The Rich Roll Podcast - Build The Life You Want: Arthur C. Brooks on Happiness, Transcendence & Creating Greater Life Satisfaction

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Everyone wants more happiness in their life, but most pursue it incorrectly, mistakenly believing it can be found in places like the promotion or the bank account. Instead, happiness is the by-product of pursuits less appreciated. Like the quality of your relationships with friends and family. Doing hard things. Creating value for others. And being in communion with the transcendent. Here to help us better orient our lives towards happiness is Arthur C. Brooks, returning for round two on the podcast. Arthur is a social scientist, in-demand public speaker, and professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. In addition, he is the creator of the popular How to Build a Life column for The Atlantic, and the author of 13 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength. His latest offering—a book he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey—is entitled, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier which is filled with practical, social science, and neuroscience-backed practices to strengthen what he dubs the four pillars of happiness: family, friendship, work, and faith.  In this conversation, we discuss what happiness is and isn’t, how to experience more of it, and the concrete steps and practical solutions you can adopt to build a better blueprint for a more fulfilling future. Arthur is a treasure. I could have talked to him all day. This one is wisdom-packed and overflowing with life-changing and actionable advice. Show notes + MORE Watch On YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Seed.com/RICHROLL Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/RICHROLL BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL Babbel: Babbel.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. So the great news is that every single person watching can get happier. And the better news is we know what they can work on to get happier, but they need the knowledge. Everyone wants more happiness in their lives, but most pursue it incorrectly, mistaken that it can be found in the usual places like the promotion or the bank account. Instead, happiness, in fact, is the byproduct of pursuits less appreciated,

like the quality of your relationships with friends and family, doing hard things, creating value for others, and being in communion with the transcendent. Here to help us better orient our lives towards greater happiness is the great Arthur Brooks, returning for round two on the podcast. If you missed our first conversation, please check out RRP683. It is a must listen. And if Arthur is new to you, he is a social scientist, an in-demand public speaker, and a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship.

In addition, Arthur is the creator of the popular How to Build a Life column for The Atlantic, and he's the author of 13 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength. York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength. His latest offering, a book he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, is entitled Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just an incredible book filled with practical social science and neuroscience-backed practices to strengthen what he dubs the four pillars of happiness, family, friendship, work, and faith. I've got a few more things I want to say about Arthur before we get into it, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had

that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of

behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment

option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Arthur, in this conversation, we discuss what happiness is and isn't, why happiness matters, how to experience more of it, and the concrete steps and practical solutions that you can adopt to build a better blueprint for a more fulfilling future. Arthur is a treasure. I could have talked to him all day long. And I just love everything about this conversation, which is just wisdom-packed and overflowing with life-changing, actionable advice. So, here we go. This is me and Arthur C. Don't forget the C. Arthur C. Brooks. Well, let's begin by talking a little bit about what happiness is, how people get confused about happiness and think it's something other than what it actually is.

And give us a framework for how to even approach this challenging subject. It's a huge conundrum for people because there's almost nobody who doesn't say, I wanna be happier. Most people say, I wanna be happy. To begin with, that's the wrong goal because you can't be happy.

Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. You can't be, I mean, for somebody to be truly happy, it would mean that you would need to eliminate the parts of your life that are literally keeping you alive, like your negative emotions. You need anger and sadness and disgust and you need grief and you need all these things to stay alive and deal with the world. So pure happiness shouldn't be the goal, but getting happier is a legitimate goal for everybody. The biggest mistake that people make is thinking that it's a feeling and chasing a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling.

It has feelings associated with it, but feelings of happiness are really evidence of happiness. Sort of the smell of dinner is the evidence of dinner. It's not dinner itself. It would be a very disappointing dinner if it were just the smell of Thanksgiving is the evidence of dinner. It's not dinner itself. It would be a very disappointing dinner if it were just the smell of Thanksgiving, shoot it into the air. And then that's what chasing feelings is really like.

It's incredibly ephemeral. And it's a terrible thing to live that way, to live hoping that tomorrow you'll feel a different way. And so the first freeing thing is that number one, don't worry about being happier. Let's work on getting happier. It's a project. That's number one, very empowering. And number two is that it's not a feeling. It's something that you really can work on. It's something, it's a skill you can really get better at. So that's the prelude to, you know, how people see it wrong and how they can be

encouraged to see it correctly and start to get better at it. Then the whole question becomes, encouraged to see it correctly and start to get better at it, then the whole question becomes, okay, it's not a feeling, what is it? And that's a big, that's a controversy in the world of social psychology and social science in general, even neuroscience, what is happiness? But as a functional definition, you find that people who have the most wellbeing in their lives have balance and abundance across three things, sort of macronutrients. So the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three things that people actually need. And none of those things is as simple as it sounds. Each one has a literature of science behind it and has protocols and habits that we can all pursue and get better at. So the great news is that every single person watching us can get happier. And the better news is we know what they can work on to

get happier, but they need the knowledge. Right. So this idea that happiness, we can have a debate on how we particularly define what it is, But the truth of the matter is that that's less important than this idea that it is evidence or something that comes about as a result of these three macronutrients that we should all pursue. Getting better at. That will, yeah, as a kind of way of life, it's not something you do once,

it's something that you incorporate into the way that you're living your life, correct? That will time and again produce that sensation of happiness however ephemeral or fleeting it may be, but with some regularity, it will build more of that into your life. Exactly right, exactly right. And these are skills that you can get better at.

This is the best news of all, but you have to know what they are. And it's not straightforward. No, it's not. When you say enjoyment as one of these, that could create some confusion. It can, and the biggest confusion is, especially for people that are really

into improving themselves through knowledge that they can get on the Rich Roll podcast, for example, is they might make the mistake of thinking that enjoyment is pleasure. And it's absolutely not. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's an ancient phenomenon. It's a signal to you that something is going to be good for your survival or passing on your genes. But the pursuit of pleasure will not bring you happiness. It will bring you addiction. That's as sure as we're sitting here is what it will do. And the reason is because it's a fleeting thing. It's a fleeting sensation. If you hit the lever and hit the lever, you'll change your brain chemistry to get really,

really good to bring you that pleasure. And that will give you addiction. All addictions are based in an excessive and unhealthy stimulation of dopamine, the neuromodulator dopamine in the human brain. So the reason that, for example, that drinking too much brings pleasure but doesn't bring happiness is because it doesn't actually bring enjoyment. So this is the key thing to understand. Enjoyment has a base in pleasure,

but it adds two things. It adds people and memory. So anything that you do that brings pleasure that you do alone, look out. As a rule of thumb, anything as pleasurable that you do alone is not going to bring you happiness. You need people involved and you need memory, which is part of your prefrontal cortex is your executive function has to be involved in that. And a good example of how we understand this intuitively, Anheuser-Busch has a beer commercial. They never have how a lot of people are using Bud Light, which is pounding a 12-pack alone in their apartment.

That's, and the reason that they don't advertise it that way, which is that they don't want to advertise their product as a way to get pleasure, but not happiness. They have people drinking Bud Light with their friends or with their family and making a memory because it's pleasure, feels good, plus people, plus memory. And then you actually get happiness.

And so this is the way to think about gambling if you're gonna gamble. This is the way to think about sexual activity. This is the way to think about any of these things that if it's alone and compulsive becomes a problem, but if it's sociable and it creates memory, it actually can be enhance your happiness. Everybody who, and I don't drink alcohol, you don't drink alcohol. I don't know how to drink alcohol in a normal way. Why? Because I started drinking alcohol when I was 13, 14 years old and it was nothing but solitary pleasure.

And I never learned how to make it into a source of enjoyment. That's the reason that it became a problem is because I was never able to use it in a responsible way where it could enhance my happiness. So if one has addictive tendencies or is in recovery, how would you frame their pursuit of enjoyment? We can set, you know, addictive behaviors and substances aside, but just general, you know,

pursuit of activities or behaviors that are gonna engender more of that in one's life. To begin with, the substances or activities of abuse should be avoided. And part of the reason for that is that we know that the neural pathways have been so ingrained with those substances and activities that they're inherently dangerous for people.

Now, however, there's comorbidity between one kind of abuse and other kinds of abuse, which is why that former problem drinkers tend to become workaholics or workout fanatics. And they do all, or for example, if you used to abuse alcohol and go to the doctor and say, I can't sleep, he shouldn't, she shouldn't give you Zolpidem Ambien

because it'll actually stimulate the same pathways. You'll probably get addicted to, you know, benzodiazepine drugs or anything else along those lines. So you gotta stay away. You gotta be careful. You gotta be awake. You gotta, you have to be, have your eyes open so you're not walking into trouble.

But anything else that you like, remember, you have to do it with people and make memories. It has to add those two elements. Anything that you're, I mean, have to do it with people and make memories. It has to add those two elements. Anything that you're, I mean, again, this is rule of thumb. So I'm sure that we could come up with some sort of an exception of something that you do by yourself. Like, you know, I walk alone in nature. Okay, fine. You know, peace, that's a different thing. But anything that has any sort of potential for abuse at all, make sure that it's not solitary and make sure it's something that you're doing consciously. So communion and consciousness on top of the pleasure, and then

you're going to be in pretty good hands. Right. On to the next one, satisfaction. Yeah. This is a killer. Satisfaction is such a funny riddle in human life. Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. There know, there's so much joy you get because of human endeavor that requires effort. And humans are made to do hard things. Humans are made to work and to get a payoff for it. And the joy, the sheer joy that you get after you do something really hard, which you've done so many, I mean, as an ultra endurance athlete, I mean, this is sort of the scenic one on lots of sacrifice, lots of pain, and then a big payoff. But life is like that.

If you're going through life and you're trying to get joy without struggle, you're not gonna get that second macronutrient of happiness. So for example, if you're, you know, I tell my students, you can cheat on my exam. It's pretty easy to cheat on my exams. But if you get an A, you won't feel any satisfaction from it. On the other hand, if you work, I mean, it's an A on an exam.

It's meaningless, but you'll get a lot of satisfaction if you worked really, really hard for it. That's the first part, which is that it requires struggle to get that little bit of joy. But the real riddle about satisfaction is that Mother Nature tells us that if you get it, it's gonna last and it doesn't. So Mick Jagger sings, I can't get no satisfaction. That's wrong. If you couldn't get it, you wouldn't keep trying and trying and trying like the song goes.

The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. And that's the thing that you never quite figure out. And we understand the brain science behind that, but we have to, once again, we have to diverge from mother nature's teachings or mother nature's teachings or mother nature's urges that she gives us and do something on the divine path. And if we do certain things that feel quite unnatural, we can make satisfaction stick around. What is the distinction between

the temporal, the fleeting temporality of satisfaction and the brain chemistry of anticipation of satisfaction? Because that's really the driver, is it not? Like I'm working towards this thing, I've done this before. I know I will experience that feeling of satisfaction when I complete this and that's part of the driving force in that direction. You know your dopamine, I can tell. That dopamine is the neuromodulator

of the anticipation of reward. It's not reward per se, it's the anticipation of the reward. And that's really part of the experience. That's really part of the experience. And if you're doing something that doesn't require any struggle, you're not gonna get anticipation of reward

in the same way. That's how pleasure and pain are so interwoven with each other and such a complicated phenomenon where you can't get real pleasure unless there is also pain because of this really delicate interplay between the ideas. So as everybody who watches your podcast knows, dopamine is this very potent neuromodulator that gives us impulse to do almost anything.

And it's just ever present in the way that it gives us motivation to do things. So for example, I want to get a sandwich and I think about it at 10 o'clock in the morning and I gives us motivation to do things. So for example, I wanna get a sandwich and I think about it at 10 o'clock in the morning and I'm kind of hungry. Just thinking about the sandwich gives me dopamine and then it dives down. And the fact that it's going down, which I feel gives me motivation

to get the dopamine back up again to go in search of the sandwich. And then around noon, I'm gonna go out to the deli, my favorite deli to get the sandwich and the dopamine is back up again. And then the deli's closed and then it just tanks. And so I look for another deli. And then when I finally get it,

the dopamine screams upward. And then I finished the sandwich and it goes back down again. And it's just this anticipation of reward and reward and more anticipation and search. That's one of the reasons, by the way, the science of happiness is so critical to understand. Because when you do, you'll see it in yourself

and you can manage it. Well, it's also about balance, right? Enjoyment could be, you could say, you could reframe that as like, do cool shit with other people, with friends or whatever. Satisfaction, do hard things. I imagine, I know myself well enough to know that

I'll take that all the way to the wall. Like that turns into perfectionism and self-flagellation. Like it's no good unless I stay up all night and I'm exhausted when I'm done. You know, I can't get that satisfaction unless I know, you know, I'm bleeding out of my eyeballs by the time it's completed and that's no good. That's no good.

And that's, you know, that's just an extreme form of, I mean, people who do extreme things do extreme things. And they engage in all sorts of extreme behaviors is what we find. And so that's just gonna be a normal part of your personality is what we find. But you have to erect guardrails around that. For sure, absolutely.

We have to manage ourselves. Either we manage our feelings or they're gonna manage us. That's the bottom line. That's actually one of the key points of this book is emotional self-management, is the whole idea that you can, through metacognition, understand the nature of your urges and desires and emotions. And there are practices, protocols you can put in place in your life to put space between your impulses and your reactions. You can be the manager.

Your prefrontal cortex can govern your limbic system because you choose your reactions if you actually know how it's done. So there's a whole bunch of very practical lessons on how to do that. I wanna get deeper into metacognition, but let's put a pin on that for now and just stick with getting through

the three macros here. So the final one is purpose. Yeah, well, before we get to that, by the way, there is this problem of not being able to keep any satisfaction. That it's always seemed like the tyranny of life. Like, you know, when I moved to California, it's gonna be so great

because it's gonna be so sunny forever. And after six months, I was just as depressed as I was, but the taxes are forever. You know, or the new car smell wears off or, you know, I thought that I was gonna love having that house and now it's just a house. But there is a way to defeat that. It's just a very unnatural feeling thing to do,

which is instead of adding, instead of this notion that the satisfaction comes from more, more, more. What's your secret? More is to remember that this real satisfaction can be thought of, can be modeled as all of your halves divided by your wants, halves divided by wants.

Now we know that to increase the satisfaction, you can increase the numerator, have more, but it's even more efficient to want less, to decrease the denominator. The fastest way for you to get lasting and stable satisfaction, sort of a blood sugar level that's not all over the place, is to manage your wants, is to want less. I literally have an exercise that I take my students through that I practice myself.

On my birthday, I used to have a bucket list. And a bucket list is all your ambitions and desires, and you imagine yourself enjoying all these wonderful things. I now have a reverse bucket list where I take all of my ambitions and desires and worldly stuff, money and success, and I might get it or I might not, but I cross out the attachment. So it's no longer a ghost in my limbic system governing me. I make the decision using my executive capacity

that I will no longer be governed by that. And it absolutely works. The reverse bucket list is an incredibly effective way metacognitively for you to manage these desires. And in so doing your satisfaction lasts, it's more enduring, it's, it's satiates, it's, it's less, well, yeah, I guess, I guess I'll feel better if I buy something on the internet,, yeah, I guess I'll feel better if I buy something on the internet. I guess I'll feel that you'll fall prey much, much less to that. So I wind up talking a lot about wanting less as opposed to having more. That requires a jujitsu black belt level of discipline and determination. Like overcoming your default settings

around desire and wants doesn't come. It doesn't come naturally. But once you're thinking about it, you will do it. This is the key is being conscious, being awake. Well, this is the metacognition. So why don't we just talk about it now? I mean, basically, you know, metacognition. So why don't we just talk about it now? I mean, basically, metacognition is this means of managing your emotions, self-regulating,

having enough presence of mind and awareness to understand what's occurring emotionally within you as a result of generally some external stimulation and being able to gauge it and have that extra moment and choose an appropriate and better, more adaptive emotional response to that scenario rather than reflexively reacting. That's right.

And when your kids were little and they were screaming their heads off because you didn't cut the sandwich vertically or horizontally, you cut it diagon vertical or horizontally. You cut it diagonally or something. And they were yelling and you said, use your words that what you were telling them was to become metacognitive, to be conscious of their feelings and to articulate those feelings. You were asking them to move the experience of their distress into their prefrontal cortex of your brain. So the limbic system is very ancient and its whole job is

delivering feelings to your prefrontal cortex so you can decide what to do with them. So the limbic system is very ancient and its whole job is delivering feelings to your prefrontal cortex so you can decide what to do with them. So you can decide whether or not, you know, flip off the driver who almost hit you or whatever it happens to be. But, you know, the emotions, the reactions, they're innate coming from the limbic system to keep you alive. The problem is that little kids can't make that connection and a lot of adults don't either. You see that when somebody is reactive, a really reactive person, they have an emotion, they spill the emotion. They think something is funny, they laugh. They think something is stupid, they yell, whatever it

happens. People with bad tempers, they tend to be really reactive. They can get much better at not being reactive. They can be less limbic. And the way to do that is putting more space between stimulus and response. There's basically three techniques for doing that, for how to be less limbic. And the way to do that is putting more space between stimulus and response. There's basically three techniques for doing that, for how to be less governed by your feelings. Number one, what they all require, by the way, is more time between what you feel and what you do, is getting better at putting time.

And so your grandmother, grandma role probably said, "'Rich, Richie, when you feel angry, count to 10, something like that, right? The truth is that the data are very clear that she was mostly right, but it takes about 30 seconds. The best way when you're angry or you're about to say something, and you're about to wreck the next 48 hours of your marriage by what you're about to say is stop and count to 30 and imagine the consequences of saying what first came to your mind, which was the limbic thing that you were about to say. That gives the experience time to be registered in the prefrontal cortex and you can have a better reaction. You can choose a better

reaction. That's number one, choose a better reaction. Number two is to choose a better emotion. You can actually choose a better emotion that's also appropriate to the circumstances, but it has to be chosen in the prefrontal cortex. And the last is to disregard the emotion and simply observe the situation. These are three very strong techniques that are backed up in the literature, but they all require that we take simply time

between what we feel and how we react. There's what that looks like on paper, and then there's what that looks like on paper. And then there's what that looks like in practice. We all know what it's like to be in a supercharged emotional state. We're not in control of our best reactive self in that scenario. It's only in the aftermath where we're able to kind of

realize what we have just said or done. So buying that sliver of additional time is challenging, because you're being asked to do it in the very state of mind and being in which it's most difficult to access. I know, and that's called amygdala hijack, by the way. The amygdala is the part of the limbic system of the brain most associated with fear and anger. And it just lights up. So when a car almost runs you over and you're a

pedestrian in the sidewalk and the car almost hits you, that crosses your visual cortex, passes down the retinal nerve, and actually registers in the occipital load of your brain as a large predator. So what that does is it sends a signal to your amygdala, just lights up the amygdala that says, alarm, you're about to be eaten by this enormous predator, attacked by this enormous predator. That sends a signal through the hypothalamus of the brain to the pituitary glands,

then down to the adrenal glands above your kidneys, spitting out stress hormones, all in 74 milliseconds. That thing goes down in 74 one thousandths of a second. You're three to four seconds behind in your prefrontal cortex in what you're gonna do. You know, you've already flipped off the driver and you're shaking and sweating before you even know what has happened

and your amygdala, your limbic system has just saved your life. That's the bottom line and how important that is. That's why all of this takes practice. And there's good ways to practice this as a matter of fact. So if a lot of people watching us have a bad temper, I don't have a big temper problem. I have other problems,

but I don't have a big temper problem. Anybody who has a big temper problem and it's hurting their relationships, let's say you're married or you have a girlfriend and you're snapping at her and it's not right. I'm gonna make a decision that when I start to get hot, I'm gonna say to her, I'm trying to work on my temper. And so what I wanna do is I just wanna, I wanna sort of take it down a notch.

I wanna sit down here for a second and I wanna pick up the conversation here in a minute. Is that okay? And your wife will be like, would you like convert to a new religion or, you know, some sort of a psychiatric medication. And it works wonders by actually declaring that, declaring that you're putting time between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex and having people assist you in that who actually have your mental wellbeing, your emotional wellbeing front and center

in their lives too. Yeah, that would be an extreme example, like having a really hair trigger temper. Everybody knows that that's not good and wishes they could behave otherwise if that's something that you succumb to. But there's so many permutations of that. Like what about, yeah, I generally,

when I get an email like that, I kind of avoid responding to it. Or what it's, I think, I guess what I'm getting at is, is the first step not simply to develop a greater self-awareness of your behaviors and where they lead you astray. Like when your default response to a certain scenario generally gets you a suboptimal kind of result,

do an inventory of that, try to figure out what the contrary action is in that scenario. So I think first, like writing down, like all of these different ways in which you wish you could like respond to situations better so that you have a framework or a blueprint or a map of,

so when those scenarios come up, a little light bulb goes off and say, says here's an opportunity. Yeah, and this is one of the reasons that, you know, metacognition requires certain sets of practices and protocols in your life. So, you know, I recommend, you know, meditation where you're meditating on,

one of the things that people typically do in standard meditation practices is to say, you're sitting in meditation, you're meditating on, one of the things that people typically do in standard meditation practices is to say, you're sitting in meditation, you're saying, Rich is angry today. You're looking at yourself almost in the third person. That's a hugely metacognitive thing to do to understand yourself better, give yourself more time and move experiences into the prefrontal cortex.

Prayer is another way to do that, to actually just to say to the divine, help me with this thing that I'm feeling, because you're articulating it. Journaling is incredibly effective, because once you write something down, you're activating the prefrontal cortex as opposed to just the limbic system. It's no longer a phantasm. Walking in nature can be incredibly helpful, because what you're doing is you're giving yourself time and space to be thinking about these issues. For some people, therapy is really helpful,

but therapy is only really helpful when it helps you understand yourself better, when it gives you a better repertoire and set of techniques with these feelings. It's why cognitive behavioral therapy can be so incredibly effective because it's basically applied metacognition. Yeah.

Meditation has been crucial for me in this context for that very reason of buying me time with that level of awareness. You're less reactive. Even if it's just one more millisecond, you know? It's a very imperfect thing because, you know, listen, you're not gonna be able to do a hundred pushups if you've never done a pushup before.

You're gonna fail most of the time. That's right. But I think being persistent in this pursuit is really a worthy one. And the other thing that I've realized through consistent meditation is the reduced half-life of the intense negative emotional response. So even if you are experiencing anger, to use your example,

it's not going to persist as long. That's right. Because your awareness around it and the mindful approach that you're bringing to it, that alone tends to disintegrate it much more rapidly. Well, once something, once a basic negative emotion or basic positive emotion for that matter, and there aren't that many.

I mean, the basic positive emotions are joy and interest and the basic negative emotions are disgust and sadness and fear and anger. And there's complex emotions that are a cocktail of these things to be sure, which is why we have such a varied emotional repertoire. But when these basic emotions are experienced in the prefrontal cortex, they're a lot less scary. They're a lot less serious. They make a lot less sense in a lot of cases because you're looking at it as if you were looking at somebody else's anger. It's funny because if you came to me and you said you have

this particular problem and you told me about the problem, I would be, I wouldn't be freaking out. I wouldn't freak out about your problem. I would be looking at it analytically and giving you some advice. And almost certainly I would think it's less of a problem than you do. I had this very interesting experience one time that I always remember about this. So when I was in Washington, DC, I was running this fancy think tank in DC with hundreds of people and millions of dollars. And it was right at the center of a lot of political controversies.

And my life was very stressful in many periods. And everything was like DEFCON 5. Everything was a big fire all the time. And something was going down and some bad story was coming out in the press about me. It was very unflattering. And it's sort of illustrative that I can't exactly remember

what the scandal was at this point, but it was 10 or 15 years ago. And I was just, I was losing sleep. I was just losing my mind about this. And I come home and my wife says, Esther says, there's a guy, a good friend who lived right across the street. Our kids all played together. He's a super high powered lawyer, like a mega high powered lawyer that was in the middle of bad nonsense. Company's

getting in big trouble. She says, why don't you go talk to him? See what he thinks about this. He's not in your business. He's not in politics. I said, okay. So I go knock on his door and he says, hey man. And I said, you've been reading the papers about this thing? He says, oh yeah, I saw that thing that's going on with you. Huh? I said, can I ask your advice? And so we sit down in his den. It's like the godfather. This is mahogany den, dimmed lights and all this. And I told him what's going on. And I said, how big is a problem is this? And he said, what's going on. And I said, how big is a problem is this? And he said, you know, problems can be ranged on a scale of seriousness. And all the years that I've been practicing law where zero is not a problem and 10 is the biggest problem I've ever seen. Your problem is a 0.25.

And he meant it. He really, really meant it. To me, it felt like a 9.75. and he meant it. He really, really meant it. To me, it felt like a 9.75. And this is what your limbic system will do to you when you're too limbic. Now, I wish I didn't need him, but it was incredibly helpful to me. And my prefrontal cortex,

especially aided with the techniques of prayer and meditation and the things that I'm very involved in in my life, it helps me see the 0.25s as 0.25s and not 9.25s. So in other words, the limbic system isn't so great at grading threats. A threat is a threat is a threat. And you're gonna have that response to it, whether it's a 0.25.

Totally, I mean, it's a bad tweet. Feels like a saber-toothed tiger. That's the reason that we're so maladapted to modern life. You know, our last conversation that we had here, like has really stayed with me, and has, and, you know, the books and the work that you do, because I do, you know, when you're on somebody else's show, I always listen. It really has taken up residence in my consciousness in a good way. And I have slowly, but surely made some changes. Like yesterday, I had a ton of work.

I was anxious. I was feeling overwhelmed. But my mother-in-law who's 93 is in an assisted living facility, not far from here. And Julie was like, let's go see my mom. It was completely inconvenient for me, but she's not gonna be around much longer. And my two youngest ones are about to leave home for school.

This is the final week that I get to spend time with them. And I was like, yeah, I need to go, right? And I think what I'm getting at is that, and this goes to the practices and the kind of way of being and the way of doing that you express in the new book, is that you have to cultivate these new habits and these habits are uncomfortable. Like every fiber in my being is like,

no, I need to stay here. I have to be prepared for Arthur. I'm not quite ready yet. So to do something, to take that contrary action doesn't feel like the right thing to do. Often, yeah. Until you repeat it and then it becomes like a new neural pathway. Exactly right. And you're an old hand at doing stuff like that. I mean, if it feels good, do it. You sit on the couch, you eat sweets all day, you have another beer.

That's what you do if you're following the path of least resistance, if you're following mother nature's imperatives, which is to do things that make you feel comfortable and survive another day and maybe even pass on your genes. You're gonna do a lot of things that are not good for you. You have to understand the animal path for sure. And the animal path exists for all sorts of good reasons,

but we have choices as well. We can make choices that help us lead a better life, a divine path, if you will. And that's not even a religious concept necessarily. It's the idea of doing something better because we have the capacity and free will to make these decisions, but you have to know what those urges are.

You have to be in touch with what those cravings are. You have to do something hard on purpose. You have to embrace the fact that it's incredibly uncomfortable. I have to tell you, you're a super endurance athlete. This is completely unnatural and very beautiful at the same time. And there's a version of that super endurance mentality in the whole way that we can live our lives. Yeah. I'm not afraid to put myself in uncomfortable situations, but I have my preferences around what those uncomfortable situations are.

I choose the uncomfortable situations that everyone else thinks are hard, but actually are second nature to me. And the real uncomfortable situations are more the emotional and mental ones that are contrary to this narrative that I've told myself repeated over decades that this is who I am, this is what I do. If you wanna make your way in the world, you do X, Y, and Z, and to kind of push that aside and say, actually, I'm gonna do this other thing that feels totally wrong, but I know because I've done the work

and I've read your books and I've listened to you, and I have other sources of influence in my life that help guide my decision-making process to make that decision that doesn't quite feel right. In recovery, it's called contrary action. Do the opposite of what your gut is telling you to do. All the decisions that you made ended you up in these rooms. Maybe you should reassess.

It's called the OSS, the opposite signal strategy among social scientists. And there are lots of cases, for example, where if you're very lonely, a classic case of this is when people are lonely, it impairs their executive function. The one thing that you really need to do when you're feeling lonely is to get out of the house, is to call a friend, is to get sunshine, is to get outside. But because of the impairment of your executive function due to the actual loneliness, because of the impairment of your executive function due to the actual loneliness,

what you do is you curl up in a blanket and watch Netflix and eat Haagen-Dazs. And so you have to use the opposite signal strategy. You can get very good at the opposite signal strategy. There's one little wrinkle in this, which is for somebody who's a discipline freak, somebody who broke out of the shackles of something really bad like addiction. The problem with that is that you can turn your life into kind of a discipline factory that's dedicated toward the success, toward being special, toward being unusual, toward the discipline itself. And that becomes a dangerous path in and of itself. And, you know, one of the things that I find, and, you know, I've found this again and again, you know, when the last time we, we talked, I was talking about

my book from strength to strength, which was, I was talking to extraordinary performers all over the world and, and the unhappiness that they feel when, when they're dedicated entirely to their superior performance, as opposed to being happy people with happy lives, that they have dedicated themselves to being specially the expense of being happy. And that's the problem. So if you're saying, who's Rich Roll? Rich Roll's a hard worker. Rich Roll's super dedicated. Rich Roll is excellent.

And that means I work and I work and I work. And you actually have to dedicate yourself to being fully alive as a person, meaning you gotta go see your mother-in-law who's 93 and spend some time with your kids because specialness and happiness can be at odds with each other. That's a threat to specialness.

And I found myself thinking, and I've said it out loud in the past, this idea that I'm okay with not being, I'm fine with not being happy. I'll double down on special. I'll be a martyr. I'll work really hard. I'll provide for my kids and try to set them up

for the best life that they can possibly have. I'll do this thing in the studio until I just bleed out of my eyeballs. And my happiness is a luxury that I don't necessarily need. It's sort of a form of hubris too, because- Yeah, it's masochistic and narcissistic. Yeah. Any loser can be happy, but not everybody can be special. But there's a lot of evolution

that goes into that too, because mother nature does not actually care if you're happy. Mother nature has only two goals for Rich and Arthur and everybody watching us, which is survival and passing on your genes. That's all mother nature cares about. And so if you actually find a really good way to survive and pass on your genes, you're gonna hit the button and hit the button. And you're gonna become miserable doing that until you break free and choose the divine path or the animal path.

Until you actually choose to do something that mother nature is not urging you to do. And that's the secret. I'm working on it. I have made some strides. I shared with you, yeah, I said my two youngest are going away to do. And that's the secret. I'm working on it. I have made some strides. I shared with you, I said, my two youngest are going away to school. We won't be fully empty nesters, but pretty close to it, which means my wife and I are entering a new phase of our relationship. We've been together 23 years. And as you know, when you're raising kids, things can become

not necessarily transactional, but logistical, right? It's all about who's going where and who needs to be where and what's happening. It's day planning, you know, relentlessly for many, many years. And then suddenly when you don't have to do that, you're like, who are you?

I said, you know, we said for better or for worse, but not for lunch. And yeah, no, it's actually an interesting thing because couples, they get together because they find each other interesting, fascinating, attractive, wonderful. But then after a while, especially after they have kids, a bunch of kids and the kids grow up, the one thing they still have in common is the kids. And then they lose that and they have nothing in common. And they have to reacquaint themselves with each other. They have to start dating again.

I wind up doing a lot of work on the happiness of relationships and even the neuroscience of romantic love for people who've been married for a really long time. And it's an interesting subject, I have to say, and it's not self-evident how it works. What is the big reveal there? I mean, I know that at the heart of it,

it's really about companionship and friendship. Like, are you with your best friend? And it's not so much about differences or similarities. In fact, the differences can be a beautiful and perhaps necessary piece in making that puzzle fit together. Well, you're incredibly observant because it's one of the things I talk an awful lot about in this new book, about the fact that the big mistakes that we make, for example, is thinking that the core of a permanent romantic relationship is passion. It's actually companionate love. It really is figuring out a way to have a companion relationship, which also can have plenty of passion in terms of people who are romantically involved will with your spouse, for example.

in terms of people who are romantically involved will with your spouse, for example. But the other point is that as you grow together, you change together and you find ways to change together. You're looking for ways to actually change together, to do new things together in ways that you weren't able to. And so I recommend that when kids leave home, the couples say, what's all the stuff that we always said we wanted to do,

but we never did it and that we're still not doing? And for me and my wife, when we became empty nesters, definitively two years ago, I mean, the kids are, they're not off the payroll, but they're not coming. I don't think they're coming back, is we always said we wish that we could spend a month at the beach in the summer and a month in the beach in the winter and go away one weekend a year together. And one weekend a month together, I should say. But then the kids left and we didn't do it and said,

you know what, we can afford to do it. We're very fortunate in that way. And we have places that we can go. So we're doing it. We're going away one weekend a month and we're spending a month in California and in the wintertime and a month on the beach in Massachusetts in the summertime. It costs money and all that, but it's really good for our marriage, I have to say. And we're just saying, like, thank God there aren't other people

hanging around here. Yeah. There's a part of it, like, this is awesome. Like, I don't have to worry about where somebody is and pick them up or what they're doing at home, they're taken care of. That part's exciting. The other part, there's a little bit of fear, but turning that fear into opportunity, I think is where the magic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We also, and I'm sure you do this with your wife too, my wife and I were on a spiritual journey together. You did the Camino, right? The Camino de Santiago. But we're both very interested in, we're Catholic. And she's actually a graduate student in theology. And so she reads to me a lot and she teaches me a lot,

things I had no idea. And it's pretty mind blowing, I have to say, to be living with a theology professor, somebody who is doing this really, really deep work and taking me on this particular journey. Plus, the fact is that her Spanish accent kind of has a narcotic effect on me. The problem I have is staying awake when she talks

because it's just, it leads me into this bliss. I'm a bad sleeper, but that's- That's cool. I wanna work our way back to the faith piece in the context of a broader conversation around happiness, but let's frame this in the context of the new book. You've got this incredible book that's about to come out. It'll be out when this podcast goes up, Build a Life You Want that you co-wrote with Oprah. I wanna hear all about that. But what's really great about this book, building upon your last book, Strength to Strength,

which was really about finding meaning as we age up and different forms of intelligence. This is my crystallized intelligence beard. I like it. It looks good on you. This is really about the art and science of happiness. And what you've done brilliantly is really canonize this elusive, confusing field of understanding.

What is happiness? What is it? What isn't it? Right. And layering in like the science that supports these ideas around happiness and not necessarily how to get it, but how to cultivate more of it in your life through strategies for how you approach your thinking

and your decision-making, et cetera. So let's just start at the beginning. Like how did this book come together? How did it happen with Oprah? I mean, this is like an amazing opportunity. It is, and it was her idea. So what happened was during the coronavirus epidemic and everybody was locked down and burrowed in for that. She's a reader of my column in the Atlantic. So Thursday mornings, every Thursday morning in the Atlantic, I have 1,500 words on the science of happiness.

And I don't know who reads it. I know it's half a million people a week are reading the thing and who could be anybody. It turns out Oprah Winfrey was reading it and following it. And then she read from strength to strength and called, they called, you know, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, this is Batman. I mean, you know, it's, but it was. And I did her podcast and we talked about it. It was like a house on fire. We see the world much the same way, different background. I mean, she was in mass media and I came at it from a more academic perspective and I'm a teacher, but we have the same goal,

lift people up, bring people together in bonds of happiness and love using ideas. And we did a couple of these media things together and it was really great. It was a real synchronicity. It was a harmony between us. And I was out here in California and I was having dinner with her.

And she said, you know, if I still had my show, she said, I would have had you on 30 times. And that would have really launched it into the public zeitgeist. You know, this work where the world is the classroom on the science of happiness and everybody's hobby can be the science of happiness. And it's beneficial to have that be their hobby, but I don't have the show anymore. So why don't we write a book together where I'm talking around

the ideas and introducing the ideas, and then you're filling in the gaps on the science and the neuroscience, because it's about 30% neuroscience, about 50% social science, which is my background and about 20% philosophy, but it's all applied. It's all supposed to be something that people can read. And we started on this project and she just guided it expertly, pushing it back in one direction. She came up with the title of the book. It was her idea for the title. And her narrative weaves in and out of the book in a way that's really going to appeal to an audience that I never would have thought of before. So it was a very beautiful experience. We cooked up the whole

structure of the book in her tea house in Montecito in California. And I'm thinking, it's like, I'm just this small town college professor who fell off the turnip truck in front of Oprah's tea house. You just never know what life is going to bring. Right. But then does your, hey, let's spend a month on the beach with your wife turn into, yeah, we're spending a month on the beach, but I'm going to be writing this book most of the time. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a good point, Rich. So I was writing the book over the holidays, you know, in Christmas time in 2022. And we were in San Clemente where we had a house. And I have a son who lives in San Clemente

because he's a Marine based at Camp Pendleton, exactly. And, you know, during the day I would work and I had a desk and I was looking at a civic ocean, you know, writing this book and writing, writing, writing, sending chapters and things to Oprah and going back and forth. But I was really enjoying it in a different way by getting out of my typical ecosystem.

And I wasn't teaching during that period. And it was a beautiful experience, I have to say. And I mean, to be frank, vacation is not the easiest thing for me. It's always been, I've always white knuckled my vacations because stopping is hard. Getting the machine off is hard. You can relate to that, right?

But it's also good for me to make an effort to do that. I've been on vacation since just two days ago before we're taping this podcast, as a matter of fact, and in Massachusetts near the Cape, and that's been really great. Yeah, with my new grandson. That's right. Amazing. With respect to these negative emotions,

I'm thinking about guilt, shame, envy, that's a big thing that you talk about in the book. What are the function or the purpose of these emotions and how should we think about them? I mean, a big kind of overarching theme of the book is the process of engendering your life with more happiness doesn't involve the denial of unhappiness in your life. Like we experienced the full panoply of emotions

and we need to feel the feels, right? So where do emotions like that come in? Where are they counterproductive and how do we process them in a healthy way? So these are all complex emotions. They're largely complex negative emotions that we feel. And evolution has delivered them to us in response to our need to survive and pass on our genes.

And one of the, for example, envy is a way that we understand ourselves in the context of other people so that, envy is a way that we understand ourselves in the context of other people so that we'll have a spur to get better and rise in the hierarchy and pass on our genes. That's how you could, that's how an evolutionary psychologist would explain the phenomenon of envy. It's incredibly maladapted to modern life. You know, we're envious of, you could be envious of somebody because they have, you know, a million more downloads of their podcast per month, which doesn't really affect you, but it makes you feel a little bit less perhaps.

I'm sure you don't feel that, but some people do. We're trivial things that we all, because we understand ourselves as a little bit less and we have an evolutionary imperative to not feel ourselves as less because we don't want to, because that means getting eaten or left behind or cast out of the tribe or not mating in ancient times. It doesn't mean these things right now because you don't want 75 kids. You actually want your wife to love you and she doesn't care how many downloads of the podcast there are. So the result is we need to manage those things very, very aggressively. And the way to deal with these things, these maladapted manage those things very, very aggressively.

And the way to deal with these things, these maladaptive evolutionary impulses that we have is almost always through metacognition, choosing a better, acknowledging them and choosing a better emotion. So the case of envy is a classic, is a classic one. There's two kinds of envy. There's malignant envy and benign envy. Benign envy is where you envy somebody

who really is meritorious, an astronaut. You say, I just envy what that guy has been able to do with his life. You don't want less for him. But isn't that more like admiration? It has admiration in it. It's envy, but it also has admiration in it. And then there's malign or malicious or malignant envy, where you envy something that somebody has and you don't feel like they deserve it and you want the worst for them. And that really brings out the worst in you. That's something that's really super damaging to envy people in a malicious way. And that's very, very common. That's the reason that you're able to sell magazines about the scandals and problems of celebrities and rich people. That's all because of this particular envy. It's normal to feel these

things. And so the way to cope with it is to look, to acknowledge it, understand why you feel these things, acknowledge that you wish that there were better things in your life and you're willing to work for them, and then make a substitute emotion, make a blessed emotion. And in the case of envy, that's admiration. What is going on in terms of the neurochemistry of something like schadenfreude?

Like this idea that people are deriving some kind of perverse pleasure out of the misfortunes of somebody else. That's just pure spite. And that's what comes from malicious envy. That's unmanaged malicious envy, at least to schadenfreude. And it's incredibly dangerous for people who feel it. I mean, again, it's not a good thing.

Most religions think it's a sin, but the real problem, no matter what your religion or lack thereof is, is extremely damaging to you emotionally, to feel schadenfreude. It's interesting because you'll have all of these cases, all these studies that show that when people feel it, that they enjoy to imagine doing harm or harm coming to a particular person. And that's doing the same thing. It's actually doing the same kind of psychological damage to you

as if you were party to actual violence. It's not doing the violence to that person, thank God, but it's doing the same damage to you as somebody who's party to that violence. And that's something that we really need to manage if we're gonna become more human, but actually more effective and happier. What about guilt and shame?

Does it work the same way? Yeah, shame and guilt are slightly different phenomena, of course. And they actually have a productive aspect to them. I mean, I know it's modern to say you shouldn't ever feel any shame for anything, but you should. If you commit an immoral act that hurts somebody,

you should feel ashamed for it because you need to learn your lesson. And the immediate penalty to you, even if it's not something that you're going to pay an overt penalty, you know, a fine to the government or, you know, shaming on social media or cancellation or something,

but just that you did something wrong is that you feel a little bit bad about yourself. And that's good. That pain is actually good because pain is a signal. Pain in our lives is an alarm. It's a lesson that we need to get. And a lot of times, physical pain, for example, it exists for a particular reason. Physical pain itself is an incredibly interesting phenomenon. It has two parts to it. So I know that you're always dealing with these back issues because of all the strain and stress that you put yourself under over the years.

There's the sensory component of pain, which occurs, it feels like the site of where you hurt yourself. It's actually your brain, of course, but that has nerve implication. And then there's the affective component of pain, which is the, I hate this part of the pain. That part is really interesting because that uses a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. And that's the same part of the brain that's used for the affective component of physical pain and the affective component of emotional pain. The same part of the brain is actually lighting up when you stub your toe is when your girlfriend

breaks up with you. That's incredibly important to understand because pain is pain is pain. And that's a signal that it's time to do something different. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is baby that toe. Don't do that deadlift. You shouldn't be in that relationship in the first place.

Something's wrong here and you need to actually make some changes. And you gotta listen to that. You shouldn't numb that. That's the problem with, that's really what opioids are, they're calming down the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. So you don't feel the affective component of pain.

And the result of that is you'll just ruin your life by doing the things that are painful. Right, yeah. If you're muted out all of that signaling, then your antenna is broken and you're not able to course correct when you're doing things. Exactly right, exactly right.

You know, numbing yourself is an incredibly, now you might wanna take an analgesic to blunt it, right? Oh, one note, the sensory component of pain is better with anti-inflammatories like Advil. The affective component of pain is dealt with acetaminophen, Tylenol. Tylenol, what it really does is it calms down the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, not so you feel less pain, but you care less about the pain, which is a really interesting thing.

That's super interesting. I've never heard that. And there's one study that actually takes people who have suffered from like a painful romantic breakup and a course of Tylenol lowers their mental pain over a three week period. Oh, that's fascinating. What's a Tylenol addicts are like? Yeah, it's like, gotta be careful with Tylenol. Don't take beyond the recommended dosage on the package.

We all know people who just seem genetically wired for happiness. There certainly is a genetic component to happiness. This book is really about the non-genetic aspect of bringing more happiness into your life. But people fall anywhere along that spectrum of happy versus unhappy in terms of their just baseline disposition.

Yeah, that's right. So about 50% of your basic disposition is genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy, Rich. Or happy, I don't know. Your results are different. How many hours do you have? Is your mom watching? No way, right?

Yeah. So, and we know that from identical twin studies. So identical twins are separated at birth and adopted into separate families. And it was not a social science experiment that would be horribly ethical. But between the mid-30s and the 1960s, there was a bunch of these that happened and a number of them were located and reunited and given personality tests as adults. And it turns out that between 40 and 80% of almost every personality characteristic is genetic on the basis of seeing that they have identical DNA, but different environments. So a lot of that stuff was going into the University of Minnesota, very interesting studies.

And somewhere between 44 and low 50% happiness. So just round it off to half of your happiness. That's your baseline, the moods you always go back to. So it's not happiness in the cosmic sense of enjoyment plus satisfaction plus purpose. It's the moods that you feel, the disposition of positive versus negative emotions. Now, on top of that, you find people who are, because of their genetics and also because of their circumstances and also because of their circumstances and habits, that they feel positive and negative emotions at different levels. And that's where it gets really interesting. This is something I didn't know for and couldn't quite deal with for the longest time. There was a scientist for many, many decades believed that

happiness and unhappiness were opposites, that unhappiness meant a lack of happiness. That's wrong. Happiness and unhappiness are largely processed, that unhappiness meant a lack of happiness, that's wrong. Happiness and unhappiness are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. And you can be unusually high in happy mood and unusually high in unhappy mood. That means you're a high affect person or you can be high low or low high or low low.

And those are the four portraits of people that people really need to understand about themselves to manage themselves appropriately. So this is the PANAS test. This is a PANAS test, the positive affect, negative affect series. That's in the book. Yes. I took the test. Oh, what are you? I'm squarely in the mad scientist category. I scored above average on both, higher on positive, but definitely well above on negative as well.

Okay. So that doesn't surprise me a bit. So let's explain to the audience what this is. So high positive affect, which means you feel positive moods intensely and express them intensely, and high negative, that's high, high. You're a high affect person. That's called the mad scientist. That's a quarter of the population.

that's high, high, you're a high affect person. That's called the mad scientist. That's a quarter of the population. Every, and this is a population of people or a group of people that tends to be into everything and have strong opinions about everything. Everything is great or it sucks. There's almost, there's no gradations in there. And you're really hard to be around

because like, yeah, yeah, right? It's really difficult to be married to a mad scientist. It's a really difficult thing because it's just, you're just moody is the way and, and, and your moods change is the way that it works. Now I'm 90th percentile in positive effect and I'm 88th percentile in negative effect. Wow. I'm a mad, mad scientist. Do you know what the scores are? Cause I want to compare my scores. Yeah, give me your scores. It was, I think it was 40, oh, 41 on the positive. You're 95 percentile in positive. And 27 on negative. That's pretty high. So you're about 70th percentile in negative and about 95th percentile in positive. So you're very, very

high positive, but you're way above average in negative too. But if I had taken this test, as I was taking it, I was thinking, how set in stone is this? Because 15 years ago, if I took this test, I know that I would have been much lower on the positive. I don't know if I would have been higher on negative, but my life is so much better now and I'm generally much happier than I was then.

Yeah, for sure. So there's a mutability to this. There's mutability to it based on circumstance, but your baseline will be the same. So under the same life circumstances, you'd have the same PANAS profile probably. But if you were like, 15 years ago, you weren't drinking, were you? No. No. But life wasn't as good as it was. My guess is when you were in the grips of addiction- It was a lot different. It was a lot different, but that was because of circumstances. So circumstance can change it,

but you're always going to go back into the groove of where you are. So circumstance can change it, but you're always gonna go back into the groove of where you are. You need to accept it, love it, use it, compliment other people to you who have this. In other words, your executive team of people who work with you should compliment you and should not exacerbate these tendencies. You need people who have a different profile around you.

And we can talk about that in a second. So that's really important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's interesting is knowing that, and then knowing what the profiles are of the people in your family and the people you work with, creates a lot of work for better communication. Because if you understand those default settings,

then you kind of know how people function. And you don't resent them because they're different than you. Now, what everybody wants to be is the high positive, low negative. And that's about 25% of the population too. Those are cheerleaders. Everybody wants to be a cheerleader.

But cheerleaders, and they're fun to be around, and they're really nice, and they're pleasant, and they always have a good word. The problem is that they tend to be undiscriminating about quality, and they have an incredibly bad time getting negative information. So they tend to be bad CEOs. They tend to be bad executives because they won't give bad news and they won't accept bad news. It's just all good all the time. Oh yeah. And it's like when you have a cheerleader boss, everybody's at a cheerleader boss, they're like, hey Rich, you're doing a great job this year. This whole organization is doing well because of

you. And you're like, oh man, that's great. And then you hear the boss in the office next door where that incompetent idiot works saying the same thing. And then a wino out in the alley getting the same bit of, you're just doing great and you're looking great. You realize that they're blowing smoke at everybody. So if you're a cheerleader, you have to learn how to accept and give bad news. Now, the interesting ones, the hard ones, are the poets and the judges. The poets are high negative and low positive. And nobody wants to be a poet, but the world needs poets.

They tend to be really creative. They tend to be very discriminating. They tend to be incredibly accurate in their assessments. We need poets in our companies is the bottom line. Now, they need to manage themselves because they can be total downers is the way that this works. And they suffer a lot.

But if they can be paired up in a pair bond and a good marriage with somebody who can bring them up and could understand them and people who can appreciate the beauty that they can actually bring to the world, it can be a really, really good thing, but that's a difficult profile. Yeah. What is the optimal partner profile for the poet? So the, that you need somebody who has high, high positive affect, but who appreciates the poet and who's not going to be driven crazy by the fact that they have low negative affect. So low positive affect. So

cheerleaders, for example, they don't like poets, but when they can be married to and love and appreciate poets, that can be an optimal pairing because they tend to fit each other's gaps. And what you find is the most successful marriages are based on complementarity, not on compatibility. The most successful marriages are not compatible people, they're complementary people. And the most complementary profiles are a judge

with a mad scientist or a poet with a cheerleader. Now it doesn't always work out that way. I'm married to a mad scientist. I'm married to a Spanish mad scientist. Imagine. We've been married 32 years and it's been like 10,000 fights in my marriage. And the reason is because mad scientists fight with each other all the time. Part of the reason is because mad scientists fight with each other all the time. Part of the reason is because, man, if you have a negative, negative moment, it's like this bad electricity that happens.

And especially, you know, my wife is being Spanish, fighting is just another form of communication, right? Right. But when the positive and the positive connect, then it's probably, you know, euphoric. Sublime. Yeah. It can be just absolutely sublime,

but we have to understand each other. And I'm telling you, this is an example of how the knowledge is power. Now the judge is the low, low. These are sober people. These are judicious people. That's why it's called a judge. Oprah's a judge. Oprah's a judge.

And so that's why Oprah and I work so well together. I find her judgment absolutely impeccable and she finds me highly entertaining. And the result is that we can do this work and we just enjoy it. She helps me stay on the rails. And she likes the idea that we have sort of high amplitude of ideas and creativity and electricity

when we're working together. And so it's a really, really good match as it turns out. This feels like a much more astute framework than calling someone, you know, a toxic positive person or somebody who's just a downer or a pessimist, right? This is a more nuanced. Well, it's actually has some science behind it. I mean, the names themselves don't come from the science.

I mean, I actually gave the names to it so that people can remember what they are, but the PANAS test is an incredibly, has construct validity. In other words, it's been tested and tested and tested and passes all of the replication. It's got a big literature behind it. How does this square with people with a negativity bias?

Are the poets the ones with the negativity bias? Do we all have some form of negativity bias inside of us? We all have negativity. What do we do with that? Well, negativity bias keeps us alive. So negativity bias means, all it means is you pay more attention to the negative aspects of things around you

than the positive aspects. And the reason is because the positives are nice to have, but the negatives can be lethal. So when somebody's smiling at you, that's nice. When somebody's frowning at you, you don't pay attention, you can die, at least in ancient times. Now that's horribly maladapted

because if you're walking around with this negativity bias saying everything sucks, everything's bad, you can become incredibly unrealistic. I mean, you and I have way more reason to be optimistic than pessimistic in our lives. We have way more reason to be grateful than resentful in our lives. But negativity bias will always push you. And if you tend to be either a mad scientist or a poet, you're going to have to manage the outsized negativity bias that this brings. So how does one manage that? I certainly have my bouts with it. Yeah. Consciousness of this is really critically important. So remember, the metacognition is

awareness of your emotions. It's thinking about thinking. Any of these techniques is to say, is to be aware of these things that you're doing. The problem is not that we have unconstructive emotions, it's that they're unmanaged. All of our emotions serve some sort of a purpose, but everything is worse when we don't manage it, is what it comes down to. So you're a mad scientist, which means you're going to have outsized negative affect at particular times in your life. And that's going to exacerbate the negativity bias, probably, especially when you're sleep deprived or you're hungry or something like that, that is going to, that's going to put your nerves on edge. And that's the time for you to say, oh, that thing is happening. And just start

to, the reason Oprah and I wrote this book is so people understand themselves better. That's the basis of self-management. That's the power that you can actually get starts with knowledge. It's amazing how the science now validates or is catching up to different strains of thought, philosophers, religious traditions who sort of reverse engineered this or just back themselves into certain adaptive strategies to deal with this. In 12 step, this would be halt. Like when you're having one of those,

when you're having a negative moment, like halt, hungry. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired? Like if you're any of those things or some combination of those things, then there's very easy fixes.

There's behaviors you can do to kind of arrest that negativity bias that's in overdrive at the moment. But one of the things I'm curious about is, and maybe you can correct me, I got the sense from the book that you're advocating for replacing a negative emotion with a more adaptive emotion. And I just know that I can't think my way out

of this scenario because my brain created it. Like I can't solve the problem with the same brain that got me into it. My only solution to change my emotional relationship to whatever's going on and perhaps inhabit a new emotional state is to take an action. So I have to be action oriented.

It's not like I should be positive here. I'll have, I'll now, oh, I'm having this experience. I need to feel this other emotion. I can't make myself feel other than I feel unless I actually do something. So for me, it's always about some kind of practical thing that I can do. Or what would a positive person do in this scenario

and try to model that? Yeah, that's the as if principle. And it's a very strong. The as if principle is act the way you want to be and you will become that person. It runs the causality in the opposite direction. There's a very famous paper. There's a body of work from the late 19th century from a French physiologist named Duchenne.

And his whole thing was mapping the human smile. He wanted to know if it was culturally specific or physiological based on our common emotions. So he traveled all over the world and he found 19 smiles. Only one is associated with true happiness, which he named after himself. It's the Duchenne smiles. Like he discovered it, man. So, and it's in Papua New Guinea and India and Japan and the United States and every place else that that's the same smile every place. How do you know when somebody is actually smiling?

It's purely physiological. It has nothing to do with the mouth. It's two sets of muscles, the zygomatic major muscles in the upper cheeks and the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corners of the mouth. It's two sets of muscles, the zygomatic major muscles in the upper cheeks and the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corners of the eyes. When you see an old person who has pronounced crow's feet, that means they've been doing the Duchenne smile a lot in their lives. Never get Botox because you'll literally look like you have not enjoyed your life as much.

If you get rid of the crow's feet, you want crow's feet. It's very attractive. I mean, it doesn't make you look young, but it makes you look like an old happy person. Okay. Now here's the interesting question. If I am happy and then I do a Duchenne smile, what if I were to do a Duchenne smile, would it run the causality backwards into my body and make me feel happier? And the answer is yes. It's hard to do. The way that you simulate a Duchenne smile is to take a pencil It's hard to do. The way that you simulate a Duchenne smile is to take a pencil and put it horizontally in your molars and bite down hard for 20 seconds. That stimulates the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles manually. And after 20 seconds, you'll weirdly start feeling happier for like an hour. Wow.

So that's an example of the as if principle. So what would a happy person do? What would a happier person do? What would a, I'm feeling resentful. What would a grateful person do at this particular one? You're asking exactly the right question and do that and then run the sensation backwards and you'll get that. That's a, William James, the great psychologist, really the founder of modern social psychology, he's the one who first described that. If you wanna feel something, act as if you did. And tons of research since then

has validated the concept. Right, right, right. Yeah. But it's interesting that, so the emotional response is a result of a behavior, in other words, like the mood shift, the perception, all of that is in the wake. Yeah, well, you have an association

between a behavior and an emotion. And so the association is automatic. It's Pavlovian. And so usually when you have the emotion, you undertake the action. But they're so associated in your brain that when you undertake the action, you'll feel the emotion as well. It's a trick, but it really, really works. And so, and there's also things that you can do automatically and get into these habits. So for

example, our mutual friend, Rainn Wilson, he talks about that, that one of the things that comedians have in common is they're often, they suffer from depression. A lot of comedians are actually depressed. One of the reasons that they're so funny is that when they feel sadness, they make a joke. That's a response that they have. It's a substitute emotion when you feel sadness to actually make jokes instead. And people who feel a lot of sadness

and have a lot of facility for telling jokes, they become comedians. And that's why you see so many sad clowns. The poet is called the poet in the penestest because the creative expression is the adaptive strategy to that negative. Well, it's also the negative emotion is so implicated in creativity per se.

So, I mean, there's a, when you think of a poet, you never think of a laughing, smiling poet. You think of some guy in a beret, smoking a filterless cigarette, looking bummed. That's what you think of. That's the thing that pops into your head. There's a reason for that neurophysiologically, or there's an association that suggests the reason for that. So depression usually has rumination involved. And rumination is iterative thinking. It's obsessive thinking about something. There's a part of the brain called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex

that's highly, highly active when we're ruminating. Ruminating, ruminating. It's like, what did I say? I can't believe I did that. That's very implicated in people who are depressed. One of the things that you find is when you upregulate serotonin, it downregulates the activity

of the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. It just makes it easier to not ruminate, which is probably one of the ways that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac is one of the ways that it probably alleviates depression symptoms for many people. But what you'll also find is that that rumination is hugely important for the creative process. So artists are using the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. And you find that, for example, studies that show that when you have that famous artist, Beethoven, who was also a depressive, that when they had a bout of depression, it tended to coincide with hyperactive amounts of deep creativity and the highest quality work. That's what we find. But this is only fueling that idea

that in order for a creative depressant to do their best work, they have to just really foment that depressive state. Yeah, yeah, I know. And yeah, that certainly suggests that that's one of the ways that, and I've heard people who will kind of put on airs and act more bummed that they are

so that they will look more creative. The question is whether or not you would actually choose a depressive episode so you can get out another act of your opera. I actually don't know anybody who would make that trade. But there are, I do think there, I know plenty of artists through the recovery community who are very afraid of letting go

of their addictive tendencies. Their pain. Because yeah, the pain is the fuel for the output. And if you heal that, then you have nothing left to say. Well, part of that is that they associate their true humanity with their pain. Look, we feel the way that we feel about life and you understand yourself in the context

of the feelings that you experience. And if your life is predominantly one of pain, yourself, you, your richness is implicated in all of these feelings that you have. And so the problem is not that I won't be as good at what I do. The problem is I'm gonna lose myself. I won't know who I am.

It's a death fear. It's a loss of, and people would prefer to be alive and in pain than not alive at all. And so there's this kind of inchoate terror that people have of losing themselves. And if all they've ever felt as pain, the association with me alive is me in pain.

More broadly, that gets to this idea that our feelings define us, that our feelings, as intense as they are, are the very substance of identity. Right, which is wrong. When in fact, feelings are just feelings and they're only as powerful as we give them permission to be.

And they're always changing. Right. And when you can become, I just know in my own case, when I can become the observer of those feelings and create a little bit of distance between myself and the experience of those emotions, they tend to dissipate more quickly.

Oh yeah. And when people actually become better managers of their own feelings, they lose the fear. They just lose the fear and life just gets manifestly better for everybody. So we didn't even get through all the macros. There's the third one. Oh, the heavy one.

Which is purpose. Yeah, meaning. Oh, meaning, right. Meaning, yeah. I mean, purpose is actually a subcategory of meaning. So it's almost a joke. What's the meaning of life? You know, you sit at the mouth of the cave

and ask the guru in the Himalayas, what's the meaning of life? And that's the mouth of the cave and ask the guru in the Himalayas, what's the meaning of life? And that's a joke because it's a question that is not meaningful insofar as it's too general. Meaning really has three parts to it. The three parts is defined by psychologists and philosophers are coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the question, why do things happen the way they do? Purpose is what's the arc and goal and direction of my life? And significance is, does it matter if I'm alive? And when I dig into those particular questions, I can find a crisis of meaning in people's lives. It's a lot more specific and we can deal with it better. I

actually have a two question diagnostic test when I'm seeing if people have a crisis of meaning in their lives. If they don't have answers, you wanna take the test? Sure. All right, it's heavy test. All right. And there's no wrong answers, but you have to have answers, okay?

So here's the two questions. Why are you alive? I am alive to help other people live better lives, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically. Solid. For what would you be willing to die today? The welfare of my wife and children? Your family, very solid.

I believe those answers. A lot of people don't have answers. For what are you, why are you alive? I don't know. For what would you be willing to die? I don't know. And the problem, there's a meaning crisis in your life, which is arguably the most difficult

and most complicated and most beautiful and sort of manifold aspect of happiness, because it involves so much unhappiness. You didn't find the answers to the question you just gave me, except through tremendous pain. You didn't. I mean, if you had not gone through a lot in your life and suffered, you wouldn't know that. You never said, you know, when I found the meaning of my life is that week at the beach in Ibiza. That's not when you find meaning in your life. It's when you get sick and you don't die. When you lose somebody, when you're rejected,

when you're afraid, those are the moments when you actually learn the answers to that. And I meet people all the time who are trying to avoid unhappiness so much that they never find meaning in their lives. It's the opposite of the hippie generation. If it feels good, do it, which is terrible advice. Even worse is if it feels bad, make it stop. If I'm in pain, it means there's a problem and I'm defective. If there is suffering, I must treat it immediately and make it go away.

That's folly. Because that's the way to avoid meaning. And if you avoid meaning, you're not gonna find happiness. Yeah, pain is the teacher. It is. It is the guide that ultimately delivers many a person to the promised land of trying to understand

greater meaning and purpose in their lives. Suffering is incredibly sacred. Is it just, you just can't waste it. All of the great answers that I have sought throughout my life have come through the crucible of suffering and pain. And I've often thought, does it have to be that way? I know for a lot of people,

they're able to figure that out short of those experiences, but I'm also always very careful to rob people of the beauty of what can come when somebody is enduring something challenging. Obviously you don't want anyone you care about to be suffering unnecessarily, but there is something divine about that process that makes me step aside

and just want to allow them to have that process for themselves. Including your kids. Yeah. And it's just horrible. That's the worst one. But you know perfectly that they need to suffer too because they need to grow and they need meaning

and they deserve meaning. And the idea that we would take all of the suffering out of their lives or protect them from the vicissitudes, the slings and arrows of the things that happen to us and don't do this. And it's not right. It's not right because you have to live a full existence. Suffering will find them

and trying to deliver them from it. All it will do is spoil your relationship with them. Yeah, there's a thing in the book where you feel the question of like, well, if I avoid suffering in my life, how does that work with happiness? Like, don't worry, suffering's gonna find you. Like you're not avoiding suffering.

I don't care what trajectory you're on. It'll hunt you down. Life has a way. It does, and you know, it's interesting because when you see your kids, I would ask my kids these questions. Why are you alive and for what are you willing to die? It's probably not that fun to be raised

by a social scientist, you know, but. I asked you before the podcast, like how are the kids doing with all this stuff you're spouting all the time? Are they rejecting it or are they embracing it? They embrace it implicitly, even though they roll their eyes when it's like, oh, dad's gonna apparently do a speech at dinner tonight.

You know, my dad was a mathematician. So we would always have math problems during dinner. But it's interesting because, you know, one of my kids, I would make them, I had my kids write a business plan when they were in high school because they're entrepreneurs. I'm sure that was fun. Yeah, but the enterprise of life,

I mean, they're startup entrepreneurs. That's the ultimate enterprise is each person's life. And I'm VC, so I get a business plan. I figure, right, if I'm gonna invest. And so then I would send it back for revisions. And my son, he hated school. He just couldn't focus and it didn't go well and all that. And his business plan was just,

I got into some college and I was like, no, no, no, this is unoriginal. How are you gonna find the answers to these questions? I've got my answers, but I need the answers, your answer. You have to find your answers to these questions. Why am I alive? Why don't I die? And he finally turned in this great business plan that said he was going to find the answers by working with his hands, you know, outside doing something real. And so he did. He went to Grangeville, Idaho, and he's working on a dry land wheat farm for a couple of seasons after high school. Then he joined the Marines. It's my son who's in the Marines.

Today he's a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, which is a scary job for me and his mom, right? But he has answers, man. I mean, he's 23 years old, he's married and he has answers. You know, he's alive because God made him. And for what is he willing to die? His faith, his family, his friends in the United States of America. Boom, solid.

Yeah, I mentioned to you beforehand, he's born out of time. Born out of time. Yeah, he feels like a great generation guy. Kinda, yeah, and he's a knucklehead. You know, I'm not gonna deny it. I admire him so much. I admire him so much

because he's found the answers so much earlier than I did. You know, I was doing my thing. You did. I was doing my thing. I was 23 years old. I was playing the French horn. I was traveling around. I was drinking too much, doing my thing. But I wasn't finding the answers. It took me longer to find those answers. I admire him so much because he did a hard manly thing and he found the answers to his questions. And that's a really, really good thing to do. How do you know when somebody has really found those answers for themselves genuinely and honestly, as opposed to making a decision prematurely or for the wrong reasons, even if they believe it to be true? Yeah, that's a good question. And I'm sure that happens all

the time where the question, the answers to the questions that they should give, the noble answers to the questions. But they're disconnected from who they are. They haven't really excavated the soul. They don't really know why they behave the way that they behave. And their instincts are firing in ways that they don't fully understand.

They're gonna make decisions without that level of self-awareness or mindfulness that's gonna lock them in on the right path. That's right. And the answer is that they have to be the real answers that come after a period of discernment. And that requires work. The biggest mistake that a lot of people,

I mean, people come to me for career advice all the time and you too. And I teach graduate students at Harvard University. And so they're on a hardcore path toward professional excellence. I mean, MBAs at the Harvard Business School, imagine this. These are gonna be the masters of the universe. And they're incredibly excellent.

They're incredibly smart, but they have a lot of questions about what they wanna do. And the biggest mistake that they can make is thinking that taking every opportunity that comes into their path or doing the thing that looks the most worldly rewarding is actually going to give them, deliver them the answers to their meaning questions and thus give them a sense of purpose and then happiness. And that's just not right. You need to actually do the work. And to do the work, you actually have to think deeply about the answers to these questions,

about the questions themselves, about, you know, who am I as a person? And so, you know, every religious tradition has the structure of discernment, you know, the discernment of spirits to Catholics, panna for the Buddhists in the Mahayana tradition, sunesis for the ancient Greeks. You know, who am I? What do I stand for? What do I mean? I mean, these are the questions that every philosophical and religious tradition has.

Right, and people aren't going to HBS to find answers to those questions, although your class is oversubscribed. So there is something about that. Maybe they don't know what they're in for. I would imagine that the population of students in your Harvard Business School class would skew towards people who are motivated by financial security.

Do you still teach at the Kennedy School? I do, I do. That population probably skews a little bit more towards people who are interested in power. Or public service. Or service, yeah, service. But yeah, it's a different, certainly it's a different group.

Right, but you're dealing with young people and most likely I would imagine you tell me, I mean, I think in general people, when they think about happiness, they're thinking about, well, I'll be happy when I get this, when I get the job, when I get the job, when I get the house, when I get the promotion, et cetera.

Or if you're asked, and this is in the book too, like Oprah talks about like, well, when people would ask her like, or she would ask people like, what would make you happy? They would always have some kind of answer that was really a goal and not something that would actually engender happiness in their lives. So that sort of brings us to the four pillars

that you've arrived on that are the true kind of drivers of bringing more of this into your life that are outside of that very, very kind of limited, but typical way of thinking about happiness. That's right. So when people have inadequate emotional self-management, all the stuff we've been talking about to this point, they're incredibly distracted all the time.

The main problem that people don't make proper investments to get happier is because they're so distracted. I mean, life is basically a process of sitting in an airport for a delayed flight. And so what are you doing? Shopping online and scrolling Instagram and playing solitaire. And life is just full of boring diversions because we're so emotionally uncomfortable all the time. Once you can emotionally self-manage, then you can focus on what actually matters. You can get the apps off your phone, maybe even literally, and you can

focus on investing in the parts of your life that really will bring more enduring happiness. And what those are is super validated by social science. I mean, there's 10,000 you could find. You know, is endurance gonna bring you more happiness than weight training? Is, you know, is it, you're gonna be happier as a vegan than if you have a high protein, animal protein diet? I mean, there's lots of little papers and little findings like that, but there's biggies,

the biggies that we can really focus on once we're no longer distracted or making an investment every day in our faith, spiritual, or philosophical lives, the transcendent walk, the things that are bigger than us, whether it's religious or not, our family lives.

And family is pretty self-explanatory, although it's not easy. Our friendships, deep, real friendships, by the way, the family and friendships, they come together in one single person, which is your spouse, and then meaningful work, work that serves others and which you can create value with your life.

These are the accounts that we need to put our energy in every single day, and that will build and build and build and build a better life. Now, we're not gonna get to happiness because that's not a destination. That's a direction that we'll get to. And Oprah coined this word in the book, which I love. She said, the goal is happier-ness.

Right, happier-ness. Yeah. Yeah. Happier-ness, I like that. Yeah, on a surface level, it all feels very self-evident and obvious. Like, of course, you want more friends and you want family around and you want family around and you want work that has meaning

and you want a connection to some kind of faith tradition that gives your life a little bit more meaning and you wanna be giving back, right? It sounds so intuitive and yet most people are bereft of these things because they actually don't. Yeah, it's hard. It is hard. Mostly it's we don't quite believe it

and so we don't quite do it. A classic case of this is most people say, I wish I were reading more Stoic philosophy. I wish I were doing more meditation. I wish I were going to church like I say I do, whatever your thing is, but they don't actually get around to it because they're not persuaded that this is as important

as getting your vegetables and getting into the gym or any of the other things that are the basic maintenance for building a healthier, better life. Or if you're busy and you're time crunched and you got little kids and you're working two jobs, it just feels like- A nice to have. Yeah.

It feels like a nice to have. It's fundamental. With family life, it's really interesting too, because we find that family relationships are more attenuated than they've ever been in the data. Yeah, that's a big one. Let's talk, let's spend a little time on that, because I think that is a common thing where family, maybe not the nuclear family so much as the extended family is just fraught with landmines and produces a lot more unhappiness than happiness. So most people, maybe not most people,

but a lot of people would say, actually avoiding my extended family is better for my happiness than engaging with them. Yeah, and part of that is because we have a tendency to believe that differences of opinion are more important than they are. In older times, and you even go back to the life of our parents.

They didn't lose track of their extended family nearly as much as we do today because they sort of needed them more. There was a sense that these are my people. And so they would put up with a lot more nonsense than we do today. Plus, there's a tendency in modern life, if people disagree with you on things that I think are relatively trivial like politics, but other people have turned into a religious cult in America today to say that if Uncle Jack, he likes Trump, so that's a personal attack on my identity

and so I'm not gonna talk to him anymore. Well, that's insanity. That's just ridiculous. You're losing your kin, you're losing your people, you're losing people close to you who have a deep hardwired understanding of you and who can bring something to your life if you'll actually let them. And we're losing that. And that's one of the reasons that loneliness is just through the roof. Yeah. Well, with respect to families, it can be complicated for those

reasons, but what's beneath the surface there are decades of patterning, right? So that when you go into a situation with that challenging uncle, to use your example, it's not just what happens to be coming out of that person's mouth in the moment, it's a long history that then, you know, overrides, you know, whatever part of your brain and, you know, allows you, prevents you

from having that mindful response. And then there's a cascading, because those patterns are so entrenched, then that's gonna get a response. And then these things devolve very quickly. They can, and that's actually a good opportunity to use metacognition and chosen reactions and all of the emotional self-management

that we talked about before. You know, when you're in old relationships that have unconstructive patterns in them, you can reform those relationships. You can get new kinds of muscle memory by using your emotional self-management skills through metacognition. And this is, you know, one of the things that I talk about

is what should you be thinking about on the way to Christmas dinner when you're gonna be around your relatives that you don't like. There's literally stuff that you can actually think about. You can meditate in that loving kindness meditation on the good of the people that you're about to see. You can focus on the parts of your life unrelated to the evening and where you're incredibly grateful for the things that have nothing to do with this Christmas dinner. You can literally focus on your death. Focusing on your death will improve your relationships immediately. So think about, I'm not dead all the way to the Christmas dinner,

it'll be better. There's lots of ways that you can do this because what you're trying to do is you're trying to change your emotional patterns. You're trying to condition yourself, manage yourself in a different way. These should be seen as opportunities as opposed to just nuisances. Yeah. And disabusing yourself of the idea that you're gonna change them. Yeah. All you can manage is your own response to whatever's happening.

And the more neutral you can comport yourself in those scenarios. And also if you create a little bit of distance, almost one tactic that I use is to pretend that I'm watching everything go down on television as opposed to experiencing it, to have like a buffer zone that gives me a little bit more time

for that better metacognition. There's one other thing to keep in mind, which is the hardest thing to keep in mind of all, but it's the most constructive, which is that Uncle Jack might be right. Yeah, well, that goes to the idea is that Uncle Jack might be right. Yeah. Well, that goes to the idea of holding your ideas and how they inform your identity

a little bit more loosely, right? Yeah, and it's basically holding, so Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk and writer who wrote The Miracle of Mindfulness and many other really, really important books that we should all be reading still today. Thich Nhat Hanh said that one of the greatest areas

of attachment is attachment to opinion. He said, and attachment of course, is the source of suffering. It's the first noble law of Buddhism. Dukkha is that life is suffering, but really what that meant was that life, dukkha is actually not suffering so much as life is dissatisfaction.

And the reason for dissatisfaction. And the reason for dissatisfaction is our attachment to these worldly things. It gets back to the conversation about satisfaction that we had before. One of the greatest areas of dissatisfaction has everything to do with our attachment to our opinions. Our opinions are like jewels in a box that we're counting every single day as I think this, and I think that, and I'm completely sure of this. It's like, okay, okay. Hold it lightly. I mean, okay, that's your opinion. That's fine. I have a reverse bucket list. My reverse bucket list is how I cross things off. We talked about this, the reverse bucket list. And on my reverse bucket list, when I turned 59 in May,

I had half my political opinions because I was too attached to them. Interesting. And so it doesn't mean- I think that's really powerful and incredibly timely right now. Yeah. And it doesn't mean I don't believe these things.

It doesn't mean I don't think these things. It just means I don't care that much about being right. And I'm a lot more willing when people are, I mean, I crossed them off, I need more friends. Well, this is also like an amazing arc given, you know, your career trajectory from what you used to do. Yeah. You know, where self-identification

with a certain, you know, set of political ideas is just, that's, I grew up in Washington, DC. Yeah, you know the world. I know how that operates. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was never a good fit for that because I've always had lots and lots of friends across the aisle, but I thought that my opinions were becoming too strong in a highly electrified political environment. And, and, and, and I think that they're mostly well-founded. I mean, I suffered through a PhD in public policy analysis. And, you know, so I've thought deeply about economic policy

and foreign policy and, you know, but I know I'm wrong on a lot of things. I just don't know what, and I'm not gonna find out unless I'm around people who disagree with me. And so I might as well find out first and not last. And so it just gives me a lot. I have to hold my opinions much more lightly and love people who disagree with me a lot more.

And so that was what was on my reverse bucket list. And it's been a real game changer. Yeah, I could use a little bit more of that in my life. And I think that that is a huge thing in terms of unlocking dormant happiness. Sure, totally. I mean, it's like if politics is getting in the way of love in your life,

that's a bad trade. That's a really bad. I think that's true of a lot of people. Oh yeah, being politically right and trading away happiness, you're stepping over a hundred dollar bills to reach for nickels. It's a bad trade.

You're doing bad cost benefit analysis. And you know, it's easy to fall into because we've got a lot of culture warriors that are conscripting us into their war. And without paying attention, they will, those guys are bad, those guys are evil, those guys are stupid. And you're like, yeah, yeah, it's true.

I heard Yuval Noah Harari say, don't be a profiteer in the culture war. Yeah, don't be an arms trader. Yeah. But it's so easy to get activated in that space, especially if you have an opinion or you have a platform and then you think about what your responsibility is to engage with ideas publicly. But I just don't find it to be productive to do that in the construct of those social media environments. Completely. Social media in particular, because it has no nuance whatsoever. And it turns out to be ideally suited to fighting. I mean, here's the rule in general. I mean, I have opinions,

you have opinions about politics and life, right? I mean, you have opinions about what to eat, how to exercise, how to conduct your affairs. Your opinions are a gift. They're not a weapon. Your values should always be used as a gift and never as a weapon. If you're ever using something that you believe is a weapon, you've eviscerated its moral content and you've lost. You've already lost. You're not gonna, you're not gonna, you're gonna get people who already agree with you going, yeah, rich, who needs it, right? You're not gonna convince anybody. You're gonna harden down people's opinions

with what psychologists call the boomerang effect, which is pretty self-explanatory idea. When you tell somebody that they're a moron, they think their old ideas even more than they did before. But if you use them as a gift and you intend them as such, if your views are an expression of your love for somebody else, they will usually be, they might not persuade, but you will improve the relationship. And that's really a good thing to do. As a social scientist and somebody who's spending a lot of time thinking about happiness and

and somebody who's spending a lot of time thinking about happiness and deeply understanding the crisis of declining happiness and the rising rates of depression and the relationship between those trends and what's happening on social media, do you see a solution for what ails us and what might help us cohere as a democratic country so that we can, you know, kind of operate a little bit in a healthier way.

Yeah, so I am not a catastrophist at all about what's going on. On the contrary, I'm more hopeful than I've been in a long time. Not necessarily more optimistic. Optimism and hope are very different. Optimism is just a projection. It's a prediction about the future. Hope is that something can be done and I can do something about it. And when people are in pain, there's always opportunity. Opportunity lies

in pain. And so our country right now is being torn apart. People are not just not getting along. We're not one nation in important ways. It's not the first time. It's not the worst time. I mean, the 19th century was consistently worse than it is today. The late 1960s were worse than they are today. There were political assassinations and there's something like 900 political bombings in the United States in 1968 and 1969.

I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Ken Burns, the filmmaker, told me that at one point. 700, 900, such an enormous number that we wouldn't even be able to comprehend at this point. But we always think it's the uniquely worst time possible. On the other hand, we really are not living together as one society.

It feels like a society in decline as a result of that. There really is only one solution to that, which is bringing more love to the table. That's the solution. I mean, I sound like John Lennon or something. It's that, which is bringing more love to the table. That's the solution. I mean, I sound like John Lennon or something. You know, it's like, oh, we need his love. It's like my whole career is boiling down to a John Lennon song.

But, you know, there's a lot of truth, a lot of empirical truth to this as well. You know, we need this complex adaptive solution and none of the solutions that we're bringing, you know, I'm gonna vanquish a political solution where I'm going to make sure that the, this party or that party holds both houses of, you know, the house and the Senate and the white house and stack the Supreme court. And then we'll have a 30 year reign of progressive or conservative policies. That's, that's not going to do it. We all know that's not going to do it. Okay. Well,

what are the bread and circuses of more tech of of AI, of a new social media platform, of an easier way to shop that makes things more fun? That's nothing more than distractions. What we need is to double and triple down on the quality and content of our relationships. That's what we need. We need a much more transcendent understanding of the experience of life that we have. And I honestly believe, the reason I wrote this book, the reason I'm doing my work, the reason I'm alive, I believe, is because that's the revolution I wanna try to foment. I wanna love rebellion against all the things that we find.

And the more misery there is, the more opportunity there is to actually bring this about. That's an interesting frame to look at it. That's beautiful. I mean, you say at the very end of the book, you kind of make this declaration about that. And it left me thinking, this book provides tools

for people to practice this on an individual basis. But I also think in terms of how do we move culture and society from a macro perspective in this direction? And one thing I've come to understand and learn I also think in terms of how do we move culture and society from a macro perspective in this direction. And one thing I've come to understand and learn is that you can't browbeat people into changing their habits,

but what you can do is create systems that drive better choices more conveniently for people, like what Blue Zones is doing in cities, where they come in and they create bike paths and they get rid of vending machines. And so the unhealthy behavior is just a little bit more difficult than it used to be. And it's conducive to the healthier choice.

Are there things that can be done beyond the individual things that we can all learn about and practice through this book that we could be thinking about from a community or civic perspective. Yeah, one of the things that I'm really keen on and my lab at Harvard is dedicated to doing is creating more happiness teachers

throughout all of society. I don't mean people who suffer the graduate school and all that stuff. I'm talking about people who understand how their leadership platform is one of actually bringing more happiness to other people. And the day gig, the day job is just a pretext for being able to do that.

So I want executives to understand this technology and these ideas and see themselves as happy teachers. I want politicians to do that. I want community leaders, I want people in families to do this. And if this actually became, I believe that this is something that we could do because it's interesting and it's fun

and everybody likes it. That if people actually saw themselves that my job is lifting people up, is lightening the load of other people around me. If you can create that kind of a movement of happiness teaching on the basis of this incredibly winsome, and the science is so interesting.

And by the way, when you teach happiness, you get happier. The secret to getting happier is teaching happiness. Shouldn't this be in every high school curriculum? I mean, you're teaching it, you're teaching one class at Harvard Business School and everybody wants to be in that class. Obviously, this is something that people want and need, right? But how about we back it up and start teaching it when younger people are, before they've decided what they think their career trajectory should be to help inform better decisions

about how they're gonna invest all their attention and energy for the rest of their life. I agree. And I'm working with a number of state university systems to make it a required first year class in state universities. So thousands and thousands and thousands of kids who come into college doing

this. I want to create a high school class on this. I want to have ways that we can actually teach many of these ideas to children. At this point, when you write a book that can get to millions of people, or you have a platform like this, this is public education. You're an educator. I mean, you're a teacher. And this is how we're teaching these ideas to people. And everybody watching us can take these ideas and teach them to other people as well. This is incredible leverage. So almost anything where you're talking about these things in public, formally, informally, with a structure of traditional teaching or not is a way that we can actually create more happiness education going

around. And I think that's a movement that's actually quite possible. And it's something that people want. Yeah, that's very exciting. Yeah. I wanna talk a little bit about finding a way to make your life about something more than yourself. And one thing that I think we share is we both have found ourselves in career paths that we've crafted for ourselves

where we get to do this thing that we love and it takes care of ourselves and our families, but it's about more than ourselves. Like I really do try to approach all of this from a perspective of service. How can I serve the audience? How can I bring these amazing individuals here so that I can share their wisdom and experience and enrich people's lives? how can I serve the audience? How can I bring these amazing individuals here

so that I can share their wisdom and experience and enrich people's lives? And I can't think of anything more fulfilling or better or more exciting to do. And I'm incredibly grateful every single day. Like I just can't believe I'm in this situation. And I want everybody to have their version of that. But I'm imagining the person who's listening to this saying,

well, I'm just, you know, I'm in my cubicle job. I, you know, I do the thing and it's very difficult for me to figure out how this is ever gonna be about anything more than a paycheck that allows me to pay my bills. There's a trap where I feel stuck. And I'm very sympathetic to that person. I think a lot of people suffer from that. So talk a little bit about how to build more purpose and service

into one's life, whether through career or otherwise. Yeah. So career is one means for doing that. So let's talk about that because work is one of the pillars of the happiest life, work that serves others in which you feel like you're earning your success. It's easier for some people than for others. And by the way, there are a lot of people watching who think, I like being an accountant. I sure am glad I don't have to do Rich Roll's podcast. Sure. Because that's a hard job that I wouldn't know how to do. And it would be really, really stressful. And always being on the line to read Arthur's book before I actually interview Arthur. It's just, at least I know what I'm doing and my work ends at a particular time. I mean, I talked to a guy who was driving me, an Uber driver, a couple of months ago, and he's more than about a year and a half ago,

as a matter of fact, he's in this book. And he said that the happiest thing that he ever did was give up his job that was sprawling all over the place so that he could drive Uber because when it's over, it's over. He talks to people all day long and it doesn't have any pressure except in so far as he doesn't run into the guy in front of him in traffic. And so different strokes is what it comes down to.

But all of us can actually use our work as an opportunity to serve other people in different ways. We can all lighten the load for others. So when you're boring job in the cubicle in a day, when you're feeling really frustrated and you feel like your autonomy has been violated and all you really want to be doing is playing in your band and you're not getting your big break and whatever it is, you can actually get up and go get a cup of coffee and bring it to the guy in the next cubicle. Say, it looks like you can use a fresh cup of coffee, your day will change.

The truth is that the act of service per se changes a person. And the acts of service, they don't have to be grandiose, like this is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. You don't have to have the most popular podcast in the world. It's at the margin. It's the interaction that you actually bring.

You know, there's an old in the Talmudic book of the Sanhedrin, which is part of the ancient Jewish Talmud. There's the axiom that in every man is the whole world. And so the whole idea is that you serve one person really, and you've served the whole world because all of us is the whole world. And it's an important way for us to understand

in a world that's diverse and diffuse and confusing and do something beautiful for someone. I remember reading that for the first time and telling it to my wife and I was writing a book about charitable giving. It was early, I was an academic, I was teaching at Syracuse in those days. She's like, yeah oh yeah, yeah.

You know, so instead of, you know, writing checks to all these charities and all the stuff that we do, we give away 10% of our income and the whole deal. And she says, why don't we adopt an orphan? And I'm like, it's only a book. And we did, we did. And it was game changer for us. It was a game changer.

It completely changed our lives. It was one person. Look, there's 8 billion people. Who cares? But it changed the world. It changed the world that we live in. It changed our interaction, our understanding of the world. There's do one little thing on the basis of this.

And you've changed, you've turned the dial because this is not about scale. This is about people. This is about moments. It's about what's written on your heart at this very second. That's beautiful. Yeah, in AA, it is said,

they say our primary purpose is to stay sober and help another alcoholic achieve sobriety. Teach it, you'll get it. It's not help millions. I know. You know. Yeah, no, of course. Of course, look, this is-

It's the same idea. Love is one person at a time. There's the old joke that a socialist is a man who loves humanity, but only in groups of 1 million and above. I'm not trying to cast aspersions or make a political statement, but the whole point is that a lot of us have this mentality, right? It's like, how can I bring these big ideas to bear? You know, I need to have world historical impact. No.

Well, it's born out of ego and also envy and social media comparison and seeing what other people are doing and this desire or this need to make an impact and be noticed and approved of as much as it is about the act of service itself, which can be small, anonymous, and is better if it's that way. That's what Mother Teresa used to teach. She said that it's all in the little acts. That's where the magic of love really comes, is brought to bear, is in the little things that people don't see. But that will actually change a moment

in somebody else's life, will relieve stress in somebody else's life at one particular time. And everybody can do that. Everybody can do that. There is a weird ripple to this, which is you can practice this selfishly. Like you can practice selfish selflessness,

like understanding that service will make you happier and will improve your life and improve the life of somebody else. You can do it for reasons that have nothing to do with the outcome for the receiver and all about yourself. You can do it for reasons that have nothing to do with the outcome for the receiver and all about yourself. You can. If you're struggling with trying to like get activated, I'm not saying that's the ideal perspective to have,

but if somebody is not used to that or unconvinced that this is going to move the needle for them. Yeah, one of the things that you can do for troubled teens, for example, really, really struggling, is you put them into a program where they're serving people who are in even more trouble. It's one of the best ways you can inflect people

toward a better life for themselves is to put them into a place of service. When you find that the most effective social service programs that keep people sober and out of prison, for example, is where they are the counselors of people who have just been released back into society. It also disabuses you of your self obsession to get into somebody else's life. Yeah. One of the ways that I made a commitment

several years ago that I was going to live these ideas and live a better life. And one of the ways that I did that publicly was identifying myself very publicly with the science. Look, if I'm screwing up, if I write a nasty tweet, I'm gonna hear about it. I mean, I've lashed myself to the mast. I use my values as a gift. And I suddenly I start, you know, drop an F-bomb on Twitter and say, you jerk.

You know, you, I mean, it's not, let's just say it's not on brand. Have you been, you've been able to do that though? Yeah, because I committed myself to it. It's one of the reasons I did. I mean, if you publicly commit yourself to sobriety, you've made the stakes higher. You know, you've made the stakes higher

for doing the thing that's not going to help you and be bad for you and be a short run pleasure fix to, you know, a moment of misery in your life. And so this is one of the things that we can, that, that one of the things I recommend that everybody do is that you make a public commitment to the virtue that you seek, because that will ultimately pay the biggest dividends in a, in a life that's, that's disciplined and consistent. Right. Family, friendship, family, friendship, work, ideally work

that is tethered to some form of service. But that service can come in other areas of your life. And then the final pillar being faith. And I'm imagining the person who's enjoying this conversation, thinking to themselves, I get all those other pillars, like that makes perfect sense, but you lost me with the faith part. Record scratch.

I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna put that one aside. I'll practice these other ones, you know, Arthur and going to mass every day, good for him, God bless him, but not for me. Yeah, I got it. I think that's because there's a lot of people who've had challenging experiences

with organized religion over the past and have sort of, you know, cast that aside and thought, you know, I'm not going back. They're not there in their life. And the interesting thing, faith is a catch-all. Faith is just of, it starts with F, so faith, family, friends, you know, it kind of has a nice alliteration to it.

But the truth is that what I mean by that, what the literature is very clear on, is not my faith. It's not not my faith, but the point is that you need something transcendental to your day-to-day experience. You will almost literally go crazy if you focus on yourself day in and day out. And if you don't have something transcendental that zooms you out on the majesty of life, it'll be my job, my work, my commute, my money, my lunch, my back pain, my, me, me, me. It's unbelievably tedious.

You need something that zooms you out and defocuses you. And maybe that's reading the stoic philosophers like our friend Ryan Holiday likes to do. And I like to do too. Maybe that's getting up before dawn and walking in nature for an hour every day without devices. Maybe that's your meditation practice. Maybe that's analyzing the structure of Bach fugues. Maybe that's the faith of your youth. But you need something that's transcendental

to the day-to-day experience. And that's really what we're talking about. And that takes practice and work. That takes seriousness. You have to approach that with a certain kind of seriousness. That means usually the way that I recommend that people start on that is reading 15 minutes a day of love wisdom literature. Not Dale Carnegie. Oh, that's good.

That's not the wisdom literature that I'm talking about. I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, real stuff that has transcendental content to it that helps you understand the context of you and your life and the majesty of the great universe. That is unreplaceable in the happiness equation.

That's beautifully put. And I think another way of phrasing that is that you're in charge of locating the nature of divinity in your own life as you see fit. When you come into 12 step, they say you've got to find a higher power, but it's a higher power of your own making, right? Or your own definition.

And you acknowledge the existence of higher power, but they don't say what it is. Yeah, it's like, that's up to you, but basically you have got to figure out how to connect your life to something bigger than you. That's right. And there is something bigger than you that puts you in perspective,

helps you understand that you aren't the center of everything, thank God. You know, here's the weird thing. People are afraid to find out they're not the center of everything, but when they do, it's just the biggest relief. Finally, the pressure's off. You know, finally, I can actually get on with the serious business of being part of this incredible life, you know, stand in awe of what it actually is. And that's really, really important. So, you know, doing the reading, doing the practice and, you know, having a contemplative practice, having wisdom reading, I recommend that people think deeply, deeply about what their values are and then trying to live

according to them really consistently with that, you know, writing out what is my, what is the order of operations of everything I'm trying to do? I mean, I have a, I have a, you know, I have a startup that's doing all this work and I've got my, my, my lab at the university and all that, but there's an order of operations that I've, that I'm, I'm clear on. The people who work with me are very clear on the order of operations. That's, you know, one, two, three, four, and all the work that we do has to do all four and it has to be in that order. And then I hold myself accountable to that. That's really part of the spiritual journey as well, is finding the consistency. Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson talks an awful lot about Carl Jung, but Carl Jung is just, you know, it's just deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper the

farther you go. And one of the things that he talked about is the secret to happiness is knowing what you believe and living according to it. It doesn't mean you have to live the way I think you should live, but knowing what you actually think is right and knowing what you think is wrong and the difference between those two things and acting consistently with those values

and unhappiness will come either if you don't know the difference between right and wrong in your views or you don't act consistently with your own views. And so writing down that mission statement, saying, am I living according to this mission statement? I have a spreadsheet that I keep literally in my life of the different micronutrients of my happiness equation. And a lot of it's ethical. Am I living up to these? Am I living up to my order of operations? And I rate myself on it. Wow. That's how important it is to

me. That's quite rigorous. And so what do you, how do you navigate dips in that? Like if you find yourself not living up, if you're, if there, if you're out of alignment between a certain value and a certain behavior or action, what is the process of working through the emotions of that and then correcting it? So I confess it and I make a commitment to be better with a course of action to make it better. So I take a series of steps and I make commitments to myself on what I'm going to do differently. So for example, I'll look through it and twice a year, I'm really updating the spreadsheet, mostly on my birthday, but on the off birthday, the half birthday as well. And I'll see in there that I'm not getting good grades with my wife. I'm not getting good grades. Now I know my wife,

if I'm not getting good grades, it's me. And the reason is because I'm not on my game. I'm, you know, being a little bit too much Arthur Brooks, a little bit too much. And it's like, yeah, I think I'll do, I think I'll do 49 weeks this year. I think I'll do more speeches this year. I think, yeah, I'll do that. That sounds cool. Mostly because I'm following these idols, money, power, honor, admiration,

all these things that I don't admire about myself. I say, okay. And it's actually taken a toll on my relationship with Esther. So I write that down. I confess it to her. I usually go to the confessional. So I write that down, I confess it to her. I usually go to the confessional, I'm Catholic. I get to confess it to a priest too.

And I make a commitment, I'm gonna make it better. And I actually put together a plan and I check in more regularly and I see whether or not I'm bringing my score back up. Do you think that the person you choose to be in life partnership with is maybe the most important decision a person is gonna make? If I named the top three decisions,

it would be one of them at least. Mm-hmm. You know, it's, now it's interesting because the way you phrase that is who you choose. And there's a kind of a cosmic aspect to that. It almost feels, I bet in your life too, that you feel like she was chosen for you.

Oh, 100%, that's what happened. Yeah. I have no doubts about that. Yeah, I mean, there's this, and the truth is we know intellectually that there's any number of people that you could have had a successful marriage with, but you took one that was in the zone and made it perfect.

And that's really where the beauty of it is, is in the project of making this thing really good together. So like anything else, it's not a question, your romantic partnership is not a question of getting lucky. It's better to be good than lucky. It's more important to work hard than to have good luck. It's a funny thing about all lucky people. They tend to be really hard workers and disciplined

people. Isn't that weird? And everybody I know was a good marriage. It was like, wow, so lucky you found your soulmate. No, no, you made your soulmate. Together you made your soulmate. So, yeah. And it's not a decision. It's a series of decisions until the day you die. It's decision after decision. You talk a lot in the book about digital versus analog experiences in the context of friendships, but also romantic relationships. I'm thinking of a younger generation,

the generation beneath us, that is basically leveraging dating apps for romantic opportunities. And that's just the way that the culture, that's how it goes now. You know, as I'm sure, I don't know if your kids used it, but like, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all about that, right?

And I wondered if you had any words of wisdom for somebody who is engaged in that process about how to do it in the most healthy way. Yeah, so one of the things that we find is despite the fact that finding people in the online marketplace is easier than it's ever been before. And there's more choice than there's ever been before.

People are lonelier and they're more frustrated by dating. They feel like they're less successful in dating than people said they were in the 1980s when you and I were dating. And there's a reason for that. It has to do with the fact that we don't use the technology optimally. I mean, ideally people meet without technology, but it's harder to do. And it's not a legitimate thing for me to ask our viewers to do that because where are you going to meet? You talk to somebody in a bar and they think you're an ax murderer at this point. Or so if you're not religious, you're not going to go meet somebody in church who shares your values. Where do you meet people is where it comes down to. School, maybe. But even at Harvard,

a lot of people, a lot of my students will tell me that people don't typically date their fellow students. It's just not done. It seems weird to a lot of people to will tell me that people don't typically date their fellow students. It's just not done. It seems weird to a lot of people to date, which is strange because it's like, why else do you go to college? Yeah, that is- What's the point? I guess you're in Cambridge and Boston,

so there's other opportunities. Maybe. But for a lot of people in school, they're in a small town in the middle of nowhere. But they're using the apps, and the apps have two big problems. Number one is the paradox of choice, which means that you have too much choice.

And the result of that is that you get the feeling that there's always somebody better. And so you're always wondering. And this gets back to all these studies, the studies that show that there's one famous study where half the sample when they bought a car, it was deal is final. And the other half is they could turn it in

for any reason or no reason within the first six months. The first half was happier with our car purchased than the second half of the sample. Why? Because the second half was reassessing their car purchase over and over and over and over and noticing all kinds of imperfections. Whereas the first is like they made their peace with it and said, I love this car. This car is awesome. And that's the same thing when we're actually making decisions about dating or being with somebody in a relationship who's imperfect. The car is imperfect. The spouse is imperfect. That's just the way it is. And if you've all, you can always try again, try again, try again, try again. The paradox of choice will degrade the quality of the choice in your mind. That's number one. The bigger and worst part is

that what we use the technology for is to curate our choices on the basis of compatibility. We look for people who are just like us because we're vain. We're so egotistical. And we wind up, ironically, with people that we're not very attracted to but who are basically siblings, which is my adult kids would note is that's not hot. I don't want somebody who's, but we look for somebody who's just like us because vanity would say that that's the best possible match, but then we don't like them as much. There's even biological data. I mean, the famous t-shirt sniffing study, I'm sure you know that study, right? No, actually I don't. Oh, it's a study from the mid 1990s and where the researchers, they asked men to wear on a campus, to wear T-shirts for 48 hours

without taking them off, sweating into them, not working out, but just going about their daily life. And they would take those T-shirts and put them into shoe boxes, poke holes in the shoe boxes and get them to random women and ask the women to rate the attractiveness of the men who had worn these T-shirts simply on the basis of how the T-shirts smell.

They found that the men who were most different from them in terms of their immunological profile were the most attractive. Why? Because the olfactory bulb in the brain has all kinds of information that it gives us beyond just that smells like steak or whatever it happens to be,

or that smells like garbage or something is giving me a sense of disgust. We take information that shows all sorts of biological information about other people, and we want people who are more different than us. We find people who are more different than us sexy because we're more likely to have healthy kids if they have a different immunological profile, which gives more repertoire to our offspring. Right. There's a natural selection argument here that is favoring differentiation. Yeah. So with the apps, if you're looking for people who are just like you with your background and your college and

your political opinions that you're going to get your sib and you're going to be like, I don't know, I just can't find anybody I'm attracted to. That's why you need base level values, which doesn't include politics. If you're very religious, find somebody in your religion, that's fine. If you need to live in a particular place because you're family, that's fine. But everything on top of that, look for difference. Personality difference, background difference, values differences, that's what's gonna attract you.

That's the adventure. That's when romance is fun. And so you have to use the apps differently. Say, I'm like this. I want somebody who's gonna complete me by being different. Write that in the profile. See if you get any hits, who knows? Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I'm just thinking, how is that gonna go? I don't know. I've never been on a dating platform. My guess is that's so, I mean, either, because we're old, but thank God. I hope you never have to be or me either. I live vicariously through some friends who kind of tell me what's going on there.

Yeah, and my kids didn't. It doesn't sound like fun. One of my sons met his wife in an internship at my company. He's 25 and a father already. My 23 year old also married, met his wife on the beach in San Clemente. And my little girl who's 20 is not doing that.

Yeah, raise him Catholic, you do Catholic stuff. Yeah, I guess, right? Oh my God. In your experience teaching these young people, you know, what is another thing that you think young people have upside down when it comes to happiness beyond like the kind of low hanging fruit that we understand of chasing money and power, et cetera.

All of my students, in fact, almost all young people think they're gonna get happier as they get older. That they're just naturally gonna get happier as they get older. And the reason is because they think the circumstances of their lives are gonna improve and they are,

and that that is the main reason that they'll be happier. They'll have the job they want and the career they want and the money they need. And if they want a family, they want and the money they need. And if they want a family, they're going to have a family. But circumstances, because I can't keep no satisfaction, that's the homeostatic principle is what we call it, that those things actually don't last. The truth is that most people, they have a tendency to trade off enjoyment for meaning

all the way from their early 20s until their early 50s. And that means their moment to moment happiness falls. You enjoy your life less in your 30s than you did in your 20s. And you enjoy your life less on average in your 40s than you did in your 30s. You have more meaning, but meaning is long-term and it comes later. And so what happens is that people are shocked to find, they think their happiness is going to go up and up and up and up and up. And then it's going to max out at some point and it's going to come back down. The truth is it's going to slightly decrease from their early 20s until their early 50s. And then it goes up a lot, usually until about age 70. And then it breaks up into two groups. And whether you keep going up or start going back down again depends everything on the decisions you made when you were younger. And they don't know that.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, when you're young and you're ambitious, you're more than willing to delay, not just gratification, but happiness in the pursuit of building something that you think has meaning that's gonna provide happiness later and overlook the need for having any happiness in your life in the present moment. Yeah.

Although people still seem to have a good time in their twenties. They do. Better time than I'm having. Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, and from that, that kind of like daily enjoyment perspective. Well, people in their twenties, where enjoyment really starts to be defrayed

is when they have kids. That's when enjoyment of moment to moment experience tends to go down. The meaning goes through the roof, but enjoyment goes way down. Enjoyment of your marriage goes down when you first have kids. Enjoyment of your leisure time goes way down when you have kids. And it's just because it's hard and it's stressful. And people in their 30s and 40s, they're balancing making payments and raising kids and trying to stay married and having a job and having a boss and having a commute and

trying to get into a house that you can afford is incredibly stressful. And so enjoyment tends to be quite low, even though meaning, because all the decisions you're making in your life is going up. And you benefit from all those meaning decisions in your fifties, typically, back when your enjoyment has come back. So everybody's a little bit different, but by the time your kids come along, you start making, and again, it's still worthwhile because having kids net net raises life, purpose and meaning over the span of your life by a lot. Yeah, but also that moment when you partner up

and you start having kids, that's when you start to detach from your friendships. And then there's a long period of time, at least as the data shows with men and in my own life experience, it's not until much later when you start to realize like you haven't talked to your friends in a long time. And you're lonely.

Yeah, and the phone is heavy because you haven't talked to them in a long time. And what would that look like? And how's that gonna, how am I gonna work that back into my life? And I think a lot of people just ignore it or wish it away and end up more and more lonely. And I think what was really,

something I really appreciated in the book was you're saying like, this is work. Like, are you committed to that work? This is important and you have to do it. And yes, it's probably gonna be uncomfortable if you are one of those people. Yeah, are you committed to that work? This is important and you have to do it. And yes, it's probably gonna be uncomfortable if you are one of those people. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

And you have to take it seriously enough to put in the time. See the people that you see the most often are actually your coworkers. Most people will spend more time with their coworkers, even than their family. And they'll even say they're my friends, but they're deal friends, not real friends, typically. You can have real friends at work, that's great.

I mean, 17% of marriages actually start in the workplace. That's great. But mostly you've got these deal friends and if you stopped working together, you probably wouldn't keep hanging out. And you hang out because you kind of like that person. And then the people that you really love that you met in college and you hung out with and you were were going to be friends forever, and you haven't talked to them

for two months and three months and six months. And that's one of the reasons that some of the loneliest people in America typically have been 60 year old men. And 60% of them say their best friend is their wife, whereas 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Contemplate that statistic. I'm just thinking about your life. Like you're traveling 48 weeks out of the year, you're on the road to somewhere, you're married, your kids are out of the house.

So that probably makes it easier. But what does a day in the life look like for you? And how do you make room for friendships? Friendships and family for that matter. So, I mean, I have routines that, protocols that make sure that I don't fall down on these things too terribly much. I don't have as many friends as I would

if I lived in one place all the time, to be sure. But most of my friends don't live in Boston. I mean, I have my closest friend lives in Atlanta, as a matter of fact, and I've moved all over the place. You know, I've moved, my wife and I have moved 20 times in the past 32 years. We just, and you know, Europe and West Coast and East Coast, et cetera, et cetera,

just sort of chasing our fortune. But, you know, my friend Frank in Atlanta, he's, you know, he's stable. And we talk, usually we talk seriously about once a week. And we sometimes have a pretext, like we need something we need to talk about because something we're doing together in business, but typically we don't ever get to the business.

So how you doing? And he'll ask me something. He has a question he's been wanting to ask me that's something deep, something heavy that's on his mind, or I have some advice that I need from him, something that's kind of bugging me. And I know that Frank's gonna give me good advice. And I set aside 45 minutes or an hour

because that's how long the conversation is gonna take. And I have to schedule that because I'm busy. With my family, I'm usually out three, between two and four nights a week. So I'm usually home more nights than I'm there. And every morning when I'm at home, my wife and I start the day, I work out from five to six in the morning.

And then at 6.45, we go to mass together. That's one of the things we do together. It's sort of praying with your spouse is incredibly intimate. And you, didn't you buy a house because it was proximate to the church? I went, you know, that's a commute, right? And I wanted to cut down on the commute time.

So it's a very practical decision. It's not like I'm such, I'm that churchy, but, and then we usually spend the evening together. We have meditative prayer that we have together before we go to bed together at night when I'm home. And these are very intimate moments. And so you have to maximize, I hate to get into the quality time

versus the quantity time, but it's not untrue. And you have to maximize. I hate to get into the quality time versus the quantity time but it's not untrue. And you have to be disciplined about how the way that you're pursuing these relationships cause they'll get away from you. I mean, the tyranny of the urgent and all the adventures and fun things that I get in my life and you get in yours will get in the way

of the things that are actually more important for a long-term happy life. Yeah, I imagine the opportunities that get dangled in front of you are amazing and tempting and you probably wanna say yes to all of them. It's one of the things that I've done in my own enterprise, in my own company is that I'm not the CEO.

I have a CEO of my company and she's fantastic. She's, I mean, she's just great. And one of the, she knows me really well and I don't see the opportunities. She does with her staff. She fields them for you. Yeah, because she knows that if somebody comes directly to me, I'll also be like, yes, yes, yes.

I will go to New Zealand next Tuesday. Yes, yes. You know, because of my dopamine will go. Right. This is the thing, you know, my dopamine is like set on extra high for the anticipation of reward that comes from adventures. I love adventures and new stuff and going places and talking to people about happiness. I just want to do it so much

that if somebody comes to me, I will, you know, have an irrational decision. I'll be highly limbic. Right. I love, there's something really amazing about the fact that perhaps the most challenging impediment to your own happiness are all the opportunities to spread the gospel of happiness across the world. That irony has not been lost on my wife, Esther. Yeah. Which leads me to kind of the final thing I wanted to talk to you about on that topic of teaching that you touched on earlier. The book ends with a sort of call to action. Like, listen, if you do this and your life gets better,

like here's how you can help other people with this. It really is a populist kind of cattle prod to get people to think about not just, it's again, an I versus me thing. Like think of this, not just for yourself, but how much good you could do, especially if you're lacking that sense of purpose or meaning in your life, like here it is.

That's right. That's right. And even more, you can bring this to other people. And if you do, it will be with you forever. The secret to getting happier is teaching happiness. I mean, it's like, I hate to admit it, but it's absolutely true that I teach happiness because I want to be happy. And the more I teach it, the happier I get. My happiness has literally risen by 60% in the last four years. How do you come up with that percentage?

Because I've got the diagnostic tests that I look dynamically because I'm giving my students consistently these tests and I take it myself I'm giving my students consistently these tests and I take it myself to see actually what my progress is. And I know how to answer the questions honestly. And I've seen incredible progress because I'm thinking about these ideas. I'm sharing these ideas. I'm urging people to adopt these practices

and I adopt these practices myself. My column in Atlantic, every week, it has three things that you can do to put the science into action. And my column is usually eight weeks out. So I'm writing for eight weeks from now and I'm trying things. I'm happiness hacking all the time to see if these things actually work, to change mood, to change attitude. Some of these things will become permanent parts of my routine, but I don't recommend these things unless they actually work in my own life.

And the result is, man, I mean, it's not perfect, but my life is better. I mean, it's just better than when I was running a company. When I was running a think tank in Washington, DC, I look back on those years and there were some good times and there were some laughs and there were some light times, but I just can't believe it took me this long to get to the things I'm doing now.

You literally had to get, you know, basically make your life about trying to understand this to fix it for yourself and now spread it to other people. Yeah, my natural baseline happiness level is significantly lower than most of my students. And it's surprising to hear that. Yeah, and people often are because, you know, it's like they think happiness is like athletic Yeah, and people often are, because it's like,

they think happiness is like athletic ability, which is if you're teaching it, you're a professional at it, you must be naturally gifted at it. And the truth is that I actually know almost everybody who does science of happiness as a social scientist or neuroscientist, because it's a pretty small community of people. It's all me search, not research.

Everybody who's studying it does it for a reason. Yeah, that's not surprising to hear. That's not surprising to hear. What is the science that's coming out now that excites you? Or maybe a better question might be, what is the research that you would like to see that would unlock a new level of this for you? So for the longest time, that's a great question.

And for the longest time, happiness was an almost exclusively psychological discipline. And psychology was almost completely disconnected from neuroscience for the longest time. And it's only been relatively recently that these bodies of work has started to interact. When I started, I mean, I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008,

and there's not one single neuroscience paper that's cited in that book. Now you've read this book, you know that there's a ton of neuroscience. There's so much neuroscience in this book that I had my colleague, Josh Green at Harvard, one of the very distinguished neuroscientists, read it to make sure that,

because I'm not a neuroscientist, to make sure that I'm reading the science correctly and I'm interpreting the findings correctly. There's an increasing convergence between neuroscience and social psychology, social science in general. It's unbelievably exciting. Back in the day, psychology was,

I mean, biology was just psychology. You could will your pain away and you needed to actually have therapy and talk through things so you understood. More and more and more, we're understanding a lot of psychology is actually biology. And that's incredibly empowering

because once we understand the structure of what's going on between our ears, the psychology takes on so much more meaning because it has structural implications for the way the habits and, you know, there's a reason that, you know, then an ultra endurance athlete is talking to a social scientist

because our worlds converge when we understand that there's a reason that, you know, then an ultra endurance athlete is talking to a social scientist because our worlds converge when we understand that there's a seamlessness between the, the physiological and the psychological parts of what I'm talking about. And I want that to go forward even more. You know, when I first started teaching this stuff, it was probably a few glancing references to neuromodulators, a little bit about the prefrontal cortex and some mentions of the limbic system. Now, 30% of what I teach is neuroscience. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that make you want to go back and get another PhD? Well, I practically, I mean, right now I'm reading so much neuroscience for my column and for my books that I'd see, I probably have the level of knowledge of a rising junior in neuroscience at MIT or something,

which is to say, I have to have appropriate humility. I'm not a neuroscientist like Huberman, somebody who has the super deep knowledge in it, but I can read the literature and I can interpret it in the context of what I'm talking about. And I always, always have it vetted by the pros is the whole thing.

That's super exciting. I think what's exciting about that is the agency that it gives the everyday person once they're sort of educated up on the implications of that with tools to affect their own biology with that understanding of how the brain and the nervous system work. Yeah, I mean, for the longest time,

before these two literatures intersected, people would say, what's the relationship between fitness and happiness? I'm like, oh, now we know. Now we know. Fitness, diet and fitness, exercise lowers negative affect. It doesn't raise positive affect. It lowers negative affect.

That's the reason that people who have naturally low negative affect can't stay on an exercise regime because they have nothing to lower. They don't feel the benefit from it. They don't feel the psychological benefit that comes from managing their negative affect like this. We wouldn't have known this if these literatures were not starting to intersect. And I'm still at 27 or whatever it is. What am I at? 18? No, yeah, I'm 27 on the negative affect with all the exercises I'm doing. Well, the point is, it's always going to come back up if you're managing it. You're managing it. You're not

going to get a permanent diminution in your negative affect. But that's why I spend five to six in the gym. It's because I have to manage my negative affect because that's where I am on the pannus. Because a mad scientist is a mad scientist. It's better to be a mad scientist who's lifting weights, it turns out.

That's true. Here's your life protocol based on which box you, which person you, you know, which, Yeah. which person. And we can go way, we can do tons more on that than we have. We can do way more than we've done on that. And that's what I want the next 10 years of this

to look like, where your work and my work are intersecting more and more and more and more. So any young person out there looking for a career trajectory, neuroscience. Neuroscience and psychology. I actually do, yeah, I would do a psychology major with a neuroscience certificate at a good university or vice versa.

And then doing graduate work where you're very well versed in both. And do it at Harvard and come work in my lab. There you go, all right. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. It's really fantastic. I just love the work you're doing. By the way, as you know, you get to talk to me once a year, I get to talk to you. Thank you, Rich. It's really fantastic. I just love the work you're doing.

By the way, you get to talk to me once a year. I get to talk to you. I get to listen to you every week. I appreciate that. Thank you. I'm listening to you and I'm reading your stuff. You're out there, but you're soon about to be everywhere, I think. By the time this podcast drops,

you're gonna be a household name in a way that you weren't previously, I think, due to the turbocharging power of the Oprah effect. And I know you've got a lot of exciting stuff coming up in terms of the book and the rollout and all of that. So I appreciate you taking time to come here. The book, Build the Life You Want, co-written by Oprah Winfrey,

is probably gonna be inescapable shortly. I hope it's positive and pleasant as well. That's great. You did a great job. And we were chatting beforehand, like it's only 200 pages. Clearly you had to really strip this down and make it, it's a very easy read.

And with all the knowledge that you have, it would be very easy for you to make this dense and complicated. Yeah, I mean, I'm a professor of practice at Harvard and that means that my job is not just bringing practice to the classroom, but bringing academic ideas to the public. And so this is really what I'm dedicated to doing,

even in my academic work is bringing big ideas to the public sphere. Yeah, well, you're a gift to the world, my friend, and I can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks, Rich. I just appreciate you. I think the work you're doing is vital and super important. And just the way that you walk your talk

and comport yourself as an example of what you're teaching, I think is really impressive and magnificent. Thank you, Rich. I appreciate it a lot. And thanks for what you're doing too, for me and for everybody. All right, part three at some point. Right. Thank you, Rich. I appreciate it a lot. And thanks for what you're doing too. For me and for everybody. All right, part three at some point. Right on.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant

Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg,

graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon peace plants Thank you.