Stop Chasing Happiness: Master The Psychology Of Pleasure, Power & Success Instead | Arthur Brooks

happiness is a trap and most people waste their entire lives chasing it as today's guest says happiness is a direction not a destination and the real destination you should be chasing is far more interesting and potent than mere happiness so join me today with Arthur Brooks as we explore the joys of an honorable life lived in pursuit of pleasure power and success instead why is it a trap to think that you can be happy because happiness is not a destination happiness is a direction happiness is the idea that you can be Blissful and happy all the time is it's not just unrealistic it's unhealthy it would be terrible if you were happy all the time you'd be eaten by a tiger immediately you would be you'd be you'd have no negative feelings which keep you alive I mean the idea of you know the limbic system of your brain that's producing sadness and anger and disgust and fear these are the the emotions that have kept you alive I mean your pleistocene ancestors would have been eaten by an animal immediately you'd be run over by a car you need these things that actually make you at least temporarily unhappy or you can't put one foot in front of the other therefore happiness is the wrong goal the right goal is happier so that's really what we're trying to do and to get happier is a process all throughout your life and to be on the path toward what Oprah Winfrey calls happierness you you actually need a system that makes it possible and so that you can pursue it and you need to pursue it's reason people need to watch impact Theory by the way is because this is a Pursuit of Happiness show this is all about Pursuit this is all about achievement it's about trying it's about making your life better it's about it's about progress this is one of the most important points of human flourishing this is about progress you know if people often ask why is it so relatively easy to lose weight been impossible to keep it off it's because when the scale goes down each day it gives you this incredible reward but when you hit your goal the reward is never eating anything you like ever again for the rest of your life everything in life is progress and that's why the pursuit matters so that you can actually be on the trail toward happierness and that's the right goal for all of us it's really interesting I like that a lot I think a lot about the traps so when I think about what impact theory is and what I'm trying to make it it started out pretty simplistic so we're in phase three of impact Theory at this point because it it's really me trying to figure out okay how do you get out of the spiritual entertainment and into the real thing that people need to actually do and understand in order to make progress in order to be happier in order to be more fulfilled is how I think about it um but the way that people get trapped is very counter-intuitive to me and you're the only person that I've ever heard bring it up I don't know if you consider the the central thesis but you've talked about how people get stuck in their perceptions yeah and that to me is very interesting and there's really I think two ways that people get stuck by their perceptions one is they confuse them with objective reality so they just think oh the thing I believe is true right and so if you don't believe it you just don't see the truth and then the other way that people get trapped by perception is they identify themselves with it and so they love that they are on the left or the right and so you end up with this vicious cycle of I'm proud that I have recognized the truth and I feel good about myself for noticing how wrong you are yeah and so we end up in a pretty gnarly situation where they're not actually happy that's the freaky thing so how do people begin to unwind that well so there's a lot there's a lot in what I mean I agree with everything you said but there's so much in what you said too that that helps us understand the the bad situation or the conundrum our country is in the world is in it has everything to do with our inability to to to stop seeing ourselves in terms of the things that we think this is a classic kind of attachment so Buddhists talk about this a lot so tick not Han the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk who you know one of the one of the most important uh Buddhist teachers of the last 50 years died just a couple years ago and he used to talk about the worst kind of attachments that we have in Modern Life is the attachment to our views the attachments to what we think that's just as bad as being attached to your watch your car your television to say you know like I love my I love my car I mean what's wrong with you you'll love your car it's a thing you shouldn't you you only use things and you only love people and that's an iron law of happiness but the thing is all that we we do a version of this ideologically where we say that we we we're so identified with the things that we think that it becomes an attachment that it becomes almost a love attachment in our lives now that's really alienating that's incredibly alienating because you are not your views and I am not mine and and that's incredibly important for us to be able to learn for this Pursuit of Happiness for progress in and of itself is to not be the things that we we think and to recognize that we think many things that are wrong we just don't know which they are the reason people watch this show and listen to this show is because they want to learn more so they can update their views which is an acknowledgment that their views weren't perfect to begin with that their knowledge wasn't perfect to begin with now when you're being taught by a a you know baby boomer culture Warriors that are trying to conscript child soldiers into their culture War they will say if you don't think these things something is morally defective about you and you will have the perfect truth you will have the the secret Gnostic truths if you do believe these things and at that point our beliefs including political beliefs have just become a religion there's just because not cult and and that's really what we see and so people are inducted into these competing Cults all the time and you know it's like I have a traditional religion and I identify with my religion but I don't know if I'm right even on that I don't know the things that I either that are right and that's been incredibly freeing for me and that's ultimately what we all have to acknowledge I think these things but I'm willing to be corrected if I get better information and the only way I'm going to do that is to go to people who disagree with me people who think differently than me people who threaten my preconceived notions and and to take it in and say you disagree with me Tom come sit next to me yeah I gotta hear it why is that freeing why is it freeing to acknowledge that you almost certainly are wrong and to invite people to challenge those ideas for most people that that's like arresting yeah well that's a hard thing to do because that actually goes against that that contravenes Evolution evolution is tells us that we need to believe particular things and to defend them and the ego threats are actually dangerous to us because if you know if we're if we show ourselves to be wrong to others then that makes us look incompetent then we're less likely to survive we're less likely to thrive in a community we're less likely to rise in a hierarchy we're less likely to find mates and so the result is that you defend defend defend defend but we don't have to do that that's hugely maladapted in modern life particularly with modern technology I mean think of the technology that we're using right now to record this show and that people are using to watch us right now that's an updating learning technology and if you're stuck in the static the stasis of of here's this body of information that I have and it must all be right you've basically said that you can't grow and learn so you have to relax that evolutionary imperative you have to fight back against what Mother Nature is putting into you that's and you know this is the way the philosophers Allah always talk about sort of the animal path and the Divine path the animal path is going according to your evolutionary imperatives these are the things that I've it's like if it feels good do it the best way to ruin your life the Divine path is to stand up to the things that feel unnatural you know we do this all the time I mean you and I work out every day right and and that's a it's the the Nature's Path is sit on the couch right Nature's Path is eat that sweet thing right and and the Divine path is to do things that are hard that don't feel natural because you know you're you're you've been given a prefrontal cortex where you can make conscious decisions that are better than what what your feelings tell you that they should be so mother nature says defend your opinions at all costs because if you don't it's an ego threat and they could have you know could have catastrophic consequences for your position in the hierarchy but you know that if you don't defend your positions if you admit to the possibility that you're not right that you'll learn and you update when people say things that you think are crazy you say tell me more that you're actually going to get better and that's a conscious decision yeah so one the fact that it's a conscious decision I think is really important for people something you talk about in the book that uh when people have Collision of values they can really run into a problem one of the things going back to the question I was asking one of the things that I think think really causes problems for people is they have a value system they've never articulated it to themselves they've never documented it written it down so they know these are my actual values and then they don't realize that those were choices again they're mistaking them for this is how the world ought to be and when they collide with other people they just assume you don't recognize the way the world ought to be you are bad you're a whatever and now you get these conflicts and you said in the book that uh families break up because you didn't say Collision of values but that's how I read it to mean and people expect it to be something else I forget what you said people expect it to be well they think it's because of a behavioral discrepancy it's usually a values discrepancy it's the way that it works out so the way that families tend to break apart and again no joke one in six Americans is not talking to a family member today because of politics which is craziness for happiness it's great there's one reason of a Schism with family and that's abuse and political differences that there should be yeah that's the only legitimate reason to have a Schism in your families because of abuse and and differences of political opinion are not abuse at least they weren't they didn't used to be abused but if you're being convinced by you know by leaders who are trying to to bring you into their culture War trying to make you a soldier in their culture War they'll say if somebody disagrees with your view on you know Supreme Court decisions or something that they're somehow uh erasing your value as a human being I mean that says this wild leaps of logic and we hear about this on college campuses where I spend a lot of my time obviously that we're telling people that if people disagree with you that they're erasing you that they they they they they disagree with your existence or something it's just this crazy existential language that we're using that's way out of proportion to everything so the only reason to have these schisms is is actual abuse and again people disagree with what abuse is but it's not that okay now what do we find with when when people tend to really have a bad problem in their family people think that you know for example I deal with a lot of students and they're they're building their lives and figuring out how they're going to live their own lives and it turns out that they disagree with their parents on a lot they come home from college saying different things for example they you know they're living in a particular different way things that their parents might really disagree with it turns out that how you live your life doesn't matter it almost never matters and almost never leads to schism what you say about somebody else's values is what really matters so if you want to have a really big so all the you know all the people in college who are watching us and you have I know you have a huge audience in their in their late teens and 20s or impact three fans which is great if you want to have a live your life but have a relationship with your parents live your life but don't kill tell your parents that their values are stupid that turns out to be a direct on attack and that leads to bigger problems one thing that's become really popular though is um tell your dad or your uncle who says the racist thing at Thanksgiving what you think should they not do that no it's perfectly fine to do that but don't freak out don't freak out you say I you know I see it different yeah hey Uncle Mark you know I see it differently and and and and as you do say to yourself before you begin I love Uncle Mark and I'm going to use my values right now as a gift and not as a weapon anytime you use your values as a weapon you've denigrated their moral content you've eviscerated the effectiveness of your approach but if you use your values as a gift it might not always be taken in a charitable way but you're using them for the right reason and you've got the odds on chance of actually having a good impact okay this is really interesting um I had Sam Harris on the show who I have a great deal of respect for he's become very unpopular in certain circles for the way that he is approaching the problem of free speech right I want to be abundantly clear yeah that my value system tells me that free speech is worth dying for and so it isn't the thing that I would expect anybody to reach for and say okay we're gonna clamp down on that now Sam sees it differently and as I try to tease out when a smart person when I I learned one immutable truth when two smart people who are sincere think each other are stupid right then odds are that they have different base assumptions yeah and when I look at Sam and I say okay Sam's base assumption is that if something is an existential threat then it's worth stripping away any right to make sure that we don't succumb to set existential threat and then I was like okay because I don't know that I would disagree with that if I knew there was an asteroid hurtling towards Earth and it was life or death and we were all going to have to get on the same page and do XYZ thing if I really knew that it was do X survive do y everyone dies then I would for sure say do X right it makes sense but I don't think people know how to agree on what is the right course of action nor do you have perfect knowledge right so no perfect knowledge you don't know if it's actually an existential threat and so I'll take it out of that realm for a second that's the problem right people don't have perfect knowledge they don't know but and now I'll take it in the realm that I do understand very well when you're building a business you must give your team certainty right so what I call intoxicating them with certainty it's the only way to get them to follow you right now the catch is as a leader you have to balance you know that your team has a need for certainty it's the only way to get the moving in the same direction right but you have to balance that with what we were talking about before what I call the physics of progress that the only way to make progress is to constantly hunger for how am I wrong so you have to okay I was wrong here I need to update my thinking I need to update my Approach if you don't do that you're screwed but now there's tension between I need to present to my team hey this is the way but I also need to beg my team to tell me at all times how I'm wrong right because they're the ones that are going to recognize the flaw in your thinking that are going to show you a better way right so it's this absolutely fascinating tension now when this plays out in the bigger world with the speed of information that we have today thanks to the internet and social media you get this right which I would say has a level of pathology in it that scares the life out of me right so how do we manage that tension of its imperfect knowledge but I must give certainty in order to get a country or a globe moving in the right direction and an easy way to get people certainty is to say we're all going to die right right which is the thing that people reach for right but if you don't give people certainty meh everybody runs in weird directions well the the answer well the Buddhists would say the answer to that question is intention without attachment okay so certainty is this is the direction that we're going this is the goal this is the target as far as I can see it but I'm not attached to that because this is this is subject to updating so you'll find for example you look at the ancient navigational course of Columbus or you know the Explorers you know that had very imperfect tools they had a concept of the direction that they were going and they had a particular goal and they were going toward that goal with complete certainty it was you know Columbus was an entrepreneur and he was he was taking his team the Nina pinton Santa Maria toward this particular goal and it turned out to be completely wrong but the point is that the certainty was the intention the fact that they got something else that was arguably better was the lack of attachment to the object of the intention and this is what we're trying to do in our companies in our families and and indeed in the Enterprise the ultimate Enterprise that we need impact which is our lives I mean it's like you're Tom Inc that's the real Enterprise of you I mean just manifested itself in all sorts these other cool businesses and things are really successful but all those were just expressions of the of the real Enterprise and each of us is an entrepreneur in startup of Our Lives that's what really matters and what we need is to always have a clear intention but not attachment to the object of that intention because that makes you dogmatic and the problem that we have right now is we have fuzzy intention and strong attachment we have exactly the opposite of what we need in our politics today and the way that people talk to each other the way that people debate and so if I have a strong intention of the things that I believe even politically but a lack of strong attachment I can have a conversation in Sam Harris and I had a similar conversation except it was about religion and you know I'm I'm a traditionally religious person and he's an atheist and the way that we went at it we before we we you know hit record on a show we said we're going to talk about this to learn we're not going to talk about this to argue we're going to talk about this to learn right and so when he would say something I thought was like whoa I'd be like Dude tell me more right and he would say explain this to me because this sounds crazy to me so truly explain this to me so what is that that was we both had this intention but we didn't have the attachment and so we were willing to update and so doing we got better now when you're running a team if you've got a company and I've been a CEO so I've had I've I've made all these mistakes over the years if they see that you have this very clear intention we're running this direction this is what we think this is my best judgment but my attachment to these things is not is not absolute you can throw me off this if you actually bring the best possible information to me and you can tell me that that the way I'm thinking about it is not quite right then I'm going to change the intention but in the meantime this is the direction that we're all going that turns out to be the way to square the circle this turns out to be the way to to solve this problem personally in families and communities and in companies is intention with that attachment all right that's amazing but how do you do that how do you I I have a feeling that a big part of the problem is people have accidentally constructed their identity around that which they think they are so I am in fact oh God if I can remember this is maybe a paraphrase but it's really damn close to something you said we need less activists and more volunteers and when somebody you were like Hollow I I have tried to immerse myself in your world one for the this and two you are incredibly helpful for navigating people trying to do extraordinary things in their life in a way that makes their life better and not worse so the the Strivers curse I forget the exact words but perfect yeah you're good so if people identify as an activist or a volunteer that that simple like even you just giving me the language I was like oh whoa I get what you're trying to say helping others versus like my identity is this thing and I'm going to fight to the death for this um but how do you begin to extricate your identity from the things that you believe so that you can have non-attachment to begin with we have to ask who am I and you're going to Define that or you're going to discover we well you ultimately discover that but you have to have an understanding of that that's that's not brittle and that's not based on the outside world so there's a philosophical concept that William James talked about but the Eastern philosophers talk about this a lot too which is what William James called the I self versus the me self the I self is is say you're looking at a mirror and when you look in the mirror there's actually there's two of you there's the one who's looking in the one who's being looked at the one who's looking is the I self The Observer of the world the one who's being looked at is the me self which is the observed you're going through life as I self and me self you need me self to know who you are and how you store you stand in society and where you know where you are on the team and where you are in the hierarchy and you know where you are in traffic for that matter but you need the I sell so that you can learn and you can exist we are all too heavy on the me self on The observed and none of us almost none of us is heavy enough on the Observer part so one of the exercises I'll give my students at Harvard Business School they take this happiness class which is about the you know it's called leadership and happiness the serious science of of the business of you and and I'll say we're going to go through an hour you're gonna take an hour where you're not going to be observed You're simply going to observe and now this means a lot this means for example you say like you don't say yeah this coffee is bitter you say hmm this coffee has a bitter flavor nothing more than observation there's no mirrors there's no notifications on social media there's no judgments there's just observation of the world to get better at that and this is incredibly important if we want to learn and we want to update this also gets us away from this whole concept of my identity in my ideology because what that fundamentally is is just me me me me me me me me me me me it's like who am I I am the things that I think if somebody disagrees with me then they're attacking me that's Insanity that's pure vanity that is just looking in a mirror all day long saying mirror mirror on the wall who's the most beautiful of them all it's me and my political beliefs that's craziness there's no there's no way to live and by the way that's the fastest way to become a truly unhappy person why the reason is because you need the Grandeur of the world to actually give you what you need the experience of day-to-day life and living in the the the image of yourself is just boring it's just tedious if you know thinking about me and what they think of me and whether or not they agree with me and whether or not these things are going to satisfy me me me me it's like watching the same episode of the same season of Better Call Saul every single day for the rest of your life it was okay the first time it was not that great the second time and it's awful every time after that and being forced to do that that's identity politics that's the world of identity that's the world of mirrors that's the world of social media notifications that's the world of the me self is what it comes down to so if we really want to be happy get into the I self the learning space the observation the awe of the outside world and your life will change it'll just change and it's fast you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today so in the book you say that uh basically exactly what you just said that happiness isn't the feeling but the feeling is evidence of the happiness right so then what is the happiness what is the meat and potatoes yeah that's a good analogy because it's the either the courses or really the macronutrients in the the thing that is happiness this has three parts to it we know this from from you know measuring people who have high levels of well-being versus those who don't High well-being is associated with high levels of enjoyment satisfaction and meaning in life those are the three things that we need to actually pursue the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of enjoyment the pursuit of satisfaction and the pursuit of meaning and there are three different goals with three different sciences and three different strategies to it when somebody only pursues one they're not going to be happy you need a balance and abundance across this macronutrient profile for happiness if you're going to get it I meet people all the time who have great enjoyment in life but very little meaning and they're not happy I know people hard-working entrepreneurs who have tremendous meaning and no quality of life no enjoyment they're not happy and so I have to coach people in different ways about this satisfaction is the hardest of them because it's going to ask because you can't keep it you know and so they each have a son you keep satisfaction because the brain is something has a tendency to be homeostatic homeostasis is the tendency of the brain to always take you emotionally back to equilibrium so you'll be ready for the next set of circumstances interesting can I push back on that yeah so why and obviously I agree with homeostasis but uh the way that I've always thought about how transient satisfaction is going back to understanding the science is from an evolutionary standpoint if you ate a meal and it was satisfying forever you would starve to death right because you would only eat once right and so knowing that Evolution will conserve can serve conserve if I have this mechanism that make sure that I go do the thing again that is basically this um rise and fall of satisfaction that happens with everything that I would be in trouble if I only did once right so uh thirst satisfaction gonna rise and fall hunger rise and fall sex Rise and Fall Right consumption consumption hierarchy Prestige the watch the car the house all of it well now it's interesting now I wonder the sourcing exactly the same homeostasis that is homeostasis because the the watch losing its thing although it's probably the same mechanism is because it's trying to get me to go do more and but here's the thing about it the reason we don't we don't ever realize that when you think people say should I moved to California because then I'll be primarily happy because of the sunshine no the big benefit that you get from mood benefit from Sunshine is six months but the taxes so I'm gonna try to hurt you man so um the key thing to understand about homeostasis is that mother nature doesn't want you to know it exists Mother Nature has homeostasis so that you'll be ready for the next set of circumstances but fools you again and again and again into thinking that this time the satisfaction will be permanent and it never is by the way this is physical too so you step off the treadmill and your your heart is going 135 beats per minute which you're doing for good cardiovascular health within 15 minutes your heart rate has gone back to its base rate so you don't die well the same thing is true with your emotions homeostasis has to reset you but when it comes to the satisfactions that we seek you know caloric or you know propagation of the genes through mating and all the stuff that we want to do we always think that that relationship will give me Permanent satisfaction because if you knew if you knew then you'd be like that's going to give me 10 minutes of Happiness I'm not even going to do it and you'd stop being it's you stay you wouldn't be in the hustle you wouldn't be in the fight fight anymore you wouldn't go get the banana off the top of the tree and risk your life you wouldn't trudge across the Savannah to get that meal you would lose your motivation and mother nature wants you to be motivated and she does that by fooling you so that you think that this time I'm really going to love that car forever and it's like a month it turns out so that's so satisfaction is a real conundrum only when you understand the science of can you short-circuit the science only when you when you understand the Matrix can you find a glitch and can you find the glitch in The Matrix that's why it's so incredibly empowering because there is a way around that for satisfaction the same thing is true for enjoyment by the way everybody thinks they enjoy it's listening a pleasure wrong pleasure is not the secret of Happiness pleasure is this is is the is the short way to get addiction and nobody ever says you know yeah man you know the secret to my happiness methamphetamine never nobody ever says oh yeah it's like partying away my entire paycheck in Vegas and then my wife leaving me that's that's not the secret of Happiness that's the secret to pleasure and pleasure is not connected to happiness unless you take pleasure and you add two things people and memory if you add pleasure plus people plus memory you get enjoyment those must be stand-ins for something what are the the people and the memories and Consciousness so just uh you have to do it in the social species and I'm gonna get tremendously rewarded this uh this is a good time to bring up so I'm really obsessed with this idea that running in the back of your mind are evolutionary algorithms right and there's no escaping them and so there are just certain things you are going to have to do if you want to I don't know if you're going to agree with this framing but if you if you're going to feel the way you want to feel you must be aware of these algorithms you must acknowledge them right so I've always tried to migrate people away from happiness not as you define it as the smell of the turkey right stop worrying about stop worrying about how she feelings right exactly because they're so transient correct and get to fulfillment correct and fulfillment for me has a formula be interested to see if you agree with this um these are based on what I consider the evolutionary algorithms running in your mind that there is no escape from so you are going to have to work hard anything that comes easily will just not it won't resonate that's a satisfaction issue by the way satisfaction is the joy that comes after struggle that's what satisfaction is so you get satisfaction you just have to come from struggles you have to do something and it's a sense of earning something so for example can I if you you cheat on the exam and you get an A there's no satisfaction true but I feel deeply satisfied after good sex do I feel like I earned it I don't know I have not investigated this feeling yeah but that's that's actually that's that's not satisfaction that's enjoyment that's what you and satisfaction I feel sexually satisfied well that's a word that we use but it's different than what we're talking about here so it's again we're defining the terms which I think is important super important because you may be about to have me separate two ideas that because I don't have words for it yeah people talk about sexual satisfaction where they're talking about sexual enjoyment so an enjoyment is a better word done so when I am overcome with desire right the right way to think of it for me is hunger it feels the same right I've got to have this thing I really want it anticipatory chemicals oh my God and then I get it right and so like I'll differentiate between masturbation and sex right when I masturbate I don't necessarily feel satisfied that's one of the things that makes that such a whatever Pursuit whereas when I have sex I feel satisfied yeah like there's some deeper thing in me yeah and and it it is an extinguishing of The Hunger but because I have oxytocin and vasopressin it's like oh man I feel so good so it's this combination of the calming of that like seeking Behavior right with like and I feel so bonded and connected to this person now this is just terms so the way to think about it in in this particular framework is pleasure versus enjoyment got it okay so pleasure is you know something that pornography is associated with pleasure um sexual activity in a in a in a pair-bonded relationship is is associated with enjoyment because it has people and memory and so one of the things to keep in mind a strategy especially for a lot of young people a lot of young men is to is to do is if you like something it's best if you're not doing it alone because then you're probably gonna stop it not necessarily this is just kind of a rule of thumb this is not this is not an iron law but it's a rule of thumb doing it alone is associated with pleasure so you know um Anheuser-Busch doesn't do ads about beer where they show a dude pounding a 12-pack alone in his apartment right why not because yeah that would be yeah because a lot of people use alcohol for pleasure right which leads to addiction and misery they talk they see you know you and me cracking open a Bud Light and clink and talking about how great it is and because we're friends and we're making a memory and that's enjoyment which is associated with happiness so we have a we have a basic idea that the same thing is true with the example of sex that you talked about a minute ago you could it can be pleasure or it can be enjoyment and everybody knows the difference between sexual experiences that are pleasurable or enjoyable and joy enjoyment is the goal because that's one of the macronutrients of Happiness we talk about in terms in the terms that you define about satisfaction but it's really a in this terminology and again you know you have to just defining terms these are just words but the concepts underlying them are are critical in the book you give a really good example of pleasure without enjoyment yeah uh would you mentioned obliquely a minute ago but when you think of a drug addict yeah they're doing the drug right they're theoretically getting the pleasure but they're not getting any of the enjoyment right they're getting tons of pleasure it's because they're loading only on pleasure but no enjoyment because it's not social and it actually is not engaging the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus to create memory and so you you will you simply will have a transient experience and the transient experience will be unsatisfying until you'll hit the lever again and again and again and again and it will lower your quality of life so that's the key thing if there's something you really really love so for example I'll ask people will talk about because I've done a lot of work on the on the science of addiction it's a very interesting subject people say how do you know if you're addicted because these are behavioral constructs you know you can't take a blood test to know if you're if you're an alcoholic if you're you know so it's these are behavioral and the big behavioral thing is do you prefer to drink alone do you prefer to actually become inebriated alone that means you're looking for pleasure versus enjoyment and that is a that is has a lot that will lead you more to addiction more toward addiction and away from happiness is the way that that works that's the reason that people say never drink alone they don't know what they're saying is they're saying enjoy it don't have it be a source of pleasure because that's dangerous so that gives you an idea so we've talked a little bit about satisfaction talking a little bit of enjoyment these are heavy heavy topics in terms of the social science and Neuroscience for sure and we haven't even touched on meaning which is the heaviest of them all which is the hardest of them all so you can become a what I really want is I want people to be to be obsessed with to have their hobby be the science of happiness and how they can get it and spread it to that would be a really meritorious movement if people are like yeah more of the science more understanding it I want to be excellent at this I'm going to be most excellent my hobby is getting better at happiness and it's changed my life it's a good hobby it's really been a good hobby for me yeah I made it into a career that you most certainly did um so I want to close the loop on the Fulfillment recipe and give you a take on that so uh you have to work really hard because that's just nature reassures that you're going to do that so that you're out doing the hard things like getting a meal protecting your family Etc uh to acquire a set of skills right that's a big lean on progress because I agree progress I think is a foundational pillar of human happiness right uh so you're going to work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to serve yourself and others right and it needs to be in a way that you find exciting so that to me is those are the things that nature is going to ensure that you do and if you're the doing it for not only yourself but others is the meaning portion of this right um why do is it that people never stop to identify what gives them meaning is it that they confuse meaning is that they're stuck in the me self why do so people so few people end up cracking that code part of the reason is because they're not specifically trying to find meaning they don't make it a goal they just they they a lot of people believe that if I do what I'm really really good at and I can be successful at that it's going to give me a ton of meaning automatically and that's not right like anything else you have to do things on purpose did you get meaning when you were a classical musician no that was the reason that's the reason I'm not a class would you have gotten meaning out of it many people do but here's the thing I I my favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach maybe the greatest composer who ever lived great story yeah I mean uh uh 1685 to 1750 20 kids he had 20 kids yeah he was a he was productive as a composer I would say I was a Catholic he wasn't he was Lutheran but um but he was uh I say that because I know you're Catholic yeah you wonder why I made a joke it was just a sexy Lutheran but and and Bach was asked near the end of his life while he wrote music it's the why question you know our friend Simon sinek he always talks about start with Y and it's fantastic I mean it's been because it really is you know people are going around asking what and hoping to get the Y for free and Simon's entrepreneurial twist is start with why and then the what will come automatically and you'll be a lot more satisfied because you'll find the source of meaning so box y when he was asked why do you write music was the Eamon Final End of all music is the refreshment of the soul and the glorification of God okay not bad not bad at all but I read that in my late 20s when I was still I was in the Barcelona Symphony in those days it is a good job and it was you know I love the music it's really into it it's kind of a high Prestige job you know playing the greatest show sounds cool it sounds cool sounds cool yeah but I couldn't I couldn't answer like that I couldn't answer like that I didn't feel like I was refreshing Souls particularly I certainly didn't feel like I was glorifying God I was even built that in though because this is one thing I was saying people think they're gonna find me it wasn't my thing it just wasn't my thing and so I went in search of something where I could answer my why question like Bach I became a social scientist that was that was it because you know when I I because after that you also you you go on to run the think tank after that right right yeah so I got my PhD I actually finished College a month before my 30th birthday my correspondence so this is not a typical path to you know a professorship at Harvard obviously this is not typically the way it gets done this is a great country isn't it yeah um be a kid from Puyallup can do this it's fantastic crazy I love that so um and then I went and I I got so interested when I was doing my my bachelor's degree in the in human behavior and the fact that you can model it and you can study it that I I went back and got my Master's in PhD as a social scientist as a quantitative social scientist I was doing for a living I was doing military operations research at the Rand Corporation for you know like secret stuff for the Air Force and all that but you know using and you felt the sense of meaning and all that I was what I felt a sense of Minion was I was learning so much that was so critically interesting and I had a strong sense that I was gonna I was learning how to ask and answer original questions about human behavior they're going to push the boundary of what we knew so that people's lives could get better I had a very strong sense that it was gonna it was in the offing it was going to take decades was the part about so people's lives could be better was that a critical part of that it was a critical thing to earn my success I needed to do something where my work creative value in my life and the life of other people that I think that that is so big and look you cover this in the book so I know this is a mysterious to you but uh focusing outward like if you want to be happy we don't need this is me paraphrasing you again we don't need self-care we need other care right and I just have learned uh through unfortunate trial and error that if I'm doing something only for me it I'll run ashore on the me me probably totally until you get into me self-world it's all me self you know other care is I self that's I'm going to look outward at whether people need I'm going to be thinking more about them which gets me away from the the boring repetitive tedium of the me Me soundtrack to begin with I mean it has I mean it's just simple you're you're distracted from the stuff that's so boring and yet so um you look at so obsessively over the course of your life so that's critically important and you find I mean again there's tons and tons of studies that actually show that the more you give the happier you get the more you give the Richer you get the more you give the better looking you are is it it's a wonderful study it's all perception so there's this one study where These Guys these social psychologists they they bring men it's a men into the lab who are partnered and it's all heterosexual couples and they bring them in some have been dating for six months and some have been married for 50 years and that the guys in white lab coats and they say okay it's a simple experiment I'm gonna sir I'm gonna give you these coins put them in your pocket you and your wife or girlfriend you're gonna walk down this little path to that other building down there and my colleague is going to interview you and then you get to keep the money that's it as I walk down this little path outside and there's an Alleyway between the buildings and this homeless guy comes ambling out of the alley and panhandles the husband or boyfriend he's a Confederate to the experiment obviously he says hey got some change he does they know he does because they put the money in his pocket and he has to make a decision in front of his wife on whether he's going to help the homeless guy they get to the other building and the first question in the interview is did you help the homeless guy how much did you give him and then the second question is to the wife how attractive do you find him right now the more you support the homeless guy the hotter she finds you that's so interesting that's the reason on a first date you're like I love Humanity I support you know I build houses for the poor I love dogs I love babies you're trying to look like you know Albert Schweitzer on a first date that's hilarious because you're more handsome that is very interesting okay so um we know that being outward focused is going to be beneficial but you were talking about um you needed to find the answer to your why what is going to be that thing that I could answer in the way that Bach does I find in life basically nobody finds that like that that is so rare and when they do find it it ends up being very transient so how did you navigate because you're for people that don't know we we did another interview which I highly encourage them to go watch and so we covered this I don't want to tread a ton of the same ground but I think it's worth telling people you've would you say that your career has been spiral yeah for sure okay you gave me the language mine has for sure yeah um I I it's interesting you make me question whether that's just my personality and I was going to end up there no matter what or if it really was what I the story I've told myself my entire life which is I did all of this just to get into storytelling and I needed to control the assets maybe maybe we'll get into that well those are that's those are endogenous to each other yeah maybe yeah but what I want to know now is did your why run out and that's why you reinvented yourself did it just migrate like how have you kept that alive in your life I I took opportunities that were put in my path that I thought were in line with this vision of how I was trying to grow so I had a intention but I didn't have attachment so when I was a French horn player leaving that becoming a social scientist I I had an intention to do this work on human behavior to as to help myself and others to make life better to increase love and happiness in other people's lives but I was not attached to what manifestation that was going to take and that's what I urge all young people to do to have a virtuous beautiful intention without attachment with respect to the the expression that it's going to take at any particular time but taught for a number of years I loved it super great then I thought I should run something that I think is going to be good for Humanity and for society you know and so I ran this think tank this big think tank in Washington DC had 300 employees mostly just raised money I had to raise 50 million dollars a year to keep the doors open and it was a thrilling experience it was exhausting to be sure but what I was trying to do was to use my background as a social scientist to create better public policy to hire really good people that was going to to make the country in the world Freer and better with an emphasis us on opportunity for people at the margins of society which is what my Think Tank was engaged in after about 10 years I knew I was getting stale man I was getting stale so I had the same intention but I had no attachment to Arthur Brooks president of the American Enterprise Institute that was a that would be a disordered attachment because that's not who I am I'm Arthur Brooks I'm a husband I'm a father I'm a child of God and I am put on Earth to lift people up in bonds of love and happiness using science and ideas what's the next assignment what's the next assignment and the next assignment was to do what I do now which is I have a company that teaches writes speaks and teaches widely and does media on the science of Happiness to popularize to see the world as a classroom and an enormous course of study of the science of Happiness to lift people up and that you know so I can I have I have a call on the Atlantic and I read books and I get to talk to you and I get to travel around speak I teach at Harvard and it's phenomenal but that's no I'm not attached because I know this is not the last assignment I have intention but the attachment no no no no no the attachment's the killer of all these things and you too it's like next assignment please but here's the direction we're going in I need to do this thing this thing is going to serve and when you're really in the zone it's it's a thrill it's a thrill you just can't get it off of it when you're really in the zone too but it's not because you're going for the thrill it's because you're going for the value you want the you want to hit that vein of value right and when you run that vein out then you go look for it you dig a new mind what does it mean to run the vein out though so um okay how pure was your move into the the think tank because you talk about idols I've listened to enough of your content I know what your idol is uh I think we share an idol um so I I nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so yeah so I don't know that having an idol is bad I have a feeling that it's Nature's way of getting us moving and making us an active species and it is good right exactly but if it's the end goal if an idol of money or power or pleasure or fame is the end goal will be unto you and will be under the world but if it's an intermediate goal to lifting people up and bringing them together if you can use the prestige that you have in your job and the admiration of other people to get them interested in something that's truly generative and good and improve their lives which by the way you're doing with the show right I mean you've got lots of prestige your famous guy but you're using it so that people will watch it and change their lives so this is the end goal it's a problem if it's an intermediate goal then it's good I want to uh restate this in my language to see if I really understand this okay so the me self is getting caught up in my emotions I'm confusing the emotion for the perception of the emotion so knowing that in the brain pain and suffering are two separate spaces knowing literally two different regions of the brain not making that up for people listening uh and then in meditation I am to your point earlier about uh the bitter coffee there's a difference between my knee hurts and witnessing that I'm having a sensation in my knee that one might artificially hurts versus I don't like how my knee feels right because you know it's my knee hurts so that's a statement of facts right right it's a signal and the one last thing I'll wrap on that to see if I really get this so uh Victor Frankel talked about the gap between stimulus and response now for people that haven't heard that name he was in a concentration camp lost his wife mom dad I mean just unimaginable amounts of loss and came out of it psychiatrists came out or actually I think a psychiatrist and he was a psychiatrist and and a psychoanalyst okay which is an interesting combination very interesting writes a book about that time basically saying if you could find meaning in your suffering that you could make it but if you lost that sense he was like you could literally predict when somebody would die because once they gave up and they could no longer associate meaning with why they were going through the suffering that was it right and so that idea of there's this gap between stimulus and response and you get to decide how you interpret that thing is everything right is that we talk about when that Gap goes away You're now in me territory yeah so so there's there's so much in this and and you know we've referred to the you know the new book and there's the whole front part of this new book is emotional self-management based on the science of how your brain gives you signals that are called emotions getting away from the idea that bad emotions are unfortunate we should get rid of them and or that unhappiness for them is bad and we should get rid of it so understanding the science of how this works and what these things are for and then being able to learn grow and manage the feelings that we want such that we can adapt best to the current world and we can make growth toward happierness that's that's the whole uh front part of this book the back half is okay now that you've done that the life you want build the life you want yeah co-authored with Oprah Winfrey exactly right exactly right by the way I'm glad you like it thank you it's um it was a joy to write it there's a joy writing a book with Oprah Winfrey too what an experience it was really an interesting experience to and and recording the book The audiobook too because you keep thinking oh I know that voice not mine so um so emotional self-management comes down to number one understanding that emotions that you have are not just nice to have and bad to have all they are are signals they're like a machine the machine of your brain perceives outside stimuli and turns it into a universal language that can that can send signals to the neocortex of your brain the out outside wrinkly area of your brain especially the prefrontal cortex which is the most modern part of the human brain to send a signal so that you can decide how to react according to them and it doesn't matter what language you speak or where you grew up you everybody gets the same signals they get the basic emotions of Joy Of Interest which is the two positive basic emotions the negative emotions which doesn't mean that they're bad just means that they're negative anger disgust sadness fear and all those things are then Blended together into these complex emotions so anger and disgust you blend them together you get contempt which is the conviction of the worthless is this multiplicity of emotions that we get they exist to send signals Universal signals and then we get to decide how to react here's the problem most people don't take that opportunity most people take their emotions as given regret them like them and act according to them without doing that last trick that last entrepreneurial trick which is deciding how to react you get to decide this is Victor Frankel's point the book Is Man's Search for meaning and what he learned in the concentration camp was that all these bad things are happening and good things happen in life you decide how you're going to react to these things that's the ultimate entrepreneurial task of human life is deciding how you're going to use the resources under your control and the first set of resources you get are your emotions okay so the time between the stimulus and response the time between the emotions and the reactions that you decide that's the Gap that Victor Frankl is talking about you want that to be as wide as possible that's why every time you have an emotion the most important thing to do is to not react is to get is to practice not reacting when you feel something good or bad wait tell tell me why because this is where I see people get lost all the time they trust their emotions they think their emotions are right they are a map of actual reality and that if you feel angry you should acting yeah and that's that's that's that's a great way to live an unhappy life and make other people unhappy around you I agree so violently yeah I can't even tell you yeah and think about all the times when you're building your companies that that you you felt something negative and if you just yelled you snapped at somebody or said that was on your mind you would have done catastrophic brain damage to your company it would have been terrible and instead or you get that email you know you get an email and it's like I want I want to I want to answer right now don't never answer a bad email in the day you get it never just have an automatic as a matter of fact have somebody who's managing your email for you so you don't see them you you see them and you think about it but you can't answer it because it disappears from your inbox for 24 hours make a deal with somebody why because you want to you want to your your prefrontal cortex to be in charge you don't want your limbic system to be in charge it's a two-year-old you know when kids when you have little kids and you know I have I have grown kids but now I have grandchildren and they yell and and what you tell little kids always is use your words what you're telling them is put more time between stimulus and response and choose the response that you want you're not going to say that to a little kid you're going to say something that's truncated like use your words and people who are reactive what we say is social scientists we call them limbic people because they're they're acting according to their limbic system this is the most unentrepreneurial thing to do that's basically like I got a dollar I spent a dollar no no or Revenue comes in you decide what to do should you invest it should you distribute it should you buy something with it what should you do that that's what good entrepreneurs do with their lives but that's how we need to see our emotion so that's the most important point now what you do in that Gap is called metacognition and this is where it gets really really interesting in that Gap the best thing that you can possibly do is to think about the emotions that you're feeling what they mean and how best to use them so that and this is this is really the engagement of prefrontal Cortex that's what meditation practices tell you to do this is what prayer helps you to do this is what walking in nature helps you to do so all these metacognitive practices this is what therapy is supposed to do too by the way it's supposed to give you expertise in expanding that Gap then on top of that there's all of these ideas that you can use once you you've got this time you can make these decisions you can you can substitute emotions you can say that's not the right emotion here's a better emotion you can literally do that how's that not just faking it it's not it's what it's so for example um I work um I've talked a lot and and I've been paling around lately with you know Rayne Wilson who's the you know I'm on the show he's terrific and and we grew up he grew up in Ballard yeah yeah and so five miles away from me is this just same age as me he was a classical musician just like I was I didn't know him but we haven't played like bassoon you play the bassoon we probably overlapped an All-State band or something as we were kids but we have the same childhood basically and so it's interesting and so we really connect on this but for example he talks about the fact that most uh he believes that most comedians suffer from depression and one of the reasons they're such good comedians is because they choose the substitute emotion when they're feeling sadness of humor which is also an appropriate response to things that are making you sad you make them into a joke and people think of it as a defense mechanism no it's an emotional substitution you know it's the when you drink coffee the the the caffeine molecule it looks just like the adenosine molecule which is a neuromodulator that that is inhibitory it makes you feel tired it goes into the slot and the neuro the receptor for the adenosine and so you don't get it insane that's what makes you feel peppy it blocks the thing that makes you feel tired that's how caffeine Works emotional substitution works in the same way the humor molecule goes into the sadness receptor but you can't do that unless you're taking time you cannot do that unless you actually expand the time between stimulus and response until you understand exactly how the science works and and getting as much time as you possibly can was that the angle that you took to understand the science or did you come at it from a God says that this is the way to go about life I'm a scientist you know and one of the reasons that I'm religious is because of my because what I've learned intellectually so for me that was the the thing that freed me as well was so I'm calling at 22 I am very unhappy like really scary sliding towards depression and happy and I started reading about the brain now I don't remember what gave me that impulse it was probably something I learned in college plus taoism whatever but it like really made me think about the way the brain worked and I started reading about how brain plasticity was this hotly debated thing and maybe you really could teach an old dog new tricks and one day I just decided I'm going to act as if brain plasticity is real right and then the more studies came out the show that it really was real like the more I felt like I could grab a hold of that but it was it was a science based Insight that allowed me to really change the tenor of my entire life for sure for sure I mean it's interesting because people back when when I was a kid I'm you know 10 years old little 10 years older than you when I was a kid or even when people were older than me were coming through the the whole idea was that biology is just psychology you know that you can you can think bad things away and that was supposed to be really incredibly empowering now really what we believe with the Advent of you know the advances in Neuroscience you know as a social scientist I have to know tons of Neuroscience teaching happiness is 30 Neuroscience when I teach I'm talking about the brain constantly it's much more the case we believe that psychology is actually biology and and that sounds like it's not empowering like this is all determined is super empowering because once you actually understand the process you can intervene in the process I talked to for young Executives for example and I say one of the biggest threats to your career is an inappropriate sexual relationship in the workplace it's one of those hilarious to me it's and and so we say so let's understand how this is going to work and you can psychologize it and say you know you need to be and get get some therapy what happens is the first thing when you have a when you have attraction towards somebody who's a potential romantic partner there's the first thing that happens is sex hormones which testosterone and estrogen and in combination in both males and females this is happening the second thing that happens in the neurochemical Cascade of falling in love is there's an up um and there's a an increase in norepinephrine and dopamine so that you get the sense of euphoria and anticipation the third thing that happens is a drop in serotonin now what happens when serotonin drugs and serotonin interesting when serotonin drops it makes you ruminate that's the reason it's associated with clinical depression because of the rumination procedure it's it's a there's a part of the brain called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex which is incredibly active when you're ruminating it's one of the things when you're ruminating on a business plan on an opera on a poem on somebody who's rejected you on you know so it's it's it's you see it incredibly active in depression and creativity and falling in love and all of these things that all have rumination you know iterative rumination involved in it so and it all is involved with a drop in serotonin which is why you don't want to have that early stages of falling in love for the rest of your life because you'll want to die and then and then you want to die the early stages of Love made me feel like I'd never get anything done again yeah yeah it makes you feel out of control your brain looks suspiciously like an MRI in the brain of a methamphetamine addict yeah yeah you know that's how it felt I legitimately felt like I was on drugs and then you get the tide the warm tide that comes in of the increases in oxytocin which is a bonding neuropeptide that functions reciprocated you you well I mean what it happens when you have eye contact with somebody in a love connection and eye contact so you're both getting it the biggest bolus that you get of that is when you first lay eyes on on eye contact with your newborn baby real yeah it's just like Fourth of July in your head but anyway so it's one two three four that's the neurochemical Cascade and the reason I bring this up is when I'm talking to young people in business I say if you do not intervene early enough in this neurochemical Cascade you're gonna be in trouble because it'll be out of control it'll be like you know no breaks on the roller coaster and and then it's like I have this incredible career and this incredible job I don't know what happened we slept together and now I'm fired and you see it all the time like Harvard Business School case study uh what happened well they let the neurochemical Cascade go too long and you have to intervene number one don't put yourself in a position where you go to step two don't put yourself in a position where you go to step three what are you doing you're managing your brain and if you don't know the brain science you can't do that that's why the stuff is so incredibly empowering when you read that stuff for the first time you're like oh I have something I can do here now there's something I can use it's not just psychology now it's something that's more tangible than that because the the Grandeur of this entire experience has a biological basis and one that I can understand and one I can I can actually manage yeah for me being able to picture the thing that helps a lot sure yeah once I could understand um the myelination process I was like okay now I get why this is something I need to repeat once I understood that the the brain is a caloric hog and from an evolutionary standpoint that means anything that you do repeatedly it's going to hardwire just to make it more efficient and so all of that coming together really allowed me to begin to improve your habit well yeah because your habits what they were doing was improving the management of the organ and and that was affecting your psychology and your Effectiveness and your happiness and and the whole you know the progress that you're making in your life that's why in the information is so critically important that's why it can be so life-changing to learn science actually for sure so what are then the habits of happiness or maybe a better way this is a language to use in the book the macronutrients of Happiness like what are those things that we want to begin building our lives around if we really want to thrive so people define happiness in a lot of different ways but the biggest mistake that people make is thinking that it's a feeling that happiness is a feeling oh it's not a feeling no happiness has feelings associated with it okay but to say that my Thanksgiving turkey has a smell is different than saying that the smell of the turkey is the Thanksgiving dinner right so that's a really big distinction that it's important to make so your Thanksgiving dinner is protein carbohydrates and fat that's literally what your Thanksgiving dinner is it also has a delicious smell that attracts you to it and that you want and if it didn't have that or had the wrong smell it smelled like your you know microwaving trash when you walked into Mom's house for Thanksgiving you'd be like something's wrong here so but getting past the feelings on happiness is what will set you free to be able to manage it appropriately growing a business is hard netsuite is the number one Cloud Financial system streamlining accounting financial management inventory HR and more manage risk get reliable forecasts and improve your margins right now you can download netsuite's popular kpi checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free netsuite.com Theory what I want to understand when you started the think tank and when you stopped obviously because we did the other interview and I know you're the book from strength to strength and I know the two big movements of somebody's life where you go from fluid intelligence to crystalline intelligence where you're really bringing wisdom to the table and that was your transitional moment right between those two so I understand all of that but at the same time I do wonder if um there there were just other things caught up in it and that maybe the either I've heard you say you were no longer making progress when you were a French horn player right and that's what made you want to leave that I'm wondering if you felt like you were no longer making progress in the think tank and that's why you wanted to leave that like is that the moment where we all go oh that's my cue now to find that next assignment that's what we should use as a cue the natural Cadence of you know the value that you're creating you don't very very few people get to create more and more and more value and one exact thing over the course of their lives and we have an economy that accommodates change so it's really incumbent upon us to have our antennae up and pay attention to that because we want to be able to create that value and be open to the next assignment so yeah I mean my motives are never pure because you know I'm just a guy and but I do have a process of discernment every philosophical religious tradition has a process of discernment discernment is when you don't know what to do how you figure it out this is hard you know the decision-making process and so I'll have students are like I don't know should I do a startup or go work in Investment Banking or should I marry this person or not or should I go to law school or stay at work or or something some things are even more personal and and delicate and difficult but at any particular time a third of the people who are watching us are agonizing over a particular decision so the question is how do you make these difficult decisions and every philosophical tradition has a process on how to make a decision and here's the key thing that they all have in common you got to do the work and to do the work it means you need to think about it it doesn't mean you need to think about a particular thing you need to think about that decision process every day what are you thinking about so when I have students that have haven't even begun this process I'll say Okay 15 minutes a day I want you to start by sitting alone at your desk no music no phone is not there write lists of things you like you guys just start getting in touch with the things that are attractive to you because some people are completely even divorced from that they have no they're so far away from being able to discern what they want to do they don't even know what they like and so just starting to write places I've gone that I really enjoyed and not because you're deciding where to go next but just because you're trying to get that in order in your head what are the things that are attractive to me what are the things that I actually like I'll tell people that they have that they should to be thinking about just a process to let the discernment happen you have to be very quiet and very concerted in the effort to do so to walk for an hour before Dawn every day with no devices and to do that so people who are really religious I'll say 15 minutes a day praying about this to be given the discernment to be given proper discernment 15 minutes a day on your knees so and or meditation practices lots of ways to do the difference between prayer and meditation is there one well there's lots of forms of prayer and lots of forms of meditation so there's a lot of meditation techniques single point meditation analytical meditation um uh meditation of compassion all different sort of in theravada Tradition are you trying to make your best case to God or are you just repeating an idea in your head like please grant me the discernment to understand what I should do in this moment so there are different ways to do it there are different forms of prayer even Christian prayer even Catholic prayer which is what I engage in so every night I pray 25 minutes What's called the rosary a thousand-year-old meditative prayer before I go to sleep every night and that's and that's the thing that you repeat while you're meditating on particular Mysteries that happened in biblical tradition and what are you doing you're focusing you're you're seeing your life through the lens of these great stories and what that does is helps you understand yourself better in all kinds of insight Insight comes to you over the context of this process that's a kind of a centering prayer there are other prayers that are called uh you know mental prayer which the Buddhists call analytical meditation the Dalai Lama wakes up every morning and the first two hours are analytical meditation where he'll just think deeply about a passage in tibetan Buddhist scripture he's thinking about he's not reading it he's written down a few lines and he's looking at it and thinking about it for two hours I think that's 88 and he's doing that for the first two hours of every day that's analytical meditation that's not just like looking at a flame or doing Soul cycle or something that's not he's and that's that's also meditation incredibly important mental prayer is the same thing where you'll read a passage of scripture whether your scripture is the the suit does or the New Testament or whatever your thing is and you read it and you say and you say what does this meaning to me where am I in this how is this impacting my life two sentences 15 minutes more it's crazy how much Insight you can actually get from that there's compassionate meditation or compassionate prayer where you you bring into your mind the people that are giving you struggle and you think about you visualize good things happening to them and you ask God or you ask the cosmos that good things that that blessings be rained down upon them and you change the nature of your orientation toward them the biggest reason that you have enmity with other people is because of your enmity toward them not theirs toward you typically and you can literally change that and this is one of the techniques for doing so so different kinds of prayer and meditation they have different functions but we have to use them as such and not just be kind of like all right like like a little kid like God I sure hope I get an A on that exam can you please help me get an A on that exam you have to be a grown-up about this stuff and it's super exciting and it so that's the process of discernment when you're trying to figure out what to do is you have to concentrate on it the the ancient Greeks called it sunnisis in the Pali Buddhist tradition in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition it's called Panna and in this discernment of spirits and ignatian Catholic spirituality every tradition has it where you're focused on it focused on it focused on it for a particular period of time if you do the work or you're focused on the decision looking for the insight for 15 minutes a day for two months you'll have Clarity that's the guarantee it's amazing but the reason that people can't get clarity is because they don't do the work they don't do the analysis yeah for sure um okay uh walk me through the idols what what are the idols and how do we use them well instead of being used by them so this is a tradition that comes from um neoplatonism it's from Plato as best stated by his great pupil Aristotle and then translated into the Islamic Jewish and Christian traditions in the Middle Ages so Ava Rose who is the you know the the the Muslim philosopher for me from from southern Spain um uh uh maimonides and Thomas Aquinas so these are the you know Saint Thomas Aquatics these are the great figures of this and they really they translated Aristotle into saying that who Aristotle was the greatest of all the social scientists I mean to I realize I'm cheapening Aristotle in this way by saying it but it's it's kind of a conceit that everybody you love is like Tom you're a great social scientist that's like the ultimate compliment from a social scientist so by the way you're very good social scientist so kind and he and so for example Aquinas said that there's four substitutes for God that he he believed as did Ava Rose and and maimonides and all of the the monotheistic religious leaders that what we ultimately want is God now atheists watching us or agnostic disagree with that but we all want something can you define what that means then to Define to want God yeah because I I have a feeling even atheists want a thing to fit that god-shaped hole but I've never taken the time for myself to Define what the god-shaped hole is so I'd love to know yeah so this is the thing for example you're looking for something that's defined by your craving you know when you're when you're really really hungry it it proves the existence of food when you're really really horny it proves the existence of sex right and so when you really really are seeking the complex Singularity the source of all Truth The Cosmic Oneness it's proof it exists what is it but what is it okay so that's what different Traditions have been trying to explain for the longest time this is really interesting though by the way I don't want to just let that roll past yeah hunger is the proof that there is food you desire for sex it's a proof that there is sex the desire for it or it's evidence that there is sex it's not a proof in the classical sense but it's evidence that it exists evidence and so it would be really really really weird if you had a craving for something and the object of the craving didn't exist it doesn't really make sense yeah and so if you have a craving for the Oneness oh Arthur Brooks this is good yeah and this is by the way this is one of the reasons that when all the conversations that we're having about AI they're all misguided AI can't give us what we want it can't because all it does is gives us complicating engineering solutions for a similacrum for the thing that we're for a simulation for the thing that we really really want which is a different species of problem you know what we really want is the is the object of all the complexity of the universe complexity is simple to understand and impossible to solve complication is hard to solve but possible all of the reasons that all these things that we do in Tech that are that promise everything and deliver nothing but loneliness the reason is because they're complicated solutions to complex needs love is complex it's very easy to understand and impossible to figure out your cat is complex very simple but impossible to know what it's going to do all the things we really want in life all of our deep desires are complex all of our Solutions are complicated and we're throwing complicated Solutions and complex problems and we're not getting happier and so the only way that we can do this is to take quiet time in contemplation of the complex that's the solution now are you going to find it no no but it's just like happiness you're not going to find it you're going to make progress toward it the goal the the the the the metaphysical the transcendental goal of a spiritual or philosophical life is the approach to the complex Oneness to the ultimate truth that We crave and you got to do the work stop distracting yourself with social media stop distracting Yourself by saying if I make the money then everything will be okay or if I have the Precision this gets us back to the idols Aquinas said that we crave God but will but God is complex and hard to understand and has all kinds of Demands and and winds us up in all sorts of one-sided conversations and uh and so we take a complicated solution to the complex problem and things that are kind of god-like you know social media is kind of social life like which is why when we're lonely we'll binge it but it doesn't help and the social media equivalent for what we want in God according to Aquinas is four-fold money power pleasure and honor by which he meant fame or admiration or prestige that's what he said to the four things and those are the idols and everybody's got their Idol that when they're not on their game looking for the cosmic Oneness despite the fact that they'll never find it they'll say okay fine I'm tired I'm gonna go do that thing that's a that's a simulation for it and and it always runs you in the wrong direction it runs you in the wrong direction and only when you know what your idol is can you actually manage yourself so you say I'm doing that again I'm doing that again I'm looking for money again when I really wanted was love I'm looking for admiration again when I really wanted was enlightenment because you didn't want to do the work for enlightenment so you went and did the easy thing which was getting the idol so is Enlightenment a stand-in for God yeah yeah I mean the whole the whole point is that these are Enlightenment is something Enlightenment would be what Christians or Muslims would call the beatific Vision which is the late finally layer eyes on the face of God which is actual truth if you're a Buddhist it means because you finally understand you're sitting under the Bodhi Tree and you you finally have this you finally get it is what it comes to you know we in the monotheistic traditions we don't believe you get it on this side of death Buddhists think that you actually can achieve it but be that as it may I mean I don't know I have my hypothesis but I am I do know that we're all move we all need to move toward it we all need to do the work toward it and getting it getting the AI is not going to do it any more than Facebook interesting that you're linking because I don't think of AI as God but I hear a lot of people talk about that that it will end up being Godlike so it's interesting if they really are looking for that in AI I think what I'm trying to fill the whole Godlike hole with it so I will grant you that for anybody doing that that would be a tremendous mistake and I'll give you my thesis on what I think all this is in a second but AI I think for me anyway it is it is to finally get answers to the complex which may be your entire definition oh my god well you that's a that's an exercise in futility that's interesting I don't know that I would agree with that so I feel like and look I don't have uh the data that I have to back up the following is is merely physics right as we that's not bad grow huh well we don't understand physics yeah the the reason I bring that up is because as we strip layers off that onion it unlocks things that we couldn't do before right and all of us have grown up in a world where Einstein einstinian whichever way you would say that physics already exists yeah and not realizing that before that it was Newtonian physics and that the shift between the two unlocked right the modern world right and you know we think of him as just sort of this crazy-haired guy and we forget that so many of the things we rely on in the modern world required us to understand that breakthrough but it isn't the universal principle yet we haven't gotten there we've got Higgs Bulls on which will which will show which will render Einstein physics obsolete in all kinds of ways fingers crossed so as we begin to unlock these things and truly understand them it really does open up Avenues of um technology now one has to be careful not to view technology as a God but if we can use AI to either augment our own intelligence or for it to itself be intelligent now I'm wildly conflicted about yeah let me be abundantly clear we all are yes we're pulling it as fast as I can and at the same time I'm terrified uh but I want those answers have real world implications that's the moral of my story yeah yeah for sure absolutely they do but the point is that they that Ai and all of these particular tools they solve a different species of problem yeah they are not going to answer the gods they're not going to because they can't and the whole idea is that there's always this concept that we could understand everything if we had sufficient computational horsepower but that's not right because you can't solve complex problems which are mathematically different than complicated problems yes give me an example of so for people that don't know you did Applied Mathematics for a while so it's not me asking some random guy off the street give me an example of a complex and a complicated problem yes because in math the only thing I can think of because I am wildly ignorant I would like to be abundantly clear but from my just not knowing math at all perspective the only category of thing in math that I know as being complex would be something like the uh pie so Pi is uh fiosha Bach is correct better understood as a function rather than a number because you can never know the final digit of pi it's a relationship interesting yeah it's a relationship but but so I'll give you an example is that complex yeah well that's a good question whether or not it's complex or I think about it in a slightly different way so I'll give you an example that might um that might make it clearer so a complicated problem is one that has you know 75 equations and 75 unknowns it's a highly dimensional mathematical problem that it would just take tons of computational horsepower to to figure out but there is a solution designing a jet engine is an incredibly complicated problem making a toaster is a complicated problem you know if you try to do one out in your garage with you know stuff that's sitting around your house you'll probably burn your house down if you try to make toast with it it's a very complicated thing to do but once you do it you can do it over and over and over again with almost complete accuracy that's these are complex complicated problems a complex problem is a football game a football game is a complicated problem where I don't care how good your computer is you're not going to be able to tell me the outcome because that's complex it's complex I think I misspoke you said complicated once in complex ones but complex it's a complex problem a complex problem is incredibly simple to understand the outcome you know the Patriots score higher than the Broncos that's uh you know the natural order of things that they that it's just one team has a higher score than the other and wins very simple incredibly simple um but it's unbelievably the permutations are so vast that you can't you can't simulate it you don't think that's Noble with enough computation it's not knowable it's enough computation but actually and even if that one turns out to be that turns out to be not a complex problem but a complicated problem there are complex problems like the problem of love the problem of Love is very simple and yet it's not something you can simulate in any real way and some people will say well you have your AI girlfriend that's a that's a you've you've cracked the code of love no you haven't there's no there's nobody watching us right now it's like yeah AI girlfriend just as good no no AI girlfriend a substitute because I can't get the real thing is what it would come down to that's the difference between pornography and and and and sex with your wife all right when two smart people who are well-meaning think the other person is crazy you know they have different base assumptions yeah so to me that sounds crazy uh and the reason is that I believe we're in a deterministic universe yeah I'm guessing you do not I don't believe we're in a deterministic universe I believe in a stochastic Universe okay it defines the stochastic means there's Randomness in the universe my father was a biostatistician a PhD biostatistician and he was a devout Christian I said what gives dad you know I'm an adolescent what gives and he said you understand he said you know what Miracles are and and I said what he said events that are five standard deviations of way from the mean they're way out on the Tails of the of the of the curves you know the greatest gift that God ever gave the world was was a distribution a random uh distribution of events he believed and I think it's actually more than plausible I think it's most likely that the universe is actually has Randomness in it which means it cannot be you can't get to a single point on most of the or any of the complex problems you can't and so you can simulate a kind of a version of a curved fit but you can't actually get underneath them and simulate them properly because we have a stochastic universe and we live with deterministic brains our brains say that this happens to this and this happens to this we have a super computer that's good enough we could figure out all how it all hangs together and that's the the supposition behind Einstein physics or or Newtonian physics that these are there's a deterministic structure underneath that we're we're simulating we're doing the best that we can to put a model on top it's a map but that's actually probably not the way the universe works and if that's the case and if we have a craving for the source of that then it's some thing someone some entity that can be the the origin of that complexity per se what is it what is it you know it's like maybe my model which is yeah I got the Bible and I got God and I got that whole thing maybe that's nuts maybe it's nuts but it's it's a hypothesis and it says that we can't get it from the stuff we can't get it from the stuff you can only get it by looking for it looking for the true thing and that's the reason I think that really great intellectual life requires that we have both a an intellectual Pursuit and a spiritual Pursuit and that we need to undertake these things in parallel I think that's the only responsible course of action what's happening when you're looking for it like I can give you I don't know that Buddhists would agree with this but I think they would uh what you're getting by looking at it in a Buddhist or looking for it in the Buddhist tradition is you're getting out from under the illusion of uh perception right that that's definitely a western look at it but that feels pretty accurate that's a good way of explaining it that's a good way of explaining Buddhist thinking on it that you're no longer bound by the illusions what what in their language that we're developing here you're no longer bound by your models you're actually able to see the road as opposed to staring at the map all the time it's like you know we're looking at that we got our devices and we're looking at the GPS if you just stare at the GPS you're going to crash in your car you're actually driving on a road in real physical life but you're more and more and more divorced from that when you're stuck with the with the with the models and those are the illusions that would say that you're trying to free yourself from by actually imbibing some of the the oxygen in the in real life around you okay so if that's the Buddhist take on it what is the Catholic take on it the Catholic take on it is very similar which is that there is underlying reality but that underlying reality is not always apparent and for all sorts of reasons and that the underlying reality is um made by God and yeah it is the realm of God and that we're not we just don't have the capacity or the you know the preparation to be able to experience no Plato talked about this he was pre-christian Plato talked about this about his analogy in of the the Shadows on the cave wall the closest that we can get to actually seeing what's going on is the shadows of what's going on behind the fire in the cave wall um the a lot of the the German philosophers from the 17th and 18th centuries and 19th centuries would talk about this too so the schopenhauer for example Arthur schopenhauer is obviously one of the greatest early 19th century mid 19th century philosophers would talk about villa which was you know the sense of will that the reality exists but we can't see it because we're just not competent and we're trying to put One Foot In Front Of Another and so we create an edifice that that allows us to live but we can't actually see the reality that the complex real is happening behind it these guys were struggling with and maybe you're from your perspective the obvious answer is just God but I don't know if it's just God that's a word for it they were struggling for something they had a craving because here here is the modern take on that uh you're in a simulation right now some people believe you're in a literal computer simulation and other people like me I don't necessarily have evidence that you're in an actual computer simulation but I do have evidence that your brain is simulating reality as a wage so that you can grapple with it because instead of seeing blue if you just saw the number of photons in a given wavelength that are reflecting off that surface and into your eye it's so complicated so your brain is just taking this incredibly complex Universe which by the way for people that don't know the human uh our ability to perceive the actual electromagnetic spectrum is .0035 percent yeah so you're like way way less than half a percentage doesn't exist yeah there's tons of things we can't see so we've taken this gigantically we know the things we can't see yeah for sure and we boil it down into something that is just an absolute sliver of the reality so okay in a modern context I get it but like what were they coming up against in whatever 2000 years ago when Plato's describing the Shadows on the cave wall what is he grappling with like it's as far as I can tell he's he's getting underneath like realizing oh my perceptions do not equate to reality and once you accept that like everything begins to unwind well it doesn't begin to unwind it begins to free you to this understanding that you're that you begin to see its Illusions you begin to see that you are living in a world of Illusion now how is this the the we can militate against that by saying it's all of an assimilation and part of the simulation is that we're simulated the simulation creates the illusion that there is something bigger even though there isn't but that's just explaining something away so in a philosophical basis the way I talk about this with my students I said okay we got three we got three choices three doors to go through Monty this is for you know for those who are the that's the the Monty Hall game in economics is based on let's make a deal this old game show that was on when I was a kid right and you get the the contestants would have to choose one of these three doors and then the door would open up and it would turn out either got a car or you got a living room set or you got a goat yeah or something like that so there's three there's basically three choices about that about how you're gonna see the the existence of of an underlying reality that you can or cannot perceive and you can or cannot get closer to and make progress toward it has to do with the two concepts of essence and existence We believe We all believe that we exist I mean you can relax that by saying it's a simulation we don't actually exist on it all but let's leave that for a moment and let's just say that we all agree that there's existence what we don't agree on is the the nature of essence essence is meaning so I'm alive and my life has meaning okay now the the the traditional philosophical understanding the platonic understanding of this the ancient Greek understanding of this the Christian Jewish um Hindu um Muslim for sure understanding of this is that Essence precedes existence let's think about that for a second the meaning of your life existed before you were born your job is to live up to that meaning to find that meaning and live up to that meaning it existed it's a cosmic thing that's what comes from the cosmic Oneness the modern existentialist view modern philosophy a lot of it would say that as that existence precedes essence you're born without any meaning you have to invent meaning the best you can good luck that's Sartre like go sit in a French cafe and smoke filterless cigarettes and feel depressed as existence precedes essence now the third the middle way the most depressing way is the nietzschean way which is the nihilistic way that says existence exists and Essence doesn't there is no meaning the only responsible course of action in a life is to give up on Essence there is no meaning stop looking for God stop looking for enlightenment stop looking for all of it that creatives that you couldn't apply meaning he said there is no meaning there is no meaning life has no meaning so you can't apply because the first one is there is no meaning but you can apply meaning that there though the first one is that there is meaning you need to find it and live up to I see so the second is that there is no meaning until you create it and the last is that there is no meaning got it and you can keep looking for it and you can keep trying to create it but that's childish Let It Go Let It Go that's nihilism that's why we call you know somebody who's nihilistic somebody who believes that there is no meaning and nothing matters that's the reason we call it that in the popular vernacular so these are the kind of the three choices that we have to walk through most for most of all of existence of humanity it's been door number one which is that there is Essence and then we experience existence and the whole point of life is to figure out and pursue Essence and responsible and and in a way that's a generative and meaningful and that's what we're trying to do that's that's what I think is most compelling I think that's the most compelling view I don't I don't know the truth you know and and by the way when I've talked to Sam Harris about this he agrees with me that there's things that we don't see that there is Essence that we we can only barely perceive and and all of the things that I talk about from Catholicism to the stochastic nature of the statistical set of circumstances which we find ourselves from the science to the religion is my understanding my best understanding my fumbling around in the dark and looking at Shadows on the cave wall for what I'm trying to do to to find the essence that will give me meaning give meaning to my existence that's the point of my life it's very interesting so uh it goes back to what are we grappling with here so uh I mean I Define my version of what I think the god-shaped hole is yeah and I'm going to put it in the context of the language we've been using here so because I come at everything from an evolutionary lens right and I'm very much of a good lens by the way thank you it really helps you understand a lot has been very helpful evolutionary psychology is just the best it's bizarrely controversial which I will never understand but uh nonetheless it has been extremely useful in my life so I come at it from that so I'm like okay if we do have this hole and it is uh a yearning and that yearning is evidence that there is something what what is the nature of the yearning and what is the thing that I'm yearning for right and again using the language of this conversation um I have a feeling that humans have a um a very intrinsic evolutionarily derived desire to kneel before something and now the question becomes okay if you have this push to kneel before something why what what is the evolutionary advantage to those that kneel before the thing and the best answer that I can come up with is that you need to get out of the me self and you need to get into the eye self and you need to create that distance and by kneeling before something by put making something bigger than you now one you're just you are in the habit of living your life in service of something Beyond yourself right I don't think this is definitely just ignorance so you will help me here I don't think that any of the world's lasting religions would compel you to serve anything other than ah this would be interesting I actually don't know the answer to this question I will be very shocked if you tell me that any lasting religion has asked people to serve anything other than either Humanity itself or a God that loves Humanity is there no doubt there are no doubt there are religions that that but I guess but you stipulated to Lasting religions yes I don't see how that would be beneficial because what ultimately what I'm saying is the proxy the god-shaped hole is actually a desire to serve your fellow man because that's going to be the thing that keeps you alive because you're way better off coming together as a group evolutionary yes is my gut and then religion like the specific whether oral or written tradition is the thing that allowed humans to come together in gigantic swaths in a way that no other species no other creature not ants nothing can come together in the flexible fashion that we can by using ideas of religion like those just give you an instant bond and I'm willing to kill for and die for this thing that we have in common yeah yeah so it's um I also have a huge amount of time and admiration for evolutionary psychology but it's totally descriptive and it's not it's neither prescriptive nor deterministic so I don't believe that the evolutionary psychology of the things that actually set out our impulses and imperatives that they that they prescribe nor proscribe particular Behavior I think that we have choices way beyond our evolution so let me get an example um we talked about Mother Nature she has really two goals for you and all of evolutionary psychology comes down to survival and Gene Gene propagation that's what all of you know the evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists they say that all that they that any organism exists for is to survive long enough to pass honest genes and so it all comes down to that but virtually everybody believes that we can short-circuit that and make decisions that go beyond that we can do all and so people will say okay well you laid down your life for a stranger but that was because you had some evolutionary impulse to behave in an altruistic way that that dates back to a time when that would have been better for your tribe et cetera et cetera et cetera I think that the better explanation for that is that animal path versus the Divine path the animal path is incredibly powerful it's a it's a wonderful model for understanding why most things happen and why we have the impulses that we do but the most interesting questions of the Divine path where we actually make decisions that are that are that go beyond the what our evolutionary Evolution would suggest is the best path for us that go beyond the things that we want to do that that that help us to understand that there could actually be something bigger and and this is the really unique thing about the human species is that we can make this election between Divine and animal Divine and animal and every day is this election between Divine and animal and in fact to look for the source of the complex Oneness in a world of complex Ingenuity a complicated ingenuity that's to choose the Divine path ultimately the Divine path of the animal path in the biggest way so not everybody agrees with me a lot of really smart people disagree with me and say all the things that we actually do they still come back to Evolution even if they don't look like this is an evolutionarily Adaptive thing to do it it sort of is you just need a more complicated understanding of The evolutionary impulse I agree I think that there's man evolutionary biology it just puts us on this track and makes us act in particular ways yeah we got all these habits the things that we want to do and then we can decide not to do them because we want something higher because we're called to something higher because we have a a dim perception of something that's bigger that's something that's better that we're drawn toward and that's the the Oneness that we're distracted from when we're basically just sitting on the animal path and doing money power pleasure fame money power pleasure Fame and so instead of getting on our knees and contemplating the the nature of Enlightenment we'll you know scroll Instagram that's interesting so as somebody who believes that you can't be enlightened prior to death um what is it about the contemplation of that knowing you will never be able to actually understand it what is it about the contemplation that makes your life better I presume the progress principle you're getting closer you're getting closer and why not why would God want it such that you can't attain Enlightenment because well according to Christian yeah theology I mean so this becomes a theological question it's because ultimately it's the relationships the beatific vision is the relationship with God him or herself and you know the way that the Hindus talk about this by the way is that the transmigration of the Soul occurs as people are getting closer and closer to Enlightenment at which point the soul will be reabsorbed into the godhead so the idea of the soul for Hindus is that your soul Tom soul is a little chip of God comes down enters a human being corrupted by circumstance Etc becomes perfected over a hundred or a thousand lifetimes and this is reabsorbed into the godhead and the ultimate goal of to stop samsara the endless cycle of birth and rebirth is to be reabsorbed into God is the way that so their their understanding of this is actually easier to understand weirdly than just I got to see God awesome you know I don't know it's but it's all basically saying the same thing getting closer getting closer making progress this is the goal in life this is the impulse and how do we do that all kinds of ways that our lives are generative and help us do that you know as as silly as you know doing a podcast starting a business all these things that help other people they help us understand ourselves they make life they they lessen the burden for our brothers and sisters in particular ways this is the reason that it's so profoundly unsatisfying for you to do something it's all me me me me me as opposed to others others others and ultimately you get the juice of of the of these generative things of these creative things that you're doing when it when it really does lighten the load and and improve the lives of other people because that's the process of getting closer the process of getting closer and the physical manifestations of the things that we do every day and it gets better and we hope and again this is one Theory my whole religion I might be completely off base I mean I can't say because I have no data I can only hypothesize at this point faith is belief without data is belief without evidence it's uh it's not a set of non-testable hypotheses is what it comes down to and it's just that the progress per se is the point of what we're trying to do on Earth that's what the certainly the Dalai Lama would say about the you know the from Life To Life toward Enlightenment that's what the Hindus would say about the transmigration of the soul for the reabsorption of the godhead that's what Hindus or that's what Buddhist sorry uh Muslims and Christians would say about trying to actually go to live in heaven with God but it's all saying the same thing fundamentally about the progress the progress is the point of life thank you I don't know why at this point in my life this has become such a fascinating question you're writing schedule by the way yeah no no seriously what you you throw off Superstition and you you look for the pure oxygen of enlightenment and what looks like you know Jesus and Santa Claus what's the difference you know when you're 20 when you're 50 you're going ah big difference yeah it's interesting there is um there's something about the way that the world is moving so my goal in life is to in a really practical way help people um live a life live a life of fulfillment and I I never quite know how to put words to it it fulfillment survives grief and so I'm trying to um I have thought a lot about in my own life and have found tremendous easing of suffering in recognizing what I call that there is an evolutionary impulse to get me to do the things that will align myself with having kids that survive long enough to have kids right and so while I don't have to do that literally I have to understand what the algorithms are that are running in my mind to make that happen and um the more I explore this space of like how one clicks into fulfillment I do find myself grappling with it as you get under perception and you really start to say okay what what is the Bedrock here um it does become I'll say quasi-religious because I don't find myself going oh I'm getting closer and closer to God that isn't what it feels like from my perspective from my perspective it feels like there is ground truth and you can get closer to it and the more you understand how the illusion is created the less you are trapped by it and the less you are trapped by The Matrix to use a very uh fun word evocative way of thinking about it it's one of the most profound movies for the past 30 years notwithstanding the cinematography it has to do with the it has to do with the concepts underneath it a hundred percent it it for me it is the most useful metaphor for the human existence and so once I understand how the Matrix works then then I start seeing it in everything I start seeing it in politics which is not something I thought I would ever engage with I start seeing it in the culture War another thing I never thought I would engage with but as I I forget what this is a reference to this is a an allusion to something as I set aside childish things I really come to realize that you're just quoted St Paul is that what it is that's hilarious I can't even tell you where from but uh that you begin to realize oh this is one problem yeah and once you understand it's one problem that manifests in all these weird ways helping people get deeper on that ladder because helping people get deeper on that ladder becomes is is very meaningful to me it's obviously also self-serving in that the deeper on the letter I go the more grounded I feel the more I feel resilient to the slings and arrows of Life the more I feel like facing death isn't scary um just all the things all the things but I am I don't know what to make of the fact that when I started all of this it was a lot easier to have conversations about think like this act like this and then finding people wouldn't do it and every time I tried to scratch as to okay where were all my own Hang-Ups that it it has led to me circling around this problem of the god-shaped hole over and over and over it's uh very fascinating yeah no it is and this is I'm a psychologist sociologists have found that pattern that it tends to occur particularly with people who are who live in their heads people who are questioners that they start asking bigger and deeper questions and the answers they typically come to them even with a with a um with the greatest horsepower that the world can provide doesn't give them the truth that they seek it just doesn't give you full flavor it doesn't give you you get lots of interesting Solutions like yeah I got a good morning routine you know it's really good a ice bath you know work out whatever happens it's just not good but it's not the thing that I'm seeking you keep finding answers to questions that you weren't asking and you're not finding the solutions to the questions that you really were asking that are in Kuwait you know you don't even know quite how to put words to these questions because the complex is so hard to apprehend that you don't even you can't even you don't even know the questions let alone the answers but that's what you're grappling toward and that's I believe that's what humans are grappling toward that's what Aquinas was saying that we all want the thing but well like all right I'll take the substitute all right I'll take the substitute and people start to freak out about dying if they've been taking the substitute the counterfeit money power pleasure Fame their whole life because they're running out of time and they haven't made any progress because they've been you know eating non-nutritious food and not getting and they're starving to death and and it's just they get people get into a panic in their life and they realize they get into this deep existential dread this on WE that comes from you know the depression of the world that comes because there aren't any answers and maybe Nietzsche was right and and they were just looking in the wrong place so that's what I see I mean I'm I'm endlessly interested and enthusiastic about the about the promise of AI but I'm not kidding myself for a second to think that it's going to answer the real questions that I have and that real people have and the Really the real things that people want is funny because you know the one thing that we really all want we don't have the technology for we're not getting closer to it you know the the happiness that everybody really wants it's not sold on the Internet it's not provided by the government you know we've got lunar Landers and Tick Tock videos and you name it we can invent anything the Ingenuity is almost boundless but we're not getting closer to the thing that we want because the Ingenuity is being deployed toward complicated ends as opposed to the answers to complex problems we're answering the wrong set of questions is what it comes down to and that's why you can find people who have everything in the world and are still miserable they couldn't get it there they couldn't buy what they wanted in that store it's the way that it works interesting the Dalai Lama and I had a conversation about this because he and I worked together in various projects for the last 11 years wow anyway this conversation about he says you know he's musing this one point when the Dalai Lama Muses you listen it's like it's funny because you know that you you westerners you know you've done everything to create economic value and tremendous businesses and incredible wealth and it's so wonderful to give people all this opportunity so they don't starve to death and you know the world is richer and all that but but you spent no time actually trying to understand the nature of what really matters the most he says we're poorer yeah our societies are poorer in the East but we spent all our time and all our Ingenuity trying to get the source of pure truth did they make any more progress than we did I'm not sure but also it's interesting because a lot of Buddhists will look at Christianity and they'll be like yeah yeah we used to believe that 4 000 years ago that's a that's a rudimentary theological technology you're on the right road but you're way way back compared to where we were yeah we used to have a guy yeah we used to have a guy you know and the whole thing as opposed to these are different religions trying to get the same ideas in different ways they think there's a natural progression of Enlightenment that happens to people and societies and we're thousands of years behind where they are it's back despite the fact that we're hundreds of years ahead economically or thousands of years behind in terms of spiritual enlightenment complex versus complicated same idea I don't know if it's true that is the question uh-huh all right let's re-ground this for a second this has gotten pretty heavy man I've never had a conversation like this before yeah this is uh in in media this is amazing well thank you yeah um assuming that the audience is still with us let's uh let's reground this so in the book you talk about um what it is exactly that people need to um come back together so you talk about the four pillars to build the life you want right um what are those four pillars and if I can contextualize this why does modern technology seem to move us in the exact opposite direction yeah so what we want is love that's what we want um and and and once again the world gives us complicated things we want complex things love is complex how do you get love love of the Divine or love of you know truth love of your family love with friendship the the point of intersection between family and friendship is romantic love so that crosses both those categories and love of everybody is instantiated in the way you earn your daily bread which is work so the way that we needed the portfolio the pillars or the Investment Portfolio for happiness that we all need is to spend every day thinking about the way that we're going to make progress in our faith or philosophy whether it's religious or not family life friendship real friends not deal friends you know and and the modern world gives us lots of deal friends but not very many real friends quit your you know real friends deal friends are useful to us real friends are useless that's and that's why we don't spend a lot of time on them and then work that serves is what it comes down to and so those are the silos those are the deposits those are the accounts that we need to put investment in every single day and if we don't we're going to be we're going to be missing things we're going to we're not going to be as happy as we could be and we're not going to be building a stable and steady um happiness that will that will improve our lives and help us make progress as we go through life so those are the four things it's just a very practical matter I set people on I can actually set up a course of action most people watching us are very good at working nobody's watching impact Theory who's a total slacker it's like yeah I don't think I'm just going to sit around all day but I'm watch impact Theory no you want to be better at what you do so everybody watching us has got his work is pretty on point and okay and it's creating value and it's cool stuff generally speaking is going to be cool stuff you're you know you've got a cool stuff audience good but are you working on your philosophical life are you reading the stoics are you walking in nature without devices are you studying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach are you engaged in meditation practice are you practicing a religion of your youth you need to do something like that every day I recommend at least 15 minutes of wisdom reading every day stuff you don't need to read but you your soul needs it 15 minutes a day and I have a whole you know list of books to say toss out a couple well I'll toss out a couple um depending on what what what tradition you want to start in you know somebody who is interested in all eastern and western and very questioning and open to all different ideas I would I would recommend the way of a pilgrim which is written by a an anonymous Russian Orthodox monk in the 19th century way of a pilgrim the way of a pilgrim and what he is he's just walking around Russia having Adventures saying one prayer over and over and over again it's a meditative book you're reading in it's just like the more you read it turns into a page Turner it's the most boring book ever and turns into a page Turner Zen In The Art of archery which actually explains Zen through the activity of archery Through The Eyes of a Westerner so that's a very good way to begin to understand Zen thinking Zen is the most I sell thing ever because there's nothing more than an attitude of observation that's what Zen really is is a stripped thing compared to Tibetan Buddhism all the Buddhists are gonna you know put in the comment section how crazy and wrong and wrong-headed I am on that um I would recommend the miracle of mindfulness by tiknot Han which talks about what is mindfulness it's being alive right now and how you can actually do that and there's countless numbers of these things and there's any number that we could if you want if you want fiction that falls into this category is dostoevsky's brothers karamazov that is the most spiritual and intellectually psychologically Rich book I've ever read Dostoevsky is philosophy right so it's kind of like people were reading Atlas Shrugged because they wanted they wanted objectivist philosophy in the form of a novel if you want the essence of the search for the complex Oneness and the force of in the form of a novel Brothers karamazov by by Fiona dostoevski is great and so there's there's reading second thing is family life again we talked about that before there's one reason to have Schism in your family that's abuse everything else requires work the big reason that people drift away from their families is because they're just just lazy they're just lazy they just like I gotta call Mom I was one of the last time I saw mom do the work it takes two to tango like if the person is just not investing like you're you're trying to engage with your mom and oh my God yeah I know but the the point is that it generally speaking it's an iterative process where you don't and she doesn't and you don't and she doesn't you don't and she doesn't it's got to get restarted and doing the work actually though even the even even unilateral work even one-sided work is incredibly enriching for your happiness because the part about relationships that's best is the giving is not the getting it's better if you're giving and getting I get it I mean there's an equation it's a dynamic situation but even if you don't it's better to do it than not to do it friendship is critically important real friends not deal friends and that means the work that you have to do is not pecuniary I have people I work with who are real friends but they started as real friends and we just looked for an excuse to spend more time together and that's how they became dear friends too but the whole point is you know the people that you grew up with often people went they went to college with if they went to college and you know my I have a son in the military and his buddies in the military they're his real friends I mean they've literally saved his life and and he can't lose touch with those people I guess that's the ultimate deal right is saving and saving your life and then and then last but not least making sure that your work serves others and you earn your success and that you're working to make sure if you're an entrepreneur or a CEO like you or me that you're the people who work for you can earn their success and serve others because they deserve to earn the success and serve others and that's in the hands of the boss to a very large extent that's the that's the portfolio and are you either you're doing those things every day or you're not either you did your reading and called Mom and your best friend or you didn't right and every day that you don't you're just you're you're weakening the pillars of your happiness you're you're getting you're getting less competent in the serious business of building your life I think you may have even said it in this episode but life is an entrepreneurial game it's a startup um so when I think about those different pillars um they're not necessarily like they don't seem like big scary things uh so how do we approach those from an entrepreneurial standpoint like how do we make these more than just oh I checked in with my friend I touch base with Mom I read a passage in the Bible like how do we go beyond going through the motions and really do something meaningful yeah well to do to be more entrepreneurial about it you have to actually induce risk you have to inject risk into the proposition see one of the things about willingness and ability to take risk for outsized return you can tell I've written a textbook on entrepreneurship and it's like this is what they all have in common is this willingness and ability to take risk in exchange for outsized returns now usually for entrepreneurs the way they'll denominate it is green pieces of paper but the truth is for the startup of your life it's usually the denomination is love as you're willing to take risk for love you you said uh either in the book of the interview I wouldn't invest in an entrepreneur that was afraid to fall in love that's exactly right so that's one of the greatest examples for a lot of people who are watching us disproportionately people are watching us are going to be people in their 20s a lot of guys in the 20s the audience unless I dreadfully misperceive the audience yeah and you know I know a lot of guys my students my graduate students at Harvard who are willing to put 10 million dollars of other people's capital or risk or even their own if they've got it they're willing to to take a big scary job but they're not willing to ask a girl out on a date like what and the answer is to that conundrum to that mystery that riddle is that they're not entrepreneurial in the part of the life that matters the most which is their heart you know this is like if you're willing to put money at risk but not love at risk and self-esteem at risk you're not you're not an entrepreneur and you're not gonna have an exciting life you're just not and and here's the interesting thing you know I had this I was talking to this guy here's how it worked I was given a talk and I and I gave the analogy of Entrepreneurship in the business of romantic love and I said I gave him a it was a group of a big group of of 20-somethings in Washington DC I remember the day distinctly and and I said here's your assignment you got two weeks to tell somebody you love that person who doesn't know it and if it's not scary it's not the right person whoa and maybe by the way maybe maybe it's your dad maybe it's your dad unfortunately I love my dad to death yeah yeah yeah but but for a lot of people they have relationships with their families like I've never told you this but I love you it does like scary and weird and awkward and Etc so it doesn't have to be a romantic love but the whole point is if it's not scary it's not entrepreneurial enough okay so this kids kid in his 20s um Finds Me on an airplane a couple weeks later says I was at that speech in Washington DC and I can't get it out of my head like you know he says so I'm literally on my way right now to Philadelphia to confess my love to a woman I've been secretly in love with for two weeks wow for two months two no two years two years I've been in love with this woman I've never told her because I'm too afraid and I'm going there right now because of your speech and I'm like wow it's only a speech man bro be careful I don't want to ruin his life and and did you get a follow-up on this I did okay because I know I'm already engaged I did I know and um but not immediately I gave him my email and I said a prayer for him and the girl and I said girl and yeah I said let me know and then I didn't hear from him so I thought that was a bad sign I run into him at a holiday party a few months later and I say remember me he's like yep and I said how'd it go and she said she shot me down and she introduced me to the man she was in love with and it was awful it was awful I said I was very contrite I said I'm sorry I didn't mean to I didn't mean to mess you up you know the whole thing says no you understand I've been meaning to email you to thank you I said why he said because that was the thing I was most afraid of in my life and it happened and I didn't die and I'm Never Gonna Be Afraid again wow how did you he's also not gonna waste time on her how I mean you're you you're very successful entrepreneur not on your first venture you know I don't you need it it's like they there's work out of uh Northwestern Kellogg the you know the management School Northwestern it's a Leicester University and they they work shows that the average entrepreneur has about four failures before their first success and they learn from each one of these failures and that's the basis of the success you need to have at least four substantial heartbreaking rejections that I mean on average if that if startup data or any indication of the startup of life and that's an entrepreneurial life man put your heart on the line get it stomped on get rejected you need it you need to learn is what it comes down to and by the way life is more exciting when it actually does work out if you took a risk tell if you took a risk and you failed in the past um you know it's like it's not that good if you didn't take a risk and got rich and you never tried anything hard before that that didn't work you know part of the process is the adventure and part of the adventure is the pain that's life and and we need to understand that in love which is the way way way more important than business that's well said yeah I think a lot of people uh these days so going back to the framing of the question where you've got modern technology is pulling us away you've got the celebration of business you've got money money money as a metric of success and the thing I try to convince everybody is look somebody that's had the kind of success that most people only dream of nothing has come close to giving me as much joy fulfillment anything protection from the downside all of it other than my marriage my marriage is the thing that I protect most fiercely I am not worried about losing my money I'm not worried about losing uh accolades I am terrified of losing my wife yeah yeah and and Market can have a horrible day and you don't like it but your wife is really mad at you and you're bummed yeah yeah even if you know she's not going to divorce you you're bummed because you don't want the person you love the most to be upset with you you want her to be happy with you because what's happened it's basically like your stock market radically tanking the stock market of what really matters in your life is the way that works out it's actually a really interesting way to think about it okay so if that is the thing if that's the thing that's going to really the thing that we're pursuing is love and a bunch of different guises but the relationship is going to be most important to us is the relationship with our spouse how do we do that well yeah and let's start at the beginning so one thing you've said is delete your dating apps yeah yeah yeah or or you know there are some people who you know wind up meeting their partner and getting married based on dating apps but dating apps the evidence suggests that it's making dating harder it's actually true because it's making it harder to find somebody with you with whom you can have the complex connection that's appropriate for a couple different reasons number one is the Paradox of choice so dating apps give you too much choice and so what that means is that there's always something better so are you saying subtle yeah yeah well part of the reason is because you're not going to find the perfect person you're gonna make the perfect relationship that's the way relationships really work you know people think I'm gonna find I mean I mean magical thinking is a huge problem love at first sight doesn't exist and soul mates don't exist right I mean I I believe that God wants me to be with my wife but that's an entirely different thing than saying that there was this there was one woman in the world and she lived in Barcelona and she was a little girl and I was growing up in Seattle no no circumstances were such that I met the person that was going one of the people that could have been perfect for me if I worked to make it perfect and your wife is cool with that framing yeah because she knows that that's what God wants us to do she you know we believe that this is what God wants us to do God puts people together and then puts a lot in our hands we have free will and we have to you know part of making Cosmic Love based progress is the things that we do in our relationship this is the way that we work out the stuff of love in life is is not it's all perfect then you're in heaven automatically well boring that's boring no no progress man and you got to make progress one of the ways you make progress is the imperfect that you make as perfect as you can using your imperfect tools and that's the that's the exciting Adventure that is a romantic relationship and if and if you start off with the idea there's always something better because of magical thinking and I'm gonna find the perfect one if I keep swiping right or left or whatever it is what is it left or right I don't know never used it that's right because you and I have been married men for a long time but that I'm 21 you're how many years 32. man it's impressive 32 yeah congratulations I I am in awe of that my wife's like it's like 10 minutes underwater [Music] that's good yeah no that's like being married to an old-time comedian from the Catskills it's nice they accept she's Spanish yeah yes Spanish Jackie Mason so anyway yeah it's a good reference that no one in the audience got but that's okay Google them anyway so he's probably on YouTube yeah uh black and white maybe yeah yes Jesus everything so that's number one the second reason however is that is that it and again I'm not down on dating apps I'm just not I'm not down I'm not down with how people use them typically and people use them feels like you're caveating I am caveating for sure because there's nothing that's good or bad but that thinking makes it exactly right and so the big thinking error in apps is finding somebody who's who's completely compatible with us the technology enables compatibility the the technology is enables you to find to find people who are more and more and more compatible that you couldn't on the on the human market and so that matchmakers your parents wouldn't find for your certainly blind dates or somebody you meet in a bar you just you know it's a crap shoot for compatibility which is actually what you need we're too compatible this is something that most people don't understand that sounds crazy yeah I know and so it but but people will sort on their political views and their likes and their dislikes and you know physical characteristics what you find is that people that match up on compatibility X you know um X Auntie uh priori in the dating Market they even look alike right and and and that's a problem you know it's basically you wind up looking for somebody who's effectively your sibling which is my adult kids say is not hot not hot not hot and so when people are looking for excess compatibility they like the person less they find them less attractive what you need is a base of compatibility which is lower than you think and then tons of complementarity which is interesting and sexy okay you want difference yes agreed opposite on a track where do you want you're now confusing me where do you want things to be where do you want to be compatible you need Basics on non-negotiable values preach right non-negotiable values negotiable values doesn't matter people think that too many values are non-negotiable that are actually negotiable politics shouldn't be in there you should not sort on politics now 71 of political liberals say they won't date a conservative 41 of conservatives say they won't date a liberal which just shows that conservatives have lower standards politically than liberals and or maybe it's men versus women or something like that I'm not going to look into the data more but the whole point is that that that's a that's that's a ridiculous barrier that's a ridiculous barrier that's just that's basically like classifying being a Democrat a republican like being Jewish or Catholic or atheist it's interesting man like this is one area where I'm with you in the abstracts but political stuff's gotten so weird people are so devout about it that that isn't interesting in the moment I don't want to be like even even I try not to be dogmatic but even if I were I'm not being dogmatic if they're dogmatic like that's not interesting to me yeah I get it and one of the best ways actually is what I recommend to my students for example is that they don't talk at all about politics for four dates to see if yeah until we get into that thing exactly right so you don't actually so the Dogma or something and if you can start to fall in love suddenly you're less dogmatic yeah you're less dogmatic about politics and the person you're falling in love with when they say something that you would have previously thought was a non-starter was a deal breaker it no longer is are you and your wife politically aligned kind of now just because we've been together for so long that you weren't in the beginning no she was Spanish I mean she was right okay and it says you know what a hard red atheist family you know really really you know it's like complete socialists you know they're on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and they were all atheists she hadn't been to church since her first communion and interesting and she quietly assumed that was the first thing you guys bonded no way that was just like that was a 10-year project for me wow totally 10-year project for me but you know she when I met her she's like no I don't believe in marriage that's an Antiquated institution doesn't make sense we'll see we'll see I mean I moved to Barcelona to try to convince her to marry me how long were you guys together before you got married uh it well I hoped that it would be very short but it took me two years to close the deal okay from me to married no from from moving to marriage okay from me to marry three so we were apart for a year and I was you know right and she didn't speak any English I didn't speak any Spanish or Catalan and and so I thought I'm gonna the only I had a premonition I mean I met her for a week and I told my dad I think I think I'm gonna marry this girl whoa he's like can't wait to meet her like I got some problems and she doesn't uh speak English he doesn't live in the United States and she doesn't believe in marriage but I think I think it's surrounded than that yeah and uh and so you know we kind of stayed in touch for a year and then I'm I just quit my job and I moved to Barcelona took a job in the Barcelona Symphony because I had this I had this very strong sense and by the way maybe it didn't work out it was an entrepreneurial thing to do and I was 24 and it was okay and then I worked on it and worked on it learned the language um and we were in love and when I was 26 and I said we have to get married you have to marry me she said yes and you know and then little by little by little and you come together to see the couple's chain people change over the course of their lives for sure and couples change together and the couples that don't do well change apart because don't change together there's too much pride is what comes from it so what will happen is tons of difference at the very beginning lots of love glue glues you together and then you start to change together the ultimate goal by the way for a marriage a relationship that lasts tons of passion we talked about the neurochemical Cascade of Falling in Love of you know love addiction but within five years what you need to be left with is what we call companionate love your goal within five years is to be best friends with a person that's your goal there's lots of passion in companionate love that also sounds not hot you know here's my companion Mrs Brooks you know no companion in love is this is the person that you'll be looking into her eyes on your dying day and then who knows all your secrets with whom you can be truly yourself who really has your best interests at heart that's what companion and love is and not every relationship can get to that but that's what do you think that what's the importance of keeping sex alive so because that's the that's the you know a physical bond that is the most intimate understanding of the of your relationships it's an expression of your greatest intimacy so it's also super fun yeah A and B yeah but yeah because you can have sex with people you're not in love with you know people do that all the time too Carfax it's way way way more satisfying when it's in the expression of your greatest intimacy that's why the happiest people have one sexual partner in a given year it doesn't mean one in your whole life interesting I mean there's actually been a study there's a study on that using the General Social Survey of the University of Chicago yep is that to me that just sounds like a proxy for committed relationship yeah it is and and the greatest expression of the deep deep intimacy and commitment is usually sex because when people ask Lisa and I like what's the secret to a long marriage we always say like one of our top things obviously communicate but have a lot of sex like you don't want to become roommates right and there is something also and I don't know what you think about this but there's something about there's uh an electricity to Crossing that line and there's one person that you cross that line with and not having that like one for that just entire part of your life to die and for you to never have that thing ah well there's tons of oxytocin that happens during sexual activity that you don't get otherwise as well and that bonds you together again and again look there are other ways to get it too by the way so sex is not the only way people often ask is it bad that couples fight and the answer is it's bad when they don't and I mean some people fight a lot some people fight a little my wife and I fight a lot we fight a lot we have a lot of arguments in Spanish because yeah I mean it's for them it's just a form of communication you know and there's nothing that's not on the surface and and so that was hard the first five to ten years I was very because you're not built like that I'm American you know we didn't do that growing up Civic Northwest did we I mean it was like ah yeah that was nice learning to fight well was a big thing but the key is about about that couples that never never fight they're missing out on some of the greatest source of of of intimacy because the friction is there and yeah you're saying things you that you think that you weren't saying before that's interesting will you take a second to say that very clear of intimacy through fighting yeah people often say it's so weird you know after we have a big fight then we then we make love as if it were never once done that yeah I never do that are you in the mood for sex after you've been in a fight well it depends on how the fight resolves but I don't think is that a lot of people do that and the reason is because they're raw and intimate in their communication sometimes for the first time in a long time for the first time in a long time so if you're the kind of couple that has that you're not seeing each other very much because you're working really hard and you're on the road and and you're not talking about things a lot of tension is building up inside and then finally you have a knock down drag out fight and you're saying things that you think that that that are deeply intimate that are your deepest feelings that you would never say at work because you don't have the kind of relationship with other people you know and demoralize them you don't have trust you have enough trust and you say things that might be it might be cutting they might be wounding but they're deeply intimate you have a an intimate Bond you have a a spiritual bond with that other person because of the intimacy of the communication even though it was wounding that's really interesting so I will say this I have had moments where I was completely uninterested in sex until we had I won't even necessarily say fight because fight implies that it's like really fiery um there was one big disagreement that my wife and I got into and it was really interesting the when we when I brought up the thing we happen to be in a swimming pool and so my wife likes me to hold her and walk her around the pool and it ended up being this amazing way to have this argument because it was really like hey I've been meaning to say this thing for a few days now here's how this thing made me feel like let's really get into it and we couldn't see each other's eyes and it made it way easier to have the conversation so we were like cheek to cheek but we couldn't see each other's eyes so there it just became easier to like get those things off of our chest it was really wonderful but I and so I didn't want to have sex until we had that conversation but it wasn't like I'm gonna run you upstairs and like I've never had that response like I don't people are different for sure but it's important that you have those relationship moments and those might be as bonding your fights might be as bonding for you as when done well are you yeah for sure and there's technique yes talk to me about so so my guess is that you're in a 21-year marriage and you're going to be married till you die yes you're gonna die yes I mean till the death of your part for sure and um so my guess is I could probably write a script for your fights based on that and when when something's not right the the accusation is that we are having a problem now when you look at a couple that's tenuous and have really having trouble and be really in danger it's like you're doing something and it makes me feel a particular way so important super important and just changing the language because language change has very strong cognitive impact so if you you want your fights to be you're gonna fight and it's important that you relate to each other and you're honest with each other but you want it to stop actually creating so much brain damage just change the just change the the pronouns that's the first thing to do is to change the pronouns and the fights don't say I and you start saying we and us we and us we have we have to do this thing I mean when whenever we do this thing we have a problem and and you'll find you're stumbling across it at the very beginning you'll find it because it's because and you did we have this problem we have this breakdown in communication because then you're trying to solve a problem together and it's a joint problem you're trying to solve and when you solve it you've made progress together as opposed to I won and you lost that's really super important and just using different pronouns starts it can actually repair a multitude of problems and something my wife and I do and this has been really powerful for us as we talk in insecurities when we get into an argument yeah so if one of us is getting angry it's like we have a shared understanding if you're angry it's because your insecurity has been tripped so confess like what's the insecurity what's the thing that's bothering you right so that you can get off of the surface level argument which is usually very fruitless and you can get down into something stupid it's like you finish the milk or something right you finish the milk without talking to me and it makes me feel unseen whatever and once you get down there like oh whoa why is that making you feel unseen and also that the person isn't just I have an insecurity you triggered it shame on you it's like okay I have an obligation to work on my insecurities you have an obligation to care enough about me that you want to know but I can't just be like you have to deal with it right I have an insecurity and you better tread around it forever you're doing a lot right I can tell you that and this is one of the reasons that you've you that you States openly that your marriage is the most important thing in your life it's a it's a central institution of your life I mean like this goes all Boston and by the way this is going to go bust it's all going to go bust yeah right but the one thing on your Deathbed there's Lisa I mean here's the problem one of you is going to die first yes although if you ask my wife she really wants us to die simultaneously yes that would be like she's like I don't care if I die in a plane class as long as you're next to me and I'm like what what are you talking about why are we both going down like if I have to die in a plane crash I want you to be safe on the ground she's like no way I'd want to be with you so yeah she says that out of love though so it's yeah I sure hope you die in a plane crash yeah no I get it it's a it's but but that's a you know this isn't is an issue right because that you will be separated yeah the data say that except under the oddest of circumstances you'll be separated yep but what typically happens is really really happy couples except under conditions of bad luck they tend to live long time have a long marriage and one of them dies and then the other dies that's crazy man uh-huh because you have a joint life you have a joint life together the Enterprise it's the the startup it's a your co-founders the other thing that's really interesting too is that a lot of the relationships that do best are startups not mergers that's interesting yeah tell me more because no no well I mean second marriages are sometimes they're really great but the the marriages that that have the greatest likelihood of success they're entered into earlier when you're both in life startup mode as opposed to I got my law degree and you got your PhD and you got your startup and I got my startup and I think we're and we have separate bank accounts now let's have a merger startups are more successful than mergers there's in business oh yeah and the worst of course are hostile takeovers are Acquisitions but you know wow okay so no you can have a merger that works yeah but you gotta go into it with your eyes open and make it as much of a startup as you can make and that was I don't recommend separate bank accounts I don't recommend it really yeah there's huge data showing that couples are more successful when they have joint bank accounts interesting let me run something by you so when Lisa and I first got together um we had enough difference in values that it was I looked at the things that she spent money on and I thought they were dumb she looked at the things I spent money on she thought they were dumb so what we did was we said bills are joint but spending is separate and so we put our money together and then we each had the exact same amount to spend yeah and at the time so when we got married she certainly had more money than me because I was just absolutely broken in debt uh but then when we got married I was the only one with a job and the one insight and I wish I could track back to where I got this but I was like this because this is all pre-functional internet the internet existed but nobody was really using it right for much um and I said okay look we're gonna come together but the we're in this together so whatever money I earn it really is half yours right and so we're gonna take care of all the bills together we'll have the separate spending accounts um and really have looked at everything in that way like when we started impact Theory um the lawyers were like who's gonna own 51 and I was like what are you talking about and they said you can't be 50 50 that's the ultimate divorce Nightmare and so my wife was like you're obviously going to work more than me like you take the 51 she's like I don't have any problem with that whatsoever and I was like Over My Dead Body I was like I need you to know to the core of your existence this company whatever if something goes wrong with us I have a problem if we're in a position where I'm like thank God I have 51 I've already lost everything so right 50 50. all you're saying is impact theory is an extension of Tom and so therefore my life is 50 50 with you so axiomatically impact theory is 50 50. nice and really what I wanted to say was impact theory is an extension of Tom and Lisa right this is a thing we are doing two together and even if we weren't I mean I suppose at that point I wouldn't have thought about it but like if my wife ba trade me I'd still give her half my just be like you love her yeah and not only that I don't know who I would have become had I not I'm a startup with her you're not pre-nuppy at all no and all you were doing is avoiding fights by you know having separate allowances yes it's not the same thing I mean it's just that's just that's just prudent yeah it's the way that it works out it's like yeah we're gonna tend to fight over this and and you know we don't want me to accidentally take all the spending on you know giant chess pieces or you know or you know Batman statues or something video games video games whatever the thing has to be and so let's let's you know make it so this we just avoid a fight let's just simply avoid a fight and that way you can I can laugh at the way you spend your money you can laugh at the way I spend my money instead of feeling a source of resentment but basically saying my money your money my account your account my property your property that's problematic from the very beginning because what you're basically is you're planning for is the dissolution you're planning for the I mean it's a union and you know the union of this is to say that we're I mean it's biblically it's a man shall leave his parents and and cleave to his wife it's one flesh I mean the whole in in religious Traditions divorce is supposed to be like cutting off your arm it's supposed to be that kind of of I mean I get I get it it happens sometimes I get it I you know I live in the real world it happens sometimes but for when you're doing it from a startup you can't you don't really understand yourself without Lisa like who's Tom I don't know alone literally yeah that's the thing now not everybody can have that you know and I'm not saying people shouldn't not everybody can can be held to these standards because of the the reality of things that have happened in their lives and you know they I talk to people who have been the victims of abuse and and addiction and criminal behavior and all of this and and they have a need for love in their life and they get married again and they have an established life and it doesn't have these perfect standards social science gives you the the ideal circumstances but not the only circumstances and so here's the key when the circumstances are not ideal you have to work consciously with your eyes open to make them as ideal as you can so if you've got a merger on your hands gotta merge on your hands good you can make that work too but but make it as startupy as you can yeah the thing I would encourage people is to understand that their the reason a startup works is for a set of principles if you understand the principles and can apply them later in life so be it one of them is going to be being open to being changed by the relationship going into it and knowing we are creating a union and in doing that like what are the ways that we have to move and to dance in this thing in order to make it work and then a big part of it especially if you're older is understanding that selection is eighty percent of the battle like if you select poorly you're gonna be in dire circumstances there are I mean again without magical thinking without thinking there is one soul mate so Choose Wisely yeah yeah that is not that's not the way it's unbelievable for Sight I'm just saying that if for instance you said earlier you have to grow together as a couple now the amount of all the things that we talked about here emotion General stability getting that right knowing how to fight well like I mean there's just a laundry list of Happiness things right that if you get right you will be way Prime knowledge is power and your relationships and your work in your spiritual life knowledge is power and and again it all goes back I know people who you know say yeah we knew each other for a week and we got married in Vegas it's like that's Folly yeah that's just Serendipity that it that's just doesn't make sense on the other hand you know when somebody says I say how long you've been dating that girl it's like eight years like no yeah no no um and and you know what's the right amount of time this is what this is a question of Prudential judgment too you know my oldest son met his wife now wife when he was 24 early 24. they dated for six months they were engaged for six months they got married a year after they started dating their first child was born nine months later I mean that's called the six six nine Cadence in Catholic Life by the way six really that's a thing that's a thing six months dating six months engaged nine months till the first baby I mean it's not it's not that we recommend this it's just but it worked out really really well because that was enough time but it wasn't too much right you know it wasn't the kind of thing where I don't know why don't we lived together for you know 50 years before we decided whether or not to get married that's that's not the right thing either so you know Prudential judgment is is and it's the same thing with a startup by the way I don't know I think I need a little bit more experience so when I was writing my dissertation I would see these guys and you know I was doing my PhD with like I gotta read a couple more books like write your dissertation pop the question after a certain point but not on the first date yeah I didn't have any trouble with that so for me when I met Lisa I did not think I was going to get married and then I was 24. and when we started dating um probably about three months in something three four months in something like that I realized oh like I'm in love with her and then I was like okay well I'm either never getting married or I'm marrying this woman yeah and so I proposed that eight months and we had spent some of those eight months apart so it wasn't even like we were living together for eight months or anything because she was in England and then I was ready to get married right away I was like what's it take to get married about three months and she's like you are having a laugh she's like no way this is gonna take like a year to plan this wedding so we ended up being together for about 18 months by the time we got married but uh good and fast that's good yeah by today's standard that's fast and by today's standards you were young yeah um and again Society changes in different ways but some of these some of these principles don't change I don't know if any of the principles change that's the thing like circumstances do but principals don't yeah yeah so how do you how do people grow together like what is the key there part of it is understanding that you have a you you you are stronger when you are together and that one of the cues for you to change is the other person changing so not people who struggle they think the cue for me to do something different in my life is I feel differently about something one of the cues for you to do something differently in your your life is that your spouse starts to think feel differently about that you have to take on the characteristics of the other person as if they were inside you you know so you find for example that your spouse is on a spiritual journey starts to find stirrings of spirituality that's a cue for you to do that too that's a cue for you to do that too and to do that sincerely as well and again people say well you're losing your individuality and the whole thing yep that's exactly right yep yeah you're sublimating the individuality on these things to have greater strength in the Union right so that you can have a greater multiplicity of experiences across the two of you greater adventure and excitement across the two of you is the way that that works and sometimes it's hard for people because they feel that they're the the senior partner in the relationship doesn't that's not the secret to a successful marriage now there are social scientists that have very heterodox views on this there's a guy named Eli Finkel at Northwestern um a psychologist who's written about marriage and he says that one of the reasons that marriage is so hard today is because we we expect too much from it he says you know we expect your best friend and your your one and only lover and your business partner and the person who helps you raise your kids and the only person who who knows your secrets and it's like it's too much pressure for one relationship that was distributed across 10 people until about the 19th century or the 20th century and but then the time of the Romantic Era uh uh where in in when when romance took on it modern connotations which is it's everything it's magic it's a you know it's a it simulates the relationship with God even so the language that we've used in this conversation that then it took on too much pressure and he recommends in his book about this that and in his work and his his very interesting research that you ease off on the throttle a little bit you don't expect your wife to be your best friend necessarily he even suggests that some couples do better when they're not the only exclusive sexual partner I disagree with that well I disagree with that I don't think that I don't think the data support that I mean again as they say in finance your results May differ right but they certainly don't in my case or yours yeah that uh that one I can't imagine having unshared sexual experience the only thing that I can imagine is if yay if you're like sharing something by all means but when people go off I just don't see how that works and I certainly don't see how it works if you invite another person into the stable pair bond like whoa I know and there's actually yo is an evolution guy you'll you really really like this literature that talks about why it screws up relationships so there's a guy at University of Texas that does work on Jealousy on The evolutionary basis of jealousy and he had this hypothesis that men are more jealous of sexual infidelity and women are more jealous of emotional infidelity and so what he does is he finds that that that women in relationships they will forgive their husbands for sexual Discretions but not for falling in love with another woman and a man if if your wife says I mean yeah I had an affair all that but it was only because I felt like I was falling in love the sex was terrible you'll be like I forgive you yeah yeah I forgive it it's so asymmetrically weird and the reason for this from an evolutionary basis is that males have to be really Vigilant about making sure they're not inadvertently raising The Offspring of another male yeah and women have to be very Vigilant to make sure that the provider and defender of the family doesn't stray and take it and defend and provide for another family and another and another female's Offspring and so that's why the the jealousy is going to work in that particular way but no matter what I'm telling you if you have if you have an open marriage somebody's gonna fall in love you know and and there's all kinds of stuff that can that can go wrong on that so that's not I mean again it's like different social scientists disagree on that but I think my reading of the data and my Prudential judgment not just my Catholicism suggests that that's not a wise course of action for most I'm a big believer I think you're right about that I'm a big believer in what I call frame of reference so your frame of reference or your set of beliefs and your values right there's other things at the fringes but that's the core of it and it will make all the difference it's not what happens it's how you perceive what happens just going back to Victor Frankel So to that point you said guys have to be really hyper protective that they're not raising somebody else's kid but you adopted a kid right and so that to me speaks the frame of reference so and I've heard you say that you have every bit of love for your adopted daughter that you have for your biological kids which I have no reason to believe is not true so what did you do to your frame of reference in order to be able to welcome her in even though we would both agree that from an evolutionary standpoint that doesn't make sense yeah it will yeah from an evolutionary standpoint it actually might make sense for an evolutionary standpoint because if you if there's an orphan even in nature will be adopted it's interesting by by non-human mammals we'll adopt orphans as their own and sometimes it will be even a mistake so you see a the cuckoo bird will actually lay its eggs in the nest of other birds and then they knock the eggs out of the nest of the other of the of the birds that have the nest and then the cuckoo will hatch and be taken care of by the surrogate mother the yeah exactly right and then of course the cuckoo is twice the size the regular bird so it's hilarious because you know the the the theory is gigantic It's the funniest thing so so there there is some evolutionary basis for that in the case of not raising somebody else's Offspring per se but raising an orphan and bringing the child into your own family and one of the things that you find is that at the my experience but also the research shows that the oxytocin release for an adopted child is just as high as it is for biological child so you basically know that this is my child you lay eyes on that child and is Fourth of July all over his Roman candles in your head and and it is forever and so it's funny because you don't actually know till you do it it's all a theory oh yeah no you know the bond with the adopted childhood just as much as with a biological child it's it's it's weird because intellectually it's a it's a stronger bond in some ways because it's this this election is this human will on top of the neurophysiology of of human connection on top of it it's really something I have to say it's funny it's funny but it's just deep deep deep love and for both both kinds of kids it's really interesting speaking of kids how does a good Catholic end up with a son who becomes a sniper yeah there's been a lot of good good service members in the Marine Corps but my son Carlos it's interesting so I used to I my my Approach with my kids has been given that life is a startup they need a business plan and I need a business plan from them because I'm VC right and I deserve a good business plan and so I had my kids write business plans in high school and when they were not original or no good I'd send it back for revisions and Carlos has been planted like six rounds of revisions the first one was very unoriginal he was not a motivated student in high school it was always like you know it's he's getting a c and history he's getting a D in Latin he's getting you know all this and and he's clear he was not cut out for the you know the for college and when it came time you know he got a big athletic scholarship he's a great big healthy strapping coordinated athletic boy and um but I said in his business plan you need something more original than that you know I'm an academic so this is breaking my heart but you know so finally he comes back and he says part of it is because your business plan as a kid has to answer two questions by the way as an adult too the question the the meaning requires that you have two answers to two questions this is the diagnostic test why are you alive and for what are you willing to die today if you don't have answers to those questions you have a meaning crisis I don't know what your answers are but you have to have real answers not BS answers not nonsense were they when you started asking this high school so like junior year in high school and he didn't have answers so where are you gonna go find the answers and he had a very good answer to the question of how to find the answers which was I want to go work hard with my hands Outdoors why do you think that was a good answer because I I believe that that was the case for him he's a very kinetic boy you know he was he was a kid who he had a strong um an affinity for the outdoors fishing hunting which is not in our family you know I didn't grow up I I used to I used to go fishing every year in Lincoln City in the on the Oregon coast when I was a kid and you know that kind of thing about Outdoorsman my dad was a professor right and and so but he was really into it he's good at what good that whole thing so he took a job as a a dry land wheat farmer up in Idaho in Grangeville and worked two Harvest made a bunch of money he was alone all the time with his thoughts he was digging rocks out of the soil and mending fences and driving was he making it spiritual for himself or did well he was going to church I mean he was I was kind of half-heartedly you know but but it wasn't spiritual so much as he was he was looking for these answers to meaning you know why am I alive what does it mean for me to be alive for what would I be willing to die and at the end of that and this was kind of vaguely part of the business plan but it became clear as time went on he said I wanted I want to join the Marines I want to see what I'm made of and and so he did it was hard you know boot camp was hard he broke his foot a couple of times and a couple of times twice Jesus yeah and then he went into the Infantry training Battalion because he was a war fighter which is 15 of the Marine Corps are are our combat Marines I mean I thought they were all war Fighters yeah but 85 are in support roles 15 of the war Fighters the door kickers and the and The Rifleman wow I didn't realize it was that he was in the Infantry yeah for sure I mean this Logistics and mechanics and I mean there's so many jobs to support the 15 and then from there he became a mortar man and from there he went into the Elite Sniper core which is a really really hard during any of this kind of except that what do you want as a dad you want a kid who has the answers to these questions because this is what it means to be fully alive this is Saint in the fourth Century named Saint irenaeus and he's most famous for saying the glory of God is a man Fully Alive like don't give me half dead don't give me half dead and half dead is I don't know why I'm alive and I don't know what for what I'm willing to die I want I want my kids I want the people in my life and my friends to be able to have answers to these particular questions so I was scared but I was I was energized by his particular energy and it's so interesting because you know the the the sniper or the scout sniper platoon which is uh which is a a branch of the Special Forces they they set three hours behind the scope of a rifle just sitting there and they're they're this is a kid who couldn't concentrate in school I mean it's like ADHD whatever that is you know it's uh it's it's a funny diagnosis their their motto is suffer patiently patiently suffer that's my son I'm super proud of him I'm scared but I'm super proud of him is he active duty yeah exactly do you just get down to Camp Pendleton right now yeah for sure for sure how does he's 23 years old he's married wow he's uh he because when he when he got that you know when he got that then things became clearer when he answered because you know why are you alive did you already say what he said because if he did sorry I missed no I didn't his answers are I am alive because God Made Me for what am I willing to die today for my faith for my family for my friends and for the United States of America well and for our allies for those of you listening or you know that he'd die for you too and and those aren't everybody's answers those might not be your answers but man those are solid answers and when you have the answers life proceeds life proceeds life becomes linear life becomes clear that's why meaning is so critically important employee that my son taught me a lot he's like I got the theories I got the data but seeing it play out it's it's thrilling so you know the phone rings at 2 am don't like it not looking forward to that when he's like yeah going on a field trip not great not great but I'll take it I'll take it all day every time I get to spend time with you I love it the most it's amazing where can people follow you where can they get the new book thank you orthobrooks.com is that has a sort of it it collects all the stuff that I do my column on the science of happiness is published called how is build is how to build a life at the Atlantic every Thursday morning in the Atlantic the atlantic.com in my new book with Oprah Winfrey build the life you want the Art and Science of getting happier September 12th from penguin Random House I wrote it because I want people to understand these ideas to change to change their habits and and share these ideas with others thank you for having this conversation with me thank you for what you're doing thank you for your heart ah thank you the book's amazing everybody I highly encourage you to pick it up and speaking of things I highly encourage you to do if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace to learn more about artificial intelligence check out this episode with Mo Gadot we've never created a nuclear weapon that can create nuclear weapons the artificial intelligences that we're building are capable of creating other artificial intelligences as a matter of fact they're in

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 167,177

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: B8O6aTHBBTY

Length: 166min 36sec (9996 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023