226 ‒ The science of happiness | Arthur Brooks, Ph.D.

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast i'm your host peter etia well arthur this is a first in that we're we're doing a repeat podcast although unfortunately this time we're not in person the last time we did a wonderful podcast we were in person and i enjoy that even more you wanna you wanna tell everybody what happened yeah for sure hi peter nice to see you again and i wish i were down in austin where all the cool kids live uh with you too um showing up at your at your podcast studio last time we had a great conversation for a couple of hours and then learned afterward that we hadn't turned the sound on which it turns out you need for podcasting you know it's you people can just stare at two bald guys for two hours looking like they're talking but that turns out to be not the most interesting programming so we had a great idea we had a great time together and and now we're doing the part two yeah and we did have a great video from that first podcast um and we actually were able to get some people who could sort of sign it and uh we even had like we even contemplated releasing it with subtitles uh but but in the end we decided ah what the heck let's just do it again even though it won't look as good because we'll be on video the good news i think for the listener is though i have a pretty good memory i have an awful memory for podcasts so um when i record a podcast if you asked me two months later what did we talk about if i remember two things that's a lot so it's almost like we're doing this from the beginning at least for me because i don't really remember what we talked about and i hope that that allows us to reproduce the uh what i recall gestalt wise or valence wise was a pretty positive discussion and a really enjoyable one yeah me too i agree and i don't remember exactly what we talked about except it had to do with happiness and longevity and living a prosperous flourishing life i see by the way also that when when we were together last you turned me on to ghia which is and you're drinking it right there and i've been drinking it ever since too by the way i've been on a constant diet of it it's the best it's really nice to be able to talk about things where the company has no idea you're promoting it because you know i'm paying full retail for this stuff which is uh enjoyable and yeah i make no money off it have no affiliation with it but but do love it and i always love when i can get somebody turned on to ghia oh it's so great no i completely agree so i think for folks who might not be familiar with you at all um to understand the arc of what we want to talk about which um i think there are a lot of sort of things to talk about but the biggest arc is sort of accepting the transitions that are inevitable in life i mean if i were to sort of put my finger on one thing that resonates the most and by the way i went back and reread your book uh because i you know i read it months ago and we did the thing and i was like you know the best thing for me to do to prepare just be reread that was really the part that stood out to me especially when we get to the sort of four stages of life that you talk about as i think about personally transitioning from the second to the third but um you've lived many lives and i i think for people to understand kind of that first life which happens to be a life that has a short half-life had you stuck with it indefinitely so talk a little bit about the background uh as a as a musician yeah i mean as a social scientist you don't usually dig into the background of a guy who teaches behavioral social science and and find classical music but that's actually where i started and that's where i intended to finish i intended to be a one act guy and to be i wanted to be the greatest french horn player in the world which is a pretty weird ambition for most of the people listening i would imagine but that was also my parents ambition for me for some reason i started on violin at four piano at five and i took up the french horn when i was eight and i was really good at it or i had a natural ability in it at least and so i did it a lot i did it to the exclusion of nearly everything else as a matter of fact and and when it came time to go to college i had one successful run at a year in college and then went pro because that's really what i wanted to do so at 19 i dropped out or you know dropped out kicked out splitting hairs out of college and and i went on the road as a classical musician i played chamber music for six years um all over the united states all over the world and then then i then i went to barcelona where i was in the symphony orchestra and then my plan was to become a french horn soloist um you know playing these great concerti of the greatest composers and it just didn't work out that way and so by my late 20s actually about my my my mid-20s i was in in decline as a performer my my technique was getting worse it's it's not entirely clear why that was happening at this point but i had to make a plan to exit to do the next thing and so by my late 20s i was in college by correspondence which i finished a month before my 30th birthday then did my master's degree at night finished up my horn career at 31 started my phd and that was the new the new phase the next phase which was becoming a social scientist so so before we kind of exit that first phase i want to sort of dig into that a little bit because again as you said it's very foreign i i certainly can't really appreciate what you're speaking about and i suspect a lot of people listening can't either um what is the arc of a french horn player and how many exceptional french horn player talents can be consumed by the world so for example we were talking about baseball you know you know there are hundreds of people who can be good enough to make a living what is it with french horn players well classical music musicians in general there's about a 95 unemployment or underemployment rate in the classical music industry it's an absolute superstar industry now that's not like professional sports and so far as the people are not getting rich i mean the great soloists the great opera singers the great conductors are pretty wealthy but orchestra musicians are earning a kind of a middle class upper middle class income but they're not really very money motivated so they're they they want to do this to almost the exclusion of anything else and so what you'll find is that there are a few let's say uh probably about 100 really great orchestras in the world each one of which has a principal french horn player and then four other french horn positions in those orchestras and then a few other people a handful of other people are making a serious living and playing chamber music and they're usually about one or two french horn soloists in the world at any given time so they're not that many people making a living at it and there are a lot of people who are trying so it's weird you know most people are listening to us they're like french horn player what an exotic thing to want to do and yet there are plenty of people who are trying to do that who are really motivated by the idea of making that kind of music and are good at it and are taking every audition that they can and what kind of commitment was necessary to get to that level um how many hours a day were you practicing as a teenager for example i was all in and i was practicing five six hours a day plus playing in every ensemble i could possibly find i was basically doing it to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life it was like being a gymnast it was like being an athlete where you practice as much as you can without doing damage to the musculature so there's a there's not just diminishing returns for athletes there's negative returns if you if you over train and that's the same thing that happens in classical music you can get all kinds of repetitive stress injuries etc etc if you do that but then the time that you're not actually actively practicing you're listening to music you're learning the repertoire you're thinking about what your craft actually is so the result of it is that it's almost every hour of the day is what you're doing you're thinking about your future you're thinking about what you want to do you're trying to get better in your mind as much as in your lips and in your fingers to the craft so it's very much like a a sports career just that it's more fine motor skills as opposed to gross motor skills what distinguishes the best french horn player in the world from the 100th best which i'm guessing i wouldn't be able to distinguish them but for for the discerning ear what is it that separates those two people it largely has to do with accuracy so the french horn has a has a problem of physics and so far is that the the mouthpiece is smaller than a trumpet mouthpiece but it has a very long that the tube is as long as the tuba which is the largest of the brass instrument so by physics it should actually play in the low register but by mouthpiece it should actually play in the hive register and the result of that is for anybody who knows that any of the the physics of these of the harmonic structure of these instruments that the harmonics are very close together meaning it's very easy to miss notes that's the reason for go who like classical music and they go to the orchestra the principal french horn notwithstanding the fact that she or he is one of the best in the world is missing a lot of notes it's just really really hard to be accurate the greatest greatest greatest greatest they have some uncanny ability it's sort of like nolan ryan who's able to you know hit a postage stamp at 98 miles an hour with a fastball when he's 40. that's the kind of difference that you get the freakish microscopic differences now yeah you probably wouldn't notice the difference if you're not a big classical music buzz and especially if you're not really into the french horn but if i went to an orchestra now and i heard the best french horn player in the world versus the hundredth i would notice the difference in a big hurry you mentioned in your mid-20s that if i sort of remember what you said correctly you know you felt you were in decline or at least you'd peaked and you were now on the way down uh two thoughts on that or two questions the first is is that the typical age at which a french horn player peaks and secondly uh what is it you noticed that was changing yeah so the the answer is i was i was peaking and declining early um the average age now i've done this research subsequently as a social scientist not as a french horn player i kind of knew casually that that brass players the classical musicians in general they tend to peak in terms of of their their physical qualities their ability to dominate the instrument in their late 30s and you start to see a little bit of drop off in their 40s and 50s the greatest players in the world you know the greatest piano soloists will still be touring and and playing beautifully in the 70s but they're not what they once were i mean you find that that i mean even in rock and roll you find that you know the great guitar players can shred at 40 very differently than they can at you know now these days you know the great rock and rollers are all like a hundred at this point the rolling stones are still on tour but you heard mick jagger sing recently and it's um yeah just for you it's he's reminding you of you know what he was doing 57 years ago when when i can't get no satisfaction was released and was number one on the charts so that it's usually late 30s early 40s where the peak happens then it's a slow decline i was declining much earlier than that it's almost certainly having to do with a microscopic tear in in one of the lips an injury and that wasn't well known at the time but there actually are surgeries that brass players will get at this point to repair that and had i been 25 years younger i certainly had a much longer career in music and much to my own detriment because i wound up going on to something that's touching a lot more people i think in which i actually have more possibility of doing something positive in the world so within every what seems like a tragedy the time is is there's all kinds of opportunity now i've heard you say in the past that when you started going back to night school for college and ultimately for your bachelor's and master's degree you were a little bit ashamed you were kind of doing this in secret right why is that classical musicians uh think nothing else matters it's one of these it's a cult basically it's not it's not a profession it's more like a cult so you know it's like it's like a lot of you know my son my oldest son went to princeton and and my younger son is in the marines those are cults too right and so if you basically say something to someone your friends in the marines you know i'm getting out but i think i'm gonna i think i'm gonna i'm gonna re-up but in the navy they'll laugh you out i mean that's just like that's you just wouldn't do that well that's what it's like in classical music that i i remember one time i was hanging around with this group of brass players and i was probably 28 years old or something and it was i knew the writing was on the wall and i wasn't telling anybody i was actually studying at night serendipitously and this woman who hangs out with us she's also a french horn player she you know says i got an announcement we're like hey what what happened you win an audition man would you he says nah i decided i'm going to leave the business i just got a full scholarship the university of miami i'm going to be coming to the medical school i'm going to become a surgeon and and then and and when she leaves you know after a little while we're all sitting around going see she didn't have it it's like she's going to become a surgeon i mean this is this that's a big deal but it wasn't to us it was just like obviously she hadn't had it have it so she had to quit her crummy low paying french horn playing career to settle for becoming a you know a life-saving doctor like you peter so what did you study for your bachelor's economics and i didn't intend to do that i actually intended to get my you know my bachelor's degree in some you know some area of the humanities or maybe even composition i was a pretty avid composer and i thought that's what i would do but i took an economics class and it just opened my eyes i mean just the i statistically based social sciences it felt like i had a magic wand or some actually more like a you know crystal ball it's a better metaphor i mean i could see things about the world and furthermore i could actually analyze behavior in ways that i never i didn't even think was possible i felt like i was you know the whole world of information to be able to generate information was being open to me i was just my mind was blown i was completely hooked and i wanted to become becoming an economist you know so talk about the sublime to the dismal and then did you go straight from bachelors to masters at what point did you formally hang up your french horn and say i'm gonna pursue the phd where did where did that occur in the in the timeline so i finished my bachelor's degree completely by correspondence and in those days i was faxing in my assignments and buying course materials you know over the phone from the from the bookstores of these universities that offered these corresponding school courses and i was banking the credits at this state college in new jersey at the time that i never visited i never saw the place until i went there they gave me an honorary doctorate 20 years later and i went and gave the graduation speech um i mean what's the graduation for correspondence school is it like 10 guys around the conference table it turns out there was 3 000 people in the trenton ice rink um it was it was fun it was wild i mean it's mostly first generation college graduates a lot of active military men i was very proud that day to be among that group you know of of really um sort of american life entrepreneurs it made me very proud and then i went on to the state the local state university and at night did my master's degree a one-year master's degree and at that point i mean it was fish or cut bait and so i i left music at that point after that and and went away residentially and more traditionally started my phd and over the next four years finished my phd and what was the focus of your phd my phd was in quantitative policy analysis i was doing mathematical modeling and applied microeconomics for public policy i was working at the same time as a military operations research analyst for the rand corporation i was doing theater level combat modeling for the air force so i was doing you know large-scale early artificial intelligence algorithms to link uh computers up together to simulate battle situations across a lot of scenarios so i was learning a lot of math modeling and that was a real weakness for me was my mathematics and statistics so working in that area was critically important for me to beef that up and and and become a well-rounded scholar in the area where i had previously had weakness and what did you do right after that you went you became a professor if i'm not mistaken before you went to aei right no no i was i was 10 years as a professor then so i graduated with 34 for my phd and i went to georgia state university in atlanta for three years and then i went to i was able to secure a position at syracuse which for public policy is the best school in the country that was a that was a really a great opportunity i'll always be grateful in that place for giving me that opportunity and i moved to syracuse we spent the next seven years at syracuse and i you know i did what academics do i was writing academic journal articles refereed 14 readers highly technical writing papers that were mathematically so complex that now at age 58 i can't read them i actually don't know what i was talking about at 35 which speaks to a lot of what i do now which is the changing structure of the prefrontal cortex and our ability to learn and perform at different phases of life what are we good at then what are we good at now so i want to come back to that because of course that's really the important hook here but i just want to go to this next chapter because i want to understand when you understood this shift in intelligence so from syracuse you then went to aei you were the ceo for about a decade if i'm not mistaken yeah almost 11 years yeah before leaving to join the faculty at harvard where you are today right at what point during this journey did you begin to understand what it is that you've now written about in strength to strength so when i was i went to aei and for those who don't know the american enterprise institute is a think tank in washington dc it's a i think tech is like a university without students it's completely dedicated to high quality academic research but in in the service of better public policy so it's in the middle of washington dc it's one of the oldest thing tanks in the world it started in 1938 during the great recession the great depression to pull the united states and the world they thought out of the great depression using the tools of the american free enterprise system but they had to bring together the greatest economist later foreign policy experts and health and education experts so i had 300 employees i had to raise about 50 million dollars a year in philanthropy you know my job was like running for the senate and never getting elected and i did that you know for 10 years it was it was you know it was actually kind of a slog i mean it was an 80 hour a week ceo job and i noticed about halfway through that my skills were kind of changing i was getting worse at certain things and i was getting better at other things i didn't actually understand why that was i found that i was i was getting worse at thinking up brand spanking new clever ideas and i was getting much better at explaining things i was becoming effectively a better teacher a better instructor but i was worse as a classic innovator when i had first come to aei i was developing new programs i was coming up with these new big policy and research ideas and about halfway through i was noticing that what i was really good at was synthesizing everybody else's ideas and putting them together into a relatively compelling argument about how we should do things which was interesting to me but it also occurred to me that there was probably more to it than that and i got to work on what where this was going to lead in my own life such that i could exploit my own strengths optimally and i started looking at the the research on different forms of intelligence as people get older what it led me to conclude based on the work of a lot of um social psychologists that were doing intelligence work in the 1960s and 70s actually was older work out of the uk primarily in the work of raymond cattell is that early on we have a fluid intelligence which is largely our innovative capacity based on working memory where we can do a lot of things alone and come up with brand new ideas based on kind of limited background later on we're less good at that but we're much better at synthesizing ideas we have a vast library much less working memory but a much better vocabulary pattern recognition and ability to synthesize ideas of other people which is called crystallized intelligence now what we find is that fluid intelligence tends to peak in the late 30s which is by the way why a lot of classical musicians are peaking in their late 30s is because fluid intelligence is not just about writing mathematical formulas it's about doing a lot of things that make you great with your 10 000 hours of practice and your mastery et cetera et cetera and then it declines in your 40s and 50s but your crystallized intelligence your teaching capacity your explaining capacity your pattern recognition your management of other people that those things get better through your 40s and 50s and 60s and stay high in your 70s and 80s when i saw that i thought hmm what am i going to do what's my plan so that i can exploit that for the rest of my career and that's actually what led me to quit my ceo job and to to do what i do now which is writing and speaking and teaching really using my creative capacities to mix ideas together about happiness which is my main area of focus and research now these terms uh fluid and crystallized intelligence the first time i ever encountered them i think is about four years ago in an atlantic piece that you wrote i think it was in the atlantic obviously this was a precursor to the book does that sound about that's exactly right july of 2019 and that was when i first wrote that piece i was doing this research for myself it was me search peter and which is what we all do i mean it's like you know people think uh peter tia the great longevity doctor well peter and tia wants to live a long time with good lifespan and health span and happiness span and so that's why he's doing this work and that's exactly why i was doing that work as well and and it was so i found that it was so useful to audiences that i wrote it up for the atlantic and it you know this how to go from strength to strength in your life that article was one of the 50 most read articles of the entire year of all publications in the world and i thought it turns out i'm not the only one who's thinking about this and so i wrote it up in a book over the next couple of years and published it in february of 2022. now what i don't recall though i'm sure you explained it in the article are those terms fluid and crystallized terms you came up with or are those in the literature and you're simply bringing them to our attention those are in the literature that that was they were coined by raymond cattell the social psychologist i talked about later and his findings were replicated and and of course the social psychology then expanded into the neuroscience literature this is the way that the world is going i mean social psychology was kind of the whole show through the 50s and 60s and 70s and since about the 90s and especially this century neuroscience is really getting into the game so the neuroscientists have started to replicate these these two curves and finding the strength and and some of the neurophysiological reasons for these strengths that are occurring as well in the um in your book you open i think you open with the story about being on an airplane sitting in front of an older gentleman who's well i'll let you tell the story um because i i want to i want to hear the story and i'm also curious where that experience occurred in your personal evolution of this yeah i was thinking halfway through my time as a ceo you know where kind of where does it go i mean it's it's crazy i mean you run a company i mean you know what it means to actually run a business but sometimes you think you know i'm going to turn my i'm going to do my homework and turn it in and things are going to get better and and then it's going to stop well when and under what circumstances and what does that mean what is the end goal what is my intention with all that is very funny it's i mean that's a i remember feeling a kind of an existential crisis about that and and i was thinking about it a lot and around that time i was doing what i always did which was sit on a plane and with my laptop and i was coming back on a long cross-country flight from la to to dc is this flight that leaves la at five o'clock in the afternoon gets in about one o'clock in the morning into dulles and i took it a lot and and one night i was listening to this guy telling his wife that he might as well be dead and his wife was consulting he was very disconsolate i couldn't quite make out his words but her words were very penetrating so i was just hearing the answers oh don't say it would be better if you were dead and then it's not true nobody remembers you or cares about you or loves you anymore it's just it was just awful and and i thought you know this guy is you know somebody who's not peter atiyah i mean this is somebody who you know he hasn't lived up to his own personal standards he hasn't had the opportunities he hasn't pursued the education he started the business and and now it's kind of near the end i could tell by their voices that they were in they were elderly and at the end of the flight i was kind of curious just to get a little look and the lights went on away all stood up and i turned around it was one of the most famous men in the world this is somebody who is not controversial he's not some you know actor or politician this is somebody who's justifiably considered a hero by many millions of people for his his you know his achievements his accomplishments in the in the 1970s 1980s and before that as well and and and he evidently is living a real life of regret because those times are long past and and i got this window onto his soul now when we were leaving the plane the pilot's like you know thanks for flying united folks like i was doing and and he looks through me like a pain of glass i mean why wouldn't he sees the guy behind me and he recognizes him and he says sir you've been my hero since i was a little boy and i turned around and he's beaming with pride and joy and i thought to myself which is the real guy and then i had a selfish thought which is how can i be not that first guy how can i structure look i'm trying to i'm not going to be the hero on the plane peter but i'm trying to do a lot with my life you know i'm trying to live to the max to create a have a contribution to achieve a lot and which has some pathologies attached to it as well i write about this in my research now about the success addiction and the workaholism that's attendant to that and then and and and the neuroscience behind those addictions as well but what can i do so that the rug is not pulled out from under me and i'm telling my long-suffering wife esther on a plane in 30 years that i might as well be dead and and that's what really led to this research project that led to the book let's define happiness i i don't think i understand what it really is and given that it's your business effectively it's what you teach it's what you write about it's the thing you think about as much as i think about you know sort of the longevity component of of biology i'm sure you get asked this question all the time and i'm sure you've got a 30 second answer and i'm sure you've got a three hour answer uh take it in any direction you like yeah no i've got a semester long answer which is the class i teach at the harvard business school which is what is it and how do you get it and the reason for that is that by the time my students reach me my graduate students at harvard reach me a lot of them are realizing that the world's promises are empty that you know the money power pleasure and fame that are supposed to bring you undying happiness are false promises they're a bill of goods they could be instrumental to getting what you want but they can't intrinsically give you the satisfaction that you desire so i start in the first day of class i say okay guys i mean you you spent all your all your elective points getting into the class because they have a competitive system to get these electives and the class fills in like nine seconds it's happiness after all who have free candy kids and and there's hundreds of people on the waiting list for this class i say okay you you made a commitment to getting this class you must know what happiness is as i go around i cold call them what's happiness they'll say it's that feeling i get on thanksgiving and you know yadda yadda feelings feelings i'm wrong happiness is not a feeling any more than your thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey the feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness now we measure happiness in all sorts of very complicated and very simple ways and one of the things that we know is that all of the people who are really happy who have a lot of happy feelings but also have a lot of satisfaction content with their lives they're basically they're they're getting abundance and balance across three dimensions and so this is the the definition of happiness now think about this like if i were to say hey peter what is the thanksgiving dinner you'd say well carbohydrates proteins and fat you know you'd say there's the three macronutrients of all food and you know we're always trying to get our macros in order right and so and so you talk about forget lifespan let's talk about health span and i say let's take it even farther to happiness span so let's get our literal macronutrients in order for health span let's get our our happiness band in order with the macronutrients of happiness they are enjoyment satisfaction and purpose those are the three macronutrients of happiness if you don't have those things in balance and abundance you will not report being a happy person now this is different than unhappiness which is another entire subject believe it or not happiness and unhappiness are not opposites they're different phenomena so we're just talking about happiness here to be a truly happy person you need to enjoy your life and that requires not pleasure it's it's pleasure plus elevation is pleasure plus plus metacognition and and so you know thanksgiving dinner fills your belly and tastes good that's pleasure but the the the experience that you have of consuming the thanksgiving dinner with other people and having a memory that you can last forever that's enjoyment and so it's a much more elevated experience than pleasure satisfaction which is super fleeting and and troublesome and you know as mick jagger's saying i can't get no satisfaction the truth is you can't keep no satisfaction there's an entire research literature on that that i participated in on on the problem with satisfaction but it's the joy and reward for a job well done and a goal met you know that elation from actually meeting a goal and last but not least is purpose is meaning in life um you know i talk an awful lot about the coherence the significance the direction these these are the the the meaning of meaning and it gets back to a lot of the great philosophy but we can also measure it and i can even have i have a few diagnostic questions that i ask for the clients who come to me and they'd lack purpose in their life the questions i ask are why why were you born and for what are you willing to die and if you can't answer one or both of those questions you're going to give a serious meaning problem we've got to dig in actually to solve that particular problem but that's it i mean these are the three macronutrients either the protein carbohydrates and fat of happiness or enjoyment satisfaction and purpose there's so much i want to touch on there i'll start with the latter um i have to be honest with you and i've thought about this a lot in terms of purpose i literally can only think of one thing and i suspect a lot of people will think of this which is kids i think that's probably the only thing i'm i would say i have a real purpose for that i would die for in a second and think nothing of um is it bad that i don't have a higher purpose than that well it sort of depends on what the higher purpose means one of the things that you find is that the one of the habits of the happiest people is and this is different in the microwave maybe think of this as the dishes and the happiness meal as opposed to the mic the macronutrients and happiness meal the happiest people they all have a transcendental understanding of life which is that it's just to say that they have an understanding of life bigger than themselves the the most miserable people the people who lack happiness and have a lot of unhappiness they're they're focusing on me me me me i mean the philosophers talk about the eye self and the me self and the eye self is outward looking it's observational it's sort of zen the me self is is is reflective of the outside world it has a lot to do with social comparison it has a lot to do with i the micro circumstances you know like my job my money my career my friends my house my mortgage my commute me me it's just so boring and a transcendental understanding of life is key to a happy life because you need peace you need perspective you need to zoom out when the dalai lama says you're one in seven billion what he's saying is not that you're insignificant or you're a speck what he's saying is that you you need to stop focusing on yourself so you can actually get some relief for once in a while so that might be the higher purpose but it's just a transcendental purpose and understanding of something bigger than yourself so that's another thing and and i know you have that i know you think about things that are bigger than you um and and part of that is your family and part of that's your kids but part of that is an understanding of the universe yeah i guess it's interesting i mean coming back to the kids thing i think one of my greatest uh fears of aging is less about the physical changes of aging right and more about uh kids being out of the house right um and i again i i think a lot of parents probably feel that way which is it's so enjoyable to have young kids around even though it's hard right it's it's like a two-edged sword but i can't imagine how quiet a house would be without them and i don't know sometimes i think like i'm not really sure how enjoyable life would be when they're gone because when they're gone they're gone you know recently i posted something on instagram that i found really depressing which was a chart of the fraction of time that people spend with others in their life over the course of their life so it's kind of like the x-axis is time and the y-axis is per you know percent spent with each entity and it's various curves and the one that just depressed the hell out of me was time with your kids yeah which basically corresponds to once they turn 18 it just plummets right um now you've got kids that are all you have three kids right now my three kids have grown up my youngest is 19 and in spain in college um so yeah so you know i know all about how the empty nest works and and there were times i mean like i've been in your house and there's a lot of legos on the ground and and it's uh i mean it's there's a lot of chaos that comes from little kids and i remember i remember that and my wife and i we we said you know what's it gonna be like when actually you know they grow up and move out and it is very different and it's very disconcerting and it's kind of new to us quite frankly but the key is and this is one of the most important things for a happy life is is a partnership with somebody who will be the last person on whom you lay your eyes as you take your dying breath that's really really important a companionate love that is your wife that's all that turns out to be much more indicative of your happiness than actually getting the you know developing and having continued relationship with your kids because your kids are turning into different people every single year i mean that's super fun and that's super interesting but that's actually not the key the people who suffer the most from empty nest syndrome is not the empty nest it's the fact that they're only with one other bird and they don't really like that bird very much that's the real problem is when it comes in and that's one of the things that i talk about with my with my students and by the way i'm doing lots of executive teaching these days and it's what i'm talking about with people our age two is the goal of your marriage is not passion it's friendship this is the goal you must be close friends ideally best friends with your spouse such that your kids they grow up and they move away and then you have your grandkids i'm probably gonna have grandkids within my my oldest son is married and you know they're gonna have kids quick i bet i mean i don't know i mean you can tell that i'm projecting and praying about this but but you know then i'll have grandkids and it'll be a different experience but i'm going to be with my wife esther and until you know death do us part so that has to be the juice of you know who who of the relationship or the love that actually makes true happiness and love truly is the great secret of happiness yeah i mean that that that's the one saving grace is as i feel very fortunate that my my wife and i are we joke that like we're the best roommates in the world right and so um there i think we'll have a lot to enjoy in in that transition is the implication of that though arthur that because i don't think it is but how do we reconcile then a person who chooses not to have a partner yeah so the key is with there are some people who do really really well on their own they're that you know introverts who like to live alone for example and loneliness is not the same thing as solitude isolation and solitude are very very different phenomena but they're by the way they're neurocognitively different phenomena they affect the brain in different ways and and and so isolation is always bad but but solitude is not as a matter of fact we all need it we need it at different levels that's point one point two and actually this is based on the harvard study of adulthood and sorry just to interrupt yourself arthur you can be lonely in a relationship and you can be in solitude and not be lonely absolutely one of the greatest predictors of divorce is as partners who are lonely while living together and this is the big and this gets back to the big danger of the empty nest syndrome is that the only thing you have in common is your kids and that one point of commonality disappears and you're sitting across the table blinking at each other during dinner not talking because you literally don't have anything to talk about that's that's really that's metastatically awful for a relationship and so that's why it's critically important that couples have something in common besides their kids that they're practicing their religion together they're practicing interests together they're reading the same things they're on the same philosophical journey together i mean one of the things that i talk about with with couples um is that they should develop philosophical interests in common they're talking about deep things and and you know so it that the gold standard is that your kids are like ah mom and dad are talking about kierkegaard again or whatever i mean it's got to be something that's bigger than did you change his diaper because you know that that's not going to be something you have in common forever and you're going to be lonely inside your relationship the the second big point however is that whereas most of the truly happy people as they get older they do have a spousal partner where that's companionate in terms of its love which also has some passion but the companionate part is ascendant throughout you know the throughout your marriage whereas the passion part is not as high as it used to be and that's completely okay that's healthy normal and actually advisable because it's more sustainable over the long run but some people are very happy and don't have that what do they have in common very very close personal lifelong friends so here's the key if you don't have a spouse you need real friends these are people who know your secrets who would take your 2 am phone call and that you talk to a lot now that doesn't mean that if you're married you don't need that because you know when i talk to especially men men are horrible at real friendships they're the worst you know they got lots of deal friends but no real friends a lot of the time especially if they're really successful in business and so i'll say okay name two guys or whoever who are real friends besides your spouse and they're like yeah so-and-so and so-and-so said when's the last time you talked to him he's like i don't know four months ago not a close friend that's just the case and so you got to work on these things for sure for a lot of reasons besides the fact that it's just healthy and good you also might at some point be left alone if you're if you're widowed and and you don't want to be alone in the world under those circumstances that's really corrosive that's one of the reasons that men do so poorly when they're when they lose their wives to death because a lot of them don't have real friendships to backfill any of this need in their souls why well actually before i ask you that the the gender difference is there can you give me a few other characteristics or features that differentiate deal friends from real friends yeah so this is actually an aristotelian notion believe it or not and we do a lot of this stuff in in our you know mathematical social sciences as well but all the things that we do in behavioral social sciences now all we're doing is we're just exposing the ancients to empirical scrutiny and you know so we're just testing whether or not aristotle was right which he always is so aristotle wrote a lot about friendships and he talked about these these escalating levels of friendship in terms of the satisfaction that they bring in the virtue that they bring to our lives at the lowest level is the the friendships of transaction so these are you know friendships where people work together they're really you know you're a shirt manufacturer and you've got a guy who sells you cloth and you're friends like you know you probably really are i mean you like him he likes you you're really friendly with each other you take care not to offend each other but if you stop making shirts you're probably not going to continue that relationship above that are relationships of admiration or beauty where you admire each other you know and that's a really good thing too but that's dependent on a particular quality the perfect friendship or the friendship of virtue is just inherently satisfying you'll like being together frequently it'll revolve around a third kind of useless thing like baseball right it'll be it'll be that thing this is what guys do it's like i don't know what do you guys do together i know we build birdhouses or whatever it happens to be and it's it's that third thing that is the kind of the focus but what you're doing in parallel is developing a very beautiful friendship of that's a a very positive link and that's what these real friendships have in common they're intrinsically satisfying and they're frequently focused on the cosmic third thing it doesn't have to be useless by the way i mean i have a very close friend one of my very closest friends is he's in atlanta and we have the same religion and we talk about that a lot and and our our discussions about that are quite deep and he also wants to know what's going on with my marriage and my kids and and and he knows he knows my secrets is the bottom line you alluded to something that i think most people intuitively would would appreciate but i'm curious as to why what is it about men that makes it harder uh for us to have those really deep friendships uh again if i were to consider my parents uh you know i don't think my father has one such friendship uh i think my mother has many i mean really many she's rich in friendship uh maybe they're an extreme example why do you think that is well there's some generational differences between men and women and there are probably some intrinsic differences as well the the generational differences largely have to do with the fact that in conventional family setups i mean i'm going to guess that that that your dad was super hard working um he probably was busting his pick all the way through your childhood he put you through college he did all that stuff and and he knew that he was gone all day and then if he went out to goof around with his buddies after work he was stealing from his family and so he came home the truth was that his his intimate relationships were in his family and his business relationships were at work and there was a firewall between the two such that he could afford to spend adequate time where he had adequate time to spend with his family and so it was a very traditional situation meanwhile your mom was making sure that you kids were you know properly brought up and you had friends and she knew your your friends found your friends mothers and and and the result was that she was reinforcing friendship relationships and therefore getting better at them now the the distressing thing is that friendship is a skill that requires practice it's like a muscle and it will atrophy you can get worse and worse at friendships and so i'll meet these 60 year old guys guys who are a little older than me and they'll be like what do you want me to do call up some other dude and ask for a play date i mean how does one do this i don't know how to do this i haven't had a real friend since i was in in college and ever since then then i got married and you know i had my family and i worked really really hard and now i'm lonely and so what do you expect me to do and the answer is you have to actually learn how to make and maintain friends uh or real friendships and and that's a skill that that a lot of men lose because of our traditional social circumstances so what do you say to that guy so the 60 year old guy comes to you and let's let's make this a dramatic case he's either his wife is you know he and his wife have divorced or she's died his kids are grown up uh and and using the example you said i mean this is a guy who hasn't had uh an intimate friendship uh with somebody in 40 years and and he comes to you and he and let's say he's bought into what you're saying which is a crucial part of his happiness for the remainder of his life is going to be um intimately intimacy through friendships and and and maybe some of those are not platonic right maybe he meets another woman but but let's focus on the platonic side of that yeah so the truth is is not an easy nut to crack but you have to do the work like anything else you can we know that there's enough plasticity in the brain and there's enough emotional uh plasticity as well that we can learn all kinds of new skills i mean people can learn lots of skills they can't be as good playing the cello starting at 70 as if they started at seven we know that to be a fact but you can get plenty good at stuff and and that includes social skills but you have to be committed to doing the work what a lot of guys want is like okay i just thought great it's a good advice professor you know i'm going to go out and get some and help me get some friends like you it's going to take time it took your wife years and years and years and years to build up her friend group it's going to take you some time as well but you actually have to start putting in the work and that has to do with actually making yourself available and vulnerable to other people that means actually hanging out with other people and saying and and taking the time a lot of guys will be like i don't want to go have dinner with some guy well you got to go have dinner with some guy and and furthermore you actually have to ask that other guy questions about his kids and be interested in that other person that sounds so obvious but these are skills that a lot of men have lost or or never really cultivated over the course of their lives so you can go through these basic social skills and they're sort of mystifying to a lot of guys but once they do it i've seen case after case because i've been coaching people on this now for for a couple of years since this research has started to get some prominence and i've seen amazing progress from people who are older than me let's go back to the the three components of happiness the the one that we didn't really touch on is happy uh satisfaction yeah uh you've obviously alluded to the rolling stones tune which speaks to how fleeting it is i wonder then why it's included because whenever i think of satisfaction i echo that sentiment right which is like i'll have some goal and i mean i think of i can't think of a single goal i've had including ones that took me years to achieve where the moment i achieved it i mean i i don't think i'm being facetious to say within five minutes i'm thinking about the next one and but i mean that's a very depressing thought so so given the sort of uh fleeting nature of satisfaction why is it even a component of happiness well you're not a typical case peter and part of the reason is because you're doing an unusual and unusually difficult success-oriented thing not only are you working for your own success you're working for your client's success and so yeah you're an addict for your success you're an addict for other people's success now let me let's let's talk about a more typical profile most people are not going through life um thinking i'm going to get this great big thing and then running for the next great big thing and next great big thing after that most people are not thinking about their achievements in exactly the same way or the same scale as you most people have sources of satisfaction which is a reward for getting to the end of the day a reward that feels like a real reward to get through the week and to get to saturday and to be able to relax and those are real sources of satisfaction now you can blow that up you can bloat that to the point where your version of saturday is you know some huge business milestone you know that your your podcast now has 200 000 weekly downloads this is just so out of proportion to the ordinary experience now that doesn't mean that the ordinary person can master satisfaction and get it in a in a reliable way either we're all we all fall prey to the problem of i can't get none actually i can't keep none and there's a reason for this now it is extremely uh joyful to to to be rewarded to to to achieve a goal even a little goal i mean we're we're made our brains light up like christmas trees we all know i mean you've i've talked on your show many times i'm a i'm a regular listener to your show and i've heard this many times and i've heard you on huberman and all the other kind of parallel shows that people listen to in this suite of of of how can we improve our lives podcasts and shows that the that we all have to understand dopamine these days and dopamine of course is a neuromodulator not of pleasure but of anticipation of reward and what it does is it says you're going to get satisfaction if you get this thing and you're gonna get it forever dopamine is a liar mother nature's a liar she's horrible mother nature basically says if you you're gonna that new car smells gonna last forever right and you always believe it which is why we do what we as social sciences call get on the hedonic treadmill hedonic means feeling and the treadmill is obviously a metaphor so we can run and run and run and run but it moves against us we think we're going to get satisfaction we're going to keep it and we actually don't so we run for the next one now fortunately ordinary people get a next friday and a next friday and then next friday but if you're doing this and your main objective is you know the next big financial milestone something out of proportion to the ordinary human experience then it becomes quite tyrannical you know then it becomes something that you really can't keep up with now there's a reason that mother nature does this uh there's uh and i'm bringing kohl's to newcastle by telling peter a tea about homeostasis but every biological and even emotional process is subject to homeostasis in which we go always back to our baseline you know if you're on the treadmill this morning for good cardiovascular health and you want your pulse to be at 135 or 140 you don't want it to be there a week from now because you die homeostasis 15 minutes or 30 minutes after you get off the treadmill takes you back to your baseline pulse rate that's for good and proper health and the same thing happens emotionally if you get elation from a job well done it's going to leave so that you can be ready it's going to go away very quickly so you can be ready for the next set of circumstances that's why you can't keep no satisfaction is so that you won't be just staring at the delicious berries on the bush with joy in the pleistocene while the saber-toothed tiger is sneaking up behind you and you're not aware of it you need to be ready for the next circumstantial um you know whatever is going on in your life and that's how homeostasis work that's why it happens and that's why you can't keep no satisfaction that notwithstanding a life without those moments of satisfaction is dull and it's gray and that's what in that's one of you know the key parts of major uh depressive disorders called anhedonia you know and and hedonia means the inability to get this this feeling of satisfaction and the anticipation of the reward so you need it but the paradox is you can't keep it and so one of the things that i talk about is for people like you who have this outsized understanding of what satisfaction is going to be how you can how you can crack that code how you can dominate the matrix in a different way and the answer is basically this you need to stop managing your halves and start managing your wants in other words your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want and you need to manage the denominator of your satisfaction uh fraction as opposed to the numerator and and serious full-on wants management can can be a game changer for a guy like you for anybody for that matter but it's a less serious issue for a lot of people but for a guy like you you need a wants management strategy or you're going to be running from thing to thing to thing and as your halves go up your wants will go up by more and paradoxically your satisfaction will decline which pulls down your overall happiness a lot to unpack there so let's start with um how much of the want deals with comparison versus intrinsic needs to one up yourself so i'll give you an example a great source of satisfaction in my life has historically come uh not anymore but certainly historically has come through sort of athletic achievements right so when i was a cyclist it was certain milestones i wanted to be able to hit when it was a marathon swimmer it was certain swims i wanted to be able to do um and i mean believe it or not there's less comparison to others in some of those things depending on how you define your metrics like you might say like i want to be able to climb mount palomar which is you know a long climb 20 miles or something i want to be able to climb it in a certain amount of time i want to be able to swim you know across this sliver of the ocean or things like that so those don't feel like they're heavily dependent on comparison to others but yet there are a number of other you know things where i think it's almost exclusively about you can't ignore what's happening to others right you've mentioned income or some other measure of professional success um you know we we've joked about the idea like you could literally be worth a hundred million dollars but if your peer group is worth a billion right you might actually find yourself feeling poor which is like a loser yeah yeah it makes no sense to those of us that are you know miles beneath that but um so so how do you sort of untangle those two types of uh objects of satisfaction one that is purely intrinsic one that is pure comparator and yet both of whom could easily put you on a hedonic treadmill is there a difference well yeah there there is but they're kind of in a hierarchy of what will bring you in during satisfaction and the one you're talking about where you're comparing peter with peter peter time zero with peter time one um that's still a tyranny it's just not as bad a tyranny as comparing you know yourself with somebody else you know counting your social media followers or your you know it's like i don't care if i have 200 000 downloads as long as i have more than huberman you know that that's that's a real that'll never happen but hey that guy and and and to be clear i wasn't suggesting that the former was less insidious than the latter i just wonder what the difference is because the problem with the former is whether it's playing something on the french horn or swimming you're you know those tend to rely on going back to fluid intelligence well we've just established that that's probably going to peak in your 30s so you know your whether it be athletic achievements or whatever they're probably going to start going down for sure now the biggest problem with social comparison however there's nothing good about social comparison we do it because we have to and part of the reason is we have to understand what we're doing we have to understand who we are and where we're going and that means and we're part of a society so there's a natural fabric of comparisons that are happening all the time but but actually trying to understand your own self-worth in comparison to other people is is i mean that's really the worst tyranny that leads to envy envy is the only you know it's like joe epstein who's that you know the great essay says that that that envy is the only deadly sin that's not even fun right i mean it's just misery because it's like my dad used to my dad was a really funny guy he's the joke that it's it's not enough to win son your friends have to lose too right it's like it's it's horrible because it actually tears other people down you can feel awful about yourself not withstanding the fact that you're creating real value i mean that's the in dante you know down at the bottom of mount purgatory that he finds satan and satan at the worst of the deadly sins is actually half frozen in a block of ice keep and and and twisting in agony and this ice and he's keeping the ice solid because of the wind from his wings where he's he's fruitlessly trying to get away and is in such ag he doesn't even notice the the narrator of the inferno going down to the bottom of my purgatory this is analogy it's not envy isn't fire it's it's it's you're you're frozen it's awful there's two commandments against it it's so bad is the whole idea okay so when you're comparing yourself with yourself that's just looking for progress and and mathematicians will say that all of happiness is in the first derivative progress off the baseline that's what you want is progress and that's really good the problem is that's insidious too because that's also on the treadmill the true master you know will be getting intrinsic enjoyment from the thing that she or he is doing that's what the true master actually gets and and that's the goal that we should all be going for and the way to do that is to have this idea of wants management or or you know there are other ways to put it this there are other ways to actually get at this as well um you know i like the metaphor of instead of adding brush strokes to your the canvas of your life start thinking of your life as a sculpture where you have to chip away until you find the you know the the true peter yeah tell tell that story actually you wrote about that in the book i believe you were in the museum in was in taiwan yeah in the national palace museum in taiwan which is the greatest collection of chinese art and artifacts in the world from the paleolithic into the present and i was asking this i actually when you go to a museum never go by yourself because you'll remember nothing except like the snack bar you got to go with somebody who will show you 10 things so hire get a guy as they say in the vernacular and say i want to understand deeply 10 things that's the way to go to any museum and so i hired a guy and he was a philosopher and an expert in both eastern and western art and and i said what's you know i was looking at this block of jade that was carved a two-ton block of jade carved intricately into a village a village scene i said even if i'd never seen any chinese art in person and i were not in taiwan if i were in dayton right now i'd know this is chinese how he says oh it's just that the whole philosophy is different between western and eastern art and i said what is it he said well western art is is uses the metaphor of starting with nothing and then creating something the eastern art uses the idea is starting with everything there and chipping away until you reveal it now this is true in music too you'll find in eastern classical art traditions i've studied uh hindustani classical music you know raga for example i studied tabla which is the north indian classical drumming and you know the the the ensemble will be as small as it needs to be such that nothing is extraneous whereas in a western orchestra a symphony or just 85 people cranking in 100 decibels such that in the east they'll say i can't even hear the music of a symphony orchestra because there's too much going on it's the same kind of metaphor well your life in the first part is usually a canvas by the time you're 45 if you're a successful person that canvas is full man it's like jackson pollock you know add one more brush stroke and it adds nothing that you can possibly it probably gets worse it's just dense and dark at that particular time you got to move to the metaphor of the of the block of jade that you chip away until you actually find the beautiful thing that's in you and the goal for the second half of life certainly after 45 years old is each year having less each year getting rid of more relationships than extraneous more possessions more ambitions more experiences and the way that i do that i actually have a practical way of doing it you know when i was a i was a young guy like everybody else i had a bucket list i'm a very ambitious guy i've gone from career to career trying to do a lot with my life and i had a bucket list you know all the things that i wanted all it did make me feel like a loser you know it's like all these things that are unfulfilled and it kept me fired up to be sure but now i have a reverse bucket list where i make a list of all of my worldly cravings and ambitions and i might get them and i might not what i'm not is i make a conscious metacognitive commitment to not be attached to the things on that reverse bucket list i'm not attached to my opinions in the same way that i was my political views i'm not attached to the ambitions that will show me that i'm mr big along the way it might happen it might not happen but when i make a commitment consciously to detach myself from those things it's like chipping away and i'm telling you peter it is very very effective for helping you with a wants management strategy such that you can have a big fulfilling life that's enviable by any outward standard but at the same time not be chained to it in this this insidious kind of success addiction that brings so many successful people so much unhappiness say more about this want management i i mean i think i intellectually kind of understand i certainly understand the equation right why we want the want in the denominator um to go down yeah uh which therefore you know raises the value of the fraction but what's the practical set of tools that one so so let's just say i'm sitting here saying you know arthur i just don't think i can be happy until i um and i don't want to use myself as an example because it's people are sick and tired of hearing about me so let's just say i'm a normal guy and until i get this promotion you know i just i got to get to vp until i'm a vp it's just not you know but once i get there i swear it's going to be great um and you know i just want to pay the mortgage off like i you know because right now it's just it's a it's it's a bit of a chain and once the mortgage is paid off like we are absolutely going to be able to take a month off every summer and go anywhere and and so so there's a list of all of these things that all seem pretty reasonable in terms of aspirations in terms of you know career success et cetera et cetera um so how would you explain to that guy uh well let's skip the first part the first part is you're going to tell him that by the way when you get all those things you're not going to feel that much different for very long but more importantly how would you spare him the agony of spending the next five years pursuing that only to find out he'll be right where he is now yeah so i actually started i have an exercise that i do with my students when they're in their late 20s my mba students are on average 27 28 years old and it's the same thing that i the the same exercise that i do with people who are my age i'm 58 and it basically starts like this imagine yourself you're you're you're 49 or 50 i can't remember 49 yeah okay i'm not gonna not trying to give you an extra year peter so um imagine yourself in five years you're 54 years old okay totally imaginable at this point you're going to be in you know really good health you're going to be working really hard okay now imagine that you're happy and we've talked about what that means but you know what it means when you're when you're happy you know how it feels when you're happy so you don't even have to describe that put in order the five things in your life that explain it why you're most happy in order right and and think about it carefully don't you know it's not the stuff that you wish would make you happy the things that you might make you happy the things that never have but could somewhere the things you really know really realistically 54 years old that are making peter atiyah happier than he is today in order i guarantee you that one two and three are going to be about your relationships and only the bottom of the list is going to be about human achievements that's just the way it's going to be and then the next thing i'm going to ask you is what's your strategic plan for aggressively managing one two and three as opposed to leaving you up to chance how much of your time are you spending on four and five and even things that are not on the list as opposed to one two and three what is your strategic plan for fortifying your friendships your marriage your spiritual walk the relationships with your children your relationships with your parents all that stuff those are the biggies and that's how you think about it you say okay you got the promotion congratulations you've got extra money you might say that's a good way for me to have better relationships because i'll be able to go out of town with my family do you really think that that month away is going to be the game changer for you to have the perfect marriage or should you be thinking great if you get the promotion more power to you but do you think you should be thinking more aggressively and strategically about how to improve your marriage today how can you improve your marriage today and probably has a lot more to do with paying attention to your wife it probably has a lot more to do with actually trying to to you know get interested in many of the things that she's interested in and and you know it's not rocket science we actually know how to do this but if it turns out to be that mystifying maybe get some help but manage the things that really will be what you know will bring you the greatest happiness don't leave those things up a chance i love that exercise arthur my my question i guess is what fraction of people do you think have enough maybe awareness or introspection is the word that they could come up with that list because i i think you're absolutely correct i i think if you really think about this from the right spot one two and three have to do with your physical and emotional health and if you're physical and emotional health are out of order i don't think anything else really matters um do you get the sense that when you pose this question to your uh students that all of them are able to arrive at that conclusion yeah so it sort of depends on how deeply they take or how seriously they take the the the question so if you ask it in a kind of a breezy way a pretty informal way half the students will have these extrinsic motivations about you know money power pleasure and fame and half of them will have intrinsic motivations about relationships and love but if you ask them to think very very deeply about it almost all of them wind up in the intrinsic category of love and relationships usually the top especially for people in their late 20s is the roman romantic lives they want to have that on point the second is their family and friends is the second big category and the third is that they want to have children most of them really actually want to have children they don't know when and they don't know how but that's really that's something that they want and so we say okay well we need to be focusing strategically on on treating your romantic life the way that you would a startup you know we need to have the same seriousness you need to you know be putting in the time you need to be putting in the work and we talk about actually how to do that what the barriers typically are there's a lot of science and there's a lot of good practices behind that and they tend to when you ask them to do the work they will focus in on those three areas now if you say why weren't you paying attention to those things they'll say i don't know how to manage those things i came to the harvard business school to learn how to be successful in my career i didn't learn how to be successful in dating so professor how do i do that and then it turns out that there are ways to do that but you have to take it seriously and put it to work we spoke about the four idols right so what is it money power pleasure pleasure and fame fame is really a funny one though because most people listening to us they're like i don't want to be famous yeah but you want to be admired by others and you want to have some prestige and that's localized fame that's to be known and admired by the right people it's exactly the same phenomenon philosophically and um and psychologically so let's explore those a little bit more is it necessarily the case that we are hardwired to have preferences along that spectrum uh or how much of that well i suspect it's both nurture and nature right i i can imagine that the the circumstances by which you grow up would heavily influence that but how much of that do you think is sort of hardwired versus um developed as a result of circumstances so there's a lot of research on that and what most of the philosophy would suggest and even the evolutionary psychologists would suggest that that we're hardwired to be looking for money power pleasure and fame because that makes us most that gives us fitness in the mating market i mean you know it's who gets mates somebody who's got a bigger cave more and more flints more animal skins more buffalo jerky piled up in the corner you know it is actually known by more troglodytes than than troglodytes that he or she knows i mean that's these are this gives you mating fitness and so the result is this would become an imperative it would become a hard-wired imperative and then and then you have all kinds of evidence of this you actually find that when that when people are kind of at their base nature when they're being distracted they will go for these particular rewards over much more intrinsic more satisfying rewards having to do with love they will go for these uh these these types of rewards all day long we see this in in our consumer patterns we even see some of the you know really interesting neuroscience research talks about it how it will illuminate our brains how it will stimulate the most dopamine the most dopamine comes from these these not very satisfying rewards but nonetheless the ones that we're we're supposed to go for now here's the key thing to keep in mind mother nature wants you to pass on your genes mother nature wants peter a tea to have like a hundred kids right but of course you don't want that you want three and you want to have a lifelong partnership with one wife and that means that you can't live the hippie motto of if it feels good do it that is the that is the the motto of useful idiots now that's by the way there's other stupid mottos like if it feels terrible treat it and make it go away because suffering is really important in a full life too it turns out but but but the key thing to keep in mind is that mother nature she doesn't care if you're happy she doesn't care that's not mother nature we don't select on happiness we we select on on biological fitness to mate to pass on our genes and so the result is if you follow if it feels good do it you're gonna be you're gonna be chasing a whole lot of very fleeting rewards for what you think is enduring satisfaction and you're going to have your hedonic treadmill speeding at a terrifying velocity and you won't even know how to get off it you need to get in charge of your own life is the bottom line you wrote something god i want to say it's been in the last couple of months in the atlantic about happiness and success and noting that the happiest people weren't necessarily the most successful if i'm remembering that correctly i think you wrote this in maybe april it might have been june but the the i and it looked at some data that suggested actually a little bit of sacrifice in happiness led to greater success am i am i remembering that sort of correctly yeah that's right and and part of the reason is because people who are tremendously successful in worldly terms when i'm talking about success we could define it in different ways right yeah i mean having a lifelong marriage where you're in love with your spouse that's unbelievably successful believing like you have found spiritual transcendence that's unbelievably successful living for the good of other people tremendously successful but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about worldly success money power fame the admiration of other people so the these particular metrics of success people who are remarkably successful along those worldly metrics they're making cost-benefit calculations systematically that are not in their own happiness favor typically they're making sacrifices to their own happiness for some some reason and this is one of the things that i've looked at in my own research why why why why and i was talking to a woman one of the things that i do as a social scientist i'm not just cranking data i go out and talk to the humans which i find is a really beneficial thing to do and i was interviewing this unbelievably successful woman on wall street i mean billionaire business or epic you know success after success and very well known and she was confessing to me that she was you know missing decisions that people were doubting it that at the same time that you know she and her husband were just kind of roommates that she had a cordial relationship with her adult kids that she was starting to get bad blood work back from her doctor she thinks that she was probably drinking too much she couldn't sleep right and the whole thing and she said what are you doing so you don't need a nerd from harvard to tell you what to do you know you told me you should you're a billionaire step back from your company take a souvenir in it go onto the board whatever get to know your husband um re-establish a relationship with your kids start to take care of your drinking problem um become a client of peter tia i don't know you know what i'm talking about here and i say why don't you do these things and she said she thought about it she said you know i think i i guess i'd prefer to be special than happy and i thought that that is the hallmark of addiction you know i've met and i used to be a musician i've met a lot of addicts i've met a lot of alcoholics in my life and they will confess that before they got clean and sober that they preferred to be high and happy they all said that they knew that they'd be happier when they were finally beyond this thing but let's just get high one more time just the feel of that pipe on my lips one more time just the burning of the alcohol in my throat one more time just the what did what did william burrows call the the the um the red that of the blood in the hypodermic needle before you actually put down the plunger and it gives incredible pleasure to people and they say just one more time just one more time and that's what that lady was saying to me that's a success addiction and that is a that is absolutely implicated in the dopamine system and that is like any other behavioral addiction that a lot of very worldly successful people fall prey to a lot of people listening to us and i'm glad they're listening to us right now because they want an edge but you got to ask yourself i have to arthur has to ask himself and peter has to ask himself and all the people listening to them have to ask themselves is this a pathology that that i'm actually feeding by by actually trying to get this edge and and i hope it's not and i hope it's not for me but i know a lot of people where it is and and you know they'll that we talk about workaholism there's a lot of literature on workaholism workaholism is an ancillary addiction to success addiction you know people work really really hard the payoff the cookie that you get you know that the dopamine is just driving you to is the promotion is the raise is the dollar is the compliment is the adulation on social media that's where the real addiction is coming in and those are the people that are going to be sacrificing their own happiness decisions for these success metrics do we have a sense of i mean this is an unanswerable question so i'll rephrase it in kind of a more theoretical what would the world look like today if no one was pursuing being special over being happy like how what year would we be living in right would it would it be 1842 right now like in other words what i'm really getting at is how much of the modern marvels of this world do we owe to the backs of people who sacrificed their own happiness for the the innovation that allows us to be doing what we're doing right now it's such a smart question and i consider this myself for me to say you and i should break our success addiction um therefore the world would be better if nobody had a success addiction is the fallacy of composition you know it's to basically say since i get home faster if i go 100 miles an hour on the freeway it would be better if everybody drove 100 miles an hour on the freeway now you live in texas or you're like yeah actually that would be better but anyway but it's that that is really really relevant because what you find is that the the many of the greatest innovators composers creative intellects these were people who were that absolutely sacrificed their happiness that were deeply deeply unhappy look there's a huge literature that shows the uh i mean what is it the um the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is stimulated by um in in depressives in a way that makes them highly creative i mean we actually have good brain science at this point that shows that people who are suffering from mood disorders they tend to be disproportionately creative and they do a lot this is i mean it's not you know van gogh was not the outlier it turns out there's a lot of weird people in silicon valley that have a lot of pretty untreated maladies and they're doing a lot now you might say in silicon valley a lot when we're doing a lot of harm for society as well but the point is that that it is true that the world has been propelled by a lot of unusual people with unusual goals and so i don't know how i would if i were the if i were the divine how i would create the universe i i don't know how i would how i would designate people in society i don't know whether i would make people sacrifice their happiness for the greater good of a whole i'm just not sure whether there's a kind of a success martyrdom that's going on here yeah i think about this a lot i mean my two cents having none of the data and none of the insights that you do is that um we are we are probably a lot better off for people who have made enormous sacrifices and i and i'm not just talking about like what we think about in silicon valley i'm talking about newton and gauss and euler and like the great physicists the great mathematicians i feel like these people made untold sacrifices in terms of the pain that they endured as a result of their genius i think you're right peter i think i think that's actually right but there's one thing that i want to emphasize which is that the misery is not inevitable you can actually and this is the one of the reasons i've done my work i'm not asking people to not be successful i'm not asking people to be not ambitious to not work hard i'm asking them to dominate it such that you're not playing to your your your most innate drives so that you can be successful and happy and that's a small quadrant of the happy unhappy successful unsuccessful the successful and happy really really successful and really really happy it's a pretty small group of people but it's not it's not not populated i mean i write in my book about the case of johann sebastian bach the greatest composer who ever lived who died surrounded by the people who loved him and who revered him and the reason is because he got on his second curve because he would he dedicated his work to to other people he didn't say you know forget it i'm not going to write any more music he said i'm going to write music and and i'm just going to detach myself from the ego of having this enormous audience of people who will say that i'm the greatest composer ever and i'm gonna do it for humanity and for to glorify god and to refresh the soul of other people and and if it's really successful in commercial terms it is and if it isn't that's okay too in other words be be really ambitious but detach yourself from the worldly idols and think about how you can use your success in service of other people and that's the hack that's the work around that's actually the glitch in the in the success unhappiness matrix is when you become other focused you can be a success machine and also happy i i agree with all of that i was going to actually make a slightly different point which was just because that's what got us here today as a civilization doesn't speak to the individual choice that we all have right right i mean it's sort of like how i i'll give you an example in my world is my thinking on cancer screening for an individual is based solely on the individual if i were in charge of creating a cancer screening program for everyone in the country or in the world it's a totally different question right right because the former is really all about individual risk individual cost and what the reward potentially is when you start to talk about that at a societal trade-off level it's a much more complicated problem now you have to look at quality adjusted life years and all these other metrics and you know you have to balance a budget to basically do this right and and so yeah my my takeaway from this is that just because everything we said is probably true it doesn't mean that any one individual doesn't have the potential to make a choice to live in less misery or to be happier absolutely absolutely and part of it is i believe you don't even have to to to sacrifice the success but you do have to go against your worldly urges in a very big way not against your worldly urge for success but against your worldly urge to pursue the success for a particularly idolatrous reason and that's a really big distinction as it turns out now this is the point that's made by you know philosophers and theologians forever that when you do things in service of others to lift other people up to bring other people together then you can become unbelievably successful you can become the dalai lama you can become desmond tutu mother teresa you can do you know you can do with the you know the albert schweitzer what what do all those people have in common they were world famous but they were doing this in the service of their fellow women and men and that was the key distinction that allowed them to to wiggle their way into the both happy and successful quadrant he wrote about this also very recently um you're the only reason i subscribed to the atlantic by the way so the atlantic should know that like thank you peter um you wrote about the mortality paradox right we can't conceive of not being here i have been thinking about this so much i'll sit there on my bike and i was thinking about it yesterday i was really sitting there thinking you know how difficult is it for us to imagine the world without with us not in it because every experience we have is only through our eyes only through our senses um say more about that because i just find this to be such a fascinating topic yeah the important mortality paradoxes is has to do with the fact that we're as big brained um mammals we're able to understand that we're going to die intellectually but we can't conceive of because our brain isn't that big is the idea of not existing so i know i'm going to die but i can't imagine not existing those are two different phenomena the two different cognitions and one i can really understand the other that i can't and the fact that those two things are intention creates a lot of fear it creates a lot of of uncertainty uh real discomfort real cognitive dissonance and discomfort in people and so the result is they're trying to work through that their whole lives either they'll say okay well i'll just resolve it on the first time i won't die you know well good luck with that i mean it's like you're the longevity guy and i heard you say and i was listening to you today and you said like the one thing we all know is that we're going to die so peter attila says i'm gonna die i'm gonna die right okay or they try to resolve it on the other side which is to to to either understand to apprehend the concept of not existing or to say i will always exist not withstanding the fact that i'm gonna die and there's lots of philosophies and religions and look i'm a i'm a traditional catholic and so i've resolved it in a particular way but the result is that of all of this is that this is a lot of what leads to people's fears um you know it's people talk to me a lot about what they're most afraid of i ask people about that a lot and part of the reason is because my main focus of my happiness work is love and love and fear are opposites uh love and hatred are not opposites hatred is downstream from fear and this is a philosophical principle from lao tzu and st john the apostle but it's also a a neurocognitive um regularity where you find that you know how the brain works you know that you tend to find that love neutralizes fear and fear can turn off love and every other every other feeling like a switch because of the way that the brain is designed the main focus of my work and happiness is the subject of love and part of the reason is because love is the nuclear fuel rods of happiness if you want to know one thing about how to be happy happiness is love full stop and there's a ton of longitudinal data that shows this there's a ton of data that shows you know people who are in their 80s and 90s who are really happy if you look back in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s what they all have in common is is strong relationships that they were cultivating and working on real love relationships in terms of romance and family and and real friends not just deal friends now the interesting thing is when you're studying love is you also have to study its opposite and the opposite of love is fear that's uh that's a philosophical uh truism you know lao tzu talked about the fact that fear and love are opposites st john the apostle but also we find this in modern neuroscience in the way that emotions are processed in the human brain um psychology shows this abundantly that op that that love and hatred in opposites hatred is downstream from fear so if you want to understand what turns off love in your life when people come to me and say i don't have enough love i'll say well tell me about what you're afraid of and when people come to me and they say they have too much fear in their life they'll say well we need more relationships we need more love to neutralize the fear so the big fears that i ask people about one of the things that i find is that everybody has a deaf fear this is an interesting thing you know most people say i'm not afraid of dying and i'm not afraid of dying i mean look peter you and i are like you know it's like the reaper comes tomorrow it's like okay it's uh you know i lived right and i'm actually not afraid of that it's but i do have a death fury everybody does and it has to do with the extinction of how you understand yourself and that gets back to the mortality paradox the idea of not existing has some manifestation almost everybody's life whether it's i'm really afraid of becoming irrelevant i'm really afraid of being forgotten that's your mortality problem that's your death fear you know for me it's like i think about it the one thing about my health i'm most worried about is is dementia i'm just it you know my mother was demented i was in early stage dimension when she was my age she was mid-50s she was in in early stage dementia she lived for another 15 years and and it was man it was really really bad it was really a bad ending and and for me i mean my whole living is inside my head because these are my ideas this is how i make a living this is always support my family furthermore it's how it's how it's everything i love to do is is it has to do with my my ability to think clearly and to think creatively so for me my death fear is my cognitive decline everybody has something like this whether it's really ego related or has to do with skill related everybody's got their their mortality terror um and so this is one of the things that we need to dominate if we want to be happy and and i have an exercise believe it or not peter that i give my students on how to do that number one is you have to figure out what it is you have to do some serious reflection of what your death fear is and for most of my students at harvard is fear of failure you know these are super high performing i mean this was you i mean you went to stanford and then i mean and you did all this you know fancy college stuff and so my guess is that you never had any academic failure and you were perhaps pretty afraid of academic failure because you'd never experienced it and because it would have been problematic in your family if you had started to fail some classes in college i was going to guess right but but i'm a bit confused because what you spoke about earlier makes a lot of sense as a death failure because i see a cognitive decline being tied to physical death because it's an end of life thing i'm a bit confused about what the students these 29 year olds are equating failure in life for example starting a business and having it fail with actual death yeah so it's basically i am a a success machine most of my students start off as very objectified by their parents uh where their parents say you're the special one you're successful you always get a's you're a hard worker you know get it done and they start to see themselves as kind of homo economicus they see themselves as highly you know high performers and and and they're very bright and they're very hard working and the results they don't experience any failure in school i mean for for me these are absurd things you got to be on an exam who cares right um you know i flunked out of college i mean it's like man i know failure but but for them they've never experienced these things so it feels like a like a mortal threat because it's a threat to who they think they are which is a successful person somebody who never fails and is very foreign territory to them so whether their their death fear is failure or cognitive decline or being forgotten or being irrelevant or actually dying the technique for getting beyond this is really all the same and it comes from um that i found very successful is to do what is called the theravada buddhism the maranasati meditation this is the nine part death meditation that theravada buddhist monks in sri lanka and thailand and vietnam um what they will they will undertake and which often they'll contemplate corpses photos of corpses and various states of decay and and they'll say i that is me and that is me and they have a nine for this morning saudi is a meditation in which they they they imagine themselves decaying dying and then you know or rotting bloated corpse and then it's so graphic it's super graphic it's um and that's the point right and super accurate yeah like it really is how a human corpse decays it's just unbelievable and so and and what you're trying to do is what what psychologists would call exposure therapy you're exposing yourself to the inevitable truth look i heard you say peter i'm gonna die okay fine fine fine am i gonna no think about it think about it why because that it it loses its terror when it becomes familiar so what i make my students do is a nine part meditation on their own failure catastrophic failure by their own terms which is not necessarily human catastrophic failure but there will be i remember the first time i did this i put the steps in because they didn't know how to do it and the first one is i'm falling behind my colleagues at school um i i graduate but just barely i'm not getting the jobs that my friends are getting and then people thought i was going to get i'm finding them really my career is not what i thought it was going to be and then i get to this one point and i threw this in just for a little bit of pathos and and i said there's one point i say i think my parents feel sorry for me and a student starts crying that's the nerve man that's the nerve there's always this point in the death meditation so figure out what death means for you where this mortality paradox it really has teeth and then actually put together the exposure therapy of walking yourself through the the the experience the emotional experience of this failure and you will be free this is the one thing that i guarantee that you'll be free of that now you gotta you can't do it just once you have to do it again and again and again because what your fear is has very as deeply rooted in a lot of your experience but once you're exposing yourself to that um again and again it it has an incredible therapeutic impact so the exercise is obviously first taking some time to really be thoughtful about what these fears are and by the way i'm guessing some people have more than one i mean you have the sort of the fear of actual death perhaps the fear of failure along the way so so you might be doing this exercise twice right yeah for sure for sure you know like we probably all have multiple versions and they change throughout life you know when i was 20 years old i wasn't afraid of cognitive decline i'm 58 years old and i want to keep the party going is it a lot of wine and the party's not going to keep going i might not be demented i might be hit by a bus tomorrow i might be you know my mother-in-law died last month and she was talking about a good death she was 93 she had her marbles to the last minute and she died at home right i mean not bad not bad you know chapeau i mean that's like that's really really good but everybody goes uh and so you can't keep these things and unless you're comfortable with this inevitability the mortality paradoxes paradox this inability to process these two competing ideas it'll terrorize you it'll paralyze you it'll be a problem what's the optimal dose of exposure so if i was an arachnophobic and i came to you and said you know we came to the understanding that i need to be exposed to spiders how often would we need to do this that's a good question and actually there are psychologists and psychotherapists who deal with this with different kinds of phobias and they find that different people have to be exposed have to have an exposure that's more or less frequent and you have to re-up it or you don't some people are just they solve a problem i mean my my little girl she's 19 when she was a baby we adopted her from china and and she had you know she had never been held and you know she had she was undernourished and and so when she came to live with us she was afraid of a lot of stuff and one of the things she was really really afraid of was dogs she would see a dog outside she would scream and you know she would want to be so we wanted to solve this and we did it by getting a dog right but we didn't just like throw the dog in the room with her in the crib you know we we we held he kept the dog apart and it turns out there was about three days and after about three days she was not afraid of the dog anymore and after about six weeks she loved all dogs and that was it forever she's so crazy about all dog she's 19 years old she has pictures of the dog that was that dog who sadly passed away but lives in blessed memory at this point because it was her cognitive therapy death meditation dog or something like that but other people who have lived with these phobias all their lives including people who have these stresses about their own mortality it requires a i think a more strenuous and thorough intervention and one that's more frequent and so how how do you suggest somebody go about doing this exposure um in the case of the monastery they literally have pictures of nine stages of decaying corpses i assume that the monks come there and look at these pictures and meditate yeah yeah they stand in front of each one of the pictures each day and they say that is me while staring at the photograph and they want it what they wanted to become is actually completely trivial and familiar that's what they want so for all of us um again that's a good one to do by the way but yeah because we're all gonna die and you know he's like hey can't wait you know they're they're um but the thing that really is your bugaboo you know the thing that really is holding you back your version of the death meditation think about it contemplate it write it out and expose yourself to it as much as you need to and and you'll you you know you know when you're getting the benefit it's hard at first and that could literally just be that could just be reading it out every day yeah i actually have my students to contemplate each step for two minutes um and to do that each day for three weeks because one of the things that i found is by the end of three weeks it's like yeah yeah i'm gonna fail wow so not a big commitment look it's 20 minutes a day for three weeks basically totally yeah and again you know maybe a psychotherapist would be like hey you you're kidding yourself if it's a really entrenched problem it's going to take a lot longer than that plus cognitive behavioral therapy plus drugs i know but one of the things that i've found is that my students are afraid of failure and and we can get over it pretty quick wow you visited india you're you're i think you describe yourself as an india file yeah by the way when you were here did i make you curry i can't remember you did and it was delicious oh yeah yeah yeah i i know we talked about it i couldn't remember what we ended up doing at night it was delicious with the tofu and um and with non-fat greek unflavored greek yogurt that you actually put in it for consistency and thickness yeah yeah really good so um talk about the four ashrams and how we can kind of i know they're divided into sort of 25-year chunks but i'm i'm i find this very interesting what those four stages are and especially i guess as you pointed out i'm about to be 50 so i'm really under ending enter ending the second one about to enter the third yeah and it's really the second one that's the hardest one i think to leave isn't it yeah so these are called ashramas which are which means what it means is the quarters of a a perfect life in in vedic philosophy so really ancient indian wisdom um these ideas are probably 5 000 years old i mean this is this is you know it's funny you know when i talk to i i have studied with a lot of these very deep hindu masters in southern india when every time i go to india i try to sit at the feet of one of these masters and they'll say you're a christian right he says you think all these things that we used to think 4 000 years ago and and but the i i went to india specifically to study the ashrams with a with a wonderful guru in a place called palakkad in southern india on the border between kerala and tamil nadu which is these two southern states and his name is sri notre vincent ramon and i asked him about these ashrams which are the four quarters of a a well-balanced and perfect life ideally 25 years each now the odds of getting to a hundred are one in six thousand in the united states that ain't a lot lower than that in india so the point is not to be dogmatic about turning 50 peter what we're really talking about is just these these chunks of life the first phase of life is called brahmacharya which is the student life and all that means is not necessarily literally a student it means the time when you're learning when you're absorbing when you are a sponge for human capital and and ideas then around age 25 is when you enter grihasta which is typically when a man for example would would get married and start a household and that's called the householder phase and that's career and marriage and children and success and sexual relationships and all of these kind of worldly rewards of money power pleasure and fame you know that's when you get addicted to those worldly rewards of money power pleasure and fame and and it's fun and it's good and it's hard and it's tiring etc etc then at jo whereas in the west we talk about that one hard transition from kid to adult from brahmacharya degree hosta in india they talk about the difficulty of the second adolescence which is passing out of grija into the third phase around 50 which is called vanaprastha that's 50-75 and that's a really critical and very interesting phase it's hard to get into because it requires wanting less it requires chipping away requires a reverse bucket list what it requires it's an ivana process that comes from two sanskrit words von and prostaff where that means to retire into the forest obviously metaphoric i mean i'm not i'm not gonna go live in the forest and neither you the whole point is to retire away from a lot of the parts of grihasta you're still going to work you're still going to do your thing but you're going to have a different focus you're going to be focused on teaching you're going to be focused on other people this is very second curve this is where it all comes together and this is what i try to do with my work is i take eastern or western philosophy and wisdom i mix it up with neuroscience with historical regularity and with modern experimental social science and it all has to be consistent if it's not all consistent and there's one part of that that's not quite right then i'm on to the wrong comprehensive story so how this hangs together is you're passing into your second curve which is also vanaprastha as one of the ashramas retiring into the forest where you are the teacher you are becoming less involved in your own success but more involved in the success of other people now that might carry you to great glory but that's not primarily for that if you're going to be in the happy successful quadrant and here's the twist there's another goal ahead of you a big goal which is the last the last quarter the last ashrama which is 75 and beyond which is called sanyasa now a lot of people who studied eastern philosophy or you know hindu thought they know it as sannyasi a sannyasi is somebody who's an enlightened one and and in a lot of religious cults they talk about sannyasis and all that but basically all that means is somebody in this ashram of sanyasa and that is where you're really dedicated fully to spiritual and into spiritual enlightenment and in ancient times hindu men of some means at age 75 would take leave of their families and go to the himalayas and sit at the foot of their master until death now i'm not suggesting that right that that doesn't sound so great to me because i want to death to do us part with with my wife um but the whole point is once again not that to take it literally but rather to say look i mean the fruit of my old age requires a lot of training the intellectual and and and philosophical and spiritual transcendental root of or fruit of my life requires this elite training which is vanaprastha you can't show up to the olympics 60 pounds overweight expect to swim the backstroke having not swum in months it can't be done you have to train for it it takes according to this hindu philosophers 25 years of elite spiritual and intellectual and transcendental training to get to that point later in life arthur if you go back in time to that plane ride from la to dc um and let's just imagine you've somehow found yourself alone with this gentleman once you've figured out who he was and processed all he had to say what would you say to him well i wouldn't intrude on his privacy to begin with because i was i was overhearing a conversation about the most intimate things in his life with his wife which is one of the reasons i haven't divulged to a single soul in the identity of that man on the plane because it's not important it could be any one of you know could be anybody practically in under very similar circumstances but if you were asking me for particular advice um i would talk about the one thing that he's really missing um which he's evidently really missing and by the way i've have googled him since then i've been following him since then he divorced that woman already and it's not his first wife you know and and so the whole point is what he's been hungering after panting after lusting after is what he had in grijasta what he had on his first curve what he had in his in his idols of money power pleasure and honor that's what he wanted that's what he wants back and and the fruit of his life should be his enlightenment based on love on on faith and family and friendship and service to other people those are the habits the of the the happiest people those are the people who are maximizing their happy span i made up that word because it's awful but i'm just trying to you know i'm talking to peter and tia here so i gotta you know saying in the theme that's what i would talk about is like you're going for the wrong thing your ambition to go back in time is going to lead you to misery you need to move forward into the bonds of love that are your that should be your your rightful claim as a person later in life and i did the research so that i could give the advice to myself and other people on exactly how to do it well arthur i won't even ask if this gentleman is still alive but if he is i hope he's listening as i think we all are and i think we all benefit from this um it's a lot to think about i think this is i think this is a harder thing to fix than a lot of the things that i talk about um and i'm not sure why you know i i because you would think well gosh it must be really hard to take somebody who's sleeping six hours a night in a fragmented way and you know help them get to eight hours a night of great sleep or someone who's sitting on the couch all day and get them to exercise or someone who's living on mcdonald's and get them eat happy all of those things are difficult but they're not as difficult i think as taking somebody who lives on a hedonic treadmill and getting them to adjust that to decrease wants to make the type of strategic changes that are in keeping with what ultimately will bring them happiness i guess my final question for you is why do you think well first of all i guess do you agree with me but assuming that you would agree that this is very difficult why do you think it is uh i've contemplated that an awful lot and i mean i'll answer that actually in a weird way when i was doing work for the rand corporation on on combat modeling using you know huge computer systems to look at unbelievable number of simulations and contingencies what i found was that that you know all of the easiest problems to solve which can be very hard but they're solvable are what mathematicians call complicated problems those are problems that they're they take a lot of computational horsepower but once you solve the problem you can you can replicate the solution over and over again with great accuracy like creating a jet engine where every single jet flies and almost none of them ever crash or fail that's a complicated problem now it took a long time to do that that's we call that the toaster problem it wasn't that long ago that there were no toasters and i recommend that you don't try to build your own you probably burn your house down but now you can get a 20 toaster that'll last you for many many years and it makes really great toast that's a complicated problem but the bigger problems the problems that really bedevil us the problems of human life and the essence of human life are mostly complex problems those are the problems where we we understand the nature of what winning means very easily but there's a so many inconceivably high number of permutations that they can't be solved those are not toaster problems those are cat problems cats are complex not complicated you know what they want scratches and warmth and kibble and a box to poop in but you don't know what they're gonna do next ever and all of life's really interesting things that make life life they're complex problems love is a complex problem love is a cat not a toaster the problem that we have in our life today you know and the problem what we're getting from tech for example is that they're trying to solve our complex problems of love using complicated engineering solutions you know you're lonely here's facebook that's like saying you want a cat here's a toaster so that's the problem is that these complex issues they're they're they're insoluble actually and so we're looking for a simulacrum for a solution to these particular problems and and and when it comes down to saying just love more it's it's it's insufficient and that's why it's so hard and so what i'll do when i i can't get my cat is i'll just try to be contented with a toaster it's like i don't know i can't find a mate so i guess i'll i guess i'll buy a boat i guess i'll try to be more successful i guess i'll try to make more money and and it doesn't work and that's what leads to a lot of the heartbreak of ordinary life arthur i think that's literally one of the most remarkable explanations i've heard for i mean certainly i'm familiar with complex and complicated problems but this application of it is probably um probably one of the most helpful i've heard so i appreciate that and uh i appreciate your patience in sitting down with me a second time what a pleasure are you kidding i was like that's great that's awesome i get to talk to peter twice well uh we'll do it a third time at some point it'll be in person and we'll uh we'll come up with something great to eat as well thank you peter thank you for what you do on the you know i love your your show and all the things that you do you make my life a lot better well i can say the same to you arthur thank you so much [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 62,747

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Id: dA5OmuP8vTQ

Length: 107min 49sec (6469 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022