The Tim Ferriss Show - #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More

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Starting point is 00:03:57 vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of

Starting point is 00:04:46 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers or those performers who study world-class performers, who pick out the meta patterns, the things that you can apply to your own lives, whether they be tools, favorite books, frameworks, rituals, annual reviews, perhaps. Reverse bucket lists in the case of my guest today, and that guest is Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular How to Build a Life column,

Starting point is 00:05:29 mega popular. And Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 number one New York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday. His newest book is Build the Life You Want, subtitled The Art and Science of Getting Happier, with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. We cover a lot of ground. He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks

Starting point is 00:06:06 and practices that he implements in his own life, and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many other projects. You can find him on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks, on Twitter at Arthur Brooks. Without further ado, please enjoy my very thought-provoking and actionable, highly tactical conversation with Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur, so nice to have you here. Thanks for joining. Thank you, Tim. It's great to be with you. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. I feel like we've been looking forward to meeting and we've been warming up for this

Starting point is 00:06:40 for a long time. We have so many friends in common. We have a lot of friends in common. I have read your prior work, From Strength to Strength. Excellent book. Recommended to me by Peter Attia. People may know him as Dr. Peter Attia. Good friend. Proud Texan, also now. Where all the cool kids live. Austin, Texas. Where all the cool kids are. And I have more questions than we will have time, but I'm hoping to really explore broadly. And I wanted to start with something that I thought would pique the interest of many people listening, and that is the reverse bucket list. Is this something you still do? And what does it entail?

Starting point is 00:07:25 The reverse bucket list is something I do. Oh boy, do I ever do it. And it took me too long to figure this one out. When I was 50, I'm 59 years old. When I was 50, I found my bucket list from when I was 40. And it was a classic thing. On my birthday, I would make a list of my desires, my ambitions, and I would imagine myself, visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things, and it would fire me up and make me, well, kind of feel like a loser, quite frankly, because it was lowering my sense of satisfaction, I subsequently found out. And I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I checked everything off that list, and I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40. And so I thought, I'm a social scientist, so I thought to myself,

Starting point is 00:08:07 obviously I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? And basically, this is the problem. This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package. I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in like a minute, comes when you understand

Starting point is 00:08:31 that your satisfaction is your halves divided by your wants. Halves divided by wants. That's the model. So, you know, it's like I'll slow down because I know people watching you like, let me write that down. Halves divided by wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently and securely by wanting less. I thought to myself, hmm, so what does that mean? And the answer to that, what does that mean is I need a reverse bucket list. Not that I'm not going to get nice things in my life, but I'm going to be consciously detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out. So on my birthday now, my 59th birthday a couple of months ago, I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever,

Starting point is 00:09:17 power, ambition, admiration, all these things that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and mother nature wires us to accumulate the rewards that will help us survive and pass on our genes. I got it. I know how evolutionary psychology works. And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals, but I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them. I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me i want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex which is my executive manager the bumper of tissue right behind my forehead and the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and

Starting point is 00:09:57 saying maybe i get it and maybe i don't but i'm going to cross it out as an attachment and i'm telling you tim i'm free and so you find that to work it works as an attachment. And I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free. And so you find that to work. It works. It does not because you don't care about it, but because you're not attached to it in the same way. You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire, a ghost in your head. You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain. So you go through this exercise, so you write down whatever it is, receive such and such an honor, sell so many copies of Book X, whatever these are. All the stuff that guys like you and me do.

Starting point is 00:10:34 Right. And then you have 37-inch arms, in your case possibly. You're incredibly fit. I'm not hitting on you. I'm just saying, I aspire to- You're a beautiful man too, Tim. Well, we go to the same stylist for our haircuts, but I would say we will maybe get to self-care and physical practice later. You go through this exercise, you write those things down, you cross them out in a sort of idol worship, sleight of hand move right then following that i'm curious when there is if there is the spark of this desire whatever it might be do you have self-talk or something that acts as an interrupt i keep the list you keep the i keep the list and i go back and i look at the list just

Starting point is 00:11:20 like i would look at my bucket list later every six months or every year every 10 it happened to be. I go back and look at my reverse bucket list and say, am I living up to this? Am I truly conscious? Am I living up to not being attached? Am I practicing the detachment that I committed myself to? And the truth is, usually, yeah, kind of. I mean, the phantasm will be back. It will be flying around in your head again. But you brought it to your prefrontal cortex for a reason. And your prefrontal cortex is an adult and will govern the children. But sometimes you have to remind yourself. Remember, look, I mean, you're an adult here.

Starting point is 00:11:55 And you look back on it and you say, and it's funny. Actually, it's pretty amusing when you look at it and you say, oh, I can't believe that thing is bugging me again. But you're not governed by it in the same way. You know what I actually put on my list? I was reading, just for clarity, so it's okay to have the goal and to have it as a target and plan for it, let's say selling X number of copies, but not to have that hungry ghost attachment to it. It's nothing more than an intention. Intention is fine, but attachment is bad. And this is what the Dalai Lama talks about too. He talks about intention without attachment. There's a word in sailing, the rum line. In Spanish, rumbo, which is a lot more

Starting point is 00:12:30 common in normal everyday speech. And what it means is it's the intention of your voyage. You have to have that, even though you know you're not going to be true to it. Because if you don't know, you're just going to be going in circles. You'll just be like, I don't know. I've been out the sea for a long time. Who knows where I am? It'll be like one of your vacations. It's like, I don't know where I am. I'm just doing nothing, man. And it can be therapeutically important, but it's actually not the way that you get from Europe to the Americas. Yeah, you need a location and your endpoint on the GPS. But if you're super attached to it, then you're going to freak out when something throws you

Starting point is 00:13:03 off. And furthermore, you're not going to recognize, then you're going to freak out when something throws you off. And furthermore, you're not going to recognize the fact that it is the voyage itself that is the adventure of life, not actually reaching the particular destination, whether it's the original one or one that turns out to be better or worse or wherever you wind up. And that's the way you've got to live your life. So it's intention without attachment. Now, there's another thing that I was thinking about this year, because Thich Nhat Hanh died. You know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And I wrote his obituary in the Washington Post, actually. It was a really interesting experience, because I talked about what he's taught all of us.

Starting point is 00:13:39 Thich Nhat Hanh said, and it almost had an impact on me, but I reflected on it upon his death, that one of the greatest attachments that people have in modern life is to their views and opinions. That's a real attachment. It can be as dangerous as your attachment to money or power. Why? Because people treat their opinions as if they were gold, their jewels. You know, get between me and my political opinions, man. I'll cancel you. I'll get you fired. I'll denounce you on social media. Who knows? Maybe I'll be violent. I mean, life is crazy these days. And so I looked at it and I thought, am I weighed down by attachment to my views, to my political views? So I wrote down five of my strongest political views and I crossed them out. This was after writing the obituary. Yeah. It was on my reverse bucket list when I turned 59. And I said, look, it's not that I

Starting point is 00:14:24 don't have these views. I just don't have the attachment to these views. Look, man, I need more friends. And strong political opinions is not going to get me there. It's not going to get me there. Love is going to get me there. Tolerance is going to get me there. A sense of curiosity about other people is going to get me there. And strong political opinions is going to put me in the wrong direction. So man, dead. The attachment, dead. So maybe this is a little too granular, but I'm curious. Thich Nhat Hanh, this is a legendary figure. I would be very intimidated by the task of writing an obituary for such a person. I've read numbers of his books, been very influenced by his thinking. How do you go about deciding what goes into an obituary for someone like that, or for anyone,

Starting point is 00:15:10 for that matter, but in this particular case? The Germans talk about doing something called a festschrift. It's a word that means kind of this encomium. It's a celebration of the work of somebody. And what you always start when you do one of these things, it's a typical sort of European intellectual deal, is you look at the things that they said and did that had the most impact and that was most meaningful to them in the same way. Now, I didn't know Thich Nhat Hanh. I've worked very closely with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but the Theravada Buddhist tradition I've never penetrated personally, and so I didn't know Thich Nhat Hanh. But I do know the things that he said and taught that really changed the way that Westerners think.

Starting point is 00:15:48 And so that's what I wanted to talk about. Not what did he do that changed Theravada Buddhism. I'm not a Theravada Buddhist. I'm not equipped to write that. But I can talk about the way he changed me as a Catholic. I can talk about how he changed me as a public policy person. Because I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh when I was running a think tank in Washington, D.C., how he influenced me as a happiness professor at Harvard. That's the stuff that I really wanted to focus on.

Starting point is 00:16:13 That was the idea of attachment and detachment. That was the idea of the illusion of individuality. I mean, these are concepts that people didn't think about. He also was really behind the whole mindfulness revolution in the West. He starts off The Miracle of Mindfulness, that famous book, big bestseller, with this simple description of washing the dishes. And he says, when you're washing the dishes, you should be thinking about washing the dishes, because if you don't think about washing the dishes, you're not really there washing the dishes, are you? And he persuades you with this kind of hypnotic prose to remember that if you don't think about

Starting point is 00:16:53 washing the dishes, but you're thinking about doing something at work tomorrow, or you're thinking about something that happened yesterday, that you're living in the future of the past, and you've missed your life. Yeah, or if you're thinking about eating the juicy peach, which is a story, may not have been in that book that I remember him telling, but it was paired with the washing of the dishes. He said, if you're thinking about the peach while you're washing the dishes, when you're eating the peach, you'll probably be thinking of something else. Exactly right. And then what you're doing is you're, while you're doing this,

Starting point is 00:17:16 you're planning for a future existence that's better than now. And when you reach it, it will be a phantasm as well. It will be nothing more than a mythical past while you're thinking about a new future that doesn't quite exist and you've missed your whole life. How did he change you or influence you as a Catholic? And the Dalai Lama too, by the way. I mean, a lot of Buddhist thinking has been incredibly helpful to me to understand exactly what I'm trying to do as a person when I'm centering myself in prayer. So for example, Catholics, traditional Catholics, they generally pray what's called the rosary. And the rosary is a set of beads that you pray repetitive prayers. It's about a thousand-year-old Catholic meditation. I do it every day. And I noticed that I was having a hard time

Starting point is 00:18:02 focusing. I was having a hard time understanding what I was trying to do for myself, for this offering. I didn't know how to make it fruitful in its way. I didn't exactly know what the point was. And studying the work of Thich Nhat Hanh and also studying at the Dalai Lama's monastery in Dharamsala, India, sitting in meditation and studying meditation techniques with the Tibetan Buddhist monks, I actually learned what I was supposed to be doing as a Catholic, praying my rosary. How I actually could center my prayer and make it deeply worshipful in a meaningful way. And perhaps God wanted me to learn that from my Buddhist sisters and brothers.

Starting point is 00:18:41 This is going to be adjacent to this conversation this topic but i'm curious do you believe that we can always cut this but i'm very curious do you believe that direct transmission in some of these lines which is very important certain schools of we could call it mindfulness but that is a real phenomenon or at least i suppose it's undeniably important in the tradition but the idea that sitting with someone in meditation with them that there are teachings that are sort of directly transmitted what is your thought on that if you have any thoughts i don't know the answer to that i do know that you can deeply be in communion with somebody and really intimately and and my wife esther and i we actually actually teach young couples that are engaged. She teaches the theological part. I teach the social science

Starting point is 00:19:30 because I'm just a total wonk. And what we do tell them is that according to the best science and our experience and common sense, that one of the most intimate things that you can do with your partner or spouse is pray together. It's super intimate. I know couples that have been married for 25 years that will have sex together but won't pray together because it's too embarrassing to pray together. Because praying together is just too intimate. They don't know how to do it. It's embarrassing to them. I mentioned, you'll get naked in front of somebody else, but you won't pray in front of them. And that's because it's such a deeply intimate thing. Okay. So when you

Starting point is 00:20:08 cross the boundary of the greatest intimacy with another person, there's going to be some transmission. The idea of direct transmission rings true to me because of the nature and intensity of the intimacy that comes from that experience. We're going to take a hard left for a second okay we're going to come back to a through line which i am tracking because it's just what is top of mind for me and then we're going to come back to possible mystical slash semi-mystical experiences in mexico so i'm giving an idea all right i can't wait where my head i get to go to mexico and have mystical experiences the invitation is now formal but, for those who are not watching this video, I mean, you are incredibly physically fit. And I know that you have some very deliberate,

Starting point is 00:20:51 consistent practices, including weight training and so on. Blood occlusion training, are you still using cuffs? I do, yeah. And I recommend it for anybody over 40. Could you explain what this is and why you recommend it? So occlusion training, what it effectively does is it's not a tourniquet, but what it is, it's a band around your arms and or legs so that when you're lifting, you actually will get a much greater as you know, in the vernacular, the burn from resistance training with lower weight. Now, the reason I recommend this very strongly is because the research suggests that it's very good for both strength and hypertrophy at lower weight levels. So it saves your joints, but gives you results.

Starting point is 00:21:30 And that's what you need to do when you're over 40. Save the joints. Yeah. And I really strongly encourage people to check this out. I've done some of it. Yeah. And to say that it increases the burn or the pump is certainly true. You gotta love pain.

Starting point is 00:21:44 Yeah, exactly. I would say start conservative because you might feel weak dialing back the weights, but just wait. It hurts. Just give it a bit. It really does. And you then, but then you learn to love the pain.

Starting point is 00:21:57 And you can travel with, there are cuffs you can travel with. I have them. I carry them with me all the time. I'm on the road 48 weeks a year. Is there a particular type that you use? I don't actually remember the brand, but they're actually, they use Velcro, and they're about two inches thick. So it's too thick, and I actually can't get

Starting point is 00:22:11 the kind of occlusion that I really want. So experiment with what works with the size and shape of your biceps and triceps, and then learn how to use them, and then make them tighter, and then get in touch with the pain. And they're easy to travel with. Do your homework and start conservative. Kelly Starrett, a very famous performance coach and PT, who's a friend and has been on the show many times, introduced me to that. Yeah, it's amazing.

Starting point is 00:22:33 And he had a very similar argument, which is effectively, he doesn't say this, but I would say like you are kind of as old as your joints and connective tissue feel. I mean, there's certainly a cognitive component. And this is a really elegant way to sort of preserve or build muscle mass without. I learned this from my friend Sal DiStefano who started Mind Pump with his partners and. Mind Pump, what is that? Mind Pump, it's a fitness and culture podcast. I haven't listened to it for years and years.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And he taught me how to do it. He actually gives me training tips and good ideas, and no, it's great. It's been very helpful. And by the way, when I was a younger man, when I was in my 30s, I figured, what's my goal with fitness? And the answer is to still be lifting when I'm 80. Why?

Starting point is 00:23:15 Because we know of all the health benefits from it, but the truth is that physical fitness for me is a way to manage my negative affect. It's actually a happiness technique for me. It doesn't make me happier. It makes me less unhappy. That's what physical fitness will do. It will buy you less unhappiness.

Starting point is 00:23:31 And so I manage my negative affect that way. And I know when I'm 80, I'm going to need to manage my negative affect so I don't want to hurt myself. So I would go to the gym when I was 35 or 40 years old and I would go to these iron gyms wherever I was traveling. And I would find the oldest dude,

Starting point is 00:23:44 the old guy who's still lifting heavy things. And I would go up to him and say, can I ask your advice? And they always want to give you advice. The 76-year-old guy who's like, don't bench press. It restricts your range of movement, and that's going to hurt. You're going to get impingement injuries along the way. So that's why as you get older, you should actually press with dumbbells and then do higher rep to get volume, do higher reps with lower weight, et cetera. And just sensible stuff. But it's actually been incredibly helpful for me to not get hurt and stay in the gym. Yeah, 100%.

Starting point is 00:24:14 All right. So naturally, the next place. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Well, maybe ridiculous, maybe not. Not for me, it's not. That's for sure. Could you please describe your experience? I think it was as a teenager.

Starting point is 00:24:26 Was it as a teenager? In Mexico. Oh, yeah. The Mexican experience. It was not out in the woods with a shaman in Ayahuasca. When I was 15, I was on a band trip. I used to be a musician. And I started as a kid.

Starting point is 00:24:38 I was a real serious musician. And I wound up being a professional musician from when I was 19 until I was 31. This was French horn? Yeah, I was a French horn player, classical French horn player, all the way through my 20s. I didn't go to college until I was 30. But it's my gap decade. And when I was... I need one of those.

Starting point is 00:24:54 We're too late. And when I was 15 years old, I was on this trip with a group, not a professional. It was like an amateur concert band, but doing a tour through Mexico. And we were doing a lot of tourism. And one of the tourist activities was to go to the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Now, this is a famous place for Catholics because it's one of the great pilgrimage sites of the world. In Catholic teaching, this is where when the Spanish explorers came to Mexico and having a horrible time because their marketing was all goofed up for the Catholic church. I mean, convert or die is not a very compelling pitch, it turns out, you know, and racist and, you know, everything that you possibly could want.

Starting point is 00:25:32 What happens then is this weirdly miraculous thing for Catholics and fellow travelers. I mean, just it was a mystical experience. So, there was a peasant man by the name of Juan Diego who's out on a hill outside of Mexico City and sees an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So, he, on his poncho, has imprinted the Blessed Virgin Mary's image on his tilma. He takes it back. Tilma is a textile? It's sort of a poncho. It's the tilma is what they would wear. And it was based on a fabric made out of cactus. It's a beautiful imprint in color. We've all seen the picture of, almost everybody's seen the Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe on this.

Starting point is 00:26:12 And if you Google it, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and you see it, say, oh, I've seen that a million times. Because it's in every Latino church. For the Catholic Church, she's the patroness of all the Americas, including the United States. I mean, this is a big deal for the church. So the bishop sees it. They take the tilma, they display the tilma in public, and for the first time, they start getting converts. In the next nine years, seven million people convert to the Catholic Church. Now, why? There's worldly explanation and there's divine explanations for it. Here's a worldly explanation that's pretty compelling. Our Lady of Guadalupe is not white. She's not Spanish.

Starting point is 00:26:46 She's a mestiza. She's a woman of mixed race. Now, we don't realize today how incredibly subversive that is, how unbelievably culturally transgressive that would have been. The Blessed Virgin Mary is not white. What are you talking about? No, no, no. She's us. She's us. She's every person in the world. She loves you. She's us. She's every person in the world. She loves you. She loves me. And she's one of us because she's in all of us. And that was this weird message that nobody really would have thought of at the time, or so lore goes. And that's why people started saying, ah, oh, this actually is for me because she actually looks like me. Crazy. So I'm in this church in Mexico City, the Shrine of Guadalupe,

Starting point is 00:27:27 and I'm looking at the tilma. I was just sitting up there, and I'm thinking, this is boring. But then I noticed she was looking at me. Now, to be sure, I didn't realize that you can look at Elvis on velvet and the eyes will follow you, right? Okay, fair is fair. But I couldn't get it out of my head. I couldn't get it out of my head. I couldn't get it out of my head. So worldly or divine or mystical or not, reasonable people can disagree. But I couldn't get the image out of my head. I couldn't. Then I realized I needed more in my life. I needed a deeper sense of the metaphysical in my life. I needed the transcendent in my life. And every time I thought of it, I thought of that image.

Starting point is 00:28:07 And so I became a Catholic at 16 years old. And I've been a Catholic man ever since. And did you have a family history of Catholicism? Zero. Zero. Zero. No, I grew up in a Christian family. So I had a little bit of wiring,

Starting point is 00:28:21 but I literally knew no Catholics. It's just this thing. Okay. And my parents are like, ah, adolescent rebellion. I guess it's better than drugs. I mean, it is better than heroin. And the point is, a lot of people watching us, some are traditionally religious and some are spiritual and some are not.

Starting point is 00:28:41 But the whole point is, we have a sense that there's something else. We have a sense that there's something deeper. Let something in your life take you to the deeper place. Something needs to take you by the hand to the deeper place. There's a lot of research that suggests this is the case. Don't try to go to the deeper place to find it randomly on your own. Let someone take you. Now, that insight is ambiguous. But once people start to say, I'm ready to be taken to a deeper place, a more transcendent state, that person, that entity will appear. We may come back to that.

Starting point is 00:29:18 Thank you. And I do think that many different paths touch corners of the same thing is my impression, which we may not have time for in this conversation, but to be continued. And the reason I'm asking about this experience for those people who are wondering how this ties into maybe the headline of the podcast is because I want to better understand the influences and experiences that have shaped you and your perceptual apparatus and your thinking. So another would be, you've had multiple wake-up calls in your life. And as you described, you didn't exactly have the linear path to Harvard prof that people might have

Starting point is 00:29:55 envisioned, right? Yeah, I got rejected from Harvard. Oh, Exeter, Harvard, McKinsey. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'd actually applied to Harvard for graduate school and they're like, no. It took two weeks for them to reject my... Part of it is at the time I was 31, I was a college dropout. I had a degree from a correspondent school. I was a French horn player. These are not the core demographics of your typical Harvard graduate student. And so, yeah, I got rejected, which suggests, by the way, Tim, that our standards for faculty today are lower than for our students, but be that as it may. Maybe, maybe. I'm skeptical in your case. I'd like to talk about your dad.

Starting point is 00:30:31 Yeah. So who was your father? What was he like? And how did his life end? My dad was a mathematician. He had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a lifelong college professor, most of it at a small Christian college in Seattle called Seattle Pacific University. He was born to missionary parents, evangelical missionary parents. He was born in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, where my grandfather ran a mission school, actually. And then my grandfather went on to become the dean of a very famous college outside Chicago called Wheaton College, where all of our family members had gone. My aunt went there in the 40s and dated Billy Graham in college, as it turns out. Yeah, yeah. And then my dad went on

Starting point is 00:31:15 to another Christian college, to the college where he ultimately taught. And he was just absolutely in love with the beauty of mathematics. As kids, my know, my mother was an artist. My mother was a painter. My dad was a mathematician. And, you know, around the dinner table, we would talk about art, we would talk about math. Those are the things. My father would pose math problems to us. He would say, okay, okay, boys, me and my brother, imagine all of the integers between 1 and 100. 1, 2, 3, 4, okay. Add them all together, what's the result and we're like i don't know i need a piece of paper he said no you don't think in another way think of another way the solution by the way is one plus 100 equals 101 and two plus 99 equals 101 and three plus 98 equals 101

Starting point is 00:31:57 and there are 51 of those which makes 51 combinations of 101 5050 that's what we would do that's what what we would do. That's what my father would do. You're like, dad, I'm just trying to eat my macaroni and cheese. I know, I'm just trying to eat my macaroni and cheese. And then he would say something like, see, isn't that beautiful? Isn't that beautiful?

Starting point is 00:32:14 Isn't that evidence of God? That's what he or your mom would say. That's what he would say. My dad would say. The elegance of that. My dad believed, not that what we know is what we should pay attention to, but to marvel at what we can do and still not know anything. So my father would explain, this had a big impact on me,

Starting point is 00:32:32 that there's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems and there's complex problems. It's a mathematical difference, but the technique doesn't matter. Complicated problems are all the things that you can solve with computational horsepower and tech. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but you can never solve them. Like, who's going to win between the Patriots and the Dolphins? I know what winning looks like. It's more points on the scoreboard, but I have no idea. And that's why it's beautiful to watch the game, and you don't want to simulate it on the computer because it'll be inaccurate. Love is complex. A jet engine'll be inaccurate. Love is complex. A jet engine is complicated.

Starting point is 00:33:07 A cat is complex. A toaster is complicated. And he said two kinds of problems. And he said, as a basic math problem, the reason that we're always unsatisfied in life is because we have complex problems. We want love. And all we have is complicated solutions that the world is offering

Starting point is 00:33:25 us like, you know, computers and the internet and social media and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll never be satisfied because it's the wrong kind of solution for the wrong kind of problem. So that seems like a tremendously valuable insight. Would you describe your father as a happy man? No, my father was a gloomy man. And no doubt that had a lot to do with genetics because 50% of our emotional baseline is genetic. We know this from identical twin studies where twins are born and separated at birth into separate families. This is not an experiment that social scientists have done because that would be horribly unethical. But three identical strangers shows how that turns out yeah well yeah and um

Starting point is 00:34:05 brutal doc uh-huh oh yeah that's a great documentary it is great but 50 of your baseline mood your tendency toward you know ebullience or gloominess is sitting in your dna and this is the reason tim that i came to the happiness field because i saw my grandfather who was a wonderful man and gloomy and my father who was brilliant and a lovely person and an excellent, ethical, kind man who was gloomy. And I said, no more, man. No more. I'm going to live on the other 50%. I am not going to be governed by that 50% that made my father an unhappy man. And so he died young, 66. You know? I mean, he had cancer, and they gave him 10 or 15 years or more. And he died in two.

Starting point is 00:34:50 And as a statistician, he explained it. He was a biostatistician by his graduate degree. And I said, Dad, it's terrible luck. And he said, look, there's got to be people on that side of the curve, too. But he had a good sense of humor. But the whole point was he wasn't prepared to fight for life because he didn't have the hygiene for his own happiness. And that example set me on the path to learn about this and to share these ideas. And it has transformed my life. I'm grateful to my father and I will be for the rest of my life

Starting point is 00:35:29 for the example that he gave me and the lesson he taught me even through his unhappiness hi everyone tim here pardon the interruption just a quick announcement the recording studio had a small glitch so the audio for the next two or so minutes is not perfect but we correct it quickly please bear with us thank you you for understanding. And now back to the conversation. What were some decisions you made or things you began doing or stopped doing after your father's death? I started exercising. There is a little vanity to it, but not that much. The whole point of the matter is this is one of the single best ways to manage your negative affect is to be in the gym for an hour a day. Yeah. And there's a, it's a bit dated probably, but there's a book called Spark, which also goes into sort of a lot of like BDNF and a lot of the circuitry and biochemical reasons for exercise for this explicit purpose.

Starting point is 00:36:19 When I'm working with students, I put them through a battery of tests to look at whether the bigger challenge in their life is happiness or unhappiness. The world is really scarce in the definitions that it gives us. And there's a big mistake that almost everybody makes about happiness, which is that a lot of mistakes. Number one, that it's the absence of unhappiness. Number two, that it's a feeling. Both of those are wrong. Number three is that we can get it. So we can approach happiness, but we can't get there because we actually need unhappiness. And unhappiness and happiness are not opposites and can coexist. So there's a lot to unpack. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack.

Starting point is 00:36:53 So to begin with, happiness and unhappiness in terms of moods are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. A lot of neuroscientists believe that unhappy cognitions and emotions are largely dominated by activity in the right side of the brain. And the way that we know this, there's a terrific neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, and he's done work that shows that the left side of the musculature on your face is more active when you're unhappy, when you're experiencing negative emotions, anger, fear, disgust, sadness. And it's actually funny when you have, when my kids were little, I would notice that, you know you know when they fall down you get a moment where you don't know what's going to happen next are they going to laugh and keep playing or they're going to you're going to get the waterworks right

Starting point is 00:37:31 and the way the tell on that because it's usually five or six seconds because the the wiring in their brain is actually not complete to work in progress so one of the tests that i administer to my students and i put in my new book as a matter of fact because it's so important for me and for understanding ourselves it's called the positive affect negative affect series panas p-a-n-a-s it's on my website and it's easy to find and i didn't create it it's been psychometrically validated a bunch of times a great test and what it does is it helps you figure out if you're high positive high negative negative, or low positive, low negative, and there's four combinations. It's a two-by-two matrix. You can be a high positive affect person and a high negative affect person.

Starting point is 00:38:11 That's a high affect person who's got a lot of strong moods about everything. That's the mad scientist. That's the mad scientist profile. That's me. I'm at the 85th percentile in happy affect, and I'm at the 85th percentile in negative affect. So the highs are high and the lows are low. Right, so I don't have a happiness problem. I have an unhappiness problem is what it comes down to.

Starting point is 00:38:30 It's not a problem because unhappiness is really important. You won't be happy if you get rid of your unhappiness because you got to be fully alive to get happier. But you do need to manage yourself. Some people are really high positive and really low negative. Those are the cheerleaders. Those people can't stay in the gym. Why?

Starting point is 00:38:48 Because they don't feel better when they go to the gym because their negative affect is already in the cellar. The third is high negative and low positive. That's the poet. And nobody wants to be a poet, but the truth is that the part of the brain called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is highly active for people who are sad

Starting point is 00:39:03 and people who are creative. That's the reason when I say poet, you don't think about somebody who's skipping down the street right you think of a creative person yeah exactly right exactly right you're in a french cafe you know thinking about you know thinking nihilistic thoughts and writing poetry so that's the poetic disposition and the last, low. So you could be perfectly happy or unhappy, but you have low affect levels. That's called the judge, the sober judge. I wish it were otherwise, but I would put high confidence

Starting point is 00:39:33 that I am right down the beret-wearing way. How would you advise someone, and I know this won't apply to everybody listening, but just by way of a working example, what does someone do with, what are their options for how to act upon that? Okay. So if you know that you're a poet, this is an affect level. It doesn't mean that you're cosmically happy or unhappy. It just means that this is your natural disposition. So this is important, right? So it also means that you need to manage two levers.

Starting point is 00:40:02 You need to manage your happiness levels up and you need to manage your unhappiness levels, not to zero. There's nothing wrong with unhappiness. You need to mute them. You don't need to numb them. You need to manage them. And could you, and I may have already missed the plot, but just define those two,

Starting point is 00:40:17 because I think a lot of people, myself maybe included, would think if you remove unhappiness by default, since it's unhappiness, they seem to be antonyms. So you remove one, you have more of the other. So how should we think about these? Yeah, that's a very good question. And by the way, the answer is not obvious. As a matter of fact, psychologists until about 50 years ago really believed that unhappiness was the absence of

Starting point is 00:40:38 happiness. But it's not true because we actually find that the basic negative and positive emotions are coming from different parts of the limbic system and can coexist. I see. So if you're thinking about it, you can think about it then neuroanatomically as opposed to semantically with the words. Yeah, yeah. Not to dumb it down too hard, but it's like if your left hand performed X types of tasks and your right hand performed Y type of tasks, it's like, okay, you can sort of decide what ratio. Right. And your negative emotions are much more intense than your positive emotions. This has evolved to keep you alive. Positive emotions are kind of nice to have. Negative emotions are signals or alarms that something might kill you. A sweet smile from somebody across the room

Starting point is 00:41:18 is very pleasant, but a frowning face might be somebody who wants to murder you. And so therefore we've evolved to pay attention. This is called the negativity bias that we have. We also have mixed states that we go through all day long. And so if you look, you ask people in surveys what they're feeling at any given moment. So you'll say, you know, in five minute increments, what are you feeling, positive or negative? You'll find that about 90% of the time

Starting point is 00:41:37 people can tell you how they're feeling. In 40% of the time for the average person, it's really pure positive emotions at a low level. It's your idol is most of the time. It's okay. It's kind of sunny today, whatever, whatever. All good. About 16% of the time is pure negative emotion.

Starting point is 00:41:54 And that usually means something's happening that you don't like. Now, 33% of the time, you've got both. And usually the way that this looks in people's lives is that you're in your positive idol, but something's intruding. So there's something bugging you that you don't always remember. You know, we go through life and, you know, on a certain day, it's like, yeah, it's all good. Oh, yeah, that thing.

Starting point is 00:42:12 And then you go back to kind of going back to your positive idol. Oh, yeah, that thing. You know, that thing. And so that's the mixed state. Like Twitter. Yeah, totally. And by the way, I mean, it's an unhappiness machine. You mean X?

Starting point is 00:42:25 Yeah, sorry. Exactly by the way, I mean, it's an unhappiness machine. You mean X? Yeah, sorry. Exactly. A big black X. I mean, it's like X. It's so appropriate, you know? So, this is important because we understand that these are separable phenomena. We need both these emotions, but we need to be able to manage our emotions like prose. And that's a lot of what I do. Yeah. So, what are some options? So I go through the panus, end up poet. There are these two levers. What might be the process of thinking through how to pull these levers in different ways? So happiness side is what I spend a lot more time on because it's just so interesting on how we can pull the happiness lever. It starts by actually a

Starting point is 00:43:03 good definition, which is not feelings. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And thank God happiness isn't a feeling. Can you imagine going through life chasing a feeling? That's awful. It's like, if it feels good, do it. Or if it feels bad, make it stop. It's a terrible life strategy. Happiness and its feelings are associated with three tangible phenomena in our lives that we can actually understand and manage. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need in balance and abundance. Think of these as the macronutrients of happiness, the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness. If you don't have protein and carbohydrates and fat and balance and abundance, all kinds of weird things are going to happen to you. You're not going to be as healthy as you should be and you won't feel good. Same thing is true.

Starting point is 00:43:46 You need to enjoy your life. You need to get satisfaction from your accomplishments and you need to have a deep sense of meaning. And each one of these is a big challenge. When I meet somebody through a series of structured questions, I can figure out if there's a problem along one of these macronutrient dimensions. And it turns out that there's some very easy interventions that we can make across all three. And I'll give you an example. The first one is enjoyment. I say, do you enjoy your life? They'll think about their little pleasures. I say, that's not it. Pleasure is not a secret to happiness. Pleasure is the fast road to obsessive, compulsive activity and addiction. Why? Because all pleasure is, is a phenomenon

Starting point is 00:44:26 from the limbic system of your brain saying, do more of that thing because you're more likely to survive and pass on your genes if you get those calories, if you have that sex, whatever it happens to be. The way that you can actually turn that into a source of happiness is by mixing in two ingredients with your pleasure, people and memory. Never do something that gives you pleasure alone. That's the rule of thumb if you're doing it alone as a problem so anheuser-busch does a beer ad they never have in the beer ad a guy drinking in his closet yeah a guy pounding a 12-pack in his apartment alone you know why because that's pleasure and that actually leads to addiction it's problematic

Starting point is 00:45:01 they always have an ad of a guy cracking a beer with his buddy's people and doing something he's going to remember. Memory. That's the secret to it. So I'll take a survey of people's habits. Now, this is the reason that pornography is a big problem. You're not consuming it in public with friends to make a memory, for God's sake. Very rarely. That's a pretty weird thing to do, right? I mean, it hits the dopamine lever. I mean, they all are neurophysiologically similar phenomena. They hit dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine over and over and over again, and they ruin your life because they become addictive.

Starting point is 00:45:34 They become monomaniacal, and they're not the secret to happiness. If you're at three o'clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the lever on the slot machine by yourself, that's not the secret to happiness to anybody I know. And I've never heard somebody say, you know what gives my life happiness? Methamphetamine. Never been said. And the reason for that is because these are drugs. People say drugs of abuse. No, no. They're drugs of pleasure. Let's not lie about it. They give you pleasure. And pleasure alone without memory is a problem. This is a very practical example of how we can use the science and global economies right now. A lot.

Starting point is 00:46:29 That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can. But I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.8 APY. That's the annual percentage yield with the Wealthfront Cash account. That's more than 11 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. So why wait? Earn 4.8% on your cash today. Plus, it's up to $5 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks.

Starting point is 00:47:04 And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So why wait? Visit wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. And so you have enjoyment, which you clarify. Satisfaction and meaning are next. How would you make satisfaction granular? Because I think about satisfaction, I'm like, hmm, I might conflate being satisfied with doing, say, a large project with some form of meaning, I can see how I might

Starting point is 00:47:46 get my wires crossed. So how should we think about these two in your framework? Satisfaction is achieving something with struggle. It really is that project that you're talking about, which it will give you meaning as well. The project per se can actually cross the boundaries across the macronutrients, just like something that you eat has more than one macronutrient. But satisfaction per se is doing something that takes effort and expending the effort. So if my graduate students, they cheat to get an A and an exam in my class, they'll get the grade, but they won't get the satisfaction. The satisfaction comes from the pain. This is one of the paradoxes of life. You've got to suffer to get the satisfaction. You've got to defer the gratification. When somebody's on the pleasure meal, by the way, they also don't get satisfaction from anything because they can't defer their gratification

Starting point is 00:48:32 anymore. These problems bleed into each other. So one of the things that you find is that people who are very accomplished, you know, the people you are good at satisfaction because you can defer your gratification and do long-term projects. You're a satisfaction guy. The problem for you and me and a lot of people are going to watch your show because they want to be better. I mean, nobody's watching this show just for giggles. They're watching this show because funny enough, they're watching your show because they want to be better in their lives. And so they're going to be good at deferring their gratification and doing hard things.

Starting point is 00:49:06 Or at least aspire. Totally. I mean, it's like, I've read your books. It's interestingly deceptive. The four hour fill in the blank, the early books,

Starting point is 00:49:14 it makes it sound like it's a hack and it's easy. No, no, it's not. The four hours is hard is the point. Those four hours are going to hurt. Yeah. And there's a lot of front loading.

Starting point is 00:49:24 There's also hard work without forethought and planning. So there is built into any of those books a strategic deferral. Yeah, for sure. So that's what brings satisfaction. Here's the problem with satisfaction. And this goes back to where we started the conversation. Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. That's wrong. You can't keep no satisfaction. That's why you try and you try and you try. And there's a reason for that. Neuroscientists talk about homeostasis, which is a phenomenon of always going back physically and emotionally to your baseline. And there's a reason for that, because you need to go back to the baseline in your life so you can be ready to react to the next set of circumstances. If emotionally you were going to

Starting point is 00:50:09 be bummed out for the rest of your life, you'd become immobilized. And if you felt super happy when something good happened, you wouldn't be in the hunt anymore. Mother Nature wants you to think that you're going to feel this emotion for the rest of your life so that you will either avoid one thing or pursue something. But she wants to fool you and send you back again and again and again and have you never figure it out. Man, if I get that car, I'm going to love it. If I move to California, I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for the rest of my life. Turns out you get six months, by the way, of enjoying weather, but the taxes are forever. And that experience of never learning is called the hedonic treadmill, and it's unbelievably painful. The way to solve that problem is halves divided by wants.

Starting point is 00:50:48 The way to get real satisfaction is not having more but wanting less, and that's the reverse bucket list, etc. That's the set of habits that helps you dominate that particular science and short-circuit the loop that you're on because of Mother Nature's plans for you, which not really in your happiness interest she doesn't care if you're happy by the way no passing on producing progeny is not dependent on big smiles dna man it's all survival to pass on your genes and you know that's great for the propagation of the species it's not good for having the for i don't know for pursuing the divine path we are going to come back to meeting i want to just take a sidebar on reducing wants right for a second sure and talk about exercises that you've had your students do in your classes and i'm pulling this from memory so i may not get the wording spot on but identifying their idols, am I getting this right?

Starting point is 00:51:47 So if you could expand on what that looks like. Yeah. We have a game. I have a game show in my class at Harvard. It's called What's My Idol? Now, you can tell how old I am. When I was a really little kid, there was a game show on TV called What's My Line? Your viewers can Google it. I'm sure there's some black and white grainy footage of it or something from when I was in the 70s or back. What's My Idol is actually based on the insight of a medieval philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. Theologian, but really a philosopher in the Neoplatonic tradition. Aquinas is responsible for introducing Aristotle to the modern world. Up until that point, nobody read Aristotle. It was

Starting point is 00:52:25 all Plato, Aristotle's teacher. St. Thomas Aquinas, he said, no, no, no, no, guys, read this one. This is the one. And he interpreted Aristotle for the modern world. It was the same thing, more or less, that Averroes was doing for the Muslim world and that Maimonides was doing for the Jewish world, because they were coexisting in southern Spain in this intellectual soup. That's hard for us to understand today. It was so deep what was going on. So, St. Thomas Aquinas was an unbelievably adroit social scientist. He was also, by the way, a phenomenally impressive figure. I mean, for people who aren't familiar, just go read the Wikipedia entry and a few other things. It'll blow your mind. And his magisterial work was the Summa Theologiae.

Starting point is 00:53:07 And the way that he does it, by the way, it's a masterclass in the way that we should be thinking about big topics today, which is by starting the topic with the best objection. Here's the question. Here's the supposition. What's the best objection? Here's how I meet that objection.

Starting point is 00:53:22 What's the second best objection? Here's how I meet the objection. The whole book is written this way. It's unbelievable. And in the section on human happiness, which he pulls from Aristotle, who claims without any need for proof that this is what we all want, whether we act that way or not, that there's four things that we do that distract us from happiness. Now, his definition of happiness is seeking the divine. This is what we all want. What do you want? The divine.

Starting point is 00:53:46 Do you know that? Not necessarily. Is it hard? Yeah, and that's the reason we don't actually act like we're pursuing the divine. Because, you know, pursuing God or the divine or the metaphysical singularity or exterior consciousness or what your thing is, has a lot of one-sided conversations and a lot of inconvenient morality attached to it. So, we take these divinity substitutes. These are the idols. has a lot of one-sided conversations and a lot of inconvenient morality attached to it. So, we take these divinity substitutes. These are the idols. Idols are biblically and in mythology,

Starting point is 00:54:17 what idols all have in common is that they're God-like, but they're not God. They're convenient substitutes for God. That's all an idol is. And St. Thomas Aquinas says there's four substitutes for God, which we can think of as the four substitutes for the real secret to happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame. How little things change. And when he said fame, he actually didn't say fame. He said honor. But that has a different connotation in English. You know, I have a son who's a special forces in the military, and he serves with honor.

Starting point is 00:54:42 That's not what they mean. Honor means to be honored. It's fame. It's reputation. It's the admiration of other people. Maybe it's Instagram followers or something ridiculous, but it is something that we want in the opinion of other people. And we thirst after it. And he says, everybody is motivated by one thing. And even throwaway comments like communities, they coalesce around an idol. It's so true. we're recording this podcast in new york money baby you go to a party in new york and everyone's like how's your fund this year how you doing this year and like how much does this apartment cost it's all about money you go to la what's the idol well i'm not gonna even call it

Starting point is 00:55:20 honor fame fame fame okay okay let's keep with the quiz dc what's the idol power power man is how close are you to the president what senator do you know right vegas yeah right i mean communities will call us around this but each one of us has our idol too so here's the game you want to play sure let's play the game okay so the truth is none of us has all four none of us is so vice ridden we don't so the truth is none of us has all four. None of us is so vice-ridden. We don't have the energy or time to be serving all four of these idols. I mean, come on, life is short. You underestimate me, sir.

Starting point is 00:55:51 No. But we all have one or two that really animate us, and we don't always know it because we're not paying attention to it. Now, Aquinas' point, and modern psychology bears all this out, that as a normal adult with a complicated life, if you know your idol, you will recognize the thing that always leads you astray and leads you to do the things that you later regret because you were following that idol. So it's very important to figure out which idol that is so that you can manage it. Not that you'll make it go away because you're human, but you can your idol okay so i start by saying what's not your idol because of the four there's something that you could ditch

Starting point is 00:56:30 yeah power is not uh yeah power immediately i'll just i'll name one to start with so that's why you're not a ceo i mean you've got a company and you you know you but you're not like trying to run a corporation yeah there's a lot of things that are... And I know a lot of people who are power-focused, in a sense, in one form or another. It just doesn't... Do you dislike it? Do you actively dislike power? Like people having power over you and you having power over others?

Starting point is 00:56:57 I don't dislike it, necessarily. I mean, I think that it's an inherent dynamic in particularly chimpanzee politics, but just in nature in general. Speaking of which, let me react to this phrase. Tim Ferriss for Congress. No. There you go. Absolutely not. Your answer is correct. You are not motivated by power. It's the first one you get rid of. Okay, you got three left. Money, pleasure, fame. You got to kick one out. You got to get rid of one. What's the next one to go? I can get rid of fame easily.

Starting point is 00:57:27 I think that there was a point in my life where I sought a lot of social validation, but having seen the flip side and the shadow elements of that, it holds. But you got pretty famous young. And so you saw the dark side of that, which is what social scientists and even neuroscientists will tell you with their research, is that fame is really the only of the idols that you can ever be happy in spite of. You know, when Lady Gaga tweeted, fame is prison, and everybody derided that, I'm thinking that's deeply adept. That is a deeply clarifying comment. And by the way, I mean, John Milton wrote that in the 17th century, that it is the idol that we thirst after and sacrifice the happiness of our days for that. And you learn that by experience, not because of disposition, because you did hunger after it,

Starting point is 00:58:16 and then experienced it, and you realize that it's a very, very, very bitter fruit. Yeah, there are a lot of footnotes and a lot of fine print in that Faustian bargain. So I... That 46-year-old Tim Ferriss, that's number two that goes out the door. Don't care. In fact, if I could put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube, in numerous ways, I would do that. Right. Okay, you got two left and it's getting hot in here, right? Money and pleasure. We wealth and pleasure which which one do you i would say money i can in the hierarchy i can get rid of the marginal utility of each additional dollars is just makes no difference in the things that i care about so in a middle class life

Starting point is 00:58:58 wouldn't freak you out no at this point i mean i'm not talking about poverty i'm not talking about not getting three squares i'm talking about about not having the money for the nice stuff that people think is really wonderful to have, the houses, the boats, the cars. Yeah, I don't really buy that stuff. Yeah, I don't really care. And I care less and less because also, the more financial success you have,

Starting point is 00:59:20 the more time you spend with people who have even greater financial success. And I've seen no indication. In fact, it might even be a contraindication that wealth produces the things I'm after. And I think there are significant adverse side effects. Well, there's a lot of research that shows that there is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff. It's by buying experiences stuff it's by buying experiences it's by buying time and by giving it away and you already figured that one out yeah so yeah i mean quick example of that for me in the last handful of years i owe tim urban a huge thank you for his article

Starting point is 00:59:55 the tail end i ended up booking most years depending on my family's health and so on right a family trip once a year that we can look forward to for like six months and have group chats about and so on. And then even today was discussing a boys trip with some of my closest friends, probably like six months from now. And the ROI on those is huge. But I would say money, I can get rid of money. So we found your idol.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Yeah, pleasure. Tim Ferriss likes to feel good. I do, yeah. Yeah, and again, there's nothing wrong with feeling good. But for you, we need to watch to make sure that you're getting enjoyment do, yeah. Yeah. And again, there's nothing wrong with feeling good. But for you, we need to watch to make sure that you're getting enjoyment, not pleasure. Yeah. And we need to be very disciplined about enjoyment, not pleasure. And I would also add to this that I do think I'm a pleasure junkie for certain things. Sure. The sensual, the sexual being very high on the list. There's also, I think, a wrinkle to this, like the sort of Mara sitting

Starting point is 01:00:47 on my shoulder, if anybody gets the reference, would be given a history of depression, I fear it's opposite. So I chase pleasure as hopefully some inoculation against darkness. So there are many things contributing to that. Yeah, well, pleasure tends to be numbing. It does tend to be numbing of negative emotion. So people will pursue pleasure because they're actually trying to... It's fentanyl. There's a reason that... There's nobody who enjoys fentanyl. Because it's not something you... Like, I want to go hang out with my buddies and take fentanyl and make a memory. On the contrary, you're trying to eviscerate memory. You're trying to get rid of memory with these types of things and so numbing things tend to work that way and i understand i

Starting point is 01:01:28 mean you've actually had you have a history of mood disorders in your life and you don't want them you don't want them back you don't want to invite them back and so you do something that feels like an inoculation from those depths the key thing is that the real insurance policy is enjoyment satisfaction and purpose that's the real insurance policy okay and again because because it doesn't eradicate the unhappiness the darkness but it puts it into context such that it's part of the quilt of your life and so it's just one square in the quilt of your life and not the whole blanket yeah i so i want to i want to expand on this because this is thread selfishly that I'd like

Starting point is 01:02:06 to pull out. No, you got it. And I will add maybe just one thought, which is much of the pleasure that I pursue is not numbing. It's actually a volume competition in the sense that if I start to feel like there are whispers of the potential of an onset of a depressive episode or maybe it's the ruminative thoughts and anxiety that comes with that but let's just say those are at a two out of ten volume there's fear because i worry that that is going to spiral right and so i seek out something on the positive side of the ledger or let me just say the pleasure side of the ledger right that is higher volume. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:47 You're trying to knock yourself out of a groove. Yeah. So it's like overcoming a dread of deadness with greater aliveness. Right. What's one possible strategy that could be a substitute strategy for that? That's why I'm here, doctor. Yeah. And there are. Right? There are. Meditation and prayer,

Starting point is 01:03:08 a seeking for the divine, a serious spiritual practice. These are the things that will actually do much the same things, but without the numbing and without the danger. Because it's tricky, right? I mean, hitting the dopamine lever has consequences. Hitting it hard and often has desperate consequences for it. And none of us needs problems in our lives. We have plenty of those already. Yeah, totally. So yes, and let's just say spare prayer. Spare prayer. The name of my forthcoming book. I like the whole sound of it. Meditation, I can see the difference. It's easy for, say, a secular listener to consider. What would you say to people who are perhaps secular, not necessarily militant atheists,

Starting point is 01:03:55 who I think recognize, as I do, in some ways, I am deeply, just to layer on my sins here, envious of people who have strong religious conviction. I recognize the value. And from a, at least in the sort of monotheistic Judeo-Christian traditions, I don't think I'm likely to join one of the bands. I'll work on you. So I recognize we can go do some blood occlusion training and you can just and we'll say a rosary together in between in between sitting right in between reps lay the prayer on thick so what would you suggest to me or someone who recognized the value i don't

Starting point is 01:04:37 i do not have a counter argument yeah but i'm not sure how to embrace that so there are alternatives so i mean i can tell you as a catholic that there are alternatives. So I can tell you as a Catholic that that's my thing, but I can tell you as a social scientist that it's not the only thing that will actually bring the same neurophysiological and psychological benefits. What we need is a sense of the transcendent that makes us small. That's what we need. Why? Because we need perspective and peace.

Starting point is 01:05:00 I mean, Tim, you're going to go through all day. It's like my podcast and you know, it's my commute and my money and my money and my friends and my mom and my me, me. It's like watching the same episode every single night of Better Call Saul for the rest of your life. It's like having the seagulls from Finding Nemo in your head. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:19 Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. I mean, it's just, it's the worst. And so you have to find a way to get peace. But what we really need is to put ourselves in perspective. Now, most people are afraid to be little, are really afraid to be insignificant. Perspective requires that we see reality and we get smaller and we stand in awe of the universe and what it can bring. There's lots of ways to do that.

Starting point is 01:05:45 Meditation practices are very good for that. Prayer is very good for that. Religion, in most traditional circumstances, is very good for that. But walking in nature without devices before dawn for an hour is incredibly good for that, for all sorts of reasons. And this is extremely well-validated in the social science literature. How important is the timing on that? Well, it's good because you start the day that way and it's the programming of it. And by the way, the experience of seeing the sunrise is incredibly awe-inspiring. Plus, it's quiet and cool. Yeah, all pluses. Quiet and cool, for sure. And therefore, you get just a bigger bolus of the benefits that you actually get from being

Starting point is 01:06:19 in contact with the earth and being in contact with nature, etc. Another way to do this is to stand in awe of human genius that's way outside the realm of your experience. So learn about the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Read about his life. Your favorite. Oh, yeah. And listen to a hundred of his cantatas and learn how to analyze them. I mean, your life will never be the same. Or your neighbor and our mutual friend Ryan Holiday, read the Stoics. Read the Stoics. I mean, it's a quasi-religious experience. You will feel a deep satisfaction at your littleness, probably for the first time in years, as a matter of fact. There are many ways to get this,

Starting point is 01:06:57 but you need to get small in front of Bach, in front of Epictetus, in front of God. You need to get small is the whole point. I love that. It's easy to remember, right? Get small. Just to underscore that for myself, I mean, a few things that have been helpful. Nature, yes. Yes, for sure. Studying or could take the form of listening to say hardcore history and listening to Kings of Kings, the Assyrians, and really widening the aperture of your historic lens just to put the problems of this week in perspective and also the impermanence of empires like yeah uh maybe relevant these days

Starting point is 01:07:37 this is a moment in time and yeah yeah so going back and realizing uh like the the most some of the most powerful figures in the history of humankind you will not recognize, which also, I think, for me has been very relieving and also has taken a lot of the earlier fixation on money away because I realize it's just ashes to ashes, dust to dust. To quote the Ecclesiastes. That's right. Give me the full name of Alexander the Great. Most people can't. So rather than get fixed on some vague notion of legacy, let's actually focus on other things. The getting small, looking at the stars. Honestly, I did so much as a kid and I lost it and have sort of reclaimed as this thing that can be used as such a tool for zooming out. And I have two friends, Ed Cook is one notable example, who when he thinks of his problems, and I'm going to paraphrase this, but he will look at stars and sort of zoom out from his neighborhood himself to the planet,

Starting point is 01:08:39 to the solar system. And when he then returns back to laying on the ground looking at the stars, like the problems that were plaguing you just do not seem so significant. That's really the point. It's not just a question of minimizing your problems. It's also minimizing the scale of your hopes and dreams and opportunities and recognizing that what really matters, you're in that to be sure, but you're one part of that. It's okay. It's all okay. The great is just okay and the bad is okay too. And that's so deeply comforting and it leads to so many improvements in mental health. I just don't know how you can put one foot in

Starting point is 01:09:20 front of the other without doing something like this every day. Now, people often ask, okay, how do I get started? How do I get started? Read 15 minutes a day. Pick up the Brothers K. Brothers Karamazov? Yeah. Am I saying that? Probably not. Yeah, you are. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you like fiction, stop wasting your time on trivialities. Go get the Brothers K. Why? Because it's a deeply awe-inspiring experience about the human condition

Starting point is 01:09:46 and the absurdity of it. It's beautiful. Get the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who, by the way, a world historical figure because he was a Roman emperor. Nobody remembers practically a single thing that happened as Roman emperor. We remember what was written in his private diary. It's wild. It's craziness. Last of the great emperors. Mostly because he was dumb enough to leave his son in charge oops his waist roll that's like the story of of humankind also speaking with

Starting point is 01:10:11 i think i want to leave my business to my kids what do you think tim you know there's a there's a long conversation my kids are awesome i wonder if i wonder if i can get them into the happiness dad i know you're always beating us over the him into the happiness business. Dad, I know you're always beating us over the head on this happiness business. It's not my path. It's your path. I roll. So I'm curious for you personally, having thought about this deeply, having tracked a lot of things also, what are some of the best uses of money that you have found personally? What types of things? Are

Starting point is 01:10:47 there any concrete examples that you can give? We rolled through that fast just a second ago, but it turns out there's a ton of research on this. My colleague, Mike Norton, and my colleagues, Mike Norton and Ashley Willans at the Harvard Business School, they've done this exhaustive research on how to buy happiness. How to buy happiness, right? Okay. Mother Nature says get more stuff. Why? Because satisfaction comes from having more. What's the strategy, right? Okay. Mother Nature says get more stuff. Why? Because satisfaction comes from having more. What's the strategy for life? More. Mother Nature tells you that she lies. Lies and lies and laughs at you. That's not the strategy. You need to buy enough, but no possession will do anything beyond bring you out of misery. That's the reason that the

Starting point is 01:11:19 studies, you know, the famous Kahneman and Deaton study from Princeton shows that happiness flattens out after $75,000 a year. And, you know, Matt Killingsworth deaton study from princeton shows that happiness flattens out after 75 000 a year and you know matt killingsworth at penn actually re-ran the data and finds that it's higher but it still flattens out inflation adjusted but still inflation adjusted or you know your results may vary or whatever it is but the whole point is you just don't get happier and happier and happier as millions the reason by the way that we think that is an illusion that comes from our experience most Most people have less than they perceive that they need when they're young. And the result of it is that they, a lot

Starting point is 01:11:48 of people and a lot of people listening to us, they suffer a lack of, you know, meeting some basic needs. You know, when I was 19 to 25, I was too poor for six years to go to the dentist for six years. No, of course I don't think I ever went a day without cigarettes. So I guess it was priorities. But the point is that when I was... Breakfast of champions. Yeah, man. Yeah, beer, cigarettes, pizza. I was living in Washington Heights in those days.

Starting point is 01:12:14 And when I was 25, I took a job in the Barcelona Orchestra. I moved to Barcelona. I had benefits. I had Benny's, man. And I went to the dentist and he filled 10 cavities. And I felt a lot better. And I thought, money does buy happiness. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Money lowers unhappiness when you move out of deprivation. That's it. And so what happens is I made the mental link between feeling,

Starting point is 01:12:37 getting money and feeling better. And people do that and they chase that feeling for the rest of their life. Because you're doing sums in your head of well-being as happiness and unhappiness and all that. You can't tell the difference when you're just rolling through your life. And early on, you felt a lot better. That's all you know when you had more money. And so you want that feeling and you chase the feeling. You chase the high. You chase the early hits.

Starting point is 01:13:00 It's like drugs, like any other drugs in this way. So that doesn't work. But there are three ways you can buy happiness, according to Willens and Norton, my colleagues at HBS. You can buy experiences. This is critically important because what do experiences where you buy happiness really have in common? You add money, which is sort of like pleasure, but the really important parts are the people and the memory. People and memory are always part of experiences. Okay. Now, sometimes you want to do things alone, but generally speaking, the greatest happiness comes because it enhances love in your life. The best way to improve love

Starting point is 01:13:35 in your life, if you want your love life with your partner to get better, go away together. Go away together. That's always the best way to do it. Or stay home together, but turn off the phone. In other words, get an experience with the person that you love. That's a great way to spend money because it will reliably, unless you waste it, do something stupid. Like, I'm going to have a bender in Vegas and then get blackout drunk and sit in front of the slot machine. That's not the secret. But being prudent, you can actually buy happiness through experiences. That's number one. Number two. I'm going to ask you for personal examples, but yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:08 I'm serious. Yeah, for sure. Buy time. Buy time. But use the time correctly. If you have the money and you're cutting your lawn and you don't like cutting your lawn, improve GDP. Hire a guy.

Starting point is 01:14:23 Now, a lot of Americans don't like to do that because they have this kind of this weird reverse classist sense. Well, let me tell you, there's a lot of people who are making more money than you cutting lawns and running a gardening service. Spread the love, give somebody a job, and then use the time correctly. Don't fritter away your time scrolling social media in the house, in the air conditioning. No, no, no, no. Use the time specifically for something, ideally with somebody doing something that you enjoy, and that will truly buy happiness. And last but not least, give your money away to somebody who needs it, who deserves it, and a cause that truly inspires you, something you really, really believe in. I've studied philanthropy long before I studied happiness. I, an academic beavering away in obscurity,

Starting point is 01:15:05 writing books on charity and philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. And the reason I initially got into happiness in the first place, besides, you know, wanting to be happy, was that I found that the more people gave, the happier they got. So we don't have to tread into these waters,

Starting point is 01:15:19 but I think it would be very helpful for people. And I'm very curious. I'm happy to reciprocate also. Where have you landed for where to give your own money i give money to things that i really care about that i think have an impact on people's lives in a big way and a lot of what i do is i give to education to people who are at the margins of society so i give a lot to primary and secondary education specifically to catholic primary and secondary education because i think it is really really well done and it's an option that a lot of people don't have access to because it costs money

Starting point is 01:15:48 so a lot of what i do probably 75 percent of what i give away and i give away 10 of my income so i'm yeah because you know it's not that hard to do you just have to pay attention to it and then there's structures you know so you get a charitable giving account as a tithe or yeah i do think it was a tithe but I really think of it as a privilege. I think of it a lot less as a duty and a lot more as a privilege. My wife and I, we just look forward to it. And then we have a process in our family of, should we give money to this? Should we give money to that?

Starting point is 01:16:16 Usually we give something, kind of a big bolus one year, and then smaller gifts to things that are ongoing sources of support that we really believe in. How do you decide what to give to? Well, we know the people and we do the work. So it's not just anybody. We get a letter in the mail and we respond with a big check. It's like, huh, it seems worthy. No, we actually do the work. And part of it is because I teach, one of the classes I teach at Harvard is on nonprofit management. And so I have a kind of a strong background in whether it's a reputable cause and what to look for into measuring the effectiveness of an organization. So I do the work. I do the background work. I see what kind

Starting point is 01:16:49 of overhead rates that they're using, how they're using their money. A lot has to do with if I like the mission. Sometimes if it's going to be a substantial amount of money, I get to know the people and the organization. And it has to be something that I think is going to change people's lives for the better. Now, I've actually changed my view on this a little bit because early on, we'd write a lot of little checks, lots and lots and lots of little checks to great organizations. And then I found that you can have a lot more effect on your own well-being. And again, this is kind of selfish, but in your own well-being by concentrating on turning the whole dial in one person's life. And there's an old Talmudic

Starting point is 01:17:27 phrase from the book of Sanhedrin that says, in every man is the whole world. In other words, turn the dial for one person, you've turned the dial for all of humanity because it's really had an impact. And I remember telling my wife about that. It's like, yeah, I've got these data that when you really help one person instead of a little bit for a lot, really anonymously, you can get all these benefits. She's like, this is years ago. This is maybe 20 years ago now. And she's like, why don't we adopt a baby? And I'm like, it's only a book, man. But we did. We actually did. It was totally life-changingchanging so that's how you give you got to do the work and think about it and put your heart into it did you say more about how did she come to the adoption my wife yeah how did she came to it because i was saying you know you get a lot more benefits when

Starting point is 01:18:17 you turn the whole dial on one person's life as opposed to just you know sprinkling just throwing dollar bills at a helicopter let's turn this to 11. Yeah, she's basically like, okay, buddy. You really? Really? I mean, I know you've got this interesting research, fancy social scientist guy. Let's see. Should we put our money where our mouth is? By the way, she had also been having dreams about a little girl who was abandoned.

Starting point is 01:18:42 Dreams and dreams and dreams at night. If you're open to it, can you tell me more about your wife and how you guys met? Because I know a little bit of the background, but how did that happen since I'm back on the playing field? You're back on the playing field, Tom. One of the things that I teach my students at HBS

Starting point is 01:18:56 is that I would never invest in a firm of an entrepreneur who's unwilling to give her or his heart away. Because that's the single most risky entrepreneurial thing that you can do, putting every bit of capital at risk. If you're not willing to give your heart away, I'm not going to put my money in your fund. Now. And that takes the form of risk, man. Loving someone wholeheartedly.

Starting point is 01:19:22 Giving your heart away. Okay. Giving your heart away. giving your heart away so and the reason i believe this is because you know i've always had this sense that part of the journey of life is just like getting in it getting in it and you know entrepreneurs talk a lot about putting capital at risk and talking about money how boring the real capital of the enterprise the startup of tim ferris's life because this is the ultimate enterprise i mean the enterprise is not the podcast and the books and the company and the, that's not it. Those are manifestations

Starting point is 01:19:48 of Tim Ferriss Inc, of you. The enterprise is you and the currency of you is not money, it's love and happiness. That's your currency. So how are you going to put that at risk for explosive tectonic inflecting returns? What are you going to do to put it at risk? That's the question, right? The answers are really tricky, but the at risk that's the question right yeah the answers are really tricky but the one answer that's not right is don't put it at risk don't put it at risk right so i i'm with you now there are myriad ways that if you were to sort of take off your flak jacket and just walk into the oncoming traffic with like emotional oncoming traffic with someone who you've been on a dating app who you meet within five minutes and they're cuckoo bananas that could turn out

Starting point is 01:20:29 poorly of course that's just vegas that's not entrepreneurship that's just gambling right so how well first i want to hear your story yeah so this gets back to the issue at hand and the reason i did that little prelude is because i don't want anybody to think that my screws are too loose right i mean that's not my goal yeah that's not my goal i'm not it's insanity so okay i rest my case insane insane man on the podcast deeply unbalanced guest joins tim ferris so when i was 24 years old i was on a concert tour and i was making my living as a classical french horn player i was on a concert tour in the burgundy region of France. Going from town to town, playing concerts. And I was staying at this school. I don't know, it's just where we were housed during this. We were going out from there. And at the same time, there was a music festival going on. And there were musicians from all over Europe that were studying at this music festival. And I was at this concert playing at this very school and playing my horn, looking out at the audience.

Starting point is 01:21:28 And there was this girl smiling at me in the front row, beautiful girl smiling at me, just gorgeous. And I'm a red-blooded 24-year-old dude. And I'm like, obviously, I'm going to make a mental note to go talk to her. So I go to talk to her later. And I find out two things. Number one, she's not French, even though I was in France. And number two, that she doesn't speak a single word of english and it

Starting point is 01:21:47 was hard because you know i was trying to talk to her and you know monosyllabic grunts and fruitless search for cognates and i said are you single i mean this is like this basic are you single and she says yes i'm divorced i'm like i'm not down with that but what she meant was i just broke up with my boyfriend but she couldn't come up up with any Latin-based words besides divorce, which actually comes from Latin, to try to get me to understand this point. Anyway, so it was a comedy of errors. And we went out to dinner, and we went on some dates. And I left after a week, and I went home, and I called my dad in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle. I was living in New York at the time. I said, Dad, I think I met the girl I'm going to marry.

Starting point is 01:22:25 And where was she? From Barcelona. Barcelona. And he said, great, let's meet her. And I said, I got problems. Problem number one is that she doesn't live in the United States. Problem number two is she doesn't speak a word of English. Problem number three is that she made me aware that she doesn't believe in marriage because she thinks it's an anachronistic institution and she's never going to get married. It's a hell of a concept to communicate in Tarzanese. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, for sure. I mean, we were together for a week and we, you know, you got there. We got there. And I couldn't get out of my head. It was like Our Lady of Guadalupe kind of. And I thought about it. I thought about it. And we exchanged letters and weirdly somehow

Starting point is 01:23:03 talked on the phone. She'd started taking English classes. I started studying Spanish. Who knows what I'll see her. I traveled to Barcelona, saw her. She came to New York and visited me just a little bit here and there. And what I didn't tell her is that I had quit my job in New York, and I'd won an audition to be a member of the symphony in Barcelona because I wanted to go see if I could close that deal, if I could change her philosophy of marriage. It took me two years, but I closed the deal. And 32 years later, we have three adult kids and one grandson, and I'm still in love. So how did you end up debate teaming that? I'm just curious, like, how did- I just wore her down.

Starting point is 01:23:39 You just wore her down? I just wore her down. So, you know, we were, you know, I was living in Barcelona, and she was in love with me. And so she's not like, get out. It's not like I was some weird stalk barcelona she was in love with me and so she's not like get out it's not like i was some weird stalker she really was in love with me right and and she wanted to be with me but you know she nobody in her family was married i mean this is not what you do in barcelona i didn't realize that because i mean it sounds like a big catholic country it's a post-christian country three percent of the population of barcelona ever goes to mass three percent i never would have guessed that denmark and the mediterranean that's incredible i have no idea yeah yeah nobody does for sure i mean it but but you know it has a long tradition she comes from a a hard red communist atheist family so suffice it to say that our background is a little bit different i mean again she was

Starting point is 01:24:19 beautiful and smart and funny and and i was in love yeah and it's just love will out love will out and it finally at the end of two years i just finally i said i got down on one knee and i said are you ready to change your mind she said yes all right so once again envy has showed its ugly head and i have to admit my French horn game, very weak, very weak. It turns out the French horn was the least of it. Tight pants, tight pants,

Starting point is 01:24:51 big guns. In those days, I was six foot two and 142 pounds. My wife said that it was like hugging a tight sack of rocks. Now she says it's like a loose leather bag of ropes. So, you know, I've made some progress. Hey, yeah. Is that progress? Sounds like progress.

Starting point is 01:25:10 Maybe that should be on my dating profile. If you hug me, I feel like, maybe not. That's a little too silence of the lambs. Two babies fighting under a blanket. I don't know. I don't know. And maybe you're so far removed that this doesn't make sense to ask but what advice also you're coming from a different orientation with the catholicism and i assume

Starting point is 01:25:33 maybe wrongly but i imagine it was mine but not hers right now is she fully aboard the catholic train fully aboard but that took that took a long time wore down right around a lot of prayer as they say this is one of those problems that requires prayer and fasting so you pray and she fasted and you're like no food it will put the rosaries on its wrist uh all right thoughts on how to find a partner yeah no i think about this an awful lot because this is the number one topic in my science of happiness class at HBS that they want to know about Wednesday. It's got to be. Oh, for sure.

Starting point is 01:26:11 For sure, absolutely. Because, you know, not only is it something that we all want, that everybody wants, it's something that's getting harder. Yeah, all the traditional scaffolding is gone. Unless you, perhaps you're part of, say, a Jewish community where that type of Yenta-like matchmaking is a very esteemed yeah

Starting point is 01:26:26 but even then the modern world is encroaching on that and you know if you look at the comparison between in the 80s when i was in my 20s or the 90s when you were in your 20s sorry i didn't mean to shock you with that you know that's okay yeah i know it's much much much harder i have the ring of frodo so i'm not planning on aging anymore from this point forward side note you should look at photos of him now and 20 years ago they're the same the actor anyway yeah not me though i mean back when i was in the barcelona symphony i had this hair it was like a great civilization it's like the locks of samson that was unbelievable and and so you know then i start going bald i'm getting more and more bald my brother my older brother he's very judgmental about he's funny he loves me but he says you deserve it because of the life you've led.

Starting point is 01:27:08 Ooh, eat too, Brute. It's just a lot of DHT, man. Anyway, so what are the guardrails? What are the mistakes that we make? You know, what's actually making it harder? And there's a lot of things that go into it. You know, there's the fact that we're using tech where we would have used humans is deeply problematic. I mean, the fact that we have so much deal flow is making it harder. The paradox of choice is a real thing. Better, better, better, better, better. I mean, there's a ton of research on this, by the way, Tim. I mean, you've seen some of this research, for example, on car purchases, where you give two groups, there's the treatment and control social science experiments, two groups,

Starting point is 01:27:43 different car buying experiences, where the first buys their car and there's no refund and there's no returns. And the other side can return it for any reason in the next six months. And the first group is much happier with their car because they're not thinking about it again and again and again. There's no more swiping on their car purchase. And so the same thing is when it's very easy to have a lot of selection, it gets much, much harder to attain satisfaction. You're also exhausted more easily because of the decision fatigue. Yeah. I mean, I'll have to take your word for it, but I mean, that's certainly true. That's in the data. Well, I'm saying not outside of dating, just in general. But the bigger problem actually comes because we're looking for the wrong thing in a partner.

Starting point is 01:28:21 The data suggests that what everybody wants in a partner that they can curate carefully because of the online presence, because of the platforms, is they want compatibility. And they look for compatibility with sameness to them. I like this kind of food. You do too. Great. I vote like this. You do too. Great. I'm this religion or I'm no religion. I grew up here. I went to college. Where did you go to college, et cetera? They're not looking for someone who doesn't speak their language who- They're looking for a sibling. And as my adult kids would say, that's not hot. The truth is we're way too compatible and we're sorting on compatibility with these technological means.

Starting point is 01:28:56 And the biggest problem with dating today is we're less and less attracted to people. We're less and less attracted because they're too much like us. We need more complementarity and less compatibility. Back in the old days, you used to say opposites attract. Not true. But you need a baseline of compatibility. But on top of that, you need difference. Difference is hot. Difference is fun. Difference is an adventure. And you're just not going to find it because nobody's going to swipe on you. Quite frankly, if you're the other party, a lot of people curate on language and culture and race. It's insanity. You know, that's the reason that good old fashioned human people who say they could fall in love.

Starting point is 01:29:34 When you talk about people who fix you up on a blind date or the old fashioned matchmakers, they're always looking about complementarity. This introvert and this extrovert can fill in the gaps in each other in a kind of a divine and cosmic way. That's how I always kind of felt. I felt like my wife was, you know, I don't believe in magical thinking on this. Magical thinking is a big problem because soulmates don't exist and there's no such thing as love at first sight. But I always do feel like my wife Esther was, she was picked for me. She was really picked for me. And because of the difference as much as anything else. I mean, she completes me.

Starting point is 01:30:10 She makes me a better man. She knows when I'm going after the idol. She knows. She can see it. Going after the lure, she can see it. She's like, mm, right? And that's 32 years of experience together. But it's also the deep complementarity that came to me because I was born at a particular time.

Starting point is 01:30:24 And I accidentally had this kind of experience. And it's also the deep complementarity that came because i was born at a particular time and i accidentally had this kind of experience and that's what we need that's number one this is clear the second thing is goals you know when i ask people you know you're going to meet the person of your dreams or the good enough person or whatever what do you want to have after five years a good enough person or whatever what do you want to have after five years a good enough person to paris's guide to the good enough life to passable relationships wife me up with someone good enough man anyway so yeah because by the way step one there are no record there aren't i'm just kidding i don't know man complementarity yeah maybe it's like you've been in prison i haven't we complete each other whatever i've been trying isn't working maybe i'll skip barcelona and do the prison circuit all right

Starting point is 01:31:13 yeah but when you ask people what do you want your relationship to look like in five years they have kind of this magical notion of an ongoing passion. And that's the wrong goal. The right goal is what is called companionate love. You want to be best friends in five years. Five years to best friends. That's the goal. And if you write it out, and if you actually make it the goal, and then you have interim steps and a strategic plan, you might just get there. But if you're like, yeah, no, it's like if the magic feels like the magic's gone, obviously there's something wrong with our love. No. Best friends who are married, they're going to have plenty of passion, but you can't live like that.

Starting point is 01:31:50 Look, the neurophysiological cascade of the experience of falling in love is unbelievably intense. It's 4th of July in your head. The bolus of testosterone and estrogen at the very beginning of the relationship, massive increases in norepinephrine and dopamine that give you euphoria and concentration and focus on the other person, the deep dip in serotonin, your serotonin dips. Why? Because you want to ruminate on that person using the good old ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's the reason that falling in love is an awful lot like

Starting point is 01:32:21 being clinically depressed. So you're both addicted to meth and depressed at the same time that's what falling in love is like and then you're going to get that big dose of oxytocin which is the neuropeptide that links you to the other person in this almost magical confusing way man that's just too much you don't want that for the rest of your life sounds like a lot well you'll be institutionalized all right so let's let's pause there for a second that was a lot it was a lot i want to go Well, you'll be institutionalized. All right. So let's pause there for a second. That was a lot.

Starting point is 01:32:48 It was a lot. I want to go from falling in love as meth and depression to the lightness of death. And we haven't even talked about meaning yet, Matt. Oh, we're going to get there. We'll get there by the ninth hour. Yeah, I'm keeping track. Hour nine, I have it bookmarked also i have a promise i made to listeners that i have not fulfilled which is your personal examples for using money for experiences time whatever comes to mind so we'll get to that but before that death meditation yeah

Starting point is 01:33:19 could could you please describe your death meditation and why you have a death meditation? Most people watching us are not afraid of death, not pathologically afraid of death. Only about 20% of the population is pathologically afraid of death. And I bet you that it's less than 1% of Tim Ferriss followers. Because people watching this are in control of their lives, and they understand the contours of their lives, and they're looking at the truth of their lives. But they have a death fear. The death fear isn't physical death. And this is a problem. For some people, it's irrelevance. For some people, it's being forgotten.

Starting point is 01:33:59 For a lot of your listeners, it's failure. Just straight on failure. Because they're strivers. They're achievers. Everybody has a death fear. And what is it? It's an ego threat. It's a threat to who you see as yourself. If Tim Ferriss' Tim Ferriss-ness is threatened, that will provoke a panic in you because that's the ultimate death of who you see yourself. The way to get over that, and by the way, you have to get over that. We all have to get over that or we won't be fully alive until we actually face the death that really matters to us. This is an insight that actually comes from the Theravada Buddhists across the southern tier of Asia, from Thailand and Myanmar to Vietnam and parts of Malaysia and Sri Lanka in particular. So the Theravada Buddhist monasteries, often you'll go in and you'll see photos of cadavers in different states of decomposition.

Starting point is 01:34:46 Super, super macabre. I mean, you're like, what are these dudes all about here? And what they do is that usually there will be nine, nine states of decomposition. Photos, bodies, decomposing, falling apart, bones, bloated corpses. And they stand in front of each one and they say, that is me. And then they move to the next one after contemplating and saying, and that is me. And what are they doing? They're familiarizing themselves with the truth of their future, such that they can be liberated from any fear of physical death. Only then can they be fully alive.

Starting point is 01:35:24 That's an important insight from Theravada Buddhism. That's a meditation called Maranasati, the Maranasati death meditation. Now, when I read that, I thought it was interesting, but I thought it's a good thing to do because I shouldn't be making all of these decisions about when I'm old and when I'm retired and when I die and what's going to happen and call the lawyer and all that i want to be free from all that stuff by understanding that life and death are in a very real way an illusion particularly because i believe in eternal life but i have a death fear oh yeah you know what i'm afraid of you know my death fear who's going to take care of your cats no i don't know

Starting point is 01:36:02 that's good man who's going to care of my dog choo-choo no it's losing my mind on the way there yeah because you know you know what arthur brooks is gray matter look i'm not the smartest guy in the world i'm not the cleverest guy in the world but i make my living and i support my family and i understand me in terms of my ideas literally my company is called acb ideas it was very revealing to me when i contemplated the fact that i did you say acb yeah it's my arthur charles oh okay it took me a second i just can't remember the alphabet a little dyslexic it's like xzy anyway so i'm long island sorry guys yes so and my mother was showing signs of dementia in her early 50s and she was

Starting point is 01:36:54 quite demented by the time she was my age and it runs in families it's genetic i know it doesn't mean i'm going to get the bullet it doesn't mean i'm not being morbid about it i'm not being fatalistic about it probably the odds are in my favor, but I'm just terrified of that. And when I recognized that, I realized I need a Maranissati meditation on that. And that's what I contemplate. I'll take two minutes and I'll think, my memory's failing and I don't know why. And then I imagine going to the neurologist. The neurologist saying, well, I think you need to come into my office. And then I imagine myself telling my kids, the future is going to be rough. And then I imagine my work slipping away, my inability to have this kind of conversation, to write a book, to share an idea, to help somebody with these ideas.

Starting point is 01:37:41 And then I imagine myself not remembering what I don't remember. And then I imagine being a beloved son of God with no memory at all. Now, it's heavy, right? Seems like that ending point is important. It's the most important because you end on the truth. So if you're not religious, do you just end up, to use the parlance of the kids these days, just depressed AF? I mean, are you just shit out of luck? No. Okay.

Starting point is 01:38:12 Because at the end of the day in the Maranassati meditation, you recognize the illusion of the tragedy that was your death in the first place. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. New life will emerge. Will it be you? Will it be somebody else? Do you care? See, when you look into the abyss, you can cope with it. You're stronger than that. My students, by the way, at Harvard, graduate students, Harvard Business School, best in the world, so we like to think. They're afraid of failure because they've never failed they've never failed i mean you and i have struggled and you know we're older and you know i failed a lot but my students are deeply afraid of failure i mean i basically got kicked out of college when

Starting point is 01:38:56 i was 19 it turns out you're not supposed to drop all your required classes and take nothing but indonesian dance and north indian classical drum. Turns out that's not the secret to academic success. Kids, you know, make a note of it. So I failed, right? But a lot of my students haven't. And so I asked them to do the Maranassati meditation on their own academic and professional failure. Number one, two minutes. I think I'm falling behind academically and the people around me are getting better grades. Two, I just got put on academic probation. This was my dream to come to this school, and I'm not succeeding. Three, the job market is looking bad compared to other people. I can't believe it. Four, I think I need to move home for a while. Five, my parents feel sorry for me. That's when they cry, right? Because all you want is for mom

Starting point is 01:39:49 to be proud of you. That's all you want when you're a success addict. That's all you want. And imagine that. Look into that. Stare into it. Stare into it. And they do, and they get over it, and they can master it that's the Mara nasati death meditation on the self objectification of the success addict see what do you see in those students because they come from all different backgrounds and different orientations religious or not or somewhere in between some are some aren't yeah what types of effects and how frequently do you personally do this type of death meditation a lot because I I have my own death meditation. I'm not, I mean, I contemplate

Starting point is 01:40:29 failure sometimes because I'm afraid of it, but I'm not deathly afraid of it. The truth of the matter is the great thing about being 46 as opposed to 26 for you, the great thing about being 59 instead of 29 for me is that bad stuff is going to happen and it's going to be okay. Bad stuff is just going to happen, right? I mean, the. Bad stuff is just going to happen, right? I mean, the truth is that we realize, you and I both realize, that the worst thing that's ever happened in life probably hasn't happened yet. And okay, that's heavy, but it's not that heavy. We're going to survive. You've survived a lot and it's actually going to be okay. I don't want to fail. I've always got, we have a book coming out. I have a big book coming out a few

Starting point is 01:41:05 weeks from when we're taping this episode. And I deeply wanted to be successful, but I can't control that. And so I don't have to do much more than a couple of Mara Nasati meditations on the market failure of a book. But I have to do it about losing my mind because that feels deeply existential to me. I have to do it a lot. I do it at least once a week, actually, because I want to remember. I need to remember. And if I don't, I'm going to be walking kind of on eggshells and just sort of wondering and having that kind of minor sense of dread. I don't want to live that way. I don't need to live that way. It's not important for me to live that way. On the contrary, it's important for me not to live that way because I won't be fully

Starting point is 01:41:41 alive now. I'll be living prospectively in a future, and that future is dominated by fear, and then I'm really not washing the dishes. I'm really not enjoying that juicy peach. On the contrary, I'm breaking my teeth on the pit, and it's not even a real pit. That's crazy. Not yet, really yet. Yeah. This, I think, is a good tie-in to meaning. And I'm going to get there with a self-indulgent reference back to Marcus Aurelius. For people who have not read Meditations, read Meditations. It was never intended for publication. but also incredibly impressive during war campaigns and otherwise, but lots of thoughts on death. And also for those interested, it's considered a Stoic practice that exists in a lot of different varieties, but memento mori, there are these meditations,

Starting point is 01:42:36 premeditatio malorum. It's the Greek mernosati for all intents and purposes, right? Or Romans, right? Exactly. And he also thought very deeply on on meaning let's come to meaning so we identified two i guess of the legs on the stool on the stool right meaning how should we think about meaning is a hard one meaning is the hard one i mean look i mean enjoyment is no joke and and satisfaction

Starting point is 01:43:01 takes work but meaning eludes some people their entire lives because they don't know what they're looking for. They're fumbling around for something. They don't know exactly what it is. And a lot of people, they deeply suspect that it doesn't exist, that it doesn't actually exist. You look at a lot of 20th century and 19th century philosophers, and they say it doesn't exist. I mean, there's sort of three schools of thought about meaning. There's the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. It's all kind of based on meaning in the following way. Essence precedes existence. Meaning, you have meaning in life that precedes your actual life, and your job is to find it and live up to it. But it's already out there. You just need to go looking for it, right?

Starting point is 01:43:46 In the 19th and 20th centuries, that was relaxed with two major schools of philosophical thought, nihilism and existentialism. Existentialism, you know, Sartre, and even to a certain extent, Kierkegaard, would say that existence precedes essence. In other words, you're born, and there is no meaning until you create it.

Starting point is 01:44:05 Tabula rasa. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. Go make it. And if it's no good, it's on you, man. And by the way, Sartre, he has a very empowering, a very muscular philosophy because he says, you have to live up to the responsibility of creating your essence and living according to it. It's sort of Freudian in its way.

Starting point is 01:44:24 And then, of course, there's Nietzsche, our old pal Friedrich. A lot of young men love Nietzsche because, by the way, it's unbelievably beautiful prose. Gorgeous writer, including in English. You don't have to go learn German to read it. But the gay science, which is one of his most famous texts where he said, God is dead and we kill them. It lands, right? But his whole point is existence is real, but essence is a figment of your imagination, so don't even try to find it. That's nihilism. We're struggling with these schools of thought, and we all suspect, it doesn't matter how religious you are, it doesn't matter what your wiring actually happens to be, you kind of wonder if maybe Nietzsche and Sartre were right. So you go in search of it.

Starting point is 01:45:05 And it turns out, I want to go find the meaning of life is too big a question. You'll never find it by sitting at the mouth of the guru's cave or with the ayahuasca shaman saying, I just want to find meaning in life. You need to boil it down to really sub-questions, which are all about coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? I need to believe something about why things happen the way they do? I need to believe something about why things happen the way they do. It doesn't have to be religious.

Starting point is 01:45:28 It can be completely secular. It might even be nihilistic. You need a purpose. You need to answer a purpose question, which is, what's the purpose of my life and what direction am I going? What's the goal of my life? What's the end point of my life? And the last is significance, which is, why does it matter that I'm alive? Now, I have a test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis in their life. It's really just two questions. And to pass the test, you need incredibly true, honest, and compelling answers. There's no right answers. There's only wrong answers or no answers. So you want to take the test? Sure, why not?

Starting point is 01:46:03 It's go time. Question number one. Punish me for all the ayahuasca I've done. Go for it. I didn't say there's something wrong with it. It's what do we say? It's necessary but not sufficient. I was like an Opus Dei myself.

Starting point is 01:46:24 I left it back at the hotel. Damn. Necessary, but not sufficient. Where's my cat and I until like an opus de myself? I left it back at the hotel. Yeah. Damn. Why are you alive? Do you have an answer to the question of why you're alive? I mean, I have a very clinical answer for it. Tell me. Well, I mean, there's the physical answer, but metaphysically, why are you alive?

Starting point is 01:46:41 Which can be one of two things. Either who created you or what you're put on earth to do. You can Which can be one of two things, either who created you or what you're put on earth to do. You can answer that in one of two ways. Do you have a strong belief in why you're alive? I have a strong driver for taking advantage of the fact that I am alive, but I don't have a story of a creator or something along those lines or a strong purpose you know it can be a creator or a purpose i do feel like i have a strong purpose but it doesn't relate to my birth that's okay it's you know the why of your life our mutual friend simon senek talks about this you know start with why and the why of your life can be because of a creation or it can be because

Starting point is 01:47:22 i exist to you know lift other people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, which, by the way, is the why of my life. So that's number one. If it's there, but it's inchoate, it's not quite clear enough, find out the answer to that and write it down, and then perfect it over a six-month period. Does that make sense? Yeah, I would say that for me, I mean, it's looking at and experiencing things in unorthodox ways so that I can teach. And why do you want to teach? Mostly to alleviate suffering, I would say.

Starting point is 01:47:50 In other words, you want to lighten the load for other people. Yeah. And so in other words, you want to serve your sisters and brothers. Is that fair? Sure. Okay, that's a great why. That's a great why. That's a great answer to the first question, why are you alive?

Starting point is 01:48:01 Yeah, I don't feel conflicted about that. Okay, so the second one's harder. For what would you be willing to die today i don't have a ready answer it's a hard one it's a hard one what's your lot of people don't for my faith for my family for my country and for you i am willing to die for others that's the answer i mean i probably won't be called to it but i'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually willing to do it. And here's how I learned this from my son. I learned this actually from my son. I mean, I have theoretical answers that are politically correct in the Catholic sphere. I would die for the Catholic

Starting point is 01:48:36 church. I would die for my faith. These things are true, by the way. I really would. But it's too pat. Here's how I learned this from my son i have three kids 25 23 and 20 and my middle son's named carlos and carlos is he's a kinetic boy he's a fan of yours you know he's probably watching us right now going oh dad's gonna talk about me right now sorry carlos sorry carlos and you know carlos was having a good old time in high school. We had substantial grade problems and academic issues. And my wife's like, at least we know he's not cheating. But the problem was, he wasn't really having fun.

Starting point is 01:49:16 I think it was a meaning problem. And in search of the answers to the questions after high school, he really became an entrepreneur with his life. And I asked my kids to do a business plan when they were in high school because they're entrepreneurs and I'm VC. I'm an investor. I deserve a business plan. And when they weren't original, I'd send them back for revisions. Bank of dad.

Starting point is 01:49:37 Yeah. And it's really fun to be my son, you can imagine. So Carlos's business plan for his life was by the time it went through several rounds of revisions was appropriately unorthodox he was going to go work on a farm by himself and find the answers to the questions work hard and so he actually got a job on a wheat farm in idaho a real job not some sort of hobby farm. No, no, no. It was an 8,000-acre working wheat farm. He lived in the farmer's basement for the first year. He picked rocks out of the soil. He started at the bottom, made minimum wage, fixed fences, cut down dead trees,

Starting point is 01:50:17 ran a combine by himself 16 hours a day. Why did he choose this? How would he explain it? Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks, away from his family, away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were in Kuwait. They were like, why am I alive? I don't know. Maybe I'll find it in the Cabo Combine. Maybe I'll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil. Maybe I'll find it by doing something hard with my hands.

Starting point is 01:50:41 Then he joined the military. He was 19 years old. He joined the Marine Corps. And boot camp is no walk in the park for the U.S. Marine Corps, as we've all heard. But then it got harder from there. He did infantry training battalion, and then the in-doc for the Scout Sniper Platoon, which is a branch of the Special Forces and the Marines. Today, he's Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines 3-5 Scout Sniper Platoon. And he's corporal carlos brooks marines three five scout sniper platoon and he's got answers now that's a scary job for me and his mom he goes on field trips right field trips and thank god nothing's happened to him he's getting out of the military in december of this year but he's got

Starting point is 01:51:16 answers what types of answers i mean i don't want you here's his answers yeah i'll tell you his answers carlos why are you alive? Because God made me. For what are you willing to die? For my faith and for my family and for my friends and for the United States of America. Boom. These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give, but these are super solid answers.

Starting point is 01:51:38 I'm super proud of my son because he earned the answers to his meaning questions that everybody watching us has got to earn it. Everybody who's watching us has got to go on a quest, a vision quest for the answers to the meaning questions. There's no other way to do it. Your dad can't tell you. Your priest can't tell you. The holy books can give you inklings. They can give you shadows on the cave wall, to get back to the old Platonic metaphor. You need to live and to try things and to go through a process of discernment. And the way to do that is to do hard things, is to challenge yourself and to say to yourself, I will not stop until I have answers to these questions to my own satisfaction.

Starting point is 01:52:24 So hearing you describe Carlos' experience, hi Carlos, and congratulations on the trajectory. He's like, yeah, my dad embarrassed me, but Tim said hi to me on his podcast, so it's all good. It is not easy. I have some friends who are formerly Marine Force recon. That is not an easy path. No, it isn't. None of that is not the recon guys that is not an easy path no it is none of none of that is easy yeah i think i was over processing the for what would you be willing to die tomorrow i think it was the tomorrow piece that i fixated on so family right close

Starting point is 01:52:57 you would die to your family you just would yeah family and close friends i can give that answer right right i was thinking of it more hypothetically as a for what happening in the world would you be willing to basically off yourself tomorrow idea for what you'd be willing to die is there a truth because this is really where it gets super intense yeah that's where it gets yeah when carlos says i am willing to die for my faith i am willing to die for the united states of america which for him is an ideal of liberty. By the way, for those of you outside the United States, he's willing to die for our allies too. Dying for an idea, that's super heavy. I mean, that's like pure grade meaning. Because people are going to say, are you kidding me? Are you nuts? This is not, I'm willing to kill for an idea. That's

Starting point is 01:53:43 kindergarten stuff. That's kindergarten stuff. No, I'm willing to die for something. i'm willing to kill for an idea that's that's that's like you know that's kindergarten stuff that's kindergarten stuff now i'm willing to die for something i'm willing to give my own life i'm i'm willing to take yours yeah you and every other half-baked dark triad malignant narcissist cancel culture trait psychopath i thought you were talking to me for a second no no i was like how'd we get here all of a sudden arthur brooks got really abusive on my pocket no no no no tim i love you i will reiterate the negative moments that you're a beautiful man but but i mean i mean come on i mean it's everybody around the world is willing to you know kill for you know what they think or cancel or hurt people what they think but the real question is are you willing to sacrifice what you have for an idea and that's that's really hard

Starting point is 01:54:25 yeah i'm not sure that's a tough one for me to answer i think also thinking about what you're willing to die for let me personalize it thinking about what i'm willing to die for i also want to be very aware if there are things i would be willing to die for that could be manipulated to make me do things that i might not currently be morally aligned totally right so for sure i think the allegiance i get it it needs to be very or for me i want to be aware of their things like for instance faith has been manipulated by politicians so has patriotism of course my goodness right i mean a lot of people listening so you die for the united states of america you're crazy which is not to say that it's wrong it's just very context dependent very context dependent

Starting point is 01:55:09 and it requires a lot of updating and serious thought and it's not good enough to just be sort of raw raw raw and taking it to face value it takes serious discernment so we have the why were you born or for what why are you alive are you alive what would you be willing to die for yeah got any more those are the ones i mean what those do is that they really kind of wrap up coherence purpose and significance into two kind of handy dandy questions and and the point is really this i mean it's it's easy for me to frame that up is you know once you find those you're all good to All right. But the truth is you're going to go through the rest of your life contemplating these things. And these are the questions to ask on your birthday. Are these still the things that I believe? Have I updated my knowledge? Do I have

Starting point is 01:55:56 a better sense of who I am? Have I gone backwards a little bit? Have I lost this sense of what I'm willing to die for? Do I need to go a little deeper at this point? And touching up on those questions turns out to be a really good, it's sort of the same thing when you go to the doctor and they do the same test again and again and again and again. I have a series of tests that I do for these questions that I ask myself like that, you know, about the reverse bucket list and the meaning questions and am I pursuing my pleasures socially and making memory with my prefrontal cortex? I also have, by the way, a spreadsheet of 19 micronutrients that feed into my macronutrients. And I grade myself on tenths of 1% on a one to 10 scale weighted with respect to what my best estimate of my

Starting point is 01:56:37 well-being. And when I'm going backwards on those things, I set a strategic plan for my year. So I'm getting crazier by the minute, right? I into it i encourage it i want to pour gasoline on the fire let's do it man so i so we already talked about death meditation we talked about your experience in mexico and in build the life you want obviously we're not going to go into all the micronutrients of each of the legs on the stool per se but I'm curious whether it's meaning or one of the others, maybe meaning, but it doesn't have to be. Could you give some examples of some of those, I don't want to say antecedents, but micronutrients, the cast of characters and ingredients that are important for sort of healthy functioning? For sure. For sure. And you can

Starting point is 01:57:23 break them up in as variegated ways you want. You could make 20,000 of them, but really there's four that we should be thinking about. So there's four fundamental micronutrients and I make it more varied than that. I've got 19 because they're really about love and relationships.

Starting point is 01:57:38 That's really what it's all about. And the big four are your search for the divine or your spiritual journey or your philosophical, your faith, whatever that happens to be, religious or not, your search for the divine or your spiritual journey or your philosophical you know your faith whatever that happens to be religious or not your love for something bigger than you so you can stand in awe it's your family relationships this is the most mystical kinds of love that we get because we didn't choose the loves that were chosen for us and sometimes we're like yeah i wouldn't have chosen that friendship you know and friendship when i'm talking about

Starting point is 01:58:02 that i talk a lot about loneliness because, especially strivers, hardworking people, a lot of people watching us, they have a lot of people around them. But what they have is deal friends, but not real friends. Your deal friends are super useful to you. Your real friends are useless, cosmically, beautifully useless. And so I go into a lot of detail with my students about how to build useless friendships. Not worthless, that's different. I've got those two. And last but not least, it's loving everybody as expressed through your work. And that means serving others with your work. Your work should be a service profession no matter what you're doing. And so faith, family, friends, and work. And then there's, you know, we branch out from there. You know, when I'm talking about family, I'm talking about different branches

Starting point is 01:58:40 of family that I'm trying to make sure I'm working on. When I'm talking about, you know, my marriage is critically important. It gets one of the absolute highest scores in importance. Not always in terms of quality, because I'm not the best husband, but in terms of importance for sure. And that's because that's the apex of two of those columns, both family and friendship. My best friend and also the adopted member of my family is my wife. And so therefore, my marriage is really at the top of those two pillars. And so I'm thinking about that a lot. So I break it up into subcategories, but they all go into those silos of faith, family, friends, and work. Work that serves, work that's meaningful, right? Earn my success. And then I say, okay, well, you know, what does

Starting point is 01:59:16 it mean to earn my success? What does it mean to serve others? How do I know? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I start, you know, getting down to brass tacks. I start putting numbers on it. And if the numbers aren't, if I'm going backwards in a particular year, I do it my birthday and my off birthday, by the way. Your off birthday? Yeah, yeah. My six-month birthday. November 21st. Got it. My birthday's May 21st. So November 21st, I do it too. You got Thanksgiving week.

Starting point is 01:59:38 Yeah, I've got Thanksgiving week. And so it gives me a chance to actually think about these things in some detail, to be sure. And then I've got the data going back to about the year 1999 i've got it going forward and this system has gotten better along the way and change what are the most important changes you've made to the system would you say yeah the most important change the single most important change i made of the system was the recognition that i knew a lot about happiness, but wasn't happy because I was studying it, but I wasn't doing it. The biggest change to the system was using my knowledge to change my habits. That was number one,

Starting point is 02:00:13 far and away, right? It's one thing. I was giving people all this, all this advice about friendships and about having a good marriage and all that. And like, I was looking at my life and I wasn't living these things. I was just like everybody else, you know, waking up going, sure.

Starting point is 02:00:26 Hope I feel happy today. It was pathetic. It was pathetic. It was like, it was like a drug and alcohol counselor getting up and, you know, taking a bunch of bong hits and having a six pack. It was craziness. And by the way, it was my wife who finally clued me. She said, you have a PhD, right? What are you using it for? Exactly. I mean, you're like, your English has come a long way. You're killing me, sweetheart. You're killing me. She's like, you have a PhD, right? What are you using it for? Exactly. And you're like, your English has come a long way. You're killing me, sweetheart. You're killing me. But I'm writing academic journal articles that 14 people read so I can get promotion and tenure. It was ridiculous. So how did you, I imagine, even if you're not necessarily walking the walk as much as you

Starting point is 02:01:00 would like, you believe in what you are sharing. So it wasn't necessarily a conviction issue. So how do you then translate it to action? Are you just like, you know what, if it's not in the calendar, it's not real. Let me commit to things that I block out so that they are unavoidable in a sense. How did you convert it? Well, I started by doing habits and practices that were very, very specific. I mean, extremely specific. As specific as the stuff in the four-hour body specific. And I was writing stuff down. I held whole notebooks of protocols and things that I was trying.

Starting point is 02:01:32 I was trying things on myself based on science. And when it worked, I would keep it and I would write it down and I would practice it. Turns out that wasn't good enough. Because that was too hacky. That wasn't really habits. To ingrain a habit, you got to do one more step, which is that you got to teach it. The reason I'm a happiness professor is because I want to lash myself to

Starting point is 02:01:50 the mast and I want to be completely committed. Because look, I mean, if I'm doing something that's clearly at odds with what I'm teaching, I'm going to hear about it. I'm going to hear about it for my students. I'm going to hear about it for my family. I'm going to hear about it. Good Lord, I'm going to hear about it on social media. Not that I'm paying that much attention to that because I want to be happy. And it's really, really important. So basically there's a protocol in my life, which is number one, understand. Number two, practice. Number three, share. And that's the protocol that works for everybody when it comes to happiness. You got to take those three steps. You got to do the work and understand. And it's funny because I've done all this work

Starting point is 02:02:24 over the years with the Dalai Lama. And he always says the same thing. If you got to do the work and understand it's it's that's funny because i've done all this work over the years of the dalai lama and he always says the same thing if you want to be a spiritual adept think more feel less think more feel less i would not expect no that to be the framing okay what does that what does he mean by that well he first wakes up in the morning in the first two hours of his meditation he gets up at 3 or 3 30 in the morning the first thing that he does after a little bit on his exercise bike and hanging out with his cat, the first thing that he does is two hours of analytical meditation, which Catholics call mental prayer. That means you take a couple of lines of sacred scripture and you analyze it and you think about it. Most learning doesn't happen when the professor talks about something. If you

Starting point is 02:03:02 understand everything the professor says, it's not a hard enough class and you don't have a very good professor he has to blow your mind with something and you got to go away and think about it and then you learn it through your own thinking that's analytical meditation or mental prayer and is the dalai lama using scripture in this sense or what yeah tibetan buddhist scripture so he's contemplating something for you know words of the buddha or shanti devva or any of the ancient masters. Tactical question. Is he choosing it or is it flip open the book and, which would not denigrate it? I'm just wondering. Drop the needle?

Starting point is 02:03:33 Yeah. I mean. I know. He's, I mean, he's, it's extraordinary. I mean, the holy scriptures for Tibetan Buddhists are vast. There's a library in Dharamsala that's just stack after stack after stack after stack. It's not a Bible. It's not like a collection of books in a little library called the Bible. It's just, it's enormous. And the monks are going through the scriptures again and again and again. So he has, I'm sure, he hasn't explained it to me, but I'm sure that he has actually a regular rotation that he's going through to do his.

Starting point is 02:03:57 And that's what we need to do. He's got the equivalent of these 10 exercises when you go to the gym, skip the bench press. Like he's got his greatest 10s. No doubt. Yeah, no doubt. And so that's really important to do in the science of happiness, is to look at what the best protocols. What does it mean to stand up to your negativity bias by actually practicing gratitude when what you're feeling is resentment? How do you do that? How do you actually achieve a state of metacognition, awareness of your own feelings, such that you

Starting point is 02:04:25 can choose reactions in the face of emotions. How can you get into the state of the I-self, which is the state in which you're observing the world as opposed to observing yourself? Well, it starts with knowledge of what these concepts are. And then you put it into practice as real exercises. I have a column in The Atlantic that comes out every Thursday morning. That's next on my list of questions. The third part of every column is do these three things, is taking the science and then applying to your life in these three ways. And so it's application and change of habits and a commitment to that.

Starting point is 02:04:55 And the best way to cement in those ideas is by lashing yourself to the mast. And that's by teaching these things to everybody else. And everybody, look, I have a lab at Harvard called the Leadership and Happiness Lab. The whole point of the lab is not bench science and pouring stuff into test tubes or doing new experiments.

Starting point is 02:05:09 It's learning how we can all be happiness teachers. How can Tim Ferriss be a happiness teacher? You already are, by the way. I'm working on it. Well, you're working on it

Starting point is 02:05:16 and there's no reason that you have to be happy to be a happiness teacher. This is not like playing basketball. Thank God. Yeah, totally. I mean, on the contrary,

Starting point is 02:05:23 the people who have struggled the best at it. I'm not as miserable as some. You're fine. Pret you're pretending to be i mean the point is that you're but i do have struggles i mean i do have challenges otherwise so do i you're self-aware you're self-aware and part of your commitment because i know your work part of your commitment to lifting other people up is sharing your journey this is what it comes down to so you joke about you but the truth of the matter is we're all, we all are. And sharing that is actually part of the way that you're practicing these

Starting point is 02:05:50 protocols. You're not hacking anything. You're actually trying to build these habits. And then the teaching role, you're a teacher by the way, because this is a teaching podcast. We're not shooting the breeze and saying, what'd you see on TV? And I went to a new restaurant. No, we're talking about heavy stuff because we actually want to teach these ideas and lift other people up. So that's the secret, man. Learn more, think more. Don't feel, learn, think.

Starting point is 02:06:12 Second, turn this into habits and practice those habits. Third, share with others and commit to other people through your teaching. That's the secret to happiness. Commit, commit in what sense? Just sort of energetically taking the magnifying glass off of yourself? And committing to actually these practices in your own life. This can often be,

Starting point is 02:06:34 I've been doing this thing wrong, and I don't want to keep doing this thing wrong. And me telling you is making yourself accountable to another person. All 12-step programs work this way, right? Honestly, 12-step programs, AA, some of the most important and impressive decentralized organizations I've ever seen. And I've never participated, but I'm so impressed. But they require accountability. Because basically what 12-step programs do is knowledge of what's wrong with me, committing to new habits, and sharing it with others. That's why AA works, is because of those three steps as well. They do sneak some God in there.

Starting point is 02:07:07 Well, yeah, the higher power, for sure. The higher power. Which is helpful. I'm not going to deny it. One facet that I really appreciate of your work and your writing is that you straddle the very old and the very new. And you mentioned Aquinas earlier. Again, everybody read a few pages, at least on Wikipedia, about Aquinas. And then Aristotle. And one of your popular columns is about Aristotle's 10 Secrets to Happiness.

Starting point is 02:07:37 I wonder if any, I do have them in front of me. Yeah, because I can't remember them. Yeah, I was just going to say, there's a lot to remember. Weekly copy, you know. How about this? How about I read through yeah and then i would love for you to pick out one or two perhaps that have been particularly impacted for you or for your readers right here we go name your fears and face them to know your appetites and control them three be neither a

Starting point is 02:08:01 cheapskate nor a spendthrift. Four, give as generously as you can. Five, focus more on the transcendent, disregard the trivial. Six, true strength is a controlled temper. Seven, never lie, especially to yourself. Eight, stop struggling for your fair share. Nine, forgive others and forbear their weaknesses. Ten, define your morality, live up to it, even in private. And I want to take one off the table. Sure. Which is the last one, because there's a recency bias here, since we've been talking, I think, fairly extensively about that.

Starting point is 02:08:36 But those are... There we go. So let's start with number seven. All right. Never lie. Be impeccable with your word especially with you now i know a lot of people who are pretty honest frankly the reason my wife fell in love with me is not my you know my stunning good looks and you know my my lousy accent and the gray hair at the

Starting point is 02:09:00 time great hair no great hair great hair i know i, it was spectacular, if I do say so myself. But the reason she told me later is because I was the first man that never lied to her. I never lied. Now, that's part of my upbringing, and that has to do with your family, et cetera. That was a really super important value in my home. You had to be honest. The only really dramatic and scary consequences with my parents are for lying. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. And so the result is it was kind of

Starting point is 02:09:32 in a way easier for me because the way that I was raised, but I was the first guy she'd ever met that didn't lie. She's like, what's up with this dude? He doesn't lie. And I've procured, you know, when my oldest son, both of my sons, 25 and 23, they're both married. my when my oldest son both of my sons 25 and 23 they're both married and when my 25 year old 25 and 23 both married they're both married yeah wow i need to get relationship from advice from your son well my older son he's a piece of work i mean he's i learned a lot from him he's literally one of the brightest native intelligence people that i've ever met but But he also has this super adroit moral instinct to him. And he asked me, he said, tell me one thing that I should never do because I'm in love with this girl that I should never do. He asked good questions like that. And I

Starting point is 02:10:18 thought about it. I said, it's actually pretty easy. Never lie to her ever, ever, ever, ever, ever until you go to the grave. Never lie to her and ask her never to lie to you no matter what the consequences. That's the secret to the pure oxygen of a true companionate love, the mystical love of the romance where you feel truly chosen for each other. It has to be based on honesty. It has to be. And a lot of people are like, yeah, yeah, good luck with that. I mean, right? and there are lots of things that doesn't mean you have to say by the way sweetheart your butt looks fat in that just gonna ask yeah no no it doesn't mean you have to volunteer every single thing that you're thinking because you're not insane but when when there's a

Starting point is 02:10:59 direct question there's a direct answer so i can pretend to okay that's fine but that's you say in spanish that's primer curso that's that that's you know that's table stakes table stakes man you want to really be in the game never lie to yourself and we're doing it all the time we're doing it all the time we don't want to face up to the truth we don't want to look really in the mirror and not so that we can you know think how great our hair looks or whatever but so that we can actually see the good and the bad and to say i'm a true human being that's a hard thing to do and people lie to themselves constantly and aristotle talked about that and aquinas and and the buddha and you know one of the things that they all have in common is that they have

Starting point is 02:11:39 this impeccable idea of self-honesty which is that's taking a draft of the purest liquor of life. It's like, yeah, I can drink that. I'm going to drink that. Really? You're tough enough to drink that? And once you start doing that, I mean, it's just, it's hard. It's really hard, but it's life-changing. Yeah. So I have a question about that. And it also makes me think about some of the scientists I respect most, like Richard Feynman, who says you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool. For sure. And a lot of people would say, because I'm religious, that I'm fooling myself, right? Well, this leads not to a religion-specific question, but rather just to a fine slicing,

Starting point is 02:12:16 which is sometimes, and I'm going off the cuff, so this isn't going to be polished, but we lie to ourselves in the sense that we have a story about ourselves or the world that we know isn't quite true, but we repeat it enough because we want it to be true. Then there are times when we lie to ourselves, but we are in the delusion. It is because we have a lack of awareness or who knows there are any number of factors that have fed into this belief, which is simply not accurate for whatever reason so how do you catch how do you catch yourself could you give examples hypothetical or otherwise of because i think most people say i don't want to lie to myself right but when it comes down to actually catching those self-lies that self-deception in the butterfly

Starting point is 02:13:04 net so you can do something with that. How do you do that? Well, you commit yourself to being uncomfortable for one thing. So there's a couple of different ways to do that. Number one is you seek outside counsel. You ask people who really know you well, you ask them to be committed to telling you the absolute truth, and then you ask them incredibly hard questions about yourself. And you should have friends that can do that for you. This is one of the ways that you can do it. Your friends really have to be able to tell you.

Starting point is 02:13:29 Being a good friend usually means telling you convenient lies. That's not the right criterion for your closest friends. Your real friends. Your real friends who should be like, buddy, I don't think you're being straightforward with that right now. See, this is, I'm making, I'm doing a fake Atlanta accent because my best friend is a guy named Frank and he lives in Atlanta and he, and we are committed to telling each other the truth. And boy, does he ever give it to me, both barrels. When he thinks I'm being full of it, buddy, I don't know. I know you're saying that thing, but let's drill down on that a little bit, shall we? I talk to him every week. And that's super

Starting point is 02:14:03 important. Every week. Sure. I talk to him because he's a real friend and that takes work. Right, no, I understand. But is that like you have a standing? Not a time, no. But he's somebody where we're committed to when the call comes in and it says, Frank, I take the call.

Starting point is 02:14:15 Even if it's during work time, I take the call. Otherwise, you can't take every single call that comes in. There are certain colleagues, certain family members, and Frank. And have you guys explicitly made some type of mutual commitment? And the reason I ask is there are environments also that I suppose I could join, but I haven't up to this point. For instance, YPO forums, these small groups. Those are quite good. They are very good. Six, seven, eight guys. And I know people who have benefited from it tremendously. And there, as I understand it, based on my friend's stories, there are many hot seat moments where you get your beliefs and stories and approaches and strategies interrogated.

Starting point is 02:14:56 And you are committed in a YPO forum to have your BS called out. Yeah. So if you're saying something they know is not true about you. There are some great rules. People can study it also if you wanted to try to mimic or replicate it. I guess for a lot of folks, I hate to say it, but I think especially men, they may not have sort of a codified setting like that. Men, especially successful men, tend to get lonelier and lonelier as they get older. Yeah. Women tend to get less and less lonely, but men tend to get lonelier and lonelier. So about 60% of six-year-old men say their best friend is their wife. About 30%

Starting point is 02:15:29 of their wives say their best friend is their husband. This is a sad story of unrequited friendship, unrequited companionate love at home, for sure. But what that means is that a lot of women have very, very close friends that they've cultivated usually through family life and community life. And guys, it's like, hey, man, I worked so hard over the years and hanging out with my friends is stealing from my family. I'm not going to go golfing for five hours on Saturday. When the kids are little, it'll be terrible at home. I'll get yelled at and yada, yada, yada, yada,

Starting point is 02:15:57 all kinds of excuses. And pretty soon they're lonely. So we can, and we might come back to this, put the, I mean, loneliness is a big, big topic. Sure. And the bonding and these types of communal relationships. But as far as cultivating a relationship with the friends that you have that unvarnished feedback and interrogation, might you have any suggestion for how to approach that? Well, there's two ways to do it.

Starting point is 02:16:25 There's the organic way and there's the manual way the organic way is that you don't lose those true friends that you've had usually since you were a young adult and a lot of people do i mean we move around a lot we're really ambitious and our friends wind up being our deal friends and our real friends you know people will say i mean i'll do an exercise where i'll say tell me the 10 people that are closest to you write them down real quick i can do it easily yeah yeah i literally have it in a spreadsheet that's great and then put real or deal after each one of those names based on the fact that and for you it's all real right because you have close friends right yeah i do a lot of high percentage from a long time ago and you travel with them and you do stuff

Starting point is 02:17:01 with them right i put a lot of energy and time into ensuring that we spend time together which gets harder as people have for sure wives and kids and children and you know for sure family life tends to get in the way of that but you have to do it's like anything else you got to do the work i'm unfettered by a direct family life but you know the data say that in 10 years you'll most likely be married yeah and have kids and it's going to be harder but you you'll have to push a lot folks let's work on this shall we yeah yeah yeah all right write in the comments your best yeah all right so there's the organic way yeah there's a organic way which is you know is make sure that you don't lose track of your real friends and you have a commitment with your real friends to hold you to a standard of honesty in the friendship and with yourself because that's what true friendship really entails the manual way is

Starting point is 02:17:50 the ypo forum way where there's a bunch of guys that you know that are usually deal friends and you make a deal to make them into real friends you make a deal you know it's an arrangement where part of the friendship is actually going to be to go deeper, to hold each other's secrets, to be honest with each other. And that can actually be incredibly effective because you've actually decided to do that. And people will love those particular promises. Psychological safety is really important in that too, right? Because it's one thing to say, I want you to be completely honest with me and say, yeah, you're a jerk. It's like, not that honest. Or don't express it in that particular way. You

Starting point is 02:18:25 have to have enough psychological safety where the rules of the road are clear, that honesty is always wielded as a gift and never as a weapon. That's also true in marriages, by the way, Tim. The best marriages are completely honest, but the honesty is a gift and never a weapon. Yep. You know, one of the mantras at facebook before it was meta was face uh facebook is a gift maybe feedback is a gift feedback is a gift feedback is a gift it was repeated over and over again it's put all over the place yeah to cultivate a culture of feedback yeah and i've thought about that just grabbing these little snippets make yourself small i mean these very pithy reminders that will have some stickiness in the mind.

Starting point is 02:19:07 And also doubling down on having your friends act as the best mirrors available. Very brief side note, just to give people a Scooby snack. Mirrors, reflections. What are your thoughts? Get rid of them. All of them. Tell me more.

Starting point is 02:19:23 So I work with a guy. He's fantastic. He actually is. He's really, really helpful for me. I've recommended him to you because he does incredible body work. Physical therapy is fantastic. And he was a fitness model.

Starting point is 02:19:35 There's almost nothing you can do that's unhealthier, worse for your mental health than being a fitness model or fitness influencer. Why? Because you're just looking in the mirror all day long and your physical appearance is that on which you will be judged is very emotionally warping. And he hated it. He hated it. He hated it. He was unhappy. He never ate what he wanted for 10 years.

Starting point is 02:19:54 And the truth of the matter is, as we all know, you look great if your body fat is under 10%, but you feel crummy and you want everybody in the world to die. It can be really, really hard on you. And he said, after a while, you know, there's a reason that 35% of people who lose a lot of weight, when they get to their goal, they keep going. And a quarter of them develop an eating disorder. The reason is because you can't stop when you're looking in the mirror all the time. You can't stop. You can't stop. You don't know how to stop. So he had the presence of mind he's an adept he's a spiritual adept he got rid of all of his mirrors and showered in the dark for a year he got rid of all of the mirrors in his house the showering in the dark i need well because

Starting point is 02:20:35 i don't have that problem but i mean but yeah i get it you got washboard abs and you're looking at you going yeah man yeah yeah man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And bye-bye. Watching the water cascade off your 12-pack like rocks in a waterfall. I know. And the truth of the matter is that- I hate when that happens. Extreme physical attractiveness ordinarily is something that you do because you want

Starting point is 02:21:01 to become more lovable. And you make that judgment on the basis of what you're seeing in the mirror and not the relationship that you're projecting to others in real life it's really weird you know you talk to dudes who are trying to get to you know six percent body fat and get super jacked in the whole thing and they have this they imagine that women are going to be just super attracted to them and the only people who even say anything are dudes oh it's always dudes it's like it's like i have friends who've single guys and they've incredible beard game yeah or like mustache game and non-stop it's just dudes coming up and complimenting them

Starting point is 02:21:34 i mean i'm sure there are women who like it too but it's mostly guys for sure you know and you know no woman has ever said nice car i mean it's just no it's other guys is the whole thing and what that is is the other guys are just a mirror they're just a mirror the other guys are saying the thing that you think but it's profoundly unsatisfying right if you're actually in the heterosexual dating market to have other guys saying how did you get those apps who cares now to provide a counter example also and this is just something I've seen on dating apps, if you could talk about, but I have yet to meet a single guy I like and respect who's like, I love super intense lip fillers and all of this, you know, Frank and Botox situation. I've not met a single one. I know. And have you ever said, I've never said to my wife one time, that's such a cute little dress. Is it new? I've never said that. All her friends say that. And

Starting point is 02:22:30 she's always like, I have a cute little dress and everybody noticed it, but you didn't. For the record, I'm into cute little dresses. I don't want people to mix up voices here. The show notes just went. So why did you write this book? And how did it come to be? I know you have this long history with thinking about these catalyzing events and tracking. And I don't want to say pursuing, but analyzing, thinking deeply about happiness. So why now?

Starting point is 02:23:02 And what do you hope that it will accomplish? So this new book is the most bread and butter book I've ever written about the science of happiness. It's two parts. Part one is how to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. Part two is once you've got that down, now you can actually build your life and not be distracted and frittering away your time with stupid things. Those are the two parts of the book. And it's as deep a dive as I've ever actually written publicly about neuroscience.

Starting point is 02:23:27 It was actually vetted by my colleague at Harvard, Josh Green, who's one of the most distinguished neuroscientists in the world, just to make sure, because I'm a social scientist, so I've got to be careful getting into the biology side of this thing. I know enough to be dangerous, to be sure, but I have to be very careful about that. So I realized, and by the way this was instant this project was instigated to do a bread and butter owner's manual on you and your happiness that's what it is it's

Starting point is 02:23:51 an owner's manual on your happiness it wasn't my idea it was oprah winfrey's idea so you occupy some rarefied air so from the dalai lama how does does you just bump into her on the subway yeah his holiness dalai lama and her holiness, Oprah Winfrey, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, when Oprah Winfrey calls, it's like, right, but I'm guessing she didn't get your phone number on Zoom info. Like, how did this happen? Yeah. She calls and I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman. No, really? Who is this? No.

Starting point is 02:24:19 Hi, it's Oprah calling again. Your company has been verified by Dun & Bradstreet. Oh, wait a minute anyway so we got connected because she is a regular reader of my column in the atlantic and she was during the coronavirus epidemic when you know people were trying to use the time to learn new things etc and she was actually a serious reader of the column and she's a serious reader i mean when she has a book on her podcast she she reads the book. It's just amazing how exhaustive her knowledge is. And then when my book came out from Strength to Strength in February, 2022, she got it literally in the first week. She read it and that's when she called and

Starting point is 02:24:54 she said, would you come on my podcast? Her Super Soul, which is this book podcast, phenomenal. And we were like a house on fire from the very beginning because it's funny because you know you've met a lot of famous people and you know i've met some famous people and they're usually not exactly like they appear in public right she's like she appears in public i mean she's calm she's smart she's nice she's funny she's awesome she's actually what people think she is she's truly an authentic person. And so we really got along and we have the synchronicity of mission, which is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. But we have different platforms for doing it.

Starting point is 02:25:33 I'm teaching this class on the science of happiness at Harvard University and writing in the Atlantic. She has been in mass media forever. And whenever she weighs in, she has millions and millions and millions of people around the world that trust her and want to hear what she has to say. And so her suggestion was, let's take that class that you teach at Harvard and that you're writing about in The Atlantic. Let's present that to a big audience. You want a big audience? I said, yeah. Yes. Yes, Oprah. Can I have a big audience, please? And she says, let's write a book together and we'll present this book together and so we did and and you know we got together at her home and we framed it up we framed up the book over a three or four day period last year in her tea house in montecito california it's like you

Starting point is 02:26:16 know i was looking around going you know i'm just like this small town college professor who fell off the turnip truck in front of oprah's tea house you never know he's like god, God bless America. You never know what's going to happen. And it was super fun. It was super interesting. It's the best country for people who want to work hard. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. And she's the best case study in American success and working hard and believing in others and paying it forward possible. And then we went and we started working on our respective parts of the book and passing them back and forth. And I took a house in San Clemente in California for six weeks in the winter,

Starting point is 02:26:46 largely to look at the Pacific Ocean and write the book. And she was writing her parts. And then we got to this impasse at one point, not between us, but because the title didn't fit. The title now is How to Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier. And it was called Fully Alive. And it wasn't fitting and I didn't know. And finally, Oprah calls me and she says, got the wrong title. She's a genius. We got the wrong

Starting point is 02:27:10 title. This is a how-to book. This is an owner's manual book. This is really a how-to book on your own happiness. This should be called How to Build the Life You Want. And ka-ching, the whole thing fell into place. Because that's what happens, as you know, in the course of writing a book. You think you have it, but you don't. And then when the title actually completes the book and allows you to finish the book and make it all cohere. Then we finished it up. And it was this amazing collaborative experience, a joy, actually. It was the most fun. It was the most positive experience I've ever had writing a book because I got to write it with her, and she's enriched my life. What a wild, incredible experience.

Starting point is 02:27:47 It's nuts. It's nuts, man. You know that I told you my death fear is losing my mind. It's actually possible that I am, and that's just a hallucination. So then we had tea and we had crumpets. I know, and we had tea in her tea house and all that. It's like, but Tim, I know I want the pure truth, but if that's not true, don't tell me. Let me keep that one. Let me keep that one. Lie to me, baby.

Starting point is 02:28:12 So in this book, are there areas, because I know in my book, I can point to specific chapters where I'm like, man, I really wish people had paid more attention to X. Like maybe it didn't quite get the emphasis so I can own that responsibility but maybe they for whatever reason didn't pay enough attention to this one component yeah is there something that comes to mind i don't know yet because it hasn't come out

Starting point is 02:28:36 oh i know but i'm just saying so what do i suspect hurt you the most if people missed so i think what would bother me the most is the amount that Oprah and I emphasize the role of unhappiness in living a full life. See, one of the biggest mistakes that people make, as we talked about before, is that people say, I want to be happy, but, and then they talk about some source of unhappiness in their life that I think blocks their unhappiness. And that's the wrong way of thinking because you can get happier even if you're unhappy. Absolutely, 100% all day long because these are existing in different parts of your brain, number one. But number two, happiness is not the goal and unhappiness is not the enemy.

Starting point is 02:29:13 Getting happier is the goal. Oprah coined this term in the book. She said, we got to stop talking about happiness because that's actually not the goal. The goal is happierness. That's really what we're going for is happierness. To get happierness, you need unhappiness in your life. Look, you need negative emotions to keep you alive, but you also need the deferral of gratification to get your satisfaction. And you need to understand the nature of the frustration that comes such that you can start to manage your wants. You need

Starting point is 02:29:37 like serious, full-on suffering to find the answers to the questions of meaning that we talked about. You do. My son needed boot boot camp you and i need substantial problems with mood to put it euphemistically we need no look we need sadness a young freud's greatest student carl jung so much greater in so many ways said you don't really understand happiness until you've experienced unhappiness because of the contrast. But more to the point, you've not been fully alive because unhappiness is what actually, the suffering is what helps you understand what you're made of and what you can bear. And only then will you find the answers to the why am I alive and for what I'd be willing to die questions. You don't find the meaning questions, the answers at that week at the beach in Ibiza. Uh-uh.

Starting point is 02:30:24 You find it in the depths when somebody you love dies when you're afraid of what your future holds when you feel hopeless that's when those moments become real and that suffering turns out to be an integral part in your journey to happiness so the number one thing that Oprah and I will be very disappointed about is that people don't actually become more fully alive through the transcendent passage of both happierness and, and the unhappiness that is a, a part of what it means to be a real person. It is a diverse and ever-changing tapestry. That is for sure. It is. And, you know, you know, I think about it, one of the biggest mistakes that I think that my students make, by the way, right now, if I were to go back to 1968 or 1969, Woodstock, you know, when the hippies said, if it feels good,

Starting point is 02:31:10 do it. I remember my dad heard that for the first time and he's like, that's the end of America. He was kind of right. Anyway, if we had a Woodstock today, it might be, if it feels bad, make it stop. If I'm suffering, treat it. If there's pain, it's evidence that I'm defective, that I'm broken. Something's got to change. That's wrong. That's wrong thinking. Look, the Tim Ferriss I'm talking to right now had to suffer.

Starting point is 02:31:41 I mean, these messages that you're giving are dramatically different than what you were writing 15 and 20 years ago. They're dramatically different. It doesn't mean it was wrong 15 or 20 years ago, but it was incomplete. It wasn't deep in the same way. And the depth actually comes from the, not just from the good, it also comes from the bad. This is, you know, Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon. Have you read that book? No. It's the best book I've ever read about anxiety and depression. You know, Andrew Solomon is a phenomenal writer all right so what is the title again the noonday demon which was an ancient way of talking about depression which

Starting point is 02:32:11 comes over you like a noonday demon it's like the black dog yeah it's like it's like winston churchill's black dog for sure the noonday demon in the end it's an incredible book it's a total page turner for anybody who's actually had anything close to face value does not sound like a page turner. I know. It's phenomenal. It's so interesting. It's just beautiful writing.

Starting point is 02:32:29 But in the end, he said, in the sum and final balance, I have to conclude that I love my depression because it's part of who I am as a person, and it's allowed me to learn what my life is all about. I don't wish it on anybody. I don't want it to come back. But it is who I am. And so therefore, I have no choice but to love it. I'm paraphrasing. But it's, you know, his words are more beautiful than anything I could remember. But it's really an important thing for us to remember. And anybody who's watching you and

Starting point is 02:32:59 who follows you and who admires you and gets a lot of sustenance from the knowledge that you bring to this podcast, what they have to realize is that they are beneficiaries of tim ferris's suffering and if they want to lift up the world they have to suffer too it's food for thought yeah food for thought may not be candy bars might be high fiber but it is important food for thought it's a philosophical cliff bar. Yeah. Sorry, people love those. I don't mean to, not to cast aspersions.

Starting point is 02:33:30 My friend's a cliff. But I have thought about this very deliberately. And I don't wish suffering upon anyone. But I had someone give me very good advice at one point, and the words can be substituted, of course, but she said to me after I'd gone through a very gifted therapist with a lot of experience, a lot of mileage with different types of patients, including some very tragic and difficult cases, and she said, take your pain, make it part of your medicine. And I was like, okay. Meaning the

Starting point is 02:34:06 medicine, in my case, the way I think of that is what I can teach or provide or just the perspective through which I can speak and explore given that I have the history that I have. Right. Understand this is what the best therapists do. They teach you about yourself. They help you to learn and grow from you about yourself they help you to learn and grow from your pain and they help you to treat yourself and serve others that's what the great therapists do the worst therapist is like yeah i'll help you take care of that we'll make that problem go away no no no no no no no no i want to learn i want to grow and i want to serve surf bart has been very critical to the tether of meaning that has given the suffering meaning exactly meaning made it i don't want to say irrelevant like

Starting point is 02:34:58 the greater the potency of the meaning the less the suffering incapacitates you. Let me ask you, is it possible you're not afraid to suffer more now? Because you said, you know, pleasure and, you know, as a defense, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't feel like I'm sitting with somebody who's afraid of suffering. It's certainly less than it was. I also think that they're just pleasurable things that I really like. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's that. There's that. Weird. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's that. There's that. Weird.

Starting point is 02:35:27 Yeah, yeah. That's bizarre. There is that. I remember reading about one of your sexual experience in the four-hour body where it was like to get more testosterone, and then I ate a single Brazil nut. Oh. Yeah, it was lots of Brazil nuts, cholesterol loading. I did lots of crazy stuff in the four-hour body. But it was somebody who knew how to have fun.

Starting point is 02:35:47 Oh, yeah. Yeah, that chapter. How old were you? What, 34 or something when you were in 30? 30, yeah, early 30s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, no, I respect the fact that you like to have fun and you like to feel good. I get that.

Starting point is 02:35:57 But I don't sense fear from you. also say what i have done is i've built into my life a lot of premeditated deliberate discomfort to inoculate myself against the fear of unpredictable discomfort and it's not a cure-all but i have found that it's your it's exposure therapy it's exposure therapy also just like wading into some of the deep waters psychologically and psychoemotionally that I would be prone to fearing. Learning how to take swimming lessons in some of those deep waters, I would say, is also an approach. So it resembles exposure therapy, but there's also a skill development piece on top of that,

Starting point is 02:36:44 which is combined with the exposure, I would say, which I know is a bit nebulous. No, no, but it makes perfect sense. And there's actually a way that we can all get better at that because I know a lot of people are watching this like, yeah, yeah, how do we get better at that? Here's one way to do that that actually is a very practical way to do it. Start each day with a statement of fact and then an aspiration.

Starting point is 02:37:02 The statement of fact is, I don't know what's going to happen this day i don't know i learned this from a pediatric oncologist by the way somebody who has you know bad cancer diagnoses to kids he says he tells the parents to every day start the day saying i don't know what's going to happen in my future but i do know I am alive this day and I am deeply grateful for everything that happens for good and for bad it takes cojones man it's hard because you're like you catch your breath a little bit right because what you're what mother nature wants you to do is to look for the good feelings and to avoid the bad feelings because that's the evolutionary imperative to avoid the disgust and the anger and the sadness and the grief and the loneliness and to avoid those things not to embrace those things to you know to say it's inevitable bring it on but if you can actually do that to steal yourself

Starting point is 02:37:54 to steal as they say in isaiah i steal my face like flint right and that's how to do it look i don't know i don't know what's going to happen today but i do want to know i'm alive right now i'm not going to waste this day and the way i don't waste this day is by being grateful for every single thing that happens good and bad bring it on here we go i have a uh the gift i received quite a while ago but a actually steal my face like flint it is a piece of i think it is steel and it's engraved with a quote from i think it is neil donald walsh i may be getting that off someone can fact check but the quote is the struggle ends when the gratitude begins yeah and it's such good advice yeah yeah and you don't have to be grateful only for the obviously good things.

Starting point is 02:38:46 No, no, no, no. On the contrary. And that's what separates first course gratitude from PhD level stuff. And by the way, here's a practical way to do that, to be grateful for bad things. It's a very practical way to do it. I ask my students to make a failure journal. And so what that is, is every time bad thing happens, something bad happens frequently.

Starting point is 02:39:07 When you're 28 years old, you know, somebody breaks your heart today and tomorrow you're going to be on a test. And the next day after that, you know, you don't get the interview for that job you hoped for. And it's just a constant string of disappointments and thrills. So every time something happens

Starting point is 02:39:18 that really frustrates and disappoints you, or you screw up or whatever, you take out your failure journal and you write in your failure journal and you write in your failure journal what happened. And then you leave two lines open behind it and you put reminders on your phone. Ding, one month from now, you got to go back. And six months from now, one month from now, you got to go back and say what you learned from that thing that you would forget otherwise. And six months from now, you got to go back and say a good thing that happened

Starting point is 02:39:43 because of that thing. And there's always entries, always, always, always. And so it from now, you got to go back and say a good thing that happened because of that thing. And there's always entries. Always, always, always. And so it's like I went into my performance review and I thought I was doing a really good job. My boss basically told me that I'm a B player at best. This happens constantly. That bums me out. I just want to put it behind me. I want to go hang out with my friends and have a couple of beers and complain about my boss and move on.

Starting point is 02:40:04 Right? No, no, no, no, no. Write it on your failure journal. One month from now, remember it and go back. Huh? You know what I learned from that is I thought I was going to be super bummed about that for a long time. And it bothered me for like a week. That's interesting. Now that's homeostasis. There's a lot of brain science in that. Six months later, you come back and you say, when I thought about that, I realized that that probably wasn't the perfect fit for my career. And I went on the market and I have a better job now. I think that the job I have now is a better fit. And every single thing that happens that you put into your failure journal, you will realize

Starting point is 02:40:40 that there's something generative that happens from this in terms of learning and in terms of gratitude. And you will turn that thing into something and sooner or later when something really bad happens to you you'll be like oh good i get to put it in the failure journal it'll really change your perspective on it because it failure and disappointment and frustration and sacrifice and pain will take on their proper perspective which is part of your full life we shall see that's great we shall see that's that's terrible famous we shall see that famous terrible see so true yeah well Arthur this has been so much fun now the title of the book is

Starting point is 02:41:17 build the life you want the art and science of getting happier and by the time this comes out people will be able to certainly find it yeah and purchase it yeah and where all fine books are sold and also if people like Oprah and I will read it to you you mean I'm guessing in audiobook form and not on look no we'll come to your house and with the dulcet tones of Oprah's voice, we'll lull you to sleep. No, I mean, we read it. You could raise a lot of money that way. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's right. Sorry, Oprah.

Starting point is 02:41:50 I kind of committed us to this thing. Let's just say the book tour is taking on new dimensions. But we read the book for Penguin Random House, and I'm really super happy with the way that it turned out, mostly because my voice is interspersed with her beautiful voice, one of the most famous voices in Americaica what an incredible experience congratulations thank you so people can find the book where all fine books are sold i just love saying that yeah and is there

Starting point is 02:42:16 anything else you'd like to point people to whether it's a social profile or a request of the audience an ask of the audience something you'd like to with, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind up? Yeah, I mean, this is really a teaching experience, both for me and Oprah, and just part of my life, which is dedicated to writing, speaking, and teaching about love and happiness, to bring people together in bonds of love, using the science and ideas. That's really my mission statement for the rest of my life. And that really is a teaching mission, just like yours is a teaching mission. So there's a lot of stuff that I'm doing, ancillary to books and columns, et cetera. I have classes, like video classes and things that people can watch. And my goal in doing those things, some all on my website, orthobrooks.com, but when people do those things, my goal is

Starting point is 02:42:57 training them to be happiness teachers. This is really what it's all about. Because remember, it's understand, change your habits, share with others. And so to learn more about exactly how to do that, we're developing a lot of resources that make that possible in, I think, a pretty effective way. And I would love people to do that for the single reason that I want a movement. I want to be part of a movement of people whose hobby is the science of happiness and bringing it to others. You know, there's a lot of people who are broken in this world and who are sad and who are suffering.

Starting point is 02:43:29 And if we had people who are warriors for greater happiness for themselves through others, through real knowledge and a commitment to change, I'm truly convinced that this is the one thing that I can do that could have an impact on the world that needs to be a lot happier. Arthur, so glad that we were able to find the time, have this conversation. And I admire the work you do. I respect the work you do. I value the work that you put out in the world. It does help people. So I wanted to also just simply thank you for putting out what you put out and spending time on the things you spend time on. Likewise, Tim. I've only met you today in person, but I feel like I've known you for a long time because I've been consuming your work like so many millions of other people and you enrich my life a lot. Thank you for that. Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. This has really sparked

Starting point is 02:44:17 a lot in me. I've taken copious notes. So I have a number of things that I'll be focusing on. Getting Small, Brothers K, Muscular Philosophies. I just love the phrasing, so I wrote it down. Aristotle, Aquinas, all things that can lead you to build the life that you want. And for everybody listening, we will have extensive show notes, links to everything, as usual, at Tim.blogs.com. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found

Starting point is 02:45:15 or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,

Starting point is 02:45:45 something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently

Starting point is 02:46:26 while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I've been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high quality ingredients. How many ingredients?

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More

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