can see an extension of temporal awareness there and a broadening of social relationship. And the reason the two-year-old, it's weird, because the two-year-old now has to take turns. And that's a sacrifice because he doesn't get to be first all the time. And

that'll produce a tantrum when that's first being learned, especially with an aggressive kid. But the payoff is, well, you don't get to be first, but you get to have way more games. Yeah, it's the rats. Right. It's the rats. Yes, yes. Exactly the same thing. The rat gets to have a friend. And so he only wins 70% of the time, but he plays a hundred games instead of one.

It works out. Right, exactly. Okay, so like I worked with these guys in Montreal, we delve very deeply into the origins of antisocial and psychopathic behavior. Okay, so the first thing that we learned was that the most aggressive human beings are two-year-olds.

Right. Right, so if you group human beings together in age-matched groups, there's more kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing among two-year-olds than any other group. Right. Okay, now if you look at the two-year-olds, what you see is that most of the two-year-olds who do that are male, and it's a minority of males. Yeah, about 5%. Yeah, 5%.

Most of that minority is socialized by the age of four. Okay, the ones that aren't socialized are the repeat psychopathic offenders. And so what it seems to me is just just the absence of cortical maturation. Now, you know, classic penological theory, like I learned this kind of painfully because I was a little romantic in my attitude, I suppose before this, there's a crime age relationship, right? So criminality spikes like mad at 15.

And then it's at 15 to 19 is the real like crucial period for being a delinquent psychopath. So what happens is these aggressive kids, they maintain a high level of aggression. Normal boys match that level of aggression from 15 to 19 and then it goes down. Whereas the chronic antisocial types just stay high. If you imprison them till they're in their late 20s, they mature. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, that's right. So part of this is the synaptic development between the Olympic system and the prefrontal cortex.

That wiring is not complete in human females till age about age 21. In human males till like 70. I don't know. It's later. And that's one of the reasons, by the way. Two of my kids are military. Two of my kids are US Marines. And my son, Carlos, my middle son, he's a special operator.

He was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps. His job was to jump out of helicopters at night, down a rope, into a theater of battle, and with a high-powered rifle, and then shoot with optics at night. That's a really dangerous thing to do. That's a really dangerous thing to do. That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do. That was super fun for him at 20. I don't wanna have anything to do with that. Why?

Why was he willing to do this? And the answer is because he did not have adequate synaptic development between his limbic system and his prefrontal cortex. Well, there'd also likely be, like, you know, males are more expendable, and the more adventurous males, adventurousness is a high risk, high return investment. And man, well, so there's these great studies, you must know about these studies, of the

drug gangs in Chicago. The guy who did the studies promised the gang leader, it was a big drug gang, that he would write a book about him. And yeah, yeah, you know about this. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so they found out that the default drug dealer made less than minimum wage.

Almost all of them- And lived with his mom. And almost all of them were employed. Right, but the reason they were willing to take the risk was because the status kick made them much more reproductively successful and deaths among the higher ups opened up avenues of progress.

So even though low level drug dealing didn't even pay minimum wage, the opportunity for status was high and the relationship between status and reproductive success was unbelievable because it's like the relationship between socioeconomic position and male reproductive success is like 0.6. It's insanely high.

And so it's not surprising that young men who are looking to maximize their reproductive success when they have nothing concrete to offer are going to take a high risk, high adventure route because that differentiates them. And even if it's at the cost of their own skin. It's like being a CEO, by the way. If you're a CEO of a company, you're probably going to have to leave in disgrace. If you're the Prime Minister of the UK, you're going to leave in disgrace. Or Canada, for that matter.

To take a reasonable... Congratulations, by the way. Oh, yeah. But why do they do it? Because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime, in terms of the prestige. That's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward.

By the way, Aquinas was really good on this. Thomas Aquinas, I don't think you've actually, you haven't talked very much about Thomistic thinking, right, which was this. So Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. He was a Platonist, but he said, the pupil is greater than the master

and introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13th and 14th centuries. And he said that we are animated by four idols, that God is what we ultimately want, but God isn't convenient. God is hard to understand, and a lot of one-sided conversations, and a ton of rules.

And so we take things that have kind of a God-like feeling to them, and they're fourfold. He was an outstanding behavioral scientist. He could stand up to anybody today. He said that the four idols that we have that substitute for God are money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Yeah, that's pretty good.

Money, power, pleasure, and honor. We've distinguished, we've talked about why happiness, we talked about discernment, we talked about the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Right. Okay, so let's bring this down to practicalities. Now, you teach leadership courses at Harvard, and I presume that you take a relatively practical approach to your students in relationship to what will constitute happiness.

Well, so walk us through that. We talked about the necessity of establishing a goal, and we talked about the conceptualization of happiness. And so how do you ground that in your classes? And what have you observed as the effect? So there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about, our enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And we dug in on enjoyment.

We could do exactly the same thing for satisfaction and exactly the same thing for finding meaning. What is meaning? How do you interrogate meaning in your life? How do you actually find it? And that would get us back to discernment. Because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient. Then I talk to you. So you mean by discernment, I think probably

something very similar to what I've focused on as attention. One of the things that I used to tell my clients, for example, let's say they were having mood dysregulation problems, one of the things I would teach them to do is to notice, this is way different than thinking about, notice when they were particularly miserable during the week and when they weren't.

And to approach that with a completely blank mind, it's like you'll see that there's variation in your mood. If you can catch yourself when you're less miserable than usual, then you can think, okay, what exactly, what did I do right? Or what's the context that's informing that? Well, that's discernment, it's right, right? That's kind of-

Well, you're certainly discerning something. But when I'm talking about discernment, I use it in an almost theological sense, which is to actually find the essence of your life. I think it's the same thing. I think it's the same thing, because there's something gleaming there that's calling to you, that's setting your life in order.

And this is what happens with Moses in the burning bush, by the way. That's something that beckons to him, and he discerns. That's why he goes more deeply into it. And he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him and he discerns. That's why he goes more deeply into it. And he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him. And I would say like those moments in your life where things come together,

if you're discerning enough and attentive, there's an unlimited depth to that exploration. Okay, okay. So when it comes back to- So that discernment is really is trying to find this essence of discovering what your essence is. I just don't agree with Sartre. I just believe that you can invent your essence.

We're not self inventing. I believe that we exist in ad infinitum and trying to. Otherwise we could just tell ourselves what to do. It'd be simple. I just say to myself, be happy, and I'd obey. Well, that doesn't happen. Or even worse, you would invent your essence as your identity, which is exactly what we're doing.

See, to invent your essence is a Gnostic heresy. It's to say, I am a self-inventing creature. I'm this, I'm not that. I'm one of these people, I'm not those people. There's no shared story, there's no humanity, there's no love in that, and that's the problem. But to discover your essence, that's pure humanity, because that's what links you to everything

that has always been and everything that always will be. And that's exciting, that's an adventure. That's just- Yes, I think that's by definition an adventure, actually. That's the adventure, that's what the hero's doing in the hero's exciting. That's an adventure. That's just... Yes. I think that's by definition an adventure, actually. That's the adventure. That's what the hero is doing in the hero's journey. Right. That's what a quest is.

The quest is actually discovering your essence. Discernment is you on the hero's journey. That's a Jungian thing. Okay. Right? Okay. So... And did you familiarize yourself with Jung as well?

Yeah. I mean, everybody who's a fan of yours. Yeah, yeah, well, I was wondering if there's a separate pathway to that. Because that's not standard academic knowledge. No, no, no, no, but when I actually came back five and a half years ago, as a process of discernment, to teach happiness and to create a big public apostolate in this as well, to talk in public education,

because I'm working in the public sphere, not just at Harvard University. I'm talking in media. I write a column every week in the Atlantic. I write books that I want people to watch. I do television. And the result of that is that I actually can't, I have to range really far from the roots of my discipline.

You know, my discipline is, you know, theorem proof in economics and running regressions. That's just not good enough. And so when I looked at it, you know, I have to know where do the most interesting questions come from? They come from theology, they come from philosophy, they come from art, they come from history.

That's where the interesting questions come from. They don't come from when you and I were writing our papers, when we were writing our papers inside the university. We were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data. That's the wrong place to start, which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I've ever been before. Then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation, which is the modern neuroscience, which is the cutting edge of our field.

And only then could I expose it to the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained and you and behavioral science. And then I had to talk about how do you use it? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing I'm really curious about. Contemplative practices and psychoanalytic practices, that's you. Okay, okay, okay. So when you're doing this at the business school, or at the Kennedy School for that matter, now you're focusing on the personal and the relational,

but you're doing that in the context of business and government. Okay, well, how do you square that circle? It's, business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people. The whole idea of work-life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life. If your work is not part of your life.

It presumes alienation. Yeah, absolutely. It presumes self-objectification, which is a deeply problematic and sinful thing to do. That makes you homo economicus. That's no good. Work-life balance is a problem, is the bottom line. So what I say to my students on the very first day... Yeah, it also implies that work isn't life. Absolutely not. Your life is... Or that your that work isn't life. No, no, absolutely not. Your life is. Or that your home life isn't life.

One of the two. Yeah. And what's life, leisure? Right, and what's leisure? There's a complicated problem. I'll take those of Pieper's argument that leisure is the basis of culture, but only when it's based in learning and contemplation.

That's good as opposed to what it is. And leisure is not the, people often think of leisure as the absence of work. Yeah. Right, it's like, well, that's actually boredom. No, no, I mean, I want work before the fall. Yeah, right.

I want to tend the garden. Right. Tend the garden. That's blessing. And you discover that by discernment. Yeah. And that's what you're teaching your business students. What do they think of that? Well, it's amazing.

So the first day of class I say, look, a bunch of you, you wanna start your own companies and you're startup entrepreneurs and the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs because you're going to make your fortune working for companies that other people have started, et cetera, et cetera. That's great.

But it's trivial because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the enterprise of you and you're the founder. Start treating your life as a startup today. This is what we're going to do. What do startup entrepreneurs do? They're willing and able to take risk in exchange for the potential explosive rewards

that come from it. And to understand the explosive rewards. That's an adventure. That's an adventure. And by the way, you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are. If you're thinking in Thomistic terms of money, power, pleasure, and fame,

we'll be unto you. But if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness, game on. Let's talk about how to get explosive returns in love and happiness for the entrepreneurial endeavor of you incorporated. That's how the class starts because that's the hero's journey.

And everybody's entitled to that. What do you mean by entitled? You mean it's available to them? Because we're born to it. This is to be born in the divine image of God, where God is inherently generative, God is inherently creative, God is inherently loving, and this is the gift. Not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have positive affect all day long.

Well, I guess part of the argument you're making is that that's actually a second rate substitute for the real thing. Absolutely. Right. Hedonistic happiness is, I thought about this in terms of like addiction. It's a false adventure. Absolutely. Yeah.

Absolutely. On the contrary. And so that's one of the reasons that the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which is a good life well lived, full of suffering and full of experiences and all of it. Right, right, an adventure again. That's the thing. And that's what I want everybody to have. That's what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning.

And the master stroke is to be able to say, I am truly grateful, Lord, for this day full of blessings and happy feelings. And I'm also grateful for the things that are day full of blessings and happy feelings, and I'm also grateful for the things that are gonna challenge me and help me. You want your life to be enough of an adventure so that if you wake up in pain, you get out of bed. Because you think, no, this is worth doing. This is my life.

Right, right. This is my journey. This is part of, this is the dragon I'm going to slay. And that's what I'm teaching. That's the gist of the class. And so how do the students... Okay, so I would suspect that the typical or many of the typical students,

particularly in business, it's a bit of a stereotype, but I'm going to run with it anyways for the time being, is they're going to be much more materially focused. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Rather than admiring entrepreneurs. Like, look, I worked with a bunch of startups and a bunch of these incubators in Canada,

which are all fake, by the way. It's just, oh, it was so corrupt. It was just beyond comprehension. But in any case, you know, they would dangle these visions in front of these young people who were trying to start a business of, you know, making a unicorn and selling out for $100 million

and then sitting on the beach and having my ties. It's like, it was just complete. Well, it was so complete. It was a complete lie. It was corrupting beyond belief. And it's counterproductive because while your enterprise should be the thing, it's like, you don't wanna sell your company

unless you can think of a better company because you get to have your company and you get to expand it and you get to of a better company, because you get to have your company, and you get to expand it, and you get to bring benefit to the world, and you get to learn. And then it's like, okay, now, when you get your students at the Kennedy School or at the School of Business,

what is their ethical orientation towards the political or the business before they take your course? So it's the same as everybody, where they want to have a good life while they're, but they don't necessarily know what that means. Yeah, right. So they're the same as all of us. So are they defaulting to those four things?

Of course, because we all do. Of course, of course. So I play a game with my students. It's called What's My Idol? This is one of the very first sessions in the class, What's My Idol? Where I take them through a little bit of Aquinas, they read a little bit of Aquinas, and I say, look, this is the first modern,

really great behavioral scientist, is St. Thomas Aquinas. And it's, don't read it for the religious parts, let's read it for the behavioral parts of this. And I say, okay, he says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately, there's gonna be one that attracts you more than any other. And that when you do, you'll always do the things that you'll later regret.

That's the thing about it. Okay, and that's behavior. That's what makes them idols. I know. Right, they beckon falsely in the present. And that's very empirically robust. A very empirically robust assertion, of course. We know this from all the literature,

that when people chase these idols, that they're ultimately, they don't get what they wanted. Right, they're self-defeating. And they have a lot of course. We know this from all the literature, that when people chase these idols, that they're ultimately, they don't get what they want and they have a lot of regret. So I say, okay, let's play a game. And the way to do this is not to say what's your idol, but to eliminate the ones that they're not your idol. Do you wanna play? Sure.

Okay. So money, power, pleasure, honor. And honor is not what we say with my marine children, which is to start with honor. That means to be honored. Yeah, the narcissistic. Yeah, so that means fame or what we have in academia, which is prestige, to walk in and people say,

oh, this is Jordan Peterson, he wrote that paper. You know, that paper that got the award last year, whatever it happens to be. Or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people, right? Which we want, it's your lobsters, right? That raises serotonin levels, okay? Okay, so think of those four,

and then let's think of the one you would first eliminate, which doesn't mean you don't have it at all, but rather that you have the population mean level of it. So you've got rid of money, for example, you wouldn't be poor, you just have exactly the population mean amount of it. So you've got rid of money, for example. You wouldn't be poor. You just have exactly the population mean amount of that. So you wouldn't be in, there would be no deprivation whatsoever.

Money, power, pleasure, fame. Which one do you kick away? Power. Why? I'm not interested in exerting control over others' voluntary actions. So if I were to, you're the clinical psychologist and I'm just a working class economist,

but I would say that the reason for that is because you hate when people have power over you. Well, that's certainly an indication of the undesirability of power. That's my lived experience of the, I hate, yes, I hate that. I hate being told what to do. Not everybody hates that.

Yes, I understand that. People who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently. So it's kind of an interesting thing. So you'll find that totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems. They would just like to be the totalitarian.

Right, right, right. So you find that dictators admire dictators. I was just writing about exactly that this morning. It's like, yeah, well, this is part of our misunderstanding of totalitarian systems. Everyone is striving to be free except the bully on the top. No, it's bullies all the way down. I know. So that's okay. So now we've established that about you, but you kicked away power. You've got three left. Money, pleasure, and honor. What's next? Pleasure, probably. Pleasure? No, money, probably. Money. Why? Taste is an excellent substitute for money.

You're talking about the population mean of money. If you're wise and discerning, you're rich with that amount of money. And I would also postulate, correct me if I'm wrong, that given the fact that your material success, among other things, has taught you using your self-awareness as a behavioral scientist, that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money. It's really not that interesting.

Well, the big advantage to me of having money is that there are, it opens up avenues of possibility. It makes some things easier. Right. Medical care. It does. But it opens up avenues. It eliminates sources of unhappiness.. It does. But it opens up avenues. It eliminates sources of unhappiness. Yes.

And it opens up avenues of adventure. Right. That would otherwise be impossible. But they're not the things you care about the most. Well, there's other ways of doing them. Yeah, yeah. There's other ways of doing them. Okay.

That are they equally valuable? Sufficiently so that that was my second choice anyways. The things that I love the most are not things you buy. I just, if, you know, people say, if I could keep everything in a knapsack, I would be detached. And I say, no, I would still rent everything I want. The whole point is that, you know, buying stuff is not that interesting.

Well, money is useful to me because it enables opportunity. It's not particularly useful to me because I can buy stuff with it. I mean, I buy some things, but look, culture like ours, you can buy virtually everything you need for nothing if you pay attention. I know, I know. Like virtually everything is free.

Food maybe not. I have a whole lecture on how to actually buy happiness with money. Oh yeah. And it's exactly against your limbic system. Why? Because your limbic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your evolutionary fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate your kids. Right, right.

You need more buffalo jerky and flints in your cave. Anyway, okay, so you got two left, pleasure and honor. Now it's hot in here because these are things that you like and this is normal, but you've got to get rid of one and go to the population mean, which is a... Pleasure probably next. Yeah. And now we've established what your temptation is. Now we've established, that doesn't mean that you can't tame it, but you must know it.

You must say to yourself, honor, honor. When I do the wrong thing, it's because I pursue honor. By the way, I'm exactly like you. Mm-hmm. Why? That's too bad for you. Well, too bad for my wife and yours. Yeah, and your wife. Yeah, I mean, it's because, you know,

I hate people having power over me. I don't want to have power over others. I was a chief executive for 11 years. And the thing I hated was when people called me boss. It made me intensely uncomfortable. It made me feel embarrassed, even humiliated, when people said boss, because I felt like they were setting up a hierarchy.

It felt passive aggressive, even when it wasn't because of subversion. Money. Okay, great. Well, you know, if you're someone's boss, it's not obvious who the slave is. Right. Right. Because if I have to tell you what to do, then I have to tell you what to do. It's hard enough to get myself to do things much less bother with you.

Maybe there's some temporary thrill in ordering people around, although it's not a thrill I've ever appreciated. But I'd rather that you did your own thing. I'd hate, you know, I hate dictatorships and I wouldn't want to be the dictator, is the bottom line. Money, okay, yeah, what, it's fun.

Pleasure, I mean, I'm a very self-disciplined person. You know, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning. I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before dawn. How old are you? 60. And I'm in better health than when I was 30. And part of it is because I'm not a sensualist, because I can actually do that.

I mean, I like feeling good, but it's not high on my list of priorities. You know what tempts me? This. That's what tempts me. And I know it's true, and I know I have that particular tendency, and that knowledge is power. Why?

Because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus, and it's accessible by my prefrontal cortex, and I can use it to manage my limbic system. And that's being fully alive. As far as I'm concerned, that's being fully alive. And when my students understand that they can not just avoid errors,

they can feel like they have control. They can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey. That's what this, that's- How do you get them to start envisioning their future pathway in a more multi-dimensional manner? So I, among other things, we talk about the process of discernment.

Yeah, discovery, okay. Discovery of their own essence. What do they have to do practically to engage in that? I ask them to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers, but do have understanding. Because this is the essence of how philosophically a discernment works. So I'll ask, and I've done this to my adult children as well.

When my kids were 18 years old, I would make them write a business plan. As a B-School professor, I can kind of get away with that, right? And the whole point was, what are you gonna do with the next five years of your life? You're the entrepreneur of your enterprise, and I'm the venture capitalist kind of,

so I deserve a business plan. I want you to tell me what you're gonna do to find the answers to two distinct questions, or're gonna do to find the answers to two distinct questions or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions. Why are you alive? And for what would you gladly give your life on this day? I wanna know the answers to those questions.

I want you to- Okay, why did you come in? Okay, explain the rationale behind those questions. These are deeply existential questions that are rooted in almost every- Right, so what's more important to you than the mere continuation of your life? Yes.

That's a hard one. Yeah. So that's kind of like what would you die for and also what would you live for? Yeah, yeah. Those are the same thing. And the other one was? Why are you alive?

Which means who created you and for what purpose? In your belief. Yeah, okay, so one of the ways that I had my clients answer that question is, we did this in this exercise that I made commercial, this future authoring exercise, it's something, and you can do this when you're arguing with your wife, for example. Well, so one of the things I always ask my wife,

and she asks me too, when we're arguing, is like, what are your conditions for satisfaction? Like, you disagree with what's going on here. Even hypothetically, if I did what would satisfy you, what would that look like? Well, you can ask yourself the same thing in your own life, which is like, okay, life is difficult and it's rife with existential doubt.

Could you imagine a situation where you were thrilled with your circumstances. So what are your conditions for satisfaction? That is an exercise of discernment. You have to treat yourself like you're someone you don't know. It's like learning to please someone else. In a relationship, it takes a long time to know what makes your wife happy. It takes her a long time to know it too.

It's hard because people have a nature and what satisfies that nature has to be discerned. You have to notice it. You know, it's so interesting to understand that. It's like you have to discern what it is that actually motivates you, for example, rather than what you think should motivate you. Those aren't the same things.

Oh, absolutely not. There's what you desire and what you desire to desire. There's a whole series of iterations about that and a well-constructed life, the one of which you're really in charge, has good knowledge such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are, you can make the alterations that are appropriate.

Yeah, right, right, exactly. That's what it really comes down to. And that's the best that we can use in behavioral science. This is how- So that's all that part of discernment as well. Because one of the questions would be an analogous question to something like, well, if you were in pain,

what would get you up in the morning? This is why it's so useful for people to have children. Right. It's like, because a mother, my wife said something very interesting when she had her first child, when she had Mikaela. We went up north to where my parents were, this old, this cottage, it was all old people

up in northern Saskatchewan. There's like 20 of them in the room and they're watching this little, like, 12 month old, total round, like she was on fire, right? It's like they're just completely entranced. And my wife said it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention. That someone else had, it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention. That someone else had, it was a great relief to her

that someone else had become far more important in her life than she was, self-evidently. And you know, the statistical studies show that there's no distinction between being aware of yourself and being miserable, right? Self-consciousness loads on neuroticism. Right, and so one of the core layers. This is the psychodrama. The problem with the psychodrama is that it's me, me.

Yeah, yeah, and me is the wrong answer. Me is the wrong answer. So that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in what I teach. It's not about a particular religious faith, notwithstanding the fact that I practice one. It's self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is the essence of awe,

of getting small. I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the Dalai Lama. And he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when he saw that photo that the astronauts, the American astronauts took of Earth from orbiting the moon, that famous photo.

And he said, I'm so little. And it was a sense of peace that came over him. Now there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace, according to Scott Barry Kaufman, it's dark triads. Oh yes, they can't get outside themselves. No, no, because of the narcissism. The narcissism component of the dark triad,

triad or dark tetrad. So the problem with the dark tetrad types is they can't actually be in awe of themselves. They cannot. How annoying. They cannot experience the happiness that comes from self-transcendence. Right, right, right. And that's why they're stuck in this, the land of Nod.

That's why they're stuck pacing and roaming the land of Nod. Right, right. They're the most miserable creatures for that reason. And that's why they've been picked amongst the rest of us. That's a good place to stop. And we're pretty much exactly at the time we should stop.

I think what we should do, what we will do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who might join us there, is I think we should talk more specifically about Harvard and about the relations. I'd like to know more about your life, about how you're conducting your business and what you're doing and what your plans are and how that fits in with your academic strivings

and your role as a teacher at Harvard. What you think of the institution. I was there in the 90s, I loved it. It was firing in all cylinders, as far as I was concerned when I was there. It isn't obvious to me that that's the case anymore and I'd like to talk about that. And so if you all would like to join us

on the Daily Wire side for an additional half an hour, please, you're more than welcome to do that. We would appreciate the support as well. So thank you very much for coming here today and talking to me, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, much appreciated. Likewise.

Yeah, yeah, great, great. And thank you to all of you for your time and attention, the film crew here too, and Scottsdale, and to the Daily Wire for making all of this accessible, possible, professional, and well-produced, because those are the attributes that they bring to bear on this enterprise. So-

One note is that I've been a subscriber to The Daily Wire for years. Aha. And highly recommend it. Aha, what do you recommend about it? I recommend that it's a well-produced and high-integrity organization with quality that one can count on run by people who truly believe in what they're doing and are mission-focused. And there's not enough of that in the world.

Ah, well, there you go. Well, that's been my experience working with The Daily Wire as well, so genuinely. And I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky. So all right, thank you everyone, and thank you very much, sir. Good to have you here today. Thank you, you too. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]