Harvard Professor REVEALS Why You Feel LOST & UNHAPPY In Life | Arthur Brooks on Impact Theory

humans are not intended to decline decline is hugely painful because happiness comes from progress unhappiness comes from regress arthur brooks welcome to the show thank you tom what a joy to be with you long time viewer first time guest i seriously doubt this will be the last time your book strength to strength blew me away it was one of those where i actually got emotional reading the book because as i was telling you before we started rolling i've spent a long time haunted by the idea that genius is a young man's game and that ties into my first question which is why do so many people feel lost and unhappy and what can they do about it people feel lost and unhappy is basically part of what it means to be human and there's a there's an irony in the having the big brains that we do we developed a very large human brain over the past 40 million years for all kinds of reasons i mean it's that it gives us a it's our genetic advantage that we could say it gives us help it's our survival we're not fast you know we're not very good climbers you know we don't have a lot of hair on our bodies but we got big these guys these big prefrontal cortex of the brain the problem with that is that we can understand ourselves we're the only species as far as we know that knows that you know tom knows he's going to die for example you can understand the nature of your own existence but you you can't actually make your own existence work in a fundamentally different way and so knowing yourself that the essence of consciousness is one that gives you incredible transcendental information but at the same time it programs in a whole lot of misery so for for example you know we have a tendency to to our genetic proclivities force us to chase money and power and admiration and pleasure because those are the things that help you pass on your genes you get more animal skins and and flints and buffalo jerky in your cave and you're going to have more mates basically and so mother nature wants you to do that but it's not going to make you happy and you think that you want to be happy the big prefrontal cortex says i want to be happy because you're so conscious but the things that will help you pass on your genes are not the things that are going to make you happy mother nature doesn't care if you're happy and that's why it's so much more work if if you live by if it feels good do it you're going to be you're going to be a mess that's what it comes down to that's so true [Music] so i had a realization a long time ago i'm very grateful that this happened early it was of course born of misery but i became so profoundly unhappy chasing money i used to show up every day saying i am here to get rich and that provided me a lot of energy so as a child of the 80s growing up in tacoma so and i really grew up on the edge of tacoma it's probably more accurate even though my address really was tacoma it's more accurate to say i grew up in puyallup yeah fair was oh yes we're the western washington state fair now the washington state vet that is all accurate and i it felt almost rural and so i felt like i was living in the middle of nowhere and john hughes films showed me sort of this upper middle class chicago suburb and i was obsessed with getting a big house and so i used to tell everybody i'm going to get rich i'm going to get rich and my family was like and i had friends that like and i could literally walk to a trailer park it was like that kind of part of tacoma and so my family who are all sort of blue collar just thought that was hilarious and they're like yeah right and but that i was really obsessed and so i um i was but i was cheating so i was really i did very well in high school from cheating and then encompassing cheating yeah yeah yeah like i was charming yeah so i could get away with murder when they're incredibly clever oh that's interesting my identity is not that of someone who is clever so it was very much somebody who was charming so i could make people laugh yeah and so i could get away with things so whether that was asking my friends to let me literally take the test off of their desk and put it on mine so i could show my work right but of course i was showing their work but when i got to college and i'm not even sure what gave me this insight but i was like i'm going to be spending a lot of money taking on a lot of debt i should actually learn what i'm here to learn so i set a mantra to myself sink or swim a orf i won't cheat not even once and so and i ended up doing very well in fact i did better in college than i did in high school you're happy in college i was i was it when i graduated though i was like i'll never go back i'm not one of those people who's like oh i'm gonna get a masters and then a phd i was like give me the [ __ ] out of here but it was it was film so it was amazing yeah and you were living by the dictates of your own integrity you're a man fully alive you were not shading the truth very true he's very important and this is what's you know this is there's there's a famous speech by you know and and i can't remember who it was the guy who went on to become the president of the university of texas who gave he became famous because he gave an uh a a commencement speech that was about make your bed if you want to actually get your life on track start by making your bed what that was was uh to ask people to become men and women of integrity and that means even when nobody's looking at your bed make your bed because you're a person of integrity you went to college and you said to yourself i'm going to be a person of integrity i am not going to do that thing because that thing is not the right thing and so doing you ordered your mind in a different way it's really interesting so i wish that my life was like a straight trajectory after that but it becomes the darkest period of my life becomes right after college when i feel lost i feel hopeless i have no sense of how i'm going to put things together that was a really scary time because when you don't feel that you can affect the change that you want it really for me any well let's go back to what you said at the beginning so i call that the directives of evolution so if you think of ai ai has to be given instructions you have to want a high score or you have to want to stay within the lanes of your car whatever and humans as nature's ai need directives and so like you said get a mate that's definitely one of them and man i really hope at some point later in the conversation after we've really gone into your book we get to the fact that people are 30 less likely to get laid now which is absolutely [ __ ] terrifying to me um i have the solution for greater happiness on college campuses really it's more love yeah now what do you mean by that though i mean actually more relationships more romantic relationships this would actually solve a lot of the misery on college campuses today actually is i mean what were you trying to do in college you probably wanted to fall in love right no so i i didn't so i had a girlfriend at the very beginning of college like the first few weeks who i'd met in high school right and i broke up with her and re decided that to get into film school i had to really buckle down and i wasn't gonna date i wasn't gonna party i wasn't gonna drink i wasn't gonna do drugs and so i effectively locked myself in a room for four years to get good at filmmaking so it was a very different different experience yeah a lot of people but now i want to i want to get people back to your book because it is absolutely life-changing so i would show up every day trying to get rich that was my whole shtick as an entrepreneur yep and then because i wanted to build a studio right became profoundly unhappy pursuing that and the lesson that i ultimately ended up learning was that all that matters in life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself and so meaning and purpose matter right and so i had better figure out that money wasn't going to bring me happiness i was living the cliche and so i needed to attach meaning and purpose to whatever how did you figure that out that money was not going to bring you happiness so on paper i was worth more money than i'd ever been worth so i was making more than i'd ever made i was making like maybe 80 85 000 something like that which for me that was good at the time it was a lot of money and on paper i was worth about two million dollars so i was like okay theoretically and paper money is very different than real money but on paper i was worth millions of dollars and i was still profoundly unhappy and did you think what did you think if i'm just like i'm gonna see your limbic system of your brain saying tom go for the money then you'll be happy so what did you imagine was going to happen to you if you had a bunch of money that would actually make you happy or did you actually form an image at all you just thought that if i had more money i'm going to mysteriously be happy yes then once i wasn't i asked myself maybe the right question which is what did yeah what did i think was gonna happen and i realized that i thought i would feel about myself the way that i felt about other people when that had money when i looked at them ah yeah and i admired them thought i was a social company got it and you would actually so social comparison led you to the admiration of other people who had been successful so therefore you would have that as sort of an admiration of yourself yes and that self-admiration would have been the genesis of your of your newfound happiness on the basis of your money and if i were as able to articulate that to myself as you were just now i could have saved myself a lot of struggle but i couldn't either at 22 but yeah yeah was disastrous yes all right my friend i have a big announcement my incredible and talented wife lisa is about to launch her new book radical confidence in it she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear sometimes a lot of fear now let me tell you nobody knows lisa better than me but when i read radical confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the tv shows that she wanted to watch or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams it was brutal for me i would never say though that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it but i will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut find her voice and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things order your copy today because if you act now you can claim the bonuses that lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com then once you've done that we'll get back to today's episode all right guys read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life peace out [Music] so but thankfully i figured that out and so reading your book really began to bring home this idea that there are two different types of intelligence and so at the time i'm haunted by this idea genius is a young man's game i feel like a really late bloomer i end up spending all this time chasing money not i take this huge break from pursuing my passion and building that skill set so now i really feel like i'm behind the eight ball and my whole life has felt like that and reading your book and the whole punch line of there's these two grand movements in your life and if you understand them then you really can avoid this decline in misery right you open your book with a story that i will never forget and when i put the book down i was like running around the office like telling anybody who would listen that story if you don't mind yeah walk people through the airplane ten years ago i was the president of a think tank in washington dc and i was having these profoundly disturbing thoughts am i on the right track where does this lead what is my goal but you're really successful at this point yeah i mean successful for you know for entrepreneurs in southern california you know what is successful mean to be the president of a think tank in washington d.c maybe not so much but everybody's got a dream it's a great country isn't it and i was the president of a big prominent think tank in washington dc and i was in my late 40s so that was more or less the same age that you are right now i was looking at my life saying okay buddy what's the end game and look i had done research i'm a social scientist i do work on human behavior and i had never really trained these tools on myself and i was really disturbed by this because i didn't actually see what the future could actually bring that would be better or i would be happier and as i was kind of going through this i was doing what i always did which is basically fly around and ask people for money i was a non-profit organization i had to raise 50 million dollars a year and i was giving 175 speeches a year which is super fun i love jesus yeah yeah it's almost like running for the senate and never getting elected basically which is you know for running for the senate is probably the best thing so you don't have to be a senator and as i was thinking about this kind of an existential crisis you know what am i what path am i on what i'm supposed to do i mean some of that was evident i was i have a family i'm in love with my wife i i love my kids but i didn't have an understanding of the the course of my life i mean my religious life is figured out but i don't understand what i'm supposed to be doing what is arthur brooke supposed to be doing such that i can be happier as a person and frankly i wasn't very happy for lots of reasons that anybody can understand i mean and and i heard a conversation behind me on a plane one night that changed my entire direction it was a couple and i could it was nighttime it's like about eleven o'clock at night and i it was dark and so people were doing what people do on airplanes at 11 o'clock at night you know they're drinking or they're or they're watching a movie or they're sleeping but i could hear a couple talking i could tell as a man and a woman i could tell by their voices they were elderly clearly old and i suppose that they were probably married based on their conversation i couldn't quite make out the husband's words because he was sort of mumbling but the wife's voice was very penetrating it was coming through the chairs and she's he mumbles and he she says don't say it would be better if you were dead and then he mumbles some more and she says it's not true that nobody remembers you it's not true that nobody appreciates you anymore and i'm thinking this is a guy who holy cow he's not he's not a big shot he's not an entrepreneur he's not you know he's not somebody who lived up to his own expectations he got the he got the experience or the education or the job that he wanted and now life is kind of over and he's disappointed and that makes sense or it made sense to me because look if you're a big shot then you're going to die happy huh and the lights go on at the end of the flight an hour later so and i'm kind of curious it's not pre and interest but look you know this is my laboratory as a social scientist it is an overheard conversation perhaps and and so i turn around and it's one of the most famous men in the world this is somebody who's going to do 10 times as much with his life as i ever am he's rich he's famous he's universally admired he's not controversial for stuff that he did many many years ago and i thought to myself my whole model is wrong the problem that i have the direction that i'm going is incorrect because my model of satisfaction is wrong here's the model the world tells you here's the limbic system of your brain the ancient part of your brain that was extant a million years ago and all of marketing and entertainment which is a distributed digital limbic system says work hard make money be successful be admired be envied bank it die happy and it's wrong and and you know in your heart it's wrong because you're always asking yourself hey tom what have you done for me lately that's what your mind is asking you it's not good enough that you founded a company a long time ago and it made a bunch of money it's not good enough we we need to excel we need to achieve we need to create value that's how we're created as people and this guy was blowing away the the world's theory of happiness of satisfaction and i said to myself i don't want to be explaining to my wife esther on a plane 30 years from now 40 years from now i might as well be dead and so i set myself to crack the code what can i do and by the way the data are very clear that the people who have the earliest success the mind-blowing success they're the most likely to be unsatisfied with their lives at the end of their lives the story that you tell about darwin was unnerving he could have been a man on the plane charles darwin who is on anybody's list of the three greatest scientists of all time he was the talk of the town name rings through the annals of history he's a hero this is i think i may have been even more struck by the darwin convention than many many people who we revere today who had early astonishing success they died unhappy but we don't record that we record their success not the unhappiness with their life later on charles darwin had his greatest successes starting when he was 27 years old we all know that he visited the galapagos islands on the voyage of the beagle which is a five-year sailing voyage around the world to collect plants and animals and send him back to england he was getting quite famous in his absence but when he got back he drops this intellectual atomic bomb which is the ideas that led to his theory of natural selection aka evolution and for 30 years i mean he was i mean he's rich he was famous he was the man but then his progress stopped it stopped because he didn't have the mathematical ability to keep up with his own research his research passed him by technically and there was there was actually an advance that he needed that today we call genetics that he couldn't understand it was written in german he didn't study germany as a bad student he didn't do his mathematics homework he never learned very much about statistics and so the result was that he was left in the dust which happens to people in their 40s and at mass most their early 50s based on their early success and he spent the last 20 years of his life complaining about the disappointing i mean he wrote 11 books after that point but they're all sort of derivative they're like straw and he said i don't have the energy to do any work that i really find satisfying to his friends and you know he died disappointed he died sad the great maybe the greatest naturalist of all time died sad he could have been the man on the plane and this is not what the world tells you the world says bust your pick get as as early as you can get bet 10 000 hours man kill it kill it bank it you know and if if so what right you know the the scenic one on of happiness excellence retire at 40. well how many people do you know who've done that who've actually gotten happier who retired at 40 i know none the point is that's not how human endeavor actually works and so we need a better model and i saw that i did the research and i said time to build a better model that actually describes the dynamics of human experience that actually digs into what actually brings us happiness and that's what my research is about that's why i'm dedicating the rest of my life to exploring all right so to put a fine point on it the punchline ends up being there's two kinds of intelligence yeah so type one is fluid sort of raw intelligence darwin's genius was fluid intelligence his innovative capacity is what made tom tom which is your indefatigable energy your focus your ability to get better and better to be the ninja in your particular field which gets better and better in three years it sounds sexy even as you're saying it that that's what i find so horrible that's hustle culture man hustle culture rewards that and and by the way and it's been an awesome ride oh and it's super addictive it's super it actually works in the same dopamine pathways as you know methamphetamines and alcohol and yes it is my one addiction success addiction yeah it's a killer and you you know write about in the book about the success addiction that virtually all entrepreneurs virtually all strivers have you can be you know the ace electrician and have a success addiction because we are wired to want to be excellent and to be admired which leads you to get better and better and better what you do using what we've identified is what psychologists have identified for a long time now as fluid intelligence your the structure of your brain lends itself to just incredible energy and focus and to get better and better and better as an individual at solving any problem faster than others the problem is this is the problem that led to darwin's misery and so many others it peaks in your late 30s or early 40s and then it declines and then it declines faster and if you try to keep your groove you're going to ride that thing to the basement and you're going to be the man on the plane you're going to be darwin you're going to be bitter and unhappy and most people think they get one curve that's the bad news the good news is that's not your only curve you have a second curve that comes in behind it which is not your fluid intelligence which goes up peaks comes down it's your crystallized intelligence your wisdom which doesn't have fast working memory the innovative capacity is not as good but it's your ability to identify patterns to use the information in your environment it's like having the new york public library at your disposal it takes a while to get the information like i can't remember that thing because it's on the fourth floor back in the stacks i got to send my guy to get it but it's in there and you can use this information to be a teacher to be a historian to have actual wisdom that's what you get better at through your 40s and 50s and you can stay high in your 60s and 70s and beyond that's your true success curve as you get older the key is you got to walk from fluid intelligence over to crystallized intelligence you got to walk from the star litigator to the managing partner from the from the innovative startup entrepreneur to the venture capitalist from the from the mathematical researcher to the professor those are the different curves you got to go from one to the other and if you're stuck on the first and if that's your vision of your own greatness and you can't be thrown off that you'll be chasing that for the rest of your life even though it's just it's in it's in the basement and you can't get it back so there are some people that can wake themselves up out of the matrix other people that must be awoken i do fear sometimes that i need to be awoken uh but you woke yourself up i'm so curious so you're doing your thing you're very successful and i don't know maybe and i guess we should tell people that you started out as a musician yeah a french horn player nonetheless very specific yes and very esoteric and made a living as a professional all right so you're killing that game but you realize that you're declining do you think that going on that is what allowed you to then consciously step away while it seems like you were still in your prime as the leader the president of this think tank i got very lucky i got very lucky that i failed my first career and after having a lot of success i went into early decline and out of desperation to support my family and to have a future out of my 20s i had to change gears i didn't have a college education i dropped out of college you know dropped out kicked out splitting hairs when i was 19 i and i went on the road as a as a musician what that's my parents call it the gap my gap decade right which you can imagine how fun that was for them and you know i kind of made a living kind of made my rent you know but i was i was living my best life because i was a young guy i didn't have a health insurance i didn't go to the dentist for six years at one point which i'm still paying for and but like i've told friends i um i never missed a date without cigarettes so you know you you figure out what my priorities were at that particular point in my life and fortunately i gave that up a long time ago but i was going into decline as a french horn player and things that used to be easy became hard things that were hard became impossible and i saw the writing on the wall i saw a lot of older classical musicians who were deeply alcoholic and unhappy and had been good and now weren't and didn't have the respect of the younger people that were having a harder time making a living and i thought look i'm barely making a living now i'm ambitious and it's going well i mean like i was in the barcelona symphony so i was making a middle class living and that's a good orchestra but i knew that i couldn't keep it up and so i had to change just by necessity i had to change and i went back to college got my college degree by correspondence and at 31 left to start my phd that by the way that's not just an arbitrary thing it's the family business my father was a college professor my grandfather was a college professor so i knew that business more better than any other i know how to do a phd my father was working on his phd even when i was a kid so i saw that whole process that wasn't foreign or exotic to me at all and i knew what professors do for a living and i said okay i can do that because i know that i was very i was very ashamed i was just i felt horrible about myself that i had but i had failed at this thing that it was everything to me i mean i there were i would have just as soon died than to not be a french horn player because there was nothing else but i didn't die and i couldn't die because i was a married man i was in love with my wife and and you know we were going to have kids and what what was it going to do i mean were you honest with her about what you're going through at that point yeah yeah she knew well she knew full well i mean she knows me i'm an open world i'm an open book with her and i mean she's also smart and you know we she she knows me super well in no small part because when we were dating um we didn't speak the same language and we spoke rudimentary amounts of the same language for the entire first year of our marriage oh you got to know each other you get to know each other in a deep human way when you actually can't talk because you can't lie i recommend this to everybody that's really unexpected yeah yeah yeah how did you fall in love if you guys weren't speaking man if you saw her i was 24. she's a rock and roll singer from barcelona she's beautiful and she's lovely and she's kind and she's smart and weirdly she liked me and so and i threw in big time i moved to barcelona to try to convince her to marry me without speaking a word of the same language this is what entrepreneurs do right it's the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is to give away your heart and and to take a chance that's what young people today they're so non-entrepreneurial if they're unwilling to fall in love because that i mean forget the companies forget the money forget all the cool stuff that you and i've been able to do professionally fall in love that's entrepreneurship right that's the big bet i have never heard anybody describe it like that well entrepreneurs because of risk taking like entrepreneurship is taking a big risk in in looking for major rewards for explosive returns i'm not going to tell you how to denominate those returns it's faith and resources that you don't already have in hand these are the characteristics of the entrepreneur when i was writing a textbook on entrepreneurship i was looking at that i'm saying it's a it's a big mistake to talk about this in terms of money we should be talking about this in terms of love because that's the currency of life and when a whole generation of young people are miserable because they're comfortable putting millions of people people's dollars at risk to start a company but they're unwilling to go bankrupt in their relationships they're unwilling to have somebody crush them by breaking up with them they're just not very entrepreneurial that's the problem we have people who are too non-entrepreneurial which is one of the reasons that we have too few people who are in love today as far as i'm concerned so that was the thing man i took that i jumped i did that i did that and that that was actually very good because that gave me a lot of confidence that i could conquer my fear i could take a risk i mean look it was it was a very low chance this was going to work out and we're going to learn each other's language and she's going to realize i'm a hopeless stooge or something or we're not going to love each other or something and we just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary congratulations we have three adult children it's incredible it's amazing so so that was we know each other deeply deeply deeply she knows all of my nonsense because she knows it without the words you can shade all kinds of truth with with words you can't when it's just your heart you're just a heart to heart now that's really unexpected that's very intriguing to me i would because i have leaned on language so heavily in my life in fact if there's anything so i once went live for 24 hours as a thing like to celebrate hitting a certain number on facebook i don't even remember now what number but i went live for 24 hours and literally i that morning or the next afternoon whatever i flew to london and then i did an event with no microphone and i spoke for nine hours so at the end of that something happened to my my vocal cords and i was having a hard time talking and i could feel like my throat would click is so distressing go to a therapist they stick a camera down my throat the whole nine like trying to figure out what did i do and i start really worrying what does my life look like if i can't speak and that was the first time where i was like whoa like imagine losing that thing that made you you and i've always been highly verbal that was always the thing that i could terrible at math got horrendous sat scores but i'm highly verbal you're extremely expressive you're extremely expressive i will give you that i'll take that it's absolutely true so and i thought oh god what happens if i lose my voice so i can't imagine trying to court the woman who is now my wife yeah almost 20 years uh without my voice that's the interesting thing yeah no no and and me too look i mean i talk for a living i literally i mean blah blah blah that's what i do for a living did it not hit you then that like oh god i'm taking away my superpower well because it was my superpower i was i was a french horn player okay so you guys connected over music yeah well we were at a music festival in france in dijon in france that's how you met yeah and i was on tour and she was studying and she was studying with a teacher an american teacher there and we met at this music festival and and and we were playing music and that's what you did and so that that made it a little bit easier i mean we were less reliant on on talking yeah then than i am today yeah that's awesome yeah yeah for sure and so that was you know when i went into the client as a musician she was right there to be helpful and she gave me she gave me the courage yeah was she warm about it or was she super warm she said i was deeply unhappy because i was inclined look humans are not intended to decline decline is hugely painful because happiness comes from progress unhappiness comes from regress and when you feel that something is harder than it used to be so it's interesting you know you see this the decline in the fluid intelligence care we just talked about if you're really a striver and that's what i'm working with i'm working with people who want to make the most with their lives if you look if you never do anything with your life you're not gonna know it's over you're not gonna have this big crisis at the end of your life because you never did anything and i was like i watched a lot of tv awesome it's like i can still do that don't you think their whole life is a crisis not really no actually no no not really no no no no i know for sure i mean well here's the thing it depends on what you mean by happiness and what a good life is you know i want my life as a striver but i also recognize that it's not normal in many ways to strive and not to strive to the extent that you have but is that what you mean by it's not normal yeah and it creates problems i mean you you you rain hell on yourself when you're actually doing the stuff that you've done and there's a lot of ways you could have had a much easier life a much more relaxing life greater peace frequently yeah for sure so that's all i mean it's not a very profound point in that way but when i you know when i was when things were going poorly and i was deeply unhappy because i was in a state of regress my wife said you're unhappy you just need to quit and i said that's insane i mean like one can't just walk away but of course and she said yes you can absolutely you can do anything you want i said we'll be poor she said we're already poor you know wait how do you know it's you know multiplying by zero is still zero and uh and so we did we just we bailed you know we went to we left barcelona we moved to boca raton florida where nobody knew us i took a pretty easy teaching job and i started studying by correspondence at night nobody knew i was doing it she had a minimum wage job she spoke very poor english had not graduated from high school and so was learning english and making you know six bucks an hour or whatever it was and i was getting paid to teach the french horn while secretly working on my bachelor's degree at night to build my to to rebuild the person that i was and then finish that went on to and started my phd which is what i really thought i needed to do and that took me a little i came here to los angeles as a matter of fact i studied the rand graduate school in santa monica and then i learned a new trade i learned i actually learned who i was as a person again for the first time but it was like four years of you know it was weird i couldn't i remember trying to sign a check during that time and i couldn't replicate my own signature and it turns out that's not actually quite frequent when people in this period of liminality between phases of their life that their handwriting will change what yeah yeah that's actually a common occurrence i didn't know i was like i'm trying to check for the bank sorry mr brooks this is not the right signature is it is it because there's a subconscious part of you that's like i'm not that person anymore it's i don't it's it's not well understood but there's a the neurophysiology of a lot of this stuff is we're just starting to understand there's no doubt something that where these things are connected where your sense of yourself is somehow connected to you know these motor skills in a particular way i couldn't replicate my own signature sufficiently i got like rejected by the bank for cashing a check into my own account at one point i'm like my my early dementia early stage something what's going on here and what it was was i was in this profound state of liminality which in retrospect was this just fertile period you know i tell the story in the book is a place that you and i both know is pacific northwest guys there's a place called lincoln city in oregon that's you're near just north of newport and i used to go there because my aunt was the receptionist the hotel and she had she lived in a trailer near the beach and it was like this bliss i used to go there and i remember the first time i was trying to fish off the rocks in in lincoln city oregon i was catching nothing this old guy lived in a shack is watching me and he comes up and says kid i've been i've been watching you you know today he'd be arrested but and and i said he said you're not catching anything right he said no he says because you're doing it wrong you can't catch any fish unless it's a falling tide that's when the tide is going out very quickly rushing out between the rocks and i'm like well all the fish are gone right he says no no you'll see it's stirring up the plankton the fish go crazy it's happening in 45 minutes he has his fishing pole we throw our we throw our lines in and we're pulling him out by you know by the tens it's unbelievable and and afterward he's feeling sort of philosophical he lights up a cigarette on the rocks i'm 11 or something and he says hey kid you know during a falling tide you can only make one mistake i said what's that said not having your line in the water and i have learned this that the time between the tides of your life the falling tide of your life looks like you're losing everything get your line in the water because that's the most fertile period of your life so what does it mean to have your line in the water you must try new things you must be fully alive you must try everything you possibly can i need you to define fully alive to be to to wake up each day and to live that day full of possibility not to nurse your wounds not to waste your time not to try to do things that you used to do to be fully alive is to be alive to the new set of experiences that's that's coming across the transom that's super important because during this time of liminality by the way there's a lot of research on this this is not just an anecdote about you know this kid fishing in oregon this is there's a lot of research that shows that this time between periods in your life which there's a guy named bruce feiler who's who writes a book about transitions and he said during these life quakes you know if your if your spouse just left you that's a fertile period for you to learn new things if you you know you've lost somebody to death if you've if you're if you're going through chemotherapy for example this is and you and you're very pandemic for example for example if you during the pandemic many people find that despite the fact that they hated it were insecure and it was horrible that their lives transformed for the good that in terms of what we're talking about here the two curves fluid and crystallized intelligence that period between the two where you're you're declining in one and the other's increasing but you don't know how to get on it or even what it means that's your most fertile period that's when things are can be absolutely magic they're not going to be fun you might not be happy but that's when magic can happen so tell me about this then because this happened to you you've been in periods between you you get out you're successful but you're miserable and so you had to change what was the time between the tides for you what happened you have a concept that resonates with me profoundly which is that suffering is sacred you have to do it well though and i think there's a few key things that you have to recognize and when you were telling your story about your wife a i don't even know who i would be without my wife and as i think so for a period my wife and i now i would say are in very a traditional gender roles but in the beginning of our marriage it was very traditional in a way that was profoundly transformative so much of the way that she tried to express herself in the world was through me so she was a stay-at-home wife but very shrewd very sharp and would push me to be better and was beyond supportive when things were not going well for me and in a very similar vein of like i don't care for poor i want to see you happy that's all that matters to me and so when i was profoundly unhappy i would come home and i would say don't ask me about my day i don't want to think about it i have to separate myself from that and so finally it got to the point where she was like look this is starting to damage our marriage and so i'm going to need you to work less to figure something out whatever and so that's when i went in and decided i was going to quit and we were going to move to a small town in greece and i was going to write again she's greek and it was i was going to do that which made me feel alive and so that was the refrain i want to feel alive again i want to feel alive again and so i knew what that felt like because i had pursued my art so fervently for years and it made me feel some kind of way and so i recognized the decline was able to associate it with well you're just trying to get rich you've made money it hasn't changed so there's something here that you've fundamentally misunderstood about the world and my i guess liminal thing had been it had been going on for a while because when i left film school and did not understand how to break into the film industry that was a devastating period and i would just lay on the floor and i couldn't afford to furnish my apartment and i would the the plenty of room yeah like hilarity was not lost on me i could feel like that cheap nylon carpet that you get in cheap apartments and it would leave like an imprint on my face because i would just lay on the floor and i'm like this is so ridiculous and i started reading about the brain and i don't remember where that insight came from maybe something i picked up in college i don't know but i was like i need to learn about how the brain works and so it's late 90s and brain plasticity is being debated and it wasn't there wasn't an answer some people were like yes it's real other people like no it's not and i was like you know what i'm going to act as if it's true because that's so much more hopeful and so i didn't know the einstein quote back then but the quote of the most important decision anybody will make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe and me deciding that i lived in a world where brain plasticity was real was me saying i live in a friendly universe right and so i started trying to get better and i was teaching at the time and so i'm teaching film and i start noticing i can make the students films better if i can make their films better because by this point i believe i have no talent that's a whole part of the story so i believe i'm completely talentless i thought i was born with talent i clearly was not i don't know how to break into the industry i'm going to teach because those that can do and those that can't teach but i'm reading about the brain brain plasticity i'm helping the students make their films better and i have a question in my mind which is well if i can make their films better why can't i make my own better i was like maybe i could and so that gives me the hope that i need to be fully alive to start approaching things with hey maybe i just need to get better and i can work on this and i had read the dow dijin when i was 16 which plants some very profound seeds in my mind which i will now call a growth mindset but back then like i didn't really understand how to put them to use in my life but i start putting them to use in my life i start getting better at filmmaking and you couple that with my wife being just incredibly encouraging not afraid to be poor wanting to see me happy and and that was when i went in and as i said before we started rolling i went into my partners and i quit and i said look i can't keep pursuing money anymore and so i don't know my version of having my um my line in the water was knowing i wanted to feel alive believing that if i went and did the thing that i wanted to do that i would get better at it and that if i got good enough i couldn't be denied right and so the steve martin quote this would have been it would have been like 28 29. so you're really on your fluid intelligence curve in a big way but you're not feeling it so i have struggled my entire life have you seen amadeus for sure okay so solieri laments to god why did you make me oh my god you're a musician this will resonate with you why did you make me just good enough to realize i'll never be as good as mozart why couldn't you have made me like just a another person in the crowd that can appreciate what he does but you had to make me just good enough that i want to be that good and i realize i never will be that's how i have felt my entire life i've always had friends that were just enough smarter than me that i was like damn i'm never going to be that smart and so i always tried to find a different lane and in the beginning it was being funny and so for a long time i wanted to be a stand-up comic but it was all self-deprecating because i had low self-esteem i would just make fun of myself all day which only reinforced my low self-esteem for sure and so while i was very funny it didn't feel good and so ultimately end up rejecting that um but yeah so at the height of my fluid intelligence i did not feel intelligent i felt the exact opposite and you were getting tons of material success thus helping you to understand later on as you as you increase the wisdom that the if if you take the instrumentality of money and make it your intrinsic focus you're destined for misery no doubt now this is an interesting you know insight that that we we can take back to ancient times but saint thomas aquinas in 1265 writes his summa theologica the seminal text of western philosophy you know forget that this the theology just western philosophy and in it he talks about this very interesting thing he says that that man mankind humankind would say today has four idols you pursue everybody pursues one or more of four idols and he calls them the substitutes for god because his supposition is that that we all want god but god is extremely inconvenient a lot of one-sided conversations and a ton of rules so we look for substitutes that have kind of these divine characteristics the problem is they're 180 degrees off god their money power pleasure and fame fame he says honor which is has different connotations you have a son who's a marine who serves with honor that's not what we mean we're talking about admiration and the uh of other people of you which is which is people want that or or just prestige or maybe fame you know some people actually want to be famous but let's just call it money power pleasure and fame everybody you know i play this game what's my idol and i'll ask people not what's your actual idol but what is not your idol you know of these four money power pleasure fame what's the one that least attracts you that you could get rid of with total impunity you don't care and then we'll we'll start eliminating and we're going to find your idol is the whole thing now the interesting thing about that is that what he says is not that you'll go to hell if you do that he says you'll be unhappy if you don't recognize the idol if you don't recognize the idols in your life the trouble is the limbic system of your brain mother nature that tyrant tells you that you'll actually be happy if you get your idol and so you chase it and you chase it you can't quite figure out what you're gonna do if you get it like tom's going to get you know hundreds of millions or billions of dollars what are you going to do with that money that you would actually like and you can't quite figure out well yeah because if you articulate it you know if i say you'll buy a yacht and you're like i know that sounds like kind of a hassle to have a yacht maybe it sounds good but not that good right the real reason you want that is because you want admiration because you want the the validation of what it represents of you to you you want to this transference of social comparison you've always done with other people you want to actually feel the thing that you felt for others about yourself that's what the idols do that's the nasty switcheroo that's the that's the despotism of this of of mistaking the intrinsic good for the instrumentality that's why thomas aquinas was so astute in what he was talking about here so when we play this game and we we we see what is actually holding us back and you experienced this absolutely you were chasing the thing chasing the thing and chasing anything getting more and more and more miserable because you're actually getting closer and closer to your idol and realizing it will not realize one single thing that you needed for your own happiness it had no intrinsic worth look there's anything about money by the way the research on money is very clear that it doesn't actually ever bring happiness it lowers unhappiness which are processed in different hemispheres of the of the brain happiness and unhappiness are not opposites they're not they're different experiences and what happens is at low levels money will lower unhappiness so when i could finally go to the dentist i felt better the trouble is i don't know how to do the sums inside my brain i just knew i felt better and we always mistake lower unhappiness for higher happiness and so early on you're like wow i went from from you know fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a year and i felt better i actually felt better about myself i was able to eliminate some of these sources of of you know misery so i'm happier and so you get into the pattern early on you wire your brain when you're a young person working your way up the ladder more money feel better that means more happiness and you realize that going from 250 to 300 000 is not doing it that because it's not big enough jump apparently so you go and you go and you go and you go and you go and you're basically just chasing a lure it's a real tyranny what is up my friends i have huge news for you about one of the most exciting and important projects i've ever worked on in my life as you guys know it is my mission to help teach people about how to build a mindset and the skills that they're going to need to live an extraordinary life and over the last few months i've been working hard behind the scenes to create a brand new tool that will help you do exactly that it's called project kaizen and i'm proud to announce that i'll be bringing it to the world later this year project kaizen is a web 3 based game like experience that is a story based world that's going to allow you to get inside build an avatar that is aspirational of who you want to become and then take the path of the warrior seeking continuous improvement inside of a story world and game experience all right my friend i cannot tell you how excited i am about this amazing new project which i think ushers in a whole new form of entertainment and i want to meet you inside of project kaizen and help you have fun with these ideas of always getting better right click the link and join me in discord and until then my friends be legendary take care no doubt and that's what you experienced and that's why you were miserable right because you couldn't get there from here it's interesting yes i put different words to it and i'm curious to see what you think about this so i think about it from an evolutionary standpoint so we have directives in our brain that there is going to be a sense of dis-ease if you don't do certain things i think that deep and profound unhappiness can come from pursuing the wrong thing so that you're spending your time doing things that just they rob you of energy instead of giving you energy but i also think that people end up profoundly unhappy by not doing things that nature wants them to do right and i think one of the things that nature wants us to do and so just not doing it will be a problem is work really hard to turn your potential into skill set yeah and so if things come easily to you even though you're on top of the world and everybody else admires you and wants to be you that there will be a sense of disease for you because you're not working hard it doesn't feel meritorious yeah nature has to find a proxy right so nature wants you to have children so it makes sure that sex is intensely pleasurable but that's really just a proxy for have kids so that i find really interesting that that nature is working in these weird proxies so people end up like you think you're supposed to do one thing chase money power fame whatever you're like why does this suck but all of those things actually do have utility and so the thing with money is people are always going to pursue it the thing with fame is people are always going to pursue it why because it actually has utility so money for instance is more powerful than people think not less but it isn't what you've been told so it's never what myself and everyone else included is trying to do is feel better about themselves right it won't help with that it cannot touch your self-esteem and that's like the biggest like mind [ __ ] ever your wife won't love you more your children won't respect you more when you have more money exactly more troubling yes you won't respect you more yes which is ultimately the because other people will like people treat me differently because i have some micro fame and then because it's actually troubling too because when you know somebody is instrumentalizing you when you know somebody's objectifying you because of this outside characteristic it makes you profoundly uncomfortable it's interesting people hate that you know it's the one thing where we will allow people to objectify us you're well known you're successful and people will be nice to you because of that and deep down you know that they they they don't love you and it's not how it plays out in my head how does it play out in your head that i have no ability to be vulnerable around them no i see and so that's the same self-objective does the same part of objectification and if when you're objectified you can't be a full person there's another interesting thing that might actually apply you're creative you're fundamentally a creative when you were doing your work you were thrown off the creative process now why is creativity intensely pleasurable you get you've read the work of michael cheeks the great social psychologist who wrote a book a very famous book called flow f-l-o-w flow and what it talks about is how minutes how hours turn to minutes of sheer pleasure when you're in this flow state when you're doing something that you can master your you can it's not too easy it requires your ability but you can master it because of your skill and you can get into this groove creatives must create if creatives are not creating they will be miserable because they can't attain a flow state it's very possible tom that when you were in this part of your career you needed to create you wanted to quit and go to greece to do creation you were basically craving that it's like you had no protein in your diet for a year or something it's like i don't know i just can't stop thinking about peanut butter well because you were create you were you were you were craving this macronutrient in your psyche and and you were never getting a flow state and if you're denied the flow state that uniquely comes to you through creativity you're gonna you're gonna be practically suicidal yeah it was it was definitely a rough period that's interesting i've never thought about it as being intrinsically a reflection of the pleasurability of flow but you might be right it's just i feel i feel alive that is the right word i feel alive when i'm creating i am never happier than what i'm creating it's amazing people who are fundamentally creative look same thing you know when i retired as a ceo and i came back to writing speaking and teaching um i'm a new man i'm a new man for the past three years it's extraordinary you said something a while ago i didn't want to interrupt you but i want to go back to it now you said you rediscovered yourself yeah what does that mean like you need a sense of identity is that a core part of this like is when you say you rediscovered is it a self-narrative it's you you know who you deeply are as a person you're acquainted with yourself you're acquainted with your true self and just as with people who are around you you can you can create a an identity that's actually not authentic you can create an identity to yourself that's not authentic you can be giving yourself a self narrative that's not true to actually who you are as a person what does it mean who you are what are you good at what you love it generally speaking has to do with being in the zone of what you actually love to do and what you appreciate most in your life when you're in line with your own values when you're living a court with your own value so jung would have put it this way carl jung his definition of his understanding of happiness was that you need to understand your own values what you value what you think is proper and correct and moral and if you know what that is and can articulate it and live according to that you will be happy if you agree with that i think it's actually there's a lot of truth to that because you know you have to figure out what you think what your model of the world actually is what you think truth is and then living in accord with your own values with your own integrity is really critically important because when people live outside that groove they're they're never in equilibrium they're just never the problem is that they're not comfortable they're not comfortable in their own skin and i've noticed this you know i was working you know it was it was it was good being the president of a think tank i was lucky to be president of think tank i believed in the work but it wasn't who i was and so i was kind of out of my groove for 10 years 10 and a half years and when i started going when i went back to writing and speaking and teaching and doing creative work i said ah it's always who you were or was that because you switched into christmas i was always a creator you know as a kid i was painting and writing and composing music and i just always wanted to be i was creativity is the most important thing in my life or curiosity and creativity are the or the most important thing that i can not most important thing in my life the most important thing that i can do and when i'm actually happiest and when i was managing a large workforce managing a lot of creatives to their best selves i mean it was certainly creative moments to it to be sure but it wasn't comfortable to me and when i my second curve which was much more crystallized intelligence is a lot also a lot more creative so i was kind of out of equilibrium for a long time during that period as well which compounds the problem of my declining fluid intelligence also not being in a creative role but it's just so much better i mean i i teach at a great university which i love i write for a magazine every week about things that i'm really interested in i get to talk to you about it this is well beast's working so true for some reason i was just thinking today like i was pacing listening to you and i was like i'm technically working right now weird i was like this is cool it is super cool and you know there are people that i've met it's interesting you know i talk to lawyers who don't feel like they're working i talked to a guy who's putting in cabinets in my house and and he's super into putting in cabinets he loves making cabinets he was talking about all the details and he's so proud of his work and i say do you do do you like your work and he said it doesn't feel like work you know i went on a fishing expedition deep sea fishing expedition with my son carlos we we he loves the fish we go fishing and uh and the guy says every morning i wake up and he says today i'm going fishing and so this is what we all need to find i mean we need to eat each person because we have the blessing of living in an economy where you can do a lot of different things the problem is that people chase these extrinsic lures the money power pleasure and fame and they get out of the groove of what they're supposed to do and then they wonder why they're unhappy i want to go back to young and this idea of values so as you were saying it i was like yes part of me agrees but then as i run the thought experiment sort of check it against other things um other people to see if it holds up i feel like right now we're living through maybe a weird moment or maybe a completely normal moment in time where people are using their values to cudgel each other and it doesn't when i look at them it makes me deeply uncomfortable and does not resonate with how i think about values so is this just a bastardization of the word value or do the people that that on either side of the aisle that are just viciously going after each other right do they really believe what they're saying because it seems like a super dark energy yeah so so this is a variation on the theme they're these these are people's true values but in a fear equilibrium where we're culturally in a polarity of fear fear and love are cognitive and philosophical opposites so fear is the master emotion it occupies a part of the limbic system called the amygdala it actually uses more brain tissue than any other basic emotion because it's what keeps you alive if it were not for fear you would have been you know your lineage would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago by being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger which weirdly you were not afraid of and so so fear is really important love is the opposite of fear love will actually neutralize inappropriate fear or excessive fear fear i did not see those opposites coming yeah because we think of love and hatred but hatred is downstream from fear hatred is always a byproduct of fear downstream from fear so what happens is i love the way you say that like ultra profound [ __ ] like yeah obviously never thought of that before and so and so when when when people come to me and they have too much fear the prescription is surround it with more love neutralize it with greater amounts of love it's ph and it's it's alkaline and acid if you on the other hand if you're looking for more love and you don't have enough love in your life i'm going to ask you questions about what you're afraid of because i'm going to try to work on your fear god damn yeah and so this is and this is how we actually deal with you if you have a fear problem i'm going to work on a love dimension if you have a love problem i'm going to work on the fear dimension okay so now when all the way this all this comes together ultimately in our lives is we have to figure out what the problem is and what we have in our society today is a fear polarity in our politics and our ideology and our culture and what that meant the way that manifests in our values is we don't use our values which are beautiful and good as a gift we use them as a weapon now think how counter effective that is how how how destructive that actually is but when you're in a fear polarity you're actually through fear you're going to use your own values antagonistically toward other people which is incredibly uh ineffective you're using coercion instead of persuasion the point of values and sharing your values is to persuade each other that's the fruit of the enlightenment but it's also just you know the basis of human nature if you cuddle other people with your with your with your values and use them as a weapon there's zero percent chance you're going to convince anybody of anything but you're trying to use force zero so the problem that we have is we could move from a fear to a love polarity then people would go back to using their values as a gift we might we will disagree we will disagree but disagreement is beautiful it's the competition of ideas which is fundamental to a free society you and your wife there are things you'll never agree on and you will die married and in love that's a you can live in permanent harmony with somebody with whom you disagree but only if you have a love polarity in your life and you use your values which are in contrast to the other person's values as a gift and not as a weapon what we see today in politics on campuses in media is that people are trying to kill each other with their values you know you're a traitor well you're a racist i mean the things that people are throwing at each other is basically never going to convince anybody of anything because there's too much fear damn so what are people afraid of people are afraid we go through these these sort of sign waves of these cultural polarities a lot and emotional contagion is a very profound thing facts yeah and so emotional contagion is one in which it's uh that the culture actually starts to become infested so when when i was a kid for example growing up in the pacific northwest um in the 1970s there was deep fear of serial killers cults i remember it's a fear-based polarity of cult and what that that led to was unbelievable um bitterness in politics where left and right just as bad as today or almost as bad as it is today um between the democrats and the republicans between the conservatives and the liberals and it all came from the fear that it infected you know from in the in the aftermath of vietnam and you know the the culture wars that were going on and the and the the the cold war these were very it was a very fear-based society on the basis of this there was a break in that but then you know it comes back again is the whole thing the the opportunity for us as social entrepreneurs the opportunity for us is to is to change the polarity is to encourage people to live by love to have the courage of actually living by love in a fear of culture and that's you know you can fire people up with that it's what does it mean how do you do that you basically to make people commit to only using their values as a gift to being around people who are different than they are to listen to different points of view to go to people that with whom they would ordinarily not be in communion and say i want you to know i love you to say those incredibly transgressive words this is the most transgressive message in all of human history is love your enemies pray for those who persecute you that's the gospel of saint matthew that changed life on earth actually is to say that led to that concept led to the western enlightenment which basically said we don't have to use force we can actually live by persuasion that was a profound difference in the in the culture that led to the progress that would create an economy where tom can become a successful entrepreneur quite frankly one thing leads to another but we're in regress right now the fear polarity in our culture is leading us we're devolving culturally and because of this so if we really want a better world i mean i know i sound like a just like an unrepentant hippie of which i've been credibly accused that we need we need love we need to stand up to the people on our own side whatever that side is and say i refuse to hate i'm just i'm just not going to do it i'm i'm done man i'm done i love you it's interesting so i can't articulate it that cogently because i probably haven't spent as much time thinking about it as you but i've come to a similar conclusion so what i've been saying so i never thought that i would ever utter a word that had anything to do with the culture war and then i started to really get freaked out by watching people run in opposite directions like just seemingly as fast as i can you're not super political right i'm not political in the slightest i don't find politics interesting it seems to encourage people to be divisive right and so my thing is to your earlier point about you can be married to somebody and love them deeply and passionately and disagree about things so in business as is true in marriage if you both think alike one of you is not necessary and the i heard the same thing about so when when you really ask why are there two parties which i'd never stopped to contemplate that so ray dalio says there are only so many human personalities and that's why history repeats over and over and over ah it's really interesting yeah that there are only so many personality types and that there are basically two big buckets that you can break people into people that are we'll call compassion dominant and people who are conscientious dominant so not that they're exclusively either but people who are like you can't leave anybody behind and then people over here like you have to be responsible for yourself right so this is sort of the liberal conservative yeah exactly economy that we often think about popularly exactly yeah and so that cool all makes sense and then in business i watched this play out so i had two partners previously and there were times where they didn't see eye to eye and i remember the contribution i felt most strongly that i had brought to the dynamic was i'm on the outside going you're both extraordinary so value each other for being different right like value that friction right and that in the friction lies the magic and that either one of you would be a problem on your own but when you have that countervailing force it actually creates something really incredible but only if you respect the other person's view and so then i started going okay politically it's the same thing whether you're conservative or liberal it's like you have to respect the friction you have to understand that either one if we only had one spirals into madness and it is only in the friction i won't even say the balance it's in the friction between the two that you sharpen your ideas yes spoken like a great entrepreneur look the the private proverbs say that iron sharpens iron i was giving a talk to the assembled members of the republican party on the house and the senate side the members of the house the members of the senate all republicans at a retreat some years ago and i said i asked how many of you wish we lived in a one-party state no hands and no hearts let's be honest i said how many of you are grateful that we live in a democracy that has multiple parties or at least two every hand goes up i said you just told me you're grateful for the democratic party axiomatically i wasn't trying to be tricky but it's actually true if you're grateful that you ca that they're that we live in a country where we can actually have disagreement without a knock in the night and the jack-booted thug you are by axiom by construction grateful for the people who disagree with you look the yankees are grateful for the red sox they don't want to blow up the red sox bus on the way to the game that's not how competition works competition requires collaboration it requires rules it requires respect you know i like the red sox one of the yankees but i want their yankees to show up with their best pitching and beat them fair and square i don't want them to forfeit that's actually there's no good in that there's no good in that whatsoever and remembering this is really really critical you know the whole idea that we're in right now and this is how the fear-based polarity breaks down the iron sharpens iron how it breaks down the whole idea of competition it basically says that do whatever you have to because you know war i mean the you know scratch of the eyes you know a knee to the groin i don't actually care what happens in politics because the biggest threat to this country is my neighbor who votes for the other party that is simple insanity not to mention the fact that that is factually incorrect you know it's actually possible that vladimir putin is going to bring this country back together again it's actually possible that somebody who's your people are you know looking at like oh that's non-democratic that's what that thing means it's actually not the democrats right it's something else and that's one of the reasons by the way that that threat brings people together that a common enemy actually brings people together the great the the greatest pity that i can imagine is that the coronavirus epidemic didn't make us love them for a minute though didn't feel like it was going to sure did it sure did we politicized that because of the deep fear in our country and the fact that we have leaders that are encouraging us to kill each other rhetorically that are encouraging us for their own the outraged industrial complex in media and politics is trying to drive us apart because outrage industrial complex i like that it's an old plan eisenhower's military-industrial complex but the outrage industrial complex remember you know everybody's watching us now when you hate somebody's profiting and not you bottom line well said yeah that's exactly how it feels yeah and it's crazy and it's interesting so i'm definitely not an unrepentant hippie or credibly accused uh of being hippie i'm super weirded out by that stuff but the only thing i can think is that we have to race to the middle and love each other yeah like that's it and love has been or even not in the middle even just like standing stay in the science and still love each other it's like keep your opinions absolutely you know i'm not saying get rid of your opinions yeah yeah but isn't it the party that's closest to the middle always gets elected nah it's not necessarily the case i mean we've been kind of oscillating back and forth between between political positions that are actually not representative of the middle and this is a different kind of sort of a it's a different political dynamic which you're kind of going rail to rail and you're going rail to rail because you know you basically because you can have bashing yeah rail on youtube for example you can say that you know given the fact that we we go between parties might mean because people are so close to the center or it might be because you have two blocks that are incredibly strong that are relatively equal in power but very very different than one another so this is the key the key is basically either one can be fine you can have very i mean i always had dinner with a couple an older couple a couple of weeks ago and the the wife is super liberal like pro-choice and the democrats all the way and the husband is just he's just as right-wing as they get i mean just very pro-life on abortion i mean all these issues that down the line what you'd expect from conservatives and liberals and they're they've been they've been married for 50 years and they and it's like and privately says gosh i admire her so much she's just so wonderful in the whole thing and and it reminded me that this is the key thing that you can be in permanent disagreement but in love equilibrium we just have to be people that can do that you know we've been convinced somehow by people who are making money and getting power and followers and their jollies from our fighting that we have to that we that we can't be around people disagree with us that's insanity that's a that's a that's quite frankly a mistake and you know and you would not be a successful entrepreneur if that had been the case where everybody has to agree because as you quite astutely point out um you know if you surround yourself with people just like you you're not going to succeed i love the idea of lincoln's a team of rivals exactly right getting people to think differently getting people that will push you like in in business i will just tell you right now if you don't have people that are willing to tell you when you're wrong you are [ __ ] at least so i going back to my own insecurities i don't see myself as smart enough to just run the company by decree so i've had to create a structure where people are not afraid to speak to power and because i have not invested anything in my self-esteem around being right i don't mind like hey just tell me where i'm wrong i'm so like obsessed with getting the result i don't care if it's my idea i just need it to be the right idea but man it's really hard to get people in in a company dynamic where ultimately there's an imbalance of power and of course i can fire them at any second but they could leave at any second which is equally distressing for me except multiplied they only have you know two people my wife and i who co-founded the company to worry about we have all 50 of them uh you know to worry about so and if you're a tyrant and they leave you're cooked yeah no doubt yeah because it's hard to find good people and the secret to success actually is a good team it actually is good people it's interesting i do this test for my students i teach this class called leadership and happiness at the harvard business school and i take them through a battery of personality and happiness tests over the course of the semester and the one they like best is the positive affect negative affect battery and what that is is is your positive and negative affect emotion levels and what they learn is that you can be both very positive and negative you can be a high happiness and a high unhappiness person because you're a high affect person and you can also be a low unhappiness person but a low expression of happiness person you're a low affect person you can be high positive low negative that's the cheerleader you can be low positive and high negative that's the poet low low is the judge and high high is you he's the mad scientist right and what you need and what i show is actually you know using the you know the research on this that you got to figure out which one you are and you must surround yourself with what you're not the biggest predictor of success on teams and entrepreneurial startups or even established companies is making sure that the ceo is not surrounding herself or himself with people who have the same affect profile and there's a role for everybody there's a role for the poets there's a role for the judges it's interesting it's a guy who you know is actually a woman in my class this year and she's like i don't know if i can be a successful business leader she's a doctor um and she's getting her mba super high super strive or superstriver she says i don't know you know if i get i've got this judge profile you know this low low affect profile i don't i don't know i said what'd you do for a living before this i was a surgeon i said that's perfect i do not want a high fx surgeon you know somebody who opens me up and says oh my god and so there's a role for everybody and we actually need that iron sharpening iron on our teams and we need to value it we need to love it we need to actually resist the tendency to want to surround ourselves with people like us and this is exactly what we're not doing in our politics and our country is in decline as a result i also think we need to have a healthy distrust of ourselves you're not going to like those words but i am skeptical enough of myself meaning that i know i'm high high that i can get very excited about something i know that emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect and so it's like i have to make sure that i seek that disconfirming evidence that i don't think well i feel it and therefore we all need to get behind this idea right i'm like no no i tell people put on your cynical hat like tell me where's the problem yeah i completely agree with that and you know you if you had adam grant on the show no adam teaches it at wharton at you know penn and social psychology is fantastic his newest book was called think again which is exactly the case that you're making he makes the case that if you really want to be successful don't trust you and it doesn't mean that you can never trust you but you know look for the evidence to the contrary look for ways that where your confirmation bias is probably leading you astray don't look to feel good about yourself because you were right on everything look you're wrong on lots of stuff you just don't know on what stuff yeah so have people around you who can and it's probably not that fun to have somebody around you who every single day says you're wrong in every single thing you got to find some sort of balance for pete's sake and if you're the boss you're probably right on most things but do if you if you're wrong you should want to know first not last if you want to be successful yeah it's crazy to me how and i won't say it's crazy i understand it when you are right it feels good even now when i know better it still feels good when i was right yeah i just don't invest in that i don't encourage that in myself i'm like yo you've got to be careful with that yeah but when people would actually rather like they get angry when people point out a flaw in the idea i'm like what are you doing like that you are headed towards an iceberg and you're actively discouraging people from letting you know yeah it's ego threat ego threat is really deep for people who are living their heads because they don't want people to think they're incompetent failure's real totally failure's coming no but they will they'll resist tooth and nail it's it's like you're trying to cut off my finger by telling me my opinion was wrong it's unbelievable how the evolution has led us to this place you want to be right you want to be right because you feel like an almost physical need to be right being contradicted um is is socially painful and there's a um the same part of the brain the anterior cingulate of the brain processes both physical and social pain we have a very practical brain a very parsimonious brain and you know stimulating the same part of the brain so it's like you know being being told you're wrong and being embarrassed for something that you were wrong feels like somebody punching you in the face oh it's your brain at least and so you'll resist that because you're trying to protect yourself it's deeply sub-optimal and dangerous you're right yeah if i could just in fact my success is because i'm not afraid to be embarrassed i never like it it sucks every time but a willingness to be embarrassed is how i have learned yeah i know and humility of course is a great is one of the great secrets of happiness too that's interesting why yeah humility is in is because it gives you peace humility allows you to relax because you're not trying to protect yourself yeah you're not actually trying to protect your fortune you're not standing in front of your stash of gold all the time you know walking back and forth with a shotgun you know you could basically just walk away and take it you know you can you can relax into the reality of your fallibility for for once and a lot of people never quite and i'm sure that people are listening to our words right now and some people are going like actually i think that might be true you know i've never actually let down my guard you know and once you actually get into it it's actually it's a very interesting rhetorical habit when you're having a conversation with your spouse or your friend or your any luck interlocutor of any kind and they make a good point say huh that's a really good point i think i might be wrong i think i'm i think i might be wrong no that's really hard secret to marriage it is oh man god if you can do that it's amazing it is amazing now part of the problem is that you often don't think you're wrong that's part of the problem yeah and so you know being conciliatory in a way that that you know saying i think i'm wrong when you actually aren't or or where truth is you just don't know you just don't know i mean a lot of marital discord comes because you know somebody's saying you got to do something differently and you literally don't know what to do you don't know what to do i mean there are probably times when you're miserable i'm just going to guess in your work and you were going you're working 80 100 hours a week and you're going in a million different directions in your wife so you need to be happy you need to let this go you need to do less and you're like i don't know what to do less i don't know how to do less and that's really tough because that's giving you directions that you can't quite take and a lot of marital discord actually comes down to that it's directions you don't know how to follow that's really interesting yeah the that is money and i think that when people are confused they are not necessarily at their worst but it's not a great place to be the confused mind says no if you have a defense mechanism against being wrong then you're gonna throw that up you've got self-delusion in the mix so yeah it can be a pretty potent cocktail yeah but one thing that served my wife and i extraordinarily well is when the other person is like oh man you might actually be right i think that i'm wrong or is like you know what you're absolutely right i completely apologize we reward them like oh my god like thank you that really means something and so it isn't see i told you you finally recognized it it's oh my god like thank you that's really in good relationships that's true and loving relationships that's true but when when you're in the there's a phenomenon in in the work on on conflict called motive attribution asymmetry mode of attribution of symmetry actually yeah it explains it's actually a complicated set of words for a pretty simple idea which is what we do to get tenure in my business and the whole idea of mode of attribution to symmetry is that i know my motive which is love but i attribute hatred to you and almost all um of irreconcilable conflicts whether it's you know the balkans or the palestinians and israelis or the rwandan genocide or almost any divorce comes down to this mode of attribution of symmetry which is a mistake because two sides to a client i'm loving but you're a bit yeah and if they both think that one is wrong or both because you can't be both motivated by hatred and love at the same time now the secret to to when couples are in this dynamic according to john gottman who's you know the world's leading expert in marital reconciliation he's got this thing called the gottman marriage laboratory in seattle see the one that came up with the idea of the four horsemen of the apocalypse yes exactly right of contempt and sarcasm etc etc avoidance etc yeah and he also talks about the five to one list where you have to say five loving things for every that's the magic number where a marriage can thrive with criticism as long as there's five acts or expressions of love for every criticism no no i mean it's just it's this he's he's fantastic at these particular heuristics but he notices that you know if they can even get couples to start talking to each other truly to say i'm angry right now but don't forget i'm madly in love with you then that that diffuses that that short circuits the mode of attribution of symmetry but when you don't say that the other person actually does think that you hate even though and both sides think that the other side hates us as a result of that and this is where a lot of the problems actually come in in in the way that we're you know we become defensive because the other person hates us and we're trying to defend ourselves you defend yourself when somebody's actually attacking you through hatred but if you can get past the the communication problem where neither side actually understands the other then suddenly you can say when she's right she's right man when she's right she's right because she loves me she actually does love me she's not nice to me all the time but she actually loves me and that's how i feel about my wife by the way at the end of the day she loves me yeah yeah my wife introduced that to our marriage she said when we're in the middle of a fight she will always ask herself does he love me and she said as long as the answer is yes then we navigate through and if the answer is ever no we have a totally different problem yes and i was like damn that's really smart and so she actually bought these coins that said love on them and if we were ever in the midst of a big fight she said she would hand it to me or i could hand it to her and so we each carried them with us and we only had to do it once and it was so profoundly like disarming she pulled the love token out and slid it across and i was like [ __ ] yeah and we had agreed when we were emotionally sober that if if somebody pulls that out no matter what you stop arguing yeah and so yeah it was incredible and just doing that once gave us like the emotional memory to be like the next time we're in a fight to just remind ourselves wait this person loves me i love them like let's it doesn't mean you sweep things under the rug because we've learned that is not a winning strategy like you have to keep discussing arguing sometimes until you actually get to resolution but doing it with a constant internal reminder that this person loves me and i love them it's pretty transformative it is and it's actually very important also to of course to be together um it's damaging to be a part too much and this is one of the big mistakes that a lot of young people make is you know commuter marriages tend to be very difficult to maintain is that like a thing now for sure for sure living in different cities yeah a lot of couples live in different cities for sure the other part that's even sleeping in separate bedrooms every alarm bell i have would go off yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah absolutely and you know when you're just not together enough like i'm on the road all the time i'm on a book tour you know i'm doing all kinds of cool stuff and it's really fun but i understand that i can't do this forever i need to be and i need my wife to hear my snoring man yeah it's interesting proximity there's no substitute for proximity sure there's nothing like it this is one of the reasons that the chronovirus epidemic was so profoundly uh deleterious to our mental health because we have a mental health crisis just rolling across the united states right now ordinarily about nine and a half percent of the population is exhibiting symptoms of clinical depression right now it's about 28 oh my god yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and has everything to do with loneliness in the wake of the chronic virus many people are much lonelier than they think because of the isolation from other people you know social media is the junk food of what you need which is actual human love with real contact eye contact and touch it's sort of interesting you know this is so much better this conversation because we're actually in the same room this is so much better than if we were talking on zoom profoundly different because we've got the mind meld and we've gone through 50 topics already we couldn't have done it on zoom and the reason is because we would have established a link of oxytocin which is the hormone that links people together through eye contact we wouldn't be and and if you're not physically proximate to build this this this neuro modulator link with the person who's closest to you in your life on a regular enough basis will be unto you look out it's gonna be trouble yeah no doubt you said in an interview at some point that zoom is really making us lonely yeah for a while i thought it was pretty rad really honest like at the beginning of the pandemic i was like because i'm an introvert so i was like hey working from home this is amazing yeah right and then about i don't know probably 18 19 months in i started to feel isolated and alone and i've got a loving wife i see my sister every week like i was like man if i'm feeling it then i know people are really getting ready for it's like me man i was climbing the walls got a lot of work done got a whole book written but i was sincerely less happy sincerely and the weirdest thing about it is i mean look zoom is great this technology is really great but it's also done even bad when we don't need to use it i am too productive i am too productive we're in los angeles fantastic i could talk to you and tomorrow morning i'm going to give a a speech by zoom and then walk into a speech in person you know last friday i gave a speech in madrid followed by a speech in dallas i was in dallas you know that's too productive you know i'm actually a work machine and i need to be very disciplined to because i want to do more more and more more but we're more machines we're wired for more and and what zoom has given us the ability to do is to stack productivity on top of productivity on top of productivity and we need to sort that out that's really interesting because i'm such a fiend for efficiency yeah i am not prone to seeing the problem but i actually understand what you mean there's no like there used to be down moments where i was traveling from one thing to another even if it was small like in an uber or something like that but now when you have literal where you have to say hey guys i'm so sorry i just need to go pee because there's no break no right zoom zoom zoom it's bad it's bad for you it's bad for your brain yeah no i hate it yeah i hate it too i hate it too and and thank god the world is more or less open again and let's hope that we can keep it that way because our happiness requires that our love requires it yeah i agree yeah all right really fast i want to go back to i was super freaked out when i heard so i knew in japan they were having trouble that people were i think it's called the hikikomori or something like that these guys that live in their house they just play video games they don't want to engage with real women and but i didn't realize that people are 30 percent less likely now to get married to have sex and i was like what yeah that's startling so if we know that this is a fear of being crushed how do we begin to claw our way back out of this and what caused it well what they're this is the work of gene twenge who's a social psychologist at san diego state university down the road from here and she's shown all these numbers that were 30 percentage points less likely to date than we were when you know that when i was in my teens and 20s and i mean like that's what i cared about you know love that's what i wanted was love that was the most interesting thing ever it was absolutely captured my attention and she talks about the reasons for this and there are a bunch of different reasons for this there's a sort of safetyism culture where we brought up our kids to feel afraid of other people which is weird because you know growing up where you and i in the pacific northwest when when you did or even especially when i did the 1970s was way more dangerous there was more crime there was more drugs than and and yet we were largely unsupervised as kids right and we were probably running around puyallup oh my friend yeah i could ride my bike like four miles away unsupervised yeah ten your mom was like don't come home before dinner or whatever right yeah if i was in the neighborhood she would just whistle but i remember my mom without a helmet on i would ride my bike three or four miles away to a bike track right and like do bmx jumps and stuff like that yeah all unsupervised no adults and you know this is no small part of your success quite frankly yeah yeah good for your indeed you need to be letting your kids put themselves in danger now how i survived my childhood i will never totally it was more dangerous unambiguously was more dangerous but you were less fearful as an entrepreneur in both life business and love that's and you have to figure out how to deal with [ __ ] yeah for sure like you go to the bike track and there are bullies there but there's no parents yeah so nobody's adjudicating your disputes et cetera so you're asking for safe spaces on campuses no and you weren't afraid to ask your wife out that's step number one the second thing is the really disastrous consequences of life on social media social media has made it much much scarier for us to fail much scarier the social comparison to be much worse than it is in the past so people have lower self-esteem and more social fear because of what social media has brought to them and the last which is a really interesting phenomenon is the research on on internet dating or social media or uh dating apps on how that's actually lowered our ability to love each other and that comes down to a big problem in the algorithm actually believe it or not they we look when with dating apps they match us in in ways that where we're too compatible um love and interest come from people who are compatible sort of but not that much real love is complementary not compatible that's interesting yeah and so there's a lot of research that shows this so even biologically there's a famous set of experiments the 1990s where these uh these researchers they would have guys you know guys in college uh wear a t-shirt they love this stuff you know the study right and they weren't they didn't shower for two days and they wore the t-shirt and they took the t-shirts off and they put them in cardboard boxes and punched holes in the boxes and women who didn't know them they would have to sniff the box gross right and then they would say on the basis of this which of these guys is most attractive on the basis of the smell of their sweaty t-shirts and it turns out that that uniformly they found most attractive the guys who are most different than they were in terms of their immune systems you need a big repertoire of it's very important that your parents not be sibs for you to have a strong immune system we all know that inbreeding and you know incest actually leads to children who have are are prone to all sorts of preventable diseases because their immune systems tend to be weak you need people who are very different have a different immunological profile from each other and you can tell that with your olfactory sense that's crazy yeah yeah and so that's a that's an example biologically of a greater psychological principle too which is you find attractive people who have the qualities that you don't have now it creates conflict too i get it but what do we match on and and in your your dating profile it's like republican it's like and so this ideological conformity and it's it's you know i said this i was telling my kids you know my kids are you know 24 22 and 19. and uh telling my 24 year old my son he's getting married this summer and uh and i was telling him about this i said it's basically you're inadvertently with a dating app which he never used but all his friends did you're inadvertently trying to date your sibling oh and my son says not hot [Laughter] agreed yeah that's not ideal yeah so all of this adds up you know social fear safetyism in the way you were raised and too much compatibility one two three 30 points down wow that's crazy yeah like man i i love modernity yeah i love it but i in the same way that i'm skeptical about myself and the ways that i think i am skeptical about modernity and some of the things that it's introduced yeah it's very interesting because i am the i'm a gen xer so for me it was like i didn't get i was married before dating apps came about thank god right thank god i am a me too waiting to happen because my wife it was a school for adults but i was the teacher and she was the student but like when you really break more or less i'm three years older yeah same age more or less so it was me at my best and there's this whole thing around whoever is the center of attention women tend to find more attractive yeah and so i was a center of attention because i'm literally at the front of the class teaching and there was like a power imbalance that she found attractive yeah it's like maybe she shouldn't maybe that's bad like maybe now this is a social construction that says this shouldn't happen but and i understand that because there is plenty of abuse but you can't rule out an entire class of behavior because of cases of because of some cases of abuse look 17 this year 17 percent of people have met their spouse at work bad enough that everybody's on zoom you're not going to find your spouse on a zoom screen very very unlikely but and on top of that if you're making rules saying no love no love at work then you've you've over corrected as a as a company owner though i'm super paranoid i got it it's like oh i got it yeah but i'm the same right i want people to be able to find each other and so we've always made it in every company i've had a policy that as long as you tell hr or whatever right it's all good because damn like how was you meeting people love is awesome yes love is the best you know 70 of people who have a best friend at work love their jobs yeah 58 of people who have a best friend at work wouldn't leave for more pay this is the life in life at the friendship level and now you add now on the other hand 25 of relay of romantic relationships at work have involved one person who is married and that's bad ooh that's bad right and so look but but nobody thinks that there's no balance in here nobody thinks that there's not going to be abuses when there's something good but to rule it out because the liability this is an overcorrection that is i think that's indicative of the the way that we see love in our society that leads to these patterns that are lowering our happiness we need love love is happiness is love full stop arthur brooks that feels like the right place to stop that was [ __ ] on the money man where can people find you arthurbrooks.com or you know at the greyhound station i don't know they i'm um i do my research at harvard university and i write for the atlantic and i write a column on the science of happiness every thursday morning called how to build a life and all the stuff and the podcast and the books and anybody anything anybody wants i offer up with love and you can find it on my website arthurbrooks.com i love it guys the book is strength to strength buy it read it it it made me emotional it was that good i don't care what age you are this is information that you want to have at your fingertips and speaking of something that you want to have at your fingertips if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace we're we humans are gifted with a form of consciousness as far as we know it there's no other animal on this planet that has it perhaps on another planet there's something similar we don't know yet

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 769,589

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Arthur Brook, Strength to Strength, Conversations with Tom, interview show, mindset, entrepreneurship mindset, entrepreneur motivation, feeling lost, questions about life, questioning yourself, living a good life, being enough, feeling like enough, addicted to success, excellence, intelligence

Id: swccXduWHqs

Length: 97min 21sec (5841 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022