The Art of True Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
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There are three macronutrients to the happiest life.
The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
Those are the three macronutrients.
Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life,
and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure,
which many people don't.
I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret of happiness.
It's the secret to rehab.
Satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle,
And last but not least is meaning.
The why of your existence.
The happiest people have a bead on those three things,
and they pursue those three things really, really actively.
Now, inside all three of those things,
there's this funny thing called unhappiness.
Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness,
you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering.
If you spend your life, which many people do today,
trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering,
miss their own happiness. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,
where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Arthur Brooks. Arthur Brooks is a professor
at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School. Today, we discuss
what makes people truly happy
and what this thing we call happiness is really all about.
What I love about Arthur Brooks
and what you'll realize today
is that he looks to experimental data, philosophy,
his and others' experiences
to arrive at specific questions that you can ask yourself
to determine what matters most to you
and what stands in the way
of you actually getting those things.
In fact, I must say this episode with Arthur Brooks
is one of my favorite ever on the Huberman Lab podcast.
He is brutally honest.
He's open.
He's generous with knowledge that can help you, the listener, and he's incredibly humble. Thanks to Arthur,
the conversation you're about to hear is one that I'm confident you'll want to think about,
act on, and come back to periodically. I can say for myself with certainty that it's the
conversation I wish I had heard long ago. Arthur doesn't have all the answers, nor does he claim
to, but I do think he has a sort of hard-earned compass and a set of maps that we can all apply
to have a much better and indeed a great life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this
podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort
to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my conversation with Dr. Arthur Brooks.
Dr. Arthur Brooks, welcome.
Thank you, Dr. Andrew Huberman.
We're only going to call each other doctor once
at the beginning of this podcast.
So happy you're here.
Me too.
Yeah, I consider you a friend.
And before we became friends, you were already my teacher.
I was learning a ton from you.
You have a ton of wisdom.
And before you step into your humble self and push aside, I just really want to highlight that because there are a lot of people influencing, educating, advising, coaching, et cetera.
But you represent like really the confluence of ideas and practices and wisdom in ways that I and people can really understand and benefit from.
So really looking forward to having you here.
Thank you.
Likewise.
I mean, what you've done over the past now five and a half years with this podcast.
Just about, yeah.
You changed the whole way that educators can reach a lot of people.
What we want is educators.
Science and the public interest.
We want to touch people's lives.
them together using science, using ideas. And how, how, how do you do that? You show the way.
Because what you did was you started this podcast within six months. It was a big deal. And what
you showed was a whole generation of people, younger and older than you, I'm older than you,
that this is something that people can do, that we can reach people. You made that possible. You
made that possible for me. It was an incredible gift. Well, I'm honored and thank you. I realized
today that perhaps the toughest part about this conversation is going to be make sure that I keep
you focused on you a little bit. You're so humble, but I appreciate the kind words, and I consider us
colleagues and friends. So you're known as the happiness guy. You know a lot about it, what it
is and what it isn't. So let's start with first principles there that people can really wrap their
head around and apply. What's the difference between unhappiness and happiness, or is that
Most people start with the wrong model of what happiness actually is.
So you can't define unhappiness until you can define happiness.
And happiness is not what most people think.
Most people conceive of happiness as a feeling, as an emotion.
And that's quite wrong in the same way that the smell of your turkey is not the same thing as your Thanksgiving dinner.
The smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.
And the feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness.
And when I first came into the field, I mean, I've been a behavioral scientist for 30 years.
But I started specializing in the science of human happiness exclusively.
I wrote the first book of mine on this in 2008.
But I decided in 2019, after I took a hiatus from academia to go run a big think tank in Washington, D.C., that I was going to specialize for the rest of my career in this thing that most people believe they wanted.
I was going to really make it work.
And there was, of course, happiness.
People want to be happier.
And the first thing that I realized is there wasn't a very good definition of happiness.
It was just so crazy.
I can't quite define it.
I can't put words to it, but I know it when I feel it.
This is what I would get when I would ask my classes.
So what do you think you're studying?
Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or doing the things that I enjoy.
And I recognized that this would be completely inadequate in any other area of science.
And so I went back to try to find the right metaphor, the right parallel field to define happiness.
And I felt that the field of nutrition did it really well by taking food and breaking it into macronutrients and micronutrients.
So I asked myself, okay, what are the macronutrients of happiness?
What are the fundamental elemental building blocks of happiness?
And to figure that out, you go and you look at the people who have the highest life satisfaction that's measured in robust and proper ways, good construct validity, good science behind it.
And what you find is doing kind of a factor analysis is that there are three macronutrients to the happiest life.
The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
Those are the three macronutrients.
Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't.
I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness.
It's the secret to rehab, right?
And so you have to understand, right?
For sure.
satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle.
And last but not least is meaning, the why of your existence.
The happiest people have a bead on those three things,
and they pursue those three things really, really actively.
Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness.
Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness,
you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering.
or I should say the second misunderstanding about happiness
is that it's incompatible with unhappiness.
It's not.
If you spend your life, which many people do today,
trying to avoid unhappiness,
trying to avoid and eliminate suffering,
they will paradoxically miss their own happiness.
So that's the first thing to understand.
Could you drill a little bit deeper
into enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning?
Yeah.
And maybe just put some contour on each of those.
Sure.
And then go back to unhappiness and suffering
to all three.
For sure.
So enjoyment is very much related to pleasure,
but pleasure is fundamentally a limbic phenomenon.
I mean, if you touch in experiments,
you've done these,
you've seen these experiments forever,
the ventral striatum
or the ventral tegmental area,
you can get this stimulation
of these parts of the brain
that will give you this sense of ebullience,
this sense of immediate joy
from anything from your girlfriend saying,
Andrew, I love you,
or a big bump of cocaine.
Not that you would,
Because the brain is so unbelievably thrifty, right?
That's not part of happiness.
That's a phenomenon from sort of the Pleistocene brain,
from something, the middle Pleistocene, what, 250,000 years ago,
saying that rewards you.
Go get more of that is kind of what it comes down to.
You don't want to have that as your goal in life.
I mean, like the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it.
My dad said that's the end of America.
He was kind of right.
I don't think we have the same dad, but...
Separated brothers.
Yeah, my dad and...
No disrespect to the hippies, but my dad had very clear thoughts
about how the children of people with that mindset were at a disadvantage
because of that message specifically.
What will happen, of course, very quickly is that your pleasures,
which are fundamentally animal, I mean, your dog,
your beautiful new dog, friendly new dog that I just met,
he has a limbic system not that different than yours,
emotions that are not that different than yours, right? I mean, he has amygdala, you know,
he has a dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. He has a ventral straight. I mean, he's got all these
different parts just kind of like we do, but he's not human because he's managed largely by these
emotions. And we have this choice. We have this incredible prefrontal cortex, this human cortex
that's enormous. Your dog's is wafer thin. Ours is like 30% of the weight of our brain.
And what that supercomputer allows us to do is to choose between animal impulses and moral aspirations. We get to make
that choice. That's a conscious executive choice. When we convert pleasure into enjoyment, it's
because it takes on moral aspiration to it. We take our pleasures and we add people and memory,
thereby kind of delivering them to an executive experience that we're managing, that we understand,
that we're conscious of, that we can remember, and that's fundamentally social. It's quintessentially
as a matter of fact.
That's what it's all about.
So I talk to my students who are graduate students,
who are 28 years old on average,
and my kids who are 28, 26, and 23.
What does this mean?
And for most people, what it means is
if there's something that makes you feel good,
because we all have our thing,
whether it's highly glycemic carbohydrates
or any kind of addictive behavior.
And in point of fact, it can be dependence-provoking,
which many things can when they wire
into the dopamine system.
You've talked about this ad nauseum
§02Transcript — part 2
so many times I've heard you talk about this.
If you're doing it alone,
you're probably doing it wrong.
Probably it's probably more about pleasure
and less about enjoyment.
It's not a perfect rule.
I like to walk in the woods by myself
and say my prayers,
but those things aren't addictive.
And so that's how to think about it.
You need to enjoy your life.
And that means there are things
that give you pleasure
at a metaphysical or physical level,
but they also have people in memory
And you're managing them and they're not managing you.
So that's kind of in a nutshell how I think about enjoyment.
Now, many people are bad at that, especially strivers.
Who listens to your podcast?
People who are serious about their lives.
There's nobody that's like, eh, whatever.
Who's going to listen to your podcast?
We're not a whatever podcast.
You're a striver podcast.
We should do a title card sometime, How to Whatever.
Yeah, I know.
That won't go very well.
That'll be our April Fool's episode.
I know.
That's not one of those podcasts.
You had guys like me on, right?
one of the things they often struggle with if they're very, very, very competitive,
if they're ambitious, if they're successful,
is that they want to be special more than they want to be happy.
And so they want to put points on the board.
And if it's not putting points on the board, they're not going to do it.
And these are the people that I have to work with to work on the macronutrient of enjoyment.
Is there fear that were they to enjoy life more, be happier?
I'm probably using these terms incorrectly.
No, no, no, why not?
Somehow they would lose their drive. Because as you were describing enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and by the
way, I love this description of enjoyment as, you know, we have animal impulses, but then there's
this other end of the spectrum, which are moral aspirations. Wouldn't at least some component of
a great life be to marry those two things so that your pursuit of these animal impulses actually
raised you up morally? I mean, that's the ultimate. I mean, we have so many examples now in the media
prominent politicians in particular with all the elections going on where their careers are tanked
i do believe they might have been trying to be good people
on average but they they temptation ruined that career anyway totally and so it's clear it exists
in them and and in many and everyone right yeah but the fact that that can happen to it's almost
feels like a misuse of the animal impulse. Is there a way to marry animal impulse to moral
aspiration in a way that's seamless or is it always work? No, no. You have just defined enjoyment.
Proper enjoyment is one where you're doing what you think is prudent and natural and good
to do. It's something that you want to see yourself doing and at the same time is pleasurable.
You know, that's why the best moments over the course of my 35-year marriage are highly pleasurable and extremely enjoyable.
And it's the kind of thing where I could get, you know, found out by the press that I'm having another beautiful night with Esther.
You know, that's good is what it comes down to.
And the truth is we all struggle with these things because we are biological creatures.
You know, I'm fundamentally a behavioral scientist, but psychology is biology.
I've had to retrain in so many of these areas, especially over the past 10 years, is because the biology has become so salient in our field.
And one of the things that you find is that the trouble that people actually have is when animal impulse and moral aspiration go in different directions.
And one of the great strategies for life is how to point them in the same direction.
And sometimes you have to choose.
Sometimes you have to choose.
And people feel like, if it feels good, it must be good for me.
And so I'm going to do it.
That's having the same life goals as protozoa or something.
Or if it feels bad, it must be bad for me.
Yeah, for example.
And there's probably a lot of things that people could benefit from doing that are going to feel, quote, unquote, painful in the process.
Now we're in the gym.
I'm a gym rat.
So are you.
Do you like training?
I like training.
I really do like training.
But it's a funny thing because leg day, I still want to throw up.
I've been in the gym almost every day for 30 years.
Wow.
I feel good.
I mean, it's obvious to anyone watching, but you're...
No, but I feel good, yeah.
Is it okay to share?
You're 62?
Yeah, 62 years old, yeah.
In great shape.
Yeah, and it's...
You know, I've got genetics that keep me really lean, so it's not like it's any flex that
I can stay at, you know, 10% body fat or something like that.
That's not...
That's just nature.
But the truth is, I recognize that I need to keep the machine in good shape, because
the brain is part of the machine.
And as we both know,
hard exercise, picking up heavy things
and running around is
fundamental to affect management
and also to the maintenance of the overall functioning
of how the machine works. I don't want to fall prey to
type 3
diabetes, which is what we're calling
Alzheimer's these days. I don't want
metabolic disorders that are avoidable.
So I actually do that. Now,
leg day sucks, man.
I mean, I've been doing leg day every fourth day
for 30 years.
and I still don't like it.
I would still skip leg day.
Every day would be chest day
because everybody likes chest day, right?
Because it feels better.
But the truth is that I do it
because I actually know
how the muscle protein synthesis works.
I know that for hormone balance,
leg day is the most important day
for these really large muscle groups.
And what am I doing?
I'm making the decision
to do something that foregoes my comfort,
my pleasure,
even a moment of my happiness
for the moral aspiration that I actually have.
And that leads to this,
important conclusion from the research in this area, which is that Mother Nature
doesn't care if you're happy. This is, it's, you know, we all think it's like, if I'm not happy,
then something's not right. No, no. It might very well be not right. You know, there are all kinds
of suffering that you actually need to grow as a person. You need negative emotions because
negative emotions are an alarm system that show that your reptilian brain has registered signals
signals to your limbic system and setting off alarms from sadness and anger and disgust and fear,
that's unpleasant, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong. It means everything's right.
How you react to it can be how you want to, in so doing, having a better life,
notwithstanding the fact that it doesn't feel good. And that's a life of discipline. That's a
life of the kind of behavior that you actually want. That's worth moral aspiration.
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§03Transcript — part 3
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I've got this statement that you just mentioned, like ringing in my ears in the best way, which
is that you're saying this moral aspiration piece has a lot to do with or reflects doing
what you want to see yourself doing.
I really like that because I think for many people, they want to see themselves doing things that others would approve of.
And from a young age, we're told what we should do and why.
You need to get dressed up for this event, or you need to sit a certain way, eat a certain way, be polite, and these things, which are all important parts of our training as humans.
Right. But there's something really special that happens when we, as you point out, when we see ourselves doing something and it feels good and we, it's a positive self-reflection of the non-egotistical kind. Right. And I don't think we talk enough about this because there's so much out there now about how social media is all about comparisons. So people are showing other people, here's what I'm doing.
But there's a different version of that where somebody does something that they're proud of and puts it to the Internet and they're seeing themselves do something that they're proud of doing and they get the feedback.
And, you know, provided that their ego is in check and they don't let the positive comments go to their head or set them up for disappointment when they don't get as many of them the next time.
Things that are wired into those reinforcement circuits.
I think that's great.
They're seeing themselves exercising.
By the way, it could be painting.
It could be being in volunteer and service.
And we tend to look at that stuff and say, oh, you know, they're just doing the display.
So my question is to really get the ideal match between this animal impulse and moral aspirations piece,
that we see ourselves and experience ourselves doing what we want to see ourselves doing and that we not share it.
Because I'm open to the idea that the sharing diminishes it somehow.
It can.
Yeah.
It can.
but fundamentally I think it's actually quite important that you declare what your moral
aspirations are and part of the reason is because this gives you a commitment bias so there's a lot
of behavioral science about that a lot of psychology that actually talks about commitments
bias when you say here's the thing that I'm actually gonna do I'm gonna finish my PhD
right this is a big part of weddings I attended a lot of weddings and it's kind of an amazing
thing this wedding ceremony yeah makes you path dependent toward your own aspirations stand up
and give a bunch of really amazing promises
in front of all their friends.
And then they get a bunch of gifts.
And I'm not cynical about this at all.
Like from a reward pathway perspective,
it's like you're rewarding the promises
that they're making in addition to the union
that they're in right there.
A lot of the reward is like you're giving them things
for their life going forward.
Sadly, I have a number of friends who've been divorced
and they, depending on how long ago the wedding was,
they often feel quite sheepish about all the gifts.
Like they got all these gifts for the promises they made.
changed their mind.
Some cases broken those promises,
but they've changed their mind.
It's not till death do us part.
It's now until it got inconvenient enough
that we're going to part ways.
And it's an incredible,
still occurring,
kind of ancient display of promising publicly,
I'm not going to quit.
Yeah, no, totally.
This is my person through thick and thin,
through sickness and in health
and all the things that you actually talk about.
In the wedding promises, you're saying it's going to suck sometimes.
That's what you're saying.
I mean, it's like richer and poorer.
And we're going to stick this thing out despite the fact that we're stating right up front that there's going to be times of poverty.
There's going to be times of sickness.
There's going to be trouble ahead.
And that's basically saying that happiness has unhappiness in it.
I'm defining happiness.
How am I defining happiness?
that I'm going to get 80, 90 years,
and as I take my dying breath, I'm going to be looking.
I'm like Don Quixote, and this is my Dulcinella,
and I'm going to be looking into her eyes
as I recite the Holy Scriptures and take my dying breath.
That's basically what you're saying,
and you're defining that as your bliss.
I mean, if it weren't your bliss, you'd be like,
why are you doing it?
I want it, because that's a good life.
That's what you're stating,
and you're laying out what actually happiness looks for,
you're saying it's going to be full of unhappiness.
That's what you're saying.
And that's the thing for people to understand,
that that's what it comes down to.
When you are laying out publicly your moral commitments,
when you're actually saying this,
what you're saying is you're recognizing that happiness and unhappiness are intertwined
and you want the full.
You're basically saying, bring it on.
It's like courage.
It's a declaration of your independence from the world
and your dependence on each other,
thing. It's what you do when you're publicly baptized as an adult. Anytime that you're taken
into a new religion, there's always these commitments about these moral aspirations
that you're making, recognizing, yeah, sometimes this is going to go contrary to my animal impulses.
Absolutely. And, you know, this is one of the things that I love about sort of the modern
internet culture. There's a lot to regret. There's a lot that you and I look at, we're like, oh, no.
But the other thing I really, really like is this facilitated, this wholesale movement of
aspiration for excellence. A lot of people, they want to be excellent. You know, it's like, I mean,
this isn't just the Huberman podcast. It's not just entertainment, high-class entertainment. People
want an edge. They want to know, you know, why, why are they so attracted to the protocols?
Protocols toward what? Toward being better. They want to be more successful. They want to be
better liked. They want things to go better for them. That's a, that's a human drive for excellence.
And when people can finally make peace with the fact that your animal impulses will not always and frequently not lead you to excellence, then you can finally be free.
Do you think that a lot of the friction out there politically, socially, is basically about drawing the line between what is animal impulse and what is moral aspiration?
I mean, I don't want to take us too far down.
No, tell me more.
What do you mean?
I mean, some of the animal impulses are obvious, right?
And they're all, for the neurobiologists, we would say they're very like limbic hypothalamic, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, some people would say, okay, like here's the quote-unquote traditional model of marriage and morality.
Yeah.
And some people would say, actually, we want to kind of bend that a certain way where people could have quote-unquote unconventional relationships or unconventional families.
I mean, I think everyone would agree that lying, cheating, and stealing is bad.
Right.
Right?
But there's an attempt, I think, to draw a kind of jagged line between moral and immoral that certain things that are not of biblical, traditional morality are okay because as long as they're done consensually and in the name of love.
Right.
Right?
And we're not talking about breaking laws here.
Some people really push this to the extreme.
I know, I know.
That's not what I'm talking about.
That's marginal, right?
And I'm staying off specific issues, not to be like politically careful here, but just because I feel like a lot of it is like, where are we going to draw the line between limbic and higher order?
In fact, it actually gets inverted where people will say, no, the more evolved way of thinking is past all that, where you can really get beyond this very black and white morality and really say, no, there's all sorts of versions of what love, family, marriage, commitment, child rearing could look like.
Pontius Pilate, what is truth?
Right.
It's very postmodern.
Yeah, it is very postmodern. But I think that it, I mean, I feel like this is that, like people are pulling back and forth on this line. Just like in science, people are trying to say the scientists and doctors that are all, you know, traditional scientists and physicians, they have the knowledge. And then the general components of the general public are saying, actually, during the pandemic, you lied, you know, like a teenager telling their end, like, you need to admit you lied. And then they're like, I didn't lie. You know, and so there's just trying to pull back. We have the torch of truth. No, we have the torch of truth.
there are elements of truth on both sides.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
But with this, in this case, it's sort of, I think at the extremes, we all understand
murder is bad, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Lying, cheating, stealing, bad, right?
But then what constitutes a moral aspiration to one camp is actually a moral insult.
Right.
And vice versa.
So Jon Haidt, you've had him on the show, right?
Yes.
Yeah, Jon Haidt's great.
And Jon Haidt and I go way back.
We go back to the early part of the 21st century.
And Jon Haidt and I are just the same age, and we've had these sort of parallel careers writing about science of human happiness.
That guy's a visionary.
He's probably the greatest social scientist of our generation.
Wow.
He's that great.
I mean, he's unbelievable.
He wrote a book about moral foundations, and he talked about the fact that there are two moral foundations that everybody has in common, and that's care and fairness.
Care for others and fairness.
Now, we define those things differently.
Does the care mean giving everybody, taking care of them at the base level?
Or does it mean everybody gets an apartment and free groceries?
I mean, you figure out what that means.
And that's a legitimate argument about what it means.
Fairness is really, really different, especially between political poles,
where one side is about redistributive fairness,
and the other side is about meritocratic fairness,
what fairness actually means.
But everybody wants a fair and caring society,
and you believe that you should be fair as a parent,
you should care for your kids.
Then what he shows empirically with his work, which no doubt has a huge neurobiological basis,
and I'm sure has a huge genetic basis as well, because these personality characteristics generally do,
or usually between, in the identical twin studies, it's usually 40 to 80% genetic,
all the aspects of personality, which is super interesting in and of itself,
is that there's three elements of morality that are very different between the political poles.
They are loyalty, purity, and authority.
So loyalty is like flag burning is bad, right?
You know, I come from a very mostly progressive family, politically progressive family.
And if I asked somebody, you know, from my family of origin, what do you think about flag burning?
They'd be like inadvisable, right?
As opposed to morally evil.
Right, soft answer.
Yeah, when it comes, right?
And the second is loyalty, you know, loyalty to tribe.
And what you find is that people who are more on the politically conservative side, they have a different sense of loyalty.
loyalty towards sports teams.
So you find that when you,
in these interesting studies
that you go into
a political conservative's office
and you'll find like a sports poster
where in a political liberal's office,
you're very, very much less likely
to find this is what you find.
And then of course this,
where it really has teeth
is toward national identity,
where you're loyal toward national.
It's like my country right or wrong,
which is one of the reasons
you find such a strong
political preponderance
of one side in the military forces.
in the American military as opposed to the other.
§04Transcript — part 4
Not to say that one side's right or wrong,
but that's just how it comes down.
John Haidt would say that's a difference in moral foundations.
And the last that you were really touching on here is purity.
It's moral purity.
And the moral purity is about, for example, in sexual matters.
It's very, very profound.
And so there's a, I've seen a bumper sticker in San Francisco
that says, your body may be a temple, but mine is an amusement park.
Right?
It's funny in its way, right?
But what that is basically saying is-
It's very, what I would call, because I'm from the Bay Area, sort of older San Francisco, like circa 70s to now.
Now there's a kind of a growing conservative movement, somewhat tucked into the tech community, although you find a mix of both.
You find a mix of both, too.
But it's kind of a libertine thing where libertarianism and libertinism diverge, which is a really interesting boundary, too, is what you find.
But that actually describes those differences are, you know, so, so, you know, each side will say the
other side is immoral. No, they're differently moraled. And you decide, you know, which you
think is right. And if you tell me in a structured survey, what you think is right on those particular
issues, I have a very high degree of certitude in guessing how you vote. Actually. Now, some
people are in these weird things. You can be in kind of a, you can be a political conservative,
but a cultural liberal, right?
Those aren't very many people, but you do find them.
They tend to be the political libertarians,
as a matter of fact.
It's fascinating because ultimately here,
we're talking about drawing boundaries
between different brain areas.
At least that's what the neurobiologist in me thinks.
But I mean, obviously, politics, laws,
and behavior matters a lot.
It really matters because ultimately,
people can say all sorts of things
about what they believe, what they want to be,
but we are ultimately judged on what we do.
And I think we probably judge ourselves on the basis of what we do,
or ideally we would look at that.
Let's talk a little bit about...
We've gone through one macronutrient.
Right, one macronutrient.
What exercises do you suggest to students
to start to explore their own relationship
between animal impulse and moral aspiration?
Yeah, so one of the things that I talk about
is how they understand leisure. So leisure is what you do and they're not compensating you for in the time that's
actually free, how you understand leisure. So, and the greatest writer about this is Josef Pieper,
the mid 20th century German philosopher. His most important book was Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
That's his most inflecting. It's actually a long essay. It's very, very beautiful. He says,
I can tell you everything you need to know about a culture by how they actually use leisure.
He doesn't want to know what you do for money.
He wants to know how you use your time
when nobody's paying you.
That's because he says that's what reflects
who you actually are.
That's why I never liked the,
oh, you can tell by the books on somebody's shelf.
Because books on somebody's shelf
doesn't mean they actually read those books.
Because they own those books.
Right, exactly.
Many people own my books who haven't read them.
Well, I've spent some time with it.
I still need to pore through it again.
We can't wait to read protocols, by the way.
Oh, thanks.
If nothing else, Protocols will cure insomnia. The thing is almost 600 pages long thank you um uh your book's awesome and i uh i spend
some time with it i want to spend more time with it um in part because it marries theory with
practical steps and prompts not ai prompts but the kind of prompts you really give oneself so
this thing about leisure is fascinating yeah leisure is really interesting it's like that that
tells you what you need to know about a culture but also about a person in a way and so if you
find somebody who's using the leisure time to meet animal appetites, that's one thing. If they're
actually using it for personal betterment, for personal betterment, not career betterment,
not for the compensation, it actually comes from the worldly rewards. There's four worldly rewards,
money, power, pleasure, and honor. And if you're doing something such that it doesn't reward you
in one of those areas, that actually comes from Aristotle and Aquinas, et cetera, then you're
actually doing what he would call proper leisure. You're doing proper leisure toward, you know,
moral aspiration, which is ultimately the most rewarding thing. That's ultimately what will
take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness.
That's the theory. And it's, and it's, it's actually been verified a lot in a lot of these
ideas, the best questions that come from the philosophers and then, and then the structural
mechanisms come from neuroscience. And then the testing of these ideas comes from the behavioral
sciences, right? Do the experiments, et cetera. Then of course, applying them to your life is a
different kettle of fish. And so what he says is that there's kind of three areas that make proper
leisure and ultimate enjoyment. Want me to tell you that? Please. Yeah. Number one is deepening
relationships on purpose, man. I mean, on purpose. And so leisure is this weekend, I'm envisioning
myself not touching my phone while I'm with my wife, right? Deepening my relationship,
being fully present for my wife. And I'm going to go someplace not because I want to chill
on the beach, but because I want to be on the beach with the love of my life.
So deepening relationships on purpose with a real focus on that. The second is learning
something you don't need to learn. And the third is actually developing yourself metaphysically.
is your spiritual, your religious life, or your philosophical life. It's to transcend
what's going on here for no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence. Those are the
three areas of proper leisure. And that's how he would say, I know that you're going from pleasure
to enjoyment. That's how I know based on what you're doing, even though you don't have to.
I love this. I'll tell you several of the reasons why I love it. One is people from time to time
will say, what do you do for fun?
It's a very difficult question for me to answer
because people might be-
Because your work is fun, by the way.
My work is so much fun.
I know.
Like I'm reading this book about sunlight
and how the dermatology world is revising
their understanding about sun and skin cancer.
And I'm loving that.
I love my- I mean, I could list it off,
but I just say those things to just get people
to think about what they enjoy doing.
But the word that, you know, keeps coming up in my mind
because I have a hard time with the fun thing
do other things that are purely recreational is this word enrichment.
I mean, it sounds kind of, you know, you know, like somebody is trying to be an academic
when they say like, like, what do you do for enrichment?
It doesn't, it's not, it's not as natural a question these days as like, what do you
do for fun?
It's like, what do you do for your own enrichment?
It, it, it reshapes the question a little bit because the implication is it's not just
about immediate pleasure, which fun kind of falls into the groove of pleasure.
It's about personal excellence.
You come out of it better.
Right.
Not just for having experienced whatever it was the activity was, but there's something carried forward into other things that you do.
And in a good way.
And so the word enrichment feels good.
It's the reason why, even though I was in the sciences as an undergraduate, I decided to take a course in Greek mythology and loved it, loved, loved, loved it.
That was leisure.
And it turns out it was neuroscience too, right?
Years later, we talk about the myth of the Cyclops is all about anger.
And it has everything to do with the lack of depth perception that when you have one eye
versus two eyes.
It turns out like the Greeks like really understood
stereopsis and depth perception.
There, I couldn't help myself.
In any case.
That's interesting.
So like this notion of enrichment.
And I love that in the example you gave
of going to the beach with a friend or with a spouse
or someone else you care about,
it's not about your own experience of it.
You said, not just because you want to be there,
but because you're actually there,
that's a physical grounds for creating something else.
So it's not really about the beach.
It's about what you leave the beach with.
That's right.
And it's not just memories of the beach.
You actually both change as a consequence of being there.
Maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways.
But you've enriched the relationship.
And so the beach becomes incidental.
When people talk about wanting to go out drinking,
what I wanna know is, is it about the drinking
or is it the people you're drinking with?
That's what it comes down to.
Now, I strongly recommend that people reconsider that decision.
I mean, I've heard you.
Two drinks a week is the safe level.
I've got it, Andrew.
I've got it.
Yeah, more than that's probably not a good idea
for most people.
I'm a zero.
I'm a non-drinker
because it's the right cadence for my life.
But people who do use alcohol responsibly,
I'm not.
I wish I were a person
who could use alcohol responsibly.
I'm not, right?
So I don't.
And I don't use it at all.
But when people say I'm going to go out drinking,
I mean, I don't know if that's pleasure or enjoyment.
if that's animal impulse or moral aspiration.
I need more information.
I need to know the reason for that.
When people are talking about getting a beach house,
I'm going to get a beach house.
I don't know whether or not that's animal impulse
towards social comparison,
toward actually a scoreboard effect
so I can actually feel like I mean something.
That's all animal impulse.
All it is, that's just like your troglodyte brain
actually saying you're not good enough
unless you have a beach house like old Bill over there,
at the office, right? But on the other hand, if you tell me, it's like, I got to create bait so that my
kids and grandkids are here a lot. Okay, now I'm listening. Now I'm actually paying attention.
And so a lot of things that people will say, I need a little bit more information such that I
can categorize it in the right way, whether or not we're on the right side, we're on the animal
impulse side or the moral aspiration side, whether we're on the pleasure side or the
enjoyment side, whether it's actually going to bring happiness. I'm pausing because I have so many questions about this,
but I want to make sure we touch on the other macronutrients
because otherwise I'm going to encourage you to give a tutorial
on how to really maximize every single choice in not just my life,
but listeners' lives.
Enjoyment protocols.
We should have leisure protocols.
Absolutely.
§05Transcript — part 5
We all know that one of the major pillars is social connection
and relationships, but the idea that leisure is part of that
as a substrate for enriching those is obvious once we hear it,
reframes everything. If exercising with somebody, you know, it turns out to be a way you deepen the
relationship, which actually has been my experience with a lot of male friends, frankly.
Yeah, totally.
One of the best ways to get to know somebody, in my experience, is to have an intellectual
conversation with them, like really deep dive with them, or to go do something difficult.
Yeah, yeah. Rob, my producer and close, close friend, he's sitting to my left right now.
I mean, one of the first things we ever did was like go for a run where he kicked my butt.
and by the way a Vanderbilt graduate yeah very pleased to see that yeah yeah and um I don't
recommend people box but years ago I boxed and I'd spar on Wednesday nights don't recommend it
yes I wore headgear yes I probably took some damage I don't recommend it um but you feel so
close to people that you actually tried to hurt and they tried to hurt you but with rules yeah
in it's an amazing it's very primitive yeah and yet you there's a bond there that it's obviously
nonverbal it's a lifelong bond you see that person the next time and it's like especially if they
played fair and they hurt you yeah you're like yeah yeah like we know one another yeah i've seen
you you know there's a respect level i'm not suggesting people do this but you added people
in memory to a strong experience thus rendering it enjoyable and being part of happiness yeah
and point of fact it wasn't strictly pleasurable but that wasn't exactly the point no yeah no the
together in some way. There's a great book by a guy named Sam Sheridan called A Fighter's Heart.
He's actually a Harvard grad. I think he was an art major there. His dad was a Navy SEAL. He's a
very interesting guy. And he has this joke that, you know, that sparring is like a, it's like a
one night stand or something. You've like done something very intimate with someone you barely
know. And so it has both a feeling of connection, but it's also the illusion of connection. So he
hits it better than I did. Don't run out and start sparring with your friends.
such, you know, bonds for life.
My son is a sniper,
scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps.
And these are friends for life.
I mean, these are guys
who would literally
give their lives for each other,
who looked out for each other
in very, very dangerous situations.
And they were suffering together.
Now, the word compassion
in Latin means to suffer together.
That's what it means,
to be compassionate with somebody,
to suffer alongside that person.
That's what it comes from.
And it's, you know,
it has this, the passion of Christ
in the Christian religion
is all about the suffering of Christ.
That's what it comes to.
And to have compassion towards somebody to suffer with that person through that.
And when you even induce that suffering, as dumb as it is, beating each other up, you know, doing, getting into the octagon.
And, you know, that is what you're doing is this is the experience of compassion, which gets us to a primordial need to move beyond the animal impulse into the moral space that actually makes us quintessentially human, that makes us fundamentally different than all the other beings.
It makes us the dominant species.
But by the way, it also renders us the most miserable
of all these species as well, which is so interesting.
There's some dark and terrible examples of this,
and sometimes people will call it trauma bonding,
like the sort of Sid and Nancy story.
Like, do they kill each other at the Chelsea Hotel
in like a drug-induced rage?
But then, like, if you watch that great movie
with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, right?
Like, Walk the Line.
Like, their relationship between Johnny Cash
June Carter, right?
Was June Carter Cash, I think was eventually her married name.
It was a contentious one.
It was the feistiness.
It was the fighting.
They were forged in this challenge.
She was divorced at a time when divorce was really frowned upon.
And she was religious.
And so there was just a lot of contention.
And then there's this peace that they achieve in being together.
But you always sense that it's like that there's this recognition that there's fight in them and they've been through it.
And that's part of – like we tend to – we used to kind of hold up relationships like that.
Now we like to see everything look perfectly smooth.
Yeah.
Right?
But this gets back to like the marriage vows and this gets back to relationships of all kinds.
It's the suffering.
The suffering.
The suffering you suffer with.
I'm going to suffer with my wife until I take my dying breath.
It's because we have a relationship.
with you. My God, yes. The with is there, the both of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear.
No, for sure. I mean, it's no walk in the park being married to me. That's for sure. I mean,
it's a pain for sure, but she will. I mean, this is like the bond that we've actually taken for
life and the, and, and central to the, the, and we have great enjoyment. It's fantastic. But that
enjoyment has everything to do with the fact that it's pleasurable. It's interesting. It's,
it's fascinating. It's funny. And it's also hard. And it's also, there's a lot of suffering
And there's a lot of, it's daggers drawn.
I mean, my wife is Spanish, so you have to understand
that there's a high level of complexity and suffering.
And words per, word density per moment.
Yeah, exactly right.
And we have a 50-50 Spanish and English marriage,
which means that we can suffer in two languages.
It's what it comes down to.
But the truth is, that's what people need to expect.
That's what people need to expect,
that it's like, okay, let's suffer together, baby.
Come on, honey, let's just bring it on.
And that's a beautiful thing.
That's really what it means.
And people talk so much about peace and ease as the goal.
Yeah.
I'm hearing some of that, but I'm hearing a bunch of other things too here.
I get it.
And it's particularly true that men, they want peace at home.
They do want peace at home.
And I see that.
By the way, women want peace at home too.
But you're not going to get peace all the time.
You don't want peace all the time.
You want a full life, fully lived.
You want to be, it's like the, to be fully alive.
What does that mean?
That means the whole range of your emotions.
You're using all the parts of your limbic system.
We're wonderfully made, Andrew.
And it's just like, I want the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to give me this sense of suffering and grief when I'm feeling social exclusion or the sense of loss.
You know, I want the insula to be highly active when I have this sense of disgust or whatever it happens to be or the amygdala to be active with fear and anger, et cetera.
I want that.
I want my brain to work the way it's actually supposed to.
I mean, I want to suffer and I'm gonna if I'm actually being fully alive and if I'm taking the chances and I'm doing the things that I actually need to do.
Because that is ingrained in the full experience of what human happiness is properly understood.
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So we have the second chapter in the book
that maybe we write together.
Although you're the real writer, I confess,
I've yet to decide I'm a writer.
Which is-
You're good at what you do, man.
Oh, thanks.
I appreciate it.
One chapter will be on leisure.
You've told us that how one spends their leisure time
is a critical window into self.
and the other would be how to suffer more
in pursuit of moral aspiration,
but also how to experience pleasure
in pursuit of moral aspiration.
Absolutely, absolutely.
So we've gotten through enjoyment.
Yeah, let's talk about satisfaction.
Yeah.
Because it sounds similar,
but it sounds like deeper, more pervasive,
more like defined as satisfaction.
Yeah, so I mean, again,
And the definition, everything is in the definitions.
And one of the problems with happiness is that everybody can, they define it in different ways, etc.
So I try to stay out of the linguistic wars.
It's like consciousness.
No neuroscientist really wants to talk about consciousness anymore because it's like, it's so circular.
For sure.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It's being aware of the fact that you're aware because you're aware or something.
What?
Many billions of dollars and euros in particular.
That's a joke aimed at one Swiss scientist in particular.
You've read Michael Pollan's new book.
I haven't read the new one.
A World Appears.
But I think the world of him.
He's fantastic.
And the new book is actually the book to read
for people who are not either philosophers
or neuroscientists or even psychologists, for that matter,
on A World Appears is what it's called.
I've never met him, but I love the book.
I think it's absolutely fantastic.
And at the end of the book, you know a lot more
and you still don't understand what consciousness is.
You don't understand what it is.
It's a lot of things.
It's many things.
§06Transcript — part 6
sentience and it's feelings and it's awareness of others and it's awareness of yourself.
And we don't know where it is in the brain. And oh my goodness. But the truth is that that's one
of the problems in the field that I have too, which is the definition of terms. And satisfaction
is one of these things. Satisfaction as I define it, as many people define it, is the joy that you
get from an accomplishment after struggle. That's satisfaction. So the satisfaction that you got
was proportionate to the suffering that actually went into getting your PhD and mine too right and
they were like oh man I'm not doing that again but it was so awesome and you know I think about
but it was so awesome yeah those those are the key words I know and it's like I talked to you know my
kids my kids in the military yeah they're I mean being a marine is no you're not screwing around
and you know I saw what my kids went through and for you know the infantry training battalion and
the scout sniper indoctrination, or my daughter is, you know, and she's an officer. She actually
had got her first salute from her brother. He's 6'5 and she's 4'11. It was awesome. You know,
actually, your older brother has to salute you. It's great. So cool. Yeah, it's great. But, you
know, it's, it's, people talk when I say, you know, tell me the story of your success. I mean,
the people make jokes about it. You remember David Koch, one of the Koch brothers, you know,
of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas. And he was a very, very funny guy. And he used to say,
people say, how did you get so rich? And I say, well, it started when I was 12 years old and
I found an apple and I was shining it up and I had paid a nickel for it and somebody offered me a
dime. And I said, well, it's a hundred percent profit margin. So I went back and bought two
apples and I doubled my money and I started doing this every day and every week, doubling my money
and doubling my money. And you can do the math week after week and year after year. And finally,
my father died, left me a hundred million dollars. That's good. And the reason that that's funny is
the parahippocampal gyrus and it makes you feel like that surprise, like in every joke, right?
But the reason it's funny is because real satisfaction from your accomplishments comes
from the struggle, not from the accolades. That's what it really comes to because you earned it and
human beings are made to earn their success. This is the reason that they'll convince themselves
that when somebody's giving them absolute utter largesse that they actually earned it in some way.
if you want to get to have your career destroyed as a politician go to a bunch of senior citizens
and tell them you're getting a lot back more back from social security than you ever paid in
your career is over because you basically just you know flick their parahippocampal gyrus in a
very unpleasant way you kicked it right so cool i don't like it and and and so so the truth of
the matter is that he was saying that because the answer that people are expecting is, I suffered.
And I had three bankruptcies. And, you know, I almost lost my marriage. And I had to raid my
kid's college fund. And I was afraid. You know, like Bernie Marcus talks about the Home Depot,
and they were down there at the last dollar. And it was grim, is how he talked about it. And so
that's really, really important. And that's one of the reasons that satisfaction, which is so important, you know, we got to make
progress. Why arrival leads to frustration, but progress toward goals is how we're wired.
Purpose in life comes from goals and direction and progress toward purpose and goals. That's
what purpose, where our purpose in life actually comes from. And so the result of it is that we
need to have this sense that we're sacrificing for something, that we're doing something that's
bigger than who we are and we're willing to give something up. That's really one of the great
reasons also that when people hit their goals, they get so depressed. It's because there's no
more progress. You know, it's why Olympic athletes are so likely to fall into a clinical depression
after they win their, you know, their gold medal. And my people are so, when they win a billion
dollars, they're like, I guess I need another billion. I guess I need, you know, because I'm
not feeling it, man, because we're actually made for this progress, but the progress entails a
struggle. And we judge your students, my students. There's no satisfaction that comes if they cheat on an exam. But if they
work hard and get an A, that's very, very satisfying. And you teach your kids this,
don't eat before dinner. It's not because of nutrition. It's because you want their
synaptically plastic little brains to register the fact that, that if they come to dinner hungry,
dinner's better. Definitely. And you're, you tell junior, you know, don't eat before dinner
because it's unhealthy. But if you were being honest, you'd say, I want you to suffer.
That's why you can't have a snack. A few years ago, I was out a lot on the internet saying,
you know, dopamine that comes without effort before it is very pernicious. And I stand behind
that, but some people like took the interpretation too far. It in part, an attempt to malign me,
which is fine. Like, you know, I'm out there, you know, yeah, sure. That comes with the territory,
but it's sort of implied. I didn't have the language for it, but now I do. Thanks to you.
It's sort of implied that I don't believe in leisure. Right. I don't want to return us to
the first macronutrient in a way that distracts us, but I think this is appropriate now. So
of course, leisure is great, but I would say leisure is way better when you've been working
hard. And so if you've been working hard towards something that has its own intrinsic reward,
the work itself can become intrinsically rewarding or not. There are a lot of things I did in graduate
school that I absolutely loved the process. And there are some of them that like, the only word
for it is it sucked. It just, it sucked. All nighters, like two days recording experiments
and like, just like breathing all that isoflurane in the room. And it was just like, it sucked.
But it, and it was awesome. But there are forms of leisure, like on those Fridays when we
finished those experiments, I would drive out to this, this, this orchard outside of Davis where I
did graduate school to winters. And I would just, this would before phones. I would just listen to
music in my car. And I just felt like I felt like I'd been transported in time. That's right. And I
felt connected to all the people who had worked a hard week and then were just listening to music
in their car. And then eventually my girlfriend and I would drive out there. Now I could share
that experience with her. And she was a scientist and working really, really hard too, arguably
even harder than I was because the experiment she was doing took yet another level of persistence
that's really remarkable.
So it's not that saying that effort has to be there
before dopamine is like means you're a one track,
like self-optimization junkie.
It's just an important pie slice
in being like a good human being in my opinion.
So I kind of bristle at the idea
that a concept like that could be construed
as anti-pleasure,
but in a sense it's really like there's something about the human
mind where we want, we hear one piece of this. We hear about one pie slice and we say, oh, so that
means like leisure doesn't exist for this person. But what I love about your work and what you're
telling us today is that it's really about the complete pie chart. It's not about any one moment.
And it's working with our brains, working with our biology. We are built to earn our rewards. We are built to earn
our success. We have no concept of what anything is worth if we don't earn our success. And the
reason that we want to do that, we think that, you know, that a Snickers bar gives you pleasure.
No, no, no, no, no. It's actually the neurochemicals that are giving you pleasure,
that are actually making you feel this pleasure. It just happens to circuitously through the way
that the brain works. Getting your PhD didn't give you pleasure per se. There was nothing about
the piece of paper. It was actually the knowledge that you had done this thing. And so one of the
greatest secrets to excellence and success in people's lives is the sense of earning it. And
And that means making peace with suffering, making peace with pain, making peace with struggle.
It's what it comes down to.
Now, that doesn't mean, and one of the biggest mistakes that strivers often make is that it's all struggle.
You remember the not discredited but complicated Walter Mischel marshmallow experiments at your fine institution.
And the follow-up, the kids who ate the marshmallow within five minutes, they had no impulse control.
And they went on to actually get worse grades and worse jobs, et cetera.
And the 20% of the kids in the marshmallow experiment
who were able to not eat the marshmallow
and they got the second marshmallow,
they did much better in life.
And so the whole point was the deferral of gratification
is a big signal of how well you're actually gonna do.
One of the biggest problems that strivers have,
and I'm speaking to all the strivers watching us right now,
is that they don't know what their marshmallow even is.
And so they're just gonna wait their whole lives.
And that's not what you've been saying.
That's not what you're talking about.
never, never drive out to Winters, to never actually listen to the music, to never actually
wait for the second marshmallow and enjoy that second marshmallow. That's a mistake too. That's
actually a huge mistake. But the whole point is we're trying to find the golden mean between
earning it and not earning it. That doing enough and struggling enough and then actually taking the
reward and then starting again. This actually feeds into a lot of the experiences that people
have. A big part of my work is how to age well, about how to get happier as you age.
Yeah, do tell.
Yeah. I mean, it's super important. And part of the reason is because, man, I'm no spring chicken.
And this is me search, right? For all of us, we're always doing me search instead of research.
And so I want to know, how can I be happier at 60 than 50? And now I want to know how I can be
happy years down the road at 70 instead of 60. I want to know how to retire. And so when I'm giving
people advice, I'm doing public education about these things, it's because I've been trying to
answer these questions for myself. Retirement is a classic case of screwing up the satisfaction part of happiness.
It's like, I'm going to work and work and work and work. I'm going to be a miserable SOB.
And then at 65, I'm going to stop completely and just goof around. That's the recipe for
misery all the way through because it was no fun. It was all suffering without reward. And then it's
all reward without suffering. That's neurophysiologically unsound, but it's also
philosophically unsound. It doesn't actually make sense. So I help people retire constantly,
but I also try to help them have the best life as they do to move through the course of their
careers, do what they're actually naturally good at. That is both hard and rewarding,
which changes over the course of your career. There's a lot of research on that,
but it all gets into how can I maintain satisfaction? The mystery comes when we
actually do get the thing that we actually want. And then we find that it leaves us cold.
That seems like a real tyranny.
Like Mother Nature had a trick up her sleeve, which kind of she did.
I mean, you actually, people, if I can get that watch, that car, that marriage, then I'll be happy forever.
I mean, guys will say to women, you know, if you marry me, you'll make me happy forever.
That's not right.
You know, it doesn't matter what she says when you propose.
It doesn't matter what she says on her wedding day.
It's what you say to each other over the course of your entire marriage that actually will give you net-net the best possible life.
That's why Mick Jagger's saying, I can't get no satisfaction.
He should have sang, I can't keep no satisfaction.
And that's a whole different, as we say in Seattle, a whole nother problem, mystery.
Is that a Seattleism?
I guess so.
I don't know.
I was like, yeah.
There's so many articles out there and websites and blogs that are like the six things that people say on their deathbed.
Nobody says, I wish I worked more.
I don't know.
My dad, he's in his early 80s and he's still rocking and he loves his work.
Right.
And he loves his wife.
Right.
And he loves his kids.
And he loves his coffee and he loves his meditation and he loves life.
He's a happy guy.
And he would say like work has been a, he's giving, he's still working, consuming ideas, giving lectures.
I think he would say he was really glad he worked as much as he did, not more than that.
But these lists to me are not useful, whether it's about work or whether it's about anything,
because the lists to me are really about the question, when I look back on my life, I want to be able to say blank.
Okay, I feel like that analysis peeled back to like, when I finish my college degree, I want to be able to say,
all right that can inform some choices going forward make good friends got enriched myself
intellectually etc etc didn't you know got healthier as opposed to less healthy you could
do that but it's not I feel like it's the wrong question yeah like it's the wrong thing when I
look back on my life I went like how about now yeah and the decisions you can make today this
week this month this year because that's how you end up in a place where and let's face it most
likely those last moments they could be very peaceful and beautiful but you don't know right
So we imagine this kind of like before the curtains close moment that some people get, but I don't think most people
get that. I've watched people die. It's not, it's usually not like that. It's, I feel like we tend
to integrate our levels of satisfaction, pleasure, lack, the pain, et cetera, on a much shorter time
scale. So is there a better set of questions and answers that we can come up with for living in the
now so that we are steering right through the more of the time that we have between now and
whenever it is that that curtain closes.
Yeah, for sure.
There's a lot actually on this.
And it touches on a couple of different things.
Now, to begin with, this really gets into the third macronutrient, which is meaning.
And what are we doing to understand the meaning of our lives?
Ultimately, that knowledge is the most important macronutrient, the most philosophical, the
most, I mean, it gets closest to the, you know, the problem, the hard problem of consciousness
to use Chalmers, his formulation on this, et cetera, et cetera.
But there's a lot that goes into it.
These are, David Brooks talks about no relation,
friend, but no relation.
He talks about resume versus eulogy virtues.
And, you know, it's true.
You know, it's probably better
if you don't imagine people at your funeral saying,
he had 5 million miles on Delta.
I mean, it's probably not.
That's some friends who are, like,
really into their points on their cards.
I know.
It's a video game.
It's an adult-ish.
Yeah.
§07Transcript — part 7
They're trying to count.
They're a scoreboard.
And part of the reason is because
that's a sense of satisfaction.
You know, they're trying to count.
trying to get that, they want to make progress, progress toward a goal, goals and direction,
making progress. We're progress oriented animals, which is why the scoreboard is so
important. The trouble is that when, once you run up the scoreboard after a certain point,
I mean, you die and stay dead and you realize that nobody actually cares. And so if all anybody
talks about is this, is this score, this, this trivial scoreboard, which is frequent flyer miles
or money in a bank account, right. Or, or any of these other worldly things, it's a problem. And
leads to the first criterion for what actually is going to lead to regret and what isn't.
And that's a deep philosophical thing that has a lot of roots in classical philosophy,
but also a lot of behavioral science behind it as well.
So Aristotle, vis-a-vis St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, he asserted that we want to be happy.
Okay, fair. This is pretty good.
Now, his definition of happiness was beatitudo, which is the luminescence of presence of God, right, to the relationship with God.
Other people define it in different ways who are not traditionally religious, but I think everybody would agree, yeah, we want to be happy.
He said that to do that, I mean, you have a tendency to follow your animal impulses.
So far, so good.
Gets back to an early part of the conversation.
And he said, your animal impulses tell you one fundamental lie.
And that fundamental lie is that the following four things, when they beguile you and you get them, that you'll be actually happy and you'll be finally satisfied.
You'll finally be there.
Those four things are money, resources, power, which is influence over other people, pleasure, which also is comfort or security, right?
or honor, which means, you know, for you and me as academics, it's like, hey, that's Andrew Huberman.
He wrote that paper in the journal of, you know, seven-dimensional, you know, disappearing manifolds
or, you know, some academic journal nobody's ever heard of, but still academic prestige, admiration,
whatever it happens to be. Those are beguiling idols that if you pursue those things as an end
per se, there's nothing evil about them. They can be used for great good. But if you use them as an
end per se, that's when you'll wind up in trouble. That's the problem that we actually get. So they
say, nobody says, I wish I'd worked more. What they should say is nobody says, I wish I'd gotten
a little bit more famous. I wish I had had, you know, a million more dollars in my 401k that I
have no idea what's going to actually happen to it. That's really what they're saying. And so back
up from that and to, for us to be happier, we need to assess whether or not we are serving these worldly idols.
And that's incredibly good behavioral science because that is an almost perfect taxonomy of the things that we actually chase.
I have a game I play with my students at HBS.
They don't know what their idol is.
They don't know what it is.
And again, I got nothing against money.
I think money can be, does wonderful things.
Jobs, opportunity, growth, taxes, philanthropy.
There's nothing wrong with power.
Influence other people wielded in a virtuous way.
Pleasure.
I mean, pleasure leads to babies.
So great.
Fame, you can refract your fame.
I mean, there are lots and lots of people.
I promise you, Andrew, there are lots of people pursuing their PhDs right now because of your fame, which is a beautiful and a good thing for humanity.
The problem is it will hurt you if one of these things is your primary objective, is your primary goal, and you endow it with mythical power.
So I play a game with them.
What's my idol?
They don't know.
You want to play?
Yeah.
I'm playing What's My Idol.
Yeah, I'm a little scared, but let's do it.
Let's do it.
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The way to know what your idol is, and again, what Aquinas suggests and what modern social science absolutely verifies,
is that, again, nothing wrong with these things, but if you pursue this, this winds up being the source of your later bitterness and regret.
The reason is because when you pursue these things, you're doing it at cost.
And the cost is almost always love.
Love is the secret of happiness.
To love and be loved is what we want.
And when you pursue something that's not real, that's not alive, then you're sacrificing opportunities to love and be loved if you pursue it as a goal per se.
But when you know what your idol is, you'll still make mistakes.
You're still going to mess up.
You're still going to be miserable a lot.
But you will sometimes avoid the error, which is incredibly powerful.
Great.
So the way to play this game is to eliminate, because you always do elimination when you're trying to do these things.
It's much more robust.
It's actually better.
eliminate the idol that you don't have one by one by one it's going to get harder as we go along
it's going to start off really really easy i can even make predictions about you about what what
you would eliminate but eliminate them until you until you've got the last one and that's the one
that's most likely to beguile you and lead you down the wrong road so money resources power
pleasure fame or adoration of other people you're going to get rid of one and it doesn't mean you
don't have it. It just means you're the population average.
Get rid of one of those.
Yeah, if you got rid of money, for example,
you say, I don't care about it.
That just means you're the most average American economically,
which by world standards is unbelievable.
Historical standards is fabulously wealthy.
So you said it was money?
Uh-huh.
Power.
Pleasure.
And pleasure can also be comfort or security, right?
Or and honor, which is prestige or fame or adoration
or whatever it happens to be, or respect.
And power can be benevolent too, right?
Totally.
These all can be great.
Because the most virtuous, happy people have these things.
Yeah.
They have a lot of these things.
Yeah.
I don't care much about the notion of, like, honor and accolades.
In fact, just as a very brief anecdote, it was right about, I'd been tenured for maybe three, four years.
Yeah.
And I was struggling financially as a professor, despite what people might think about Stanford.
And I was happy to, you know.
I was one of those, too.
And so I had a conversation with my then chair, or was it vice chair?
And he said, well, you know, at some point, you know, you'll be chair. And then of the department is rotating chair. I'm still in
this department, by the way, we'll see if I still am at the end of this conversation with what the
heck. And he said, you know, it comes with a pay increase. And I was like, really? And I thought
about I'd seen what happened to chairs of departments couldn't focus as much on science. It's a total meat grinder.
It's a punishment disguised as an honor. It's a punishment to any real scientist, but they may,
but they cloak it and they say, no, this is service to the department. And that's true.
Right. And a good chair is valuable.
Some people are exceptional at it.
I have a close friend of mine from childhood.
He's a chair.
But the chair needs certain attributes that are important.
And so the response out of my mouth was, how do I make sure I never become chair?
Well, so I think now it's very unlikely I'll be chair of the department.
I'm not around enough.
But like, how do I make absolutely sure that I'm like not like,
like do anything else, anything to not be chair?
By virtue of the fact that my dad's a scientist. And I grew up seeing a lot of scientists and hearing about a lot of luminaries
of science. I heard this story about Richard Feynman, the great Richard Feynman, where
apparently, I don't know if this is true or not, but he was elected into the National Academy
of Sciences. And I think at the inaugural dinner, he said to someone like, well, what happens now?
And they go, oh, you elect other people in. And he goes, wait, so this is like a club where we
pin medals on each other? And he goes, I quit. If it's not true, it's awesome. If it's true,
It's awesome.
Yeah, it's funny.
And I knew that true or not, what the story illustrates is that like those honors mean nothing.
In fact, the most important thing about a Nobel Prize, I believe, is that it allows the winner, in addition to the value of the discovery, but it allows the winner to be a great fundraiser for other people at the university.
That's it.
Yeah.
And so, and the discovery, obviously.
But anyway, so honor doesn't really, like I'm not interested in medals or things.
So you go super famous as a public intellectual.
Is that important?
Does that motivate you?
Because that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it?
I will go on record saying that fame increases your opportunities exponentially and limits your freedoms exponentially.
No, it's not important to me.
Okay.
It's a byproduct of the pursuit of other things.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
Strongly introverted, despite how much I talk.
Got it.
No, no, I get it.
I need a lot of time.
No, I get it.
You should see me when I'm alone.
I talk to you even more.
No, I'm kidding.
You're probably exhausted after a podcast.
Yeah, I love my team, but I interact with very few people on purpose.
No, I need time to think.
And I love people, but I'm very, very introverted.
I got it.
Yeah.
I got it.
Okay, so I believe you.
And so you'd go to the normal, the most normal.
You'd be as famous as your mailman.
Oh, that would be awesome.
Okay.
I have the best, like the people that clean up my neighborhood.
I live in a pretty grungy neighborhood.
My place I do my best to keep really nice.
These people are like my heroes.
I'm always bringing them Mateina.
They're out there like they're literally scraping up shit from animals, people.
Like I love these people.
And they're so like the ones I know.
They're so happy.
They're so happy.
And I'm like, man, maybe someday I just like throw on one of those orange vests and just like disappear into like, you know, I won't name a town.
But yeah.
Don't name the town or pretty soon they'll find you.
Yeah.
So, okay, good.
Good, good.
Now we got rid of the easy one in a way.
Money, power, pleasure.
What's next?
That means it's going to be a little harder
§08Transcript — part 8
because all these things have their rewards.
Yeah.
So which one do you get rid of next?
Pleasure.
Pleasure.
And then because you're pretty austere.
I mean, look, your book's called Protocols.
Yeah, yeah.
I inherited my mom's...
People were...
I was...
This kind of like observer comes on
where people are going to think I'm scripting this.
Like my mom has a save the world piece of her
that's very real and very alive in me.
But the thing we also share, like a desire to save,
change, positive change.
But the thing that comes alive in me
that I definitely got from her is like,
if an emotion like gets to me, if it comes up, it's big.
Like the people I love, I love so big
that sometimes I think the top of my head's gonna explode.
Like, or that I think like my heart's gonna explode.
And it's not comfortable.
I've gotten better at tolerating that.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, it makes me emotional
because I do think that like grief is proportional to love.
So I don't walk out of my podcast studio
where I work with my best friends,
not all of them,
but all of them are my best friends.
It's not, but I have best friends elsewhere too.
But I walk out and I don't think,
oh God, like one of them might die on the road tonight.
I just think that I'm the luckiest human being
on the planet to work with these people.
But it fills me so much sometimes.
It's a lot to-
I tolerate it.
So pleasure is not something that I like,
I don't need more intense experiences.
I'm having intense experiences from the moment I wake up
until the moment I go to sleep.
Yeah, yeah, and you're not a drinker.
You're not a substance user.
I'm not a drinker.
I've never been a drug guy.
So let me say something nice about your mom, okay?
So the fact that you kicked out honor
right from the very beginning,
you know what honor addicts all have in common?
They think that love is earned.
That's what they all have in common.
They usually have this common childhood where they're really, really good
at something. I know you were a good student and you were a good skateboarder and you were good at
stuff. Wait, wait, to be fair, before the internet comes for me, I was not a very good skateboarder,
which drove me toward academics because I kept getting hurt. I loved the sport. And I was a good
student, but I was not, I've always had to work hard. Yeah. It's very easy for a lot of young
people, particularly the young people of those who are of intellectuals and excellent people to
learn from their parents that they get attention and affection when they do something unusual.
And the result is that their little brains register the idea that love is earned.
And love isn't earned.
Love is a free gift freely given.
Love is a grace.
And if you go through life, particularly in the most plastic part of your psychological formation, thinking that love is earned, you'll surround yourself with people who will make you earn their love.
You'll marry somebody who will make you earn her love.
And friends who kiss up to you and say, you've got to earn my love.
And the result is you'll go from person to person to person.
You'll be a real honor addict. And what people have in common is that they have a big public life, which happened
to you, that you'll crave the adoration of strangers. You'll actually crave it because
that's the addiction is trying to earn the love even of strangers. And that's a big problem.
So who actually made you whole? Probably your mom, probably your parents, because they loved
you unconditionally and they probably still do. That's good parenting. Yeah. They definitely did.
and they love us unconditionally
and they definitely do.
And yeah, I get a zero,
zero dopamine hit from people saying,
oh, you're so-and-so, can I get a picture?
It doesn't bother me.
What does fill me is when I get an email
that somebody is like,
I'm gonna go study neuroscience
or I did this thing and it really,
I learned from so-and-so on your podcast
and it's enriched my life.
That feels really good.
Yeah.
Because then I feel like, okay, great.
At least I know I'm not wasting my time.
Yeah.
Money and power.
And money just means resources.
It's the ability to do stuff.
It doesn't mean that it makes you more whole as a person.
And often the answer can come from a sense of identity.
So often a money idol will come from people who grew up rich
because that's what it means to be a normal person.
Or they grew up poor because they know how bad it is when you don't have it.
So there's all kinds of circumstances that can provoke this.
And power is just like, I want to be in charge.
I really, really want to be in charge.
It's not a vice.
It's not a, you know, but it's really what drives you.
So which one do you get rid of next?
Money.
Money, which is you become the most,
you become economically just like your postman.
Yeah, I'd be fine.
Who probably has to.
I mean, I'm saying that now from a position of financial security.
So it like.
No, no, look, they're in the comments.
Somebody's going to say, you know.
Easy to say.
Huberman and Brooks are, yeah, like completely full of it
because they're, you know, right, I got it.
But I believe you.
Yeah, but to those people.
You have been in both situations.
Definitely.
My chairman in San Diego, before I moved my lab to Stanford,
I went to him for a salary increase.
So in that department, you could set your own salary,
as long as it wasn't higher than his.
And I had a lot of grants.
Get him a raise.
What do you want to earn?
What do you want to earn?
And I told him, and he said, no.
There was no parity in that department.
In my department at Stanford, there is.
You can't make more than someone more senior than you.
I said parity is important in certain departments,
not in others.
And I had a lot of grants.
I'd like a raise of $20,000 this year which on the that was a significant fraction of what i was making and um and he said
just remember he like did the whole like pivot and look thing like that like you're not allowed
to do anymore like like male chairman pivots towards you like like sitting with his knees
open and he like you did like you can never get away with this and he said just remember you're
gonna make a lot less money than you deserve he's talking about then and he's like and then in the
later part of your career he's talking about himself you're gonna make a lot more money than
you deserve. Because you're going to have tenure, you're going to become unproductive. He's actually a really good guy. And he was absolutely right. There's Bill Mobley. He's still alive. And he's actually a meditator. He's friends
with the Dalai Lama. So hi, Bill. He was absolutely right. I didn't know how that was going to happen
or anything. I didn't know it was going to happen, but it turned out that that's true. So if I were
to average my income back across two and a half decades of, yeah, I was perfectly happy to live
in a lab and save up a little bit of money to be able to go snowboarding once a month in graduate
school. Like why pay rent? They have showers in the building. They're called monkey cage washers.
You can't turn the heat on.
You know, it's like they have a bathroom with a sink.
Like people thought I was crazy, right?
But then I didn't have to commute.
Now, granted, I wasn't married with kids or anything.
So I've lived both ways.
I wouldn't say I've ever been poor.
I want to be honest.
It was austere.
Money's not like, it's great.
It's not that fun.
I mean.
It's not that much.
Can you imagine like having a boat?
No, that'd be a pain in the ass.
Save me from the boat.
No, no, I had to go on a long boat thing with my grandfather.
It was torturous.
I want to go out on the boat for a day.
I like seeing boats on the ocean.
I like scuba diving.
I'm not, no, I, it would be nice.
We're talking extremes here, but no, money is not a big motivator.
It's nice to have, but I'll tell you, I'm sort of answering what I think will be the next question.
The best thing about having money is that I can use it to do things for other people.
And that falls to me under this thing that you're calling power, but benevolent power.
But also it gives you freedom and freedom is nice.
Freedom is nice and being able to make,
I'm not just making this up,
to make life easier by way of money
or by way of connections.
We were talking earlier about,
I know a lot of people who either have
or know people with serious medical issues
and I can connect them to the one of three people
that might actually be able to help them
when no one else can.
Like I've got story after story,
but I don't take credit.
I just happen to know the best people
in these little subdomains
And it doesn't always work out that way. But a lot of times they're like, wow. And so I'm not the physician. I'm just
the concierge. But the fact that I have this job allows me to do that. And the degree allows me to
do that. Money doesn't allow me to do that. It's just my network is insane. And the ability to use
it to help other people. And part of that is having people like you on this podcast.
right like i rob and i sometimes talk like i was like i can't believe it like we had like Fei-Fei
Li on here it's a colleague of mine at stanford you can get an hour with her at stanford but she
came here and talked for three hours about ai yeah like and i can share that with the world
that or share what you're teaching to the world that we're not just having this conversation on
a walk yeah and we can share it with the world that to me is like yeah power now power which is
the ability to be in charge, to be the maestro, to which is to say, I'm going to be in charge.
I'm not going to be subject to the authority of another person.
§09Transcript — part 9
Oh, that's a little tricky.
Which is, it is tricky, to be sure.
Now, you're not a vice-filled person.
I mean, you're a person who's actually, you don't have big problems in this regard.
But what Aquinas suggested is that when you've eliminated the others, that what you've found
is something that might make you stumble, and that might distract you from the things
that really matter.
the ways that you can actually have love in your life. And what the funny thing about it is that if I
said, okay, just tell me your idol from the very beginning, you might not have eliminated it to
that particular point. Yeah. Because I think that it's really an interesting exercise. Obviously
I'm doing this with you now, but I hope people are doing this in parallel because that's what
it's all about. It's not about me and the examples. Yeah, no, it's, it's where we want people to know
their idol. Definitely. Is that the words carry, they're loaded words, money, power, honor sounds
actually cool until you really dissect it and then you realize it's just as,
you know, nuanced as the others.
That's the ancient, that's how Aquinas would have understood,
honoris, right?
Which is not virtuous inherently.
Right, so the words can be a little misleading.
I will say where I've tended to stumble on the backdrop of all this
before people, you know, it's not about avoiding the comments.
In fact, please comment.
Yeah, totally.
We love them all.
And like and suggest, like and share.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Hit that subscribe button.
But a big part of it also is that, of course,
I'm susceptible to like the lure of pleasure,
the lure of, I mean, like I'm human, right?
We're all wired for it, right?
The place where I've stumbled consistently
is when over-resourced in a particular place,
I don't always think about what the full arc
of requirement is when trying to,
I believe in a benevolent way, share resources.
it's much easier to like connect somebody to somebody.
And then if it's not going well to be like,
well, that's their problem now,
as opposed to really continuing to like make sure that happens.
So sometimes the big learning for me has been
whenever over-resourced in any area,
whether it's money, energy, generosity, whatever,
that I need to be careful
because the misperception is that
because there's more than enough of it for me, I can just share whatever's left. But there's a
hidden cost. And it's the cost of making sure that all of that goes smoothly. And that's a cost
that's hard to quantify. And the most painful thing in my life nowadays is actually pulling
back to places where I live. My team knows this. It's like if I meet someone on the street and
they are like, they would tell me something and then they want to tell me about, like,
they have a question because they have an uncle who has a stroke. And like, I know a really great
person for certain kinds of stroke, I'll give them my phone number.
I've given up, you know, like I'll do this whole thing.
But then later, it's very hard to find the time to make sure
that if they're not getting feedback,
that I can do the call where I connect the two.
And so there's this, the hardest part for me is I can't do it.
And I got this from my mom.
She sees a homeless person on the street.
And when we were kids,
we discovered she was putting homeless people up in hotels.
Like, and we'd have people living in our garage.
She can't help herself. Now she's better about it, but it comes from a good place. She wants to fix stuff.
She wants to fix stuff. People's suffering is very, very hard. And by the way, our vices
are our virtues. When I'm weak, then I'm strong, said St. Paul the Apostle. But also when I'm
strong, then I'm weak. Our strengths and weaknesses are opposite sides of the same coin.
The weakness that you have, the idol that you have is also the opposite side of the greatest
virtue that you possess.
So that's one of the reasons that we shouldn't beat ourselves up about this.
But we need to know what it actually is because that's what will actually lead you astray a lot of the time.
Now, it's completely different for me.
I would kick out power first, control first.
The second thing I'd get rid of is pleasure.
I'm a protocols guy too.
I'm very austere, right?
I'm every day in the gym and, you know, I eat a very strict diet and okay.
The third thing I would get rid of is money, resources.
It's not, I mean, and again, like, let's watch the comments light up.
I got it.
But what does that leave?
That leaves honor.
And the truth is, I want people to love me.
I want people to love me.
I want this.
It's so, look, dude, I'm 62 years old and I still want that.
It feels good.
It's not even feeling good.
It's like, I'm not a human being.
I'm a human doing.
I'm trying to earn everybody's love.
so dumb and I recognize it now. That's power. Right there is power because I know when I'm
doing it and I'm held accountable for it because my wife does not have this, absolutely have this.
And she'll say, you're doing that stupid thing again. Why would you marginalize the people that
you actually love for the adoration of strangers for Pete's sake? Why would you go do that thing
that people really want you to do? You want it because you want people to appreciate you is what
it comes down to. And I say, you're right is the whole point. And the whole point is also that this
This is what I do for a living. This is what I study and I'm weak and I'm frail in this particular right.
And when I resist that idol, when I fight against that idol, then I choose the better path and I choose the space of moral aspiration.
And that space of moral aspiration is to love and be loved.
That's what the space of moral aspiration, that's where it actually takes me.
To love and be loved, not by the strangers, not the prestige of the crowd, not the honor that comes from rising in the hierarchy.
We're a tropical kin-based species, hierarchically arranged.
The animal impulse comes from rising in our band
of 30 to 50 hunter-gatherers, you know, 250,000 years ago.
I mean, this is all biologically wired.
But when I understand that, then I can actually do what the,
you know, that Dante in Inferno, he talks,
it's arranged around the seven deadly sins.
But he also talks about the seven, the heavenly virtues,
You know, and so pride, humility, right?
Envy, admiration is what it comes to.
The heavenly virtue of this is, of the four, are what you really want, what you truly deeply want in your soul.
To love and be loved means that you're spending your time on your faith, the love of the divine, your family,
the people that are biologically or by adoption related to you.
your friends, the people that you actually choose,
and serving the whole world through the way that you earn your daily bread,
which is to earn your success through your work,
faith, family, friends, and work.
And then only when you know that, that idol,
you can pivot to the thing that your soul actually wants,
the thing that you're actually hunger for.
And that's where real satisfaction comes in.
That's where you gain the satisfaction that you always wanted.
Can I ask you a question about the adoration piece and applause
and that kind of thing?
So embarrassed.
No, well, I'm embarrassed.
I mean, it's like that it is, it's a vulnerable place like reveal because the word is, is, is are tough.
Like power, like, you know, like, you know, like Huberman admits that he is driven by.
No, it's like, I want to power.
I want to help people.
No, you want to have control over what you can control.
I got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, but so when, let's say you, you give a lecture to a group that you respect them as an audience, whoever happens to them.
Like you respect your audience, which is so important, you know, like.
They love their audience, actually.
Yeah, and you get the feedback that you really,
like you've knocked it out of the park.
Yeah, you knocked it out of the park.
When you go back to your room at night,
are you the sort of person that thinks about that
and how great it feels?
Or are you thinking about this one thing that you said
that you wish you had done differently?
Are you the one thing that I wish I hadn't said
kind of person, or are you like basking in it?
No, I'm not basking in it.
I mean, I'm actually self-critical.
what it could be differently because it wears off and it's evanescent.
It's like a summer rain.
You know, they add the adoration of strangers feels good in the moment.
I mean, in neurochemically, it wears off very quickly, of course,
because what you're getting is, you know, when you look at people
who are deeply addicted to success, it looks very much in under brain scans
to people who are actually getting highly glycemic carbohydrate treats
or even a hit of cocaine, you know, you win in some little game.
and obviously we were talking about dopamine here,
is you actually see it's the same thing,
but that doesn't last.
That's not supposed to last.
That's supposed to wear away.
And the first thing that somebody wants
who's an addict is another hit,
whether it's a line of cocaine
or another round of applause.
So by the time I'm back in the hotel,
I'm like, yeah, okay, they're not different.
It's a drop.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Actually, what it comes down to.
But by the way,
we've got to know what the solution is to this.
And the solution to this is not to say,
okay, I'm a horrible human being.
But it's actually to pivot to choosing the path of the man that I want to be.
You know, I don't give in to the animal impulse to stay under the covers past 4.30.
The man that I want to be is down in the gym by 4.45.
4.45 a.m.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
Awesome.
I mean, the man that I want to be when I'm either thinking about something I did wrong
and I'm beating myself up or, you know, wishing there was another round of applause
is somebody who's deep in prayer. That's the man that I want to be. Because I do know that my metaphysical fitness
depends on this. And that's a choice that I can actually make.
I have a question about who we, I don't want to say idolize, but among humans, can you name
people alive or dead that sort of embody or collectively sort of embody who you aspire to
in that category.
Because one thing that I realized
in this discussion around power
and I'm not trying to soften anything around that
is I've always had this list of people
whose careers and art and music and stuff I really admire.
And in looking over that list,
I try and sometimes see the through lines.
§10Transcript — part 10
And I can tell you that almost all of them
brought together unique things based on their past,
their circumstances, et cetera,
to change the game.
To me, that's kind of the ultimate.
In our business, people think differently.
The paradigm change.
Yeah.
It's like to change the game.
And for me, this is a very important time-space dilation
where I can look back on the history of science
and a couple of neurobiologists who were there at the beginning,
like Ramón y Cajal, you'd say he changed the game
because he kind of made the game.
He created the game, basically, slicing up brains
and understanding function.
But a few people came along, even in my career,
in the time of my active lab career.
And I was like, they really changed the game.
And then I asked myself,
how and why did they change the game?
And you realize that every technique is fleeting
because it gets replaced almost always, right?
And so you start to realize that,
oh, like it was always this unique kind of like
artist, scientist, poet intersection.
And I realized like, oh, that's the thing.
There's people that are like outside the box
influence of things. Striving for that is way more important to me than quote unquote power.
It's like to be able to say like, I did it not my way, not their way, but I did it my way, period.
Like a unique expression that could only have been me coming out of me. And I don't, and so
I'm not in competition with some structure or with other people. That to me is above the four
idols that you describe.
No, I get it.
I completely do.
Because it's like,
that's like winning.
That's what you admire.
That's what I really admire.
That's kind of like an ideal type.
That's what it actually means
to be successful.
That's what it means
to be a success.
And that's what excellence
means to you.
That's the personification
of excellence is actually
that kind of intellectual
entrepreneurship.
Yeah, it's almost like
it moves from the,
because you said like to lead.
I actually am not concerned
with leading.
I also didn't want
to be a chairman, right?
Like I don't want to run the business. It's my podcast.
I let someone else do that.
He's way better at it than I could ever be.
What I'm interested in is being outside of that,
but still ethically completely free.
Yeah.
Like, I can't lead because I can't show anyone
how to be me because they're them.
Yeah.
I can show them how to,
I can get some ideas about how they can be them,
but that's like an internal process for them.
So that to me is like the ultimate.
When I think about Ramón y Cajal is a good example,
who, by the way, the greatest neurobiologist of all time ever by huge, huge margin.
Also was like really into weightlifting.
He was an artist.
Like he was an incredible,
like he drew images of the brain
and inferred from that function from dead tissue.
Amazing, amazing human being.
Like he's an N of one.
Yeah.
But it was the confluence of his interest
in physical exercise and neuroanatomy
and art that made him Ramón y Cajal.
No one else can do that, right?
Like, so I don't want to be like him.
No, I got it.
Because he did it the best. Like, why would you want to be like him? Boring. You want to be excellent like
him, but as Andrew Huberman. Exactly. To me, the unique expression and like, you know, we'll,
I think we'll eventually get to notions of like, not notions, we'll talk a little bit about God
and faith. Cause that's actually where you and I connected in person for the first time was talking
at Stanford about science and faith. Very openly. Very openly. But that to me feels, I could be
misinterpreting the message, but I feel like that's what God wants for all of us, whether it's
and in the different domains of life.
Yeah.
And of course, adhering to ethics,
like there are rules, there are structures
we have to obey within that,
but our unique expression,
I feel like that's why we're here.
Yeah.
I tell myself this anyway.
No, like I completely agree with you.
And, you know, so people often ask,
so who's your hero?
I don't know.
I don't know.
My dad, you know.
You're like Jesus.
You say Jesus.
Jesus, yeah, I know.
It's like, I mean, it's like, who's your hero?
I mean, Jesus is the master, but the hero is like the hero.
No, it's not like some sort of hero's journey,
some Jungian, you know, archetype that we're talking about here.
I struggle with that as well,
but I do see people that I deeply admire precisely for this reason.
So somebody I really admire, the guy in my field,
the social scientist par excellence is James Q. Wilson.
James Q. Wilson.
James Q. Wilson, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor
which is pretty hard to do as a social scientist.
Is he still alive?
No, he died in 2012.
And he was the greatest political scientist of the 20th century.
And somebody I knew, he sat in on my dissertation defense,
which went very poorly.
I mean, it was rough, man.
I had two Nobel Prize winners in economics and James Q. Wilson.
I was super nervous, and it was not a great dissertation.
It got signatures.
That's the scoreboard effect on that.
That's all I can say.
You passed.
that, you know, he had written monumental books. He had done works. He had written a great book
called The Moral Sense. That was the first time that a social scientist had actually used the
tools of empirical social science survey-based data to understand the moral sensibilities,
the complex moral sensibilities that they actually possessed and just quantifying it.
And I read that. I said, I just want to do that. I want to do that. I don't want to be James Q.
Wilson, though. I want to be Arthur Brooks, you know, and doing it in my own way. And he said,
said, you know, nice try. You're going to be fine. When you need something, give me a call.
And so some years later, I was an assistant professor at Syracuse at the time. And I was,
I wrote my first commercial book, my first trade book. And it was about charitable giving.
And it was, it was, it actually changed my life because the president read it for some odd reason
and talked about it. And then suddenly I was, my career was changed forever as a result of that,
for better and for worse. But when I was working on it, I wrote to James Q. Wilson and I said,
would you read this manuscript?
And he said, sure.
I sent it to him.
And he said, you know, I was going to write a book on this,
but you've written, I don't have to.
I'll write the foreword.
Awesome.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Later, he recruited me to be the president
of the American Enterprise Institute
because he was on the board of that.
And he was on the board until he passed away.
And then I spoke at his funeral.
I had the honor of speaking at his funeral
at the Memorial Chapel at Harvard
where his funeral was held.
And it was just this guy.
one of a kind.
And I want to be a social scientist too,
but not just like him,
not even studying the same things that he does,
but to have this intense curiosity
and using the tools of science
completely in the public interest.
That's what I want to do.
And so that's what inspires me.
So my hero, I guess,
but it's the admiration that I have
because he was fully alive.
He was fully alive in the way that I think
that it was his destiny to be in all of us.
Like everybody watching us and listening to us has got their thing.
That's what our destiny is, to actually find that thing and be truly excellent and use it to serve.
Be as excellent as you can possibly be in being a drywall hanger and being a cook at a restaurant and being a college professor.
God forbid being a politician in the public interest, in the private interest, in showing people that this is an expression of your love.
You see, in this way, it's godly in this way.
You know, in the book of Genesis, it's, you know, God created heaven and earth.
That was his gig.
That was his job.
And it was an expression of his love.
This is what you and I can do.
This is what you do.
This is, by the way, you're popular because you're good at your job, for sure.
But because you want the best for everybody, because this podcast is an expression of Andrew
Huberman's love.
That's why it's successful.
and everybody can be successful in their way,
can be, you know, have their own Huberman podcast,
not in podcasting necessarily,
by actually having it be an expression of your love,
love for humanity through the way
that you're earning your daily bread.
That's the quintessential expression of excellence
§11Transcript — part 11
in my view.
Does that accord with yours?
Very much so.
And, you know, it occurs to me like, you know,
and maybe I'm a little bit bothered by this word power.
Yeah.
And I'm striving for it to not be misconstrued,
But if, no, no, no, no, I just, I mean, but I'm embracing it today.
But what, to me, the ultimate win I realized a few moments ago is like what I'm really trying to do in this podcast thing is I love learning.
And when I find something that I think can be of use to people, I teach it because what's most satisfying to me is if people change their behavior and it leads them to a better place mentally, physically, or both.
Right.
And then they also understand why it did that.
Right.
And then they pass it along.
Like, and there's no need for attribution in that.
No.
Right.
There's no need for attribution.
And I hope that, like, I have a few friends who are actors, a few friends who are musicians,
and I have to imagine that they love acting and playing music.
And those sorts of people provide incredible enrichment to my life.
I love music.
I love film and as a consumer.
But I've heard them say things like, yeah, you know, like, you can transport somebody.
And I think ultimately that's what it's about,
is like I think that we do at our best,
I think we all wanna find the thing that we love to do,
put it out there, and I think we have this sense
that it could possibly ripple through time without attribution.
To me, that's like the ultimate power, right?
Totally, totally. I wanna create happiness teachers.
I want people to go be teachers because that's leverage.
I want a better world.
I wanna lift people up with these ideas.
I can't do it by myself. Well, the only reason we have like the microphones and the cameras are here, right? Is
to ripple it out further. Totally. These are literally, you know, they literally amplify
things, right? So, but yeah, the best way to amplify through space is the internet.
Right. The best way to amplify through time might be the internet, but the way to really
reinforce that whole thing is to teach people things, I believe, in a way that they understand
the process underneath so that a little bit of it. Right. So that they can, and they pass both
along. This is why I think like, cause nowadays, like I could go on any website and just go,
what are the 10 top things that people on their deathbed say are keys to happiness? And I can get
a list, but people choose to listen to the mechanics of it because there's something about
the human brain, I'm certain that when we understand a bit about the mechanics that gives
rise to that thing, that's our buy-in. That's the cost of admission. And then it becomes worth
something. That's the effort that comes before the award. Yeah. Well, you know what they say in medical schools.
they say at the Stanford Medical School,
to become a surgeon,
you need to watch one, do one, teach one.
Watch one, do one, teach one.
And the truth is that the process of learning,
and there's a ton of research on how people learn.
And the way that people learn best
is that they have to learn how something works,
then they have to actually practice it,
then they actually have to teach it.
So my dad was a math professor.
He was a brilliant biostatistician.
I one time watched him as a math professor
giving an advanced calculus lecture
and 90 minutes, no notes.
and I was old enough that I had admiration for him.
I was in my 20s.
It was before he died.
He died young, but I was still in my 20s
and he was still going.
And I said, dad, I was like,
that was a virtuoso performance.
How'd you do it?
He said, I've done it hundreds of times.
And he said, the process is simple.
You learn actually what's happening.
You look at the proof.
You admire the science.
And then you actually do a ton of problems.
And then finally you explain it over and over
and over and over again.
And the same thing is true for golf.
And the same thing is true for speaking Spanish.
Same thing is true for understanding how to live a better life.
You need to know the science.
The reason that I'm so fascinated with the science and I want to talk about it in my podcast every week is like it's so cool when you understand the science.
Then you're more likely to change your habits.
And then you're more likely to spread it and share it with other people.
In which case you will be a virtuoso in it and you'll actually keep the cycle unbroken.
That's magic.
That's like it's a complete miracle that that's actually how we do it.
And we have this moment, this miraculous moment where you and I can actually talk about serious science.
I mean, this is not a doctoral seminar at Stanford or Harvard, to be sure.
But we're talking about the real thing.
And people who watch this are like, yeah, that's like, you know, they're learning some things.
And they're going to go to PubMed.
And we're going to have show notes and the whole thing.
And then we talk about it.
Here's how you use it.
Okay, so when you go to the beach, make sure that you're going to a beach with friends.
And here's your book is called Protocols for a Reason with several hundred pages of footnotes, right?
Now go share it.
You know how many times people have told me, hey, you know what about coffee?
You should wait for 90 minutes because, you know, the caffeine molecule blocks the A2 adenosine receptors.
And you won't get to crash at 2 in the afternoon.
I'm like, yeah, I know where you got that.
I know where you got that.
You got that from Andrew.
And without attribution because they don't know they got it from you.
is better. The world is better. That's how we can bless the world with what we actually do.
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So we got through enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
We got through enjoyment, satisfaction, not meaning.
We have not gotten all the way through meaning.
Yeah, we haven't gotten through meaning.
So tell us more about meaning.
So we got the idols.
Yeah, yeah, we got the idols.
So those are the things to be aware of.
That will block your satisfaction, that they promise satisfaction they don't deliver.
They won't deliver the satisfaction that you seek, but your brain tells you that they will.
That will put you on what we in my community call the hedonic treadmill.
Hedonic simply means feelings or in your vernacular is activity of the limbic system.
And the treadmill means that the limbic system resets because emotions are not there to give you a nice day.
They give you a set of signals about threats and opportunities so you can react.
And they reset immediately.
You always think they're going to last forever.
So you have an incentive to either avoid or approach things.
This is the, you don't see it much anymore, but there used to be a bumper sticker out there that said that the person who dies with the most toys wins.
Yeah, right.
It's that one, which reminds me about quantification.
Can I share this with you?
Yeah, yeah, please do.
It's not my original idea, but Anna Lembke, Dr. Anna Lembke at Stanford.
She's been on, I've had her on my podcast and yeah, she's fantastic.
Yeah, she's amazing.
She told me that there's something interesting.
One particularly interesting lens on any behavior is whether the person tends to quantify that behavior very carefully and kind of covet the thing.
She said addicts will like constantly check back and see how many like pills they have, how many bags they have, how many people who are obsessed, perhaps even addicted to making money will constantly check how much they have.
Check their portfolio every single day.
cloaked as feeling as the need to feel safe, but it has nothing to do with that. It's the limbic
system is very, very good at charting profits and losses in whatever context, like making lists,
quantification. So we have to be very, this is not a call to not track your sleep or something
or your HRV. But by the way, it can be a problem. It can be a problem. I check it once a week.
I check my sleep once a week against a subjective quick line in my notebook.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, it's something that we don't hear often enough, even in the neurobiology crowd, that the limbic system loves to quantify.
And if we get to the extreme of quantification in a given area of life, of behavior, of obsession, it very likely, not always, but very likely reflects that that healthy behavior has become either an obsession or a full-blown addiction, which I find really interesting.
That's so interesting.
Very interesting.
What are we actually, what is the limbic system actually trying to do with that kind of control that's expressed through quantification?
Never experience the drop.
It's like a way of, it's not getting more of.
Right.
It's avoiding less of.
It's in the illusion that you're getting more of.
Right.
You're working against losses by telling yourself you have this.
It's based on loss aversion.
It's loss aversion.
Thank you.
Yes.
It's based on loss aversion.
And I said, it's funny.
I said, what do you mean?
She said, oh yeah, like people who are like addicted to like certain kinds of barbiturates or painkillers or whatever.
will like line them up and look at them and count them.
There's a very pathologic instance of this,
which is very tragic too,
because they often die sadly.
But one of the hallmark traits of like true anorexia
§12Transcript — part 12
is that these reward circuits become such
that the aversion of food becomes rewarding,
which is deadly in its ultimate form.
And people with true anorexia can look at an article of food
and they have a calculator that can tell you
within a very small margin, how many calories, how much fat, how much protein. They're like visual computers
when it comes to food. And food aversion, avoiding that stuff becomes their, it's like the addiction,
the pleasure pathways get all inverted and it's the most deadly of the psychiatric disorders.
That's an extreme pathological case. But she said heroin addicts who you would think can't
get their life together can tell you exactly how much heroin they have and how much they think they're going to get...
They're often very good at math.
You know, they understand, you know.
And so quantification is kind of a hallmark feature
of these rewards, these reinforcement circuitries.
I thought perhaps that's an interesting point
that I don't think we discuss enough.
So when I think about whether something is an addiction,
a compulsion, unhealthy or healthy pursuit,
like how tightly am I quantifying every little bit of it?
And thinking about what I've done, like, you know.
Yeah, how many articles are on my Vita, you know,
whatever, you know, because we quantify our success
that we look at the, you know,
you're not trying to pat yourself on the back.
You're trying to make sure
that you're not falling behind.
Right.
I remember this.
Followers on, you know,
I do think the social media platforms
have intentionally brought this in.
Yes.
It's not like the number of likes
can be reinforcing somewhat.
Number of followers.
But the number of followers,
people are monitoring their increases and decreases
and they kind of covet them.
Yes, absolutely.
And the rate of change of your followers,
for example.
And the media will say like,
so-and-so lost this number of followers or whatever.
Like it's like a thing.
So I think there's something there around quantification. Wait till your book comes out. Wait till you experience the New York
Times bestseller list for the first time. Oh, it's incredible. It's incredible. You know Ryan
Holiday, right? You ever had him on your show? Yeah, I have not had him on the show. He's great.
And, you know, he one time he said to me, it's like, I was sure that I was finally going to feel
like completely alive. If I someday, he said, I'm going to visualize that I'm going to have a number
one New York Times bestseller. And he said, and finally it happened. And one week later,
I got knocked off the list by Trump's kid.
Barron?
Oh, no.
No, I don't know.
I mean, one of his sons.
But, you know, it's like, I don't know.
And his whole point is that it's so absurd because it's completely arbitrary.
Right.
The metric is arbitrary.
Right.
But what you're trying to do is you're trying to quantify your sense of self.
Am I enough yet?
Am I good enough yet?
Am I enough yet?
And so on the one hand, you're actually talking about the addiction.
But one of the things that I see again and again and again and again is that people are trying to prove to themselves that they actually are enough.
And they don't feel like they are.
And the way that they earn it is actually by looking at the scoreboard.
This is what a lot of wealthy people do.
It's what a lot of academics do.
It's like, how many, what's his H index?
You know, like, how high is the H index?
And, oh, yeah, so-and-so is such a big shot.
H index is like 36.
Joke.
And nobody even knows what that means.
Like 1% of the people watching us, but you and I know what that means.
Yeah, because it's about impact, right?
Ultimately, people, or they tell themselves it's that.
But putting a numerical score on something.
I mean, the brain has circuits that are pretty much hardwired for counting.
Yeah.
I mean, my dog isn't as smart as my assistant's dog.
He has a herding dog.
They can count.
They know how many people in there.
He has a little miniature.
They look at you like that.
You look at him like, stop judging me.
His dog is tracking how many in the group are here and how many are missing.
That's what makes them really good at their job.
And that's where they get reward by making sure they're all in the book.
And here's the interesting part about this, Andrew.
That function, that quantification function, the essentializing function of how much,
that's what we're really good at using the left hemisphere of our brains.
That's that whole theory of hemispheric lateralization that McGilchrist brought back.
When I was a kid, there's right brain, left brain people.
Right brain people are artsy and left brain people are analytical.
That's not right. But the how to and what side requires hardcore quantification. And that's fundamentally
a left brain function. The right side, that's complicated. Those are complicated problems,
solvable, but complicated problems. If you've got the data, the right side of the brain deals
fundamentally more with complex questions, which don't have quantifiable answers. All they have is
understanding. All they have is intuition. That's the why side of your brain, not the how to and
what side. And that's where meaning resides, which is the last macronutrient of this.
The right side of our brain, the love side, the meaning side, the God side, the complex side,
all the problems that are most important to you, but you'll never solve. I mean, my car is left
hemisphere. My marriage is right hemisphere. I will never solve my marriage. Never. I mean,
before we stepped in here, my wife texted me, good luck. I love you. She does. I'm going to call her later. She might be pissed off
at me. I don't know. I don't know. I've been married 35 years, Andrew. I don't know.
I mean, she's Spanish, so it's really complex, but you get my point, right? I do.
But this is the thing, and this is the problem that we face. You need an integrative brain. You
get two hemispheres for a reason and a corpus callosum to connect between the two hemispheres.
You get that because you've got the, I'm going to go to work. I'm going to earn money. How to
and what? Why? Because I love my family. Because I want to create value. Because I want to do
something important in the world. Right hemisphere, left hemisphere, right hemisphere. And when that's
cut off and when you're stuck in the left hemisphere, for example, looking at your phone
205 times a day and taking, you know, an endless algorithm of useless information that's fed to you,
then meaning will be absent because you can only assess it on the complex side. And that's the
biggest problem we face. You want to know the biggest crisis we face? In happiness, it's meaning.
And that's why. So how can somebody take steps to enrich the amount and the type of,
the array of meaning in their life? You and I have done both a lot of work in the world of addiction,
personally and professionally. And addiction is unbelievably interesting. It's endlessly
fascinating how the human brain is captured. And one of the things that you find is when people
finally are not in the grip of addiction, there's three things that have to happen. Number one is
they get pissed. That's what all addicts do. They get pissed and they rebel. And they're like,
no, no more. You've ever seen, you know, you've seen people in 12-step programs and they're like,
they might laugh about the crazy things that happened to them, but they finally, they're like,
like, no, no more.
I'm not going to put up with this anymore.
You've got to get pissed and rebel.
The second thing that they do is that actually they understand something about the mechanism
of becoming de-addicted.
And that's different in different ways.
You're addicted to gambling.
You're addicted to pornography.
If you're addicted to alcohol, you're addicted to drugs.
There's different mechanisms for becoming de-addicted.
And of course, that's very complicated and very, very hard.
And it requires science and clinical practice, et cetera, et cetera.
But the last part is actually the most difficult, which is living in a new way, living with you.
You know, it's like it's one of the things that alcoholics always do.
They always do this is they move.
They always move.
And they're like, dude, if I move, it's like all these losers that are around me.
And I'm not going to see any of those people.
And I'm not going to be living upstairs from a liquor store.
And for God's sake, moving is going to do the trick.
I'm going to change my circumstances.
And of course, it never works because the first thing that jumps out of your suitcase is you with your alcoholic brain.
That's the problem.
And so you have to learn to live with you is the hard thing that actually comes from this.
We are deeply, deeply, deeply addicted.
We're deeply technologically addicted.
We're hooked into this thing.
We all know this.
You've talked about it ad infinitum.
So have I.
Jon Haidt, who's been on your show, has talked about the affliction that we actually have.
That's what we have to do.
My work is fundamentally about how to rage against the machine to get pissed off enough. And even more
than that, it's fundamentally about how to live with you, how to live differently. Because when
you live with you, then you're in the right hemisphere of your brain. And you have to have
right hemispheric experiences, which by the way, my great grandfather, Leroy Brooks,
he was in the right hemisphere all day long. He spent all day looking at a mule's butt.
And he never came home and said to my great grandmother, honey, I had a panic attack behind
a mule today. No. And he also never said, you know, my life is so boring. And part of the reason was
because his brain wasn't broken. His brain was working the way it was actually supposed to.
But that's not ordinary today. And so what we need to do, number one, is we need to break the cycle
and then we need to live in an old-fashioned way. That's what it comes down to. That's how we find
the meaning in our lives. And breaking the cycle, by the way, I mean, we all know the research.
You've had it on your show.
I've taken huge amounts of knowledge from you on this.
You can break the cycle of technological addiction in your life simply by doing first hour of the day, last hour of the day, and mealtimes.
Simply doing that.
And there's tons of research that shows that the neurocognitive programming that happens in your first hour awake,
the relationship programming and the sleep architecture that you're wiring in the last hour of your day,
and then the neuropeptides that you'll actually elicit by eating with other people without devices.
your relationship to technology will change. But you've got to break the cycle. And there's tons of resources
out there. How do you live in a different way? Well, how do people illuminate the right hemisphere
of their brains? They ask un-Google-able questions, right? Like, why am I alive?
For what would I give my life? You know, the deep philosophical questions. And that's what
philosophy and spirituality and religion bring to you, is the deep questions that are fundamentally
ungoogleable. And that's one of the reasons that the hemispheric lateralization literature shows
that when you're in these spaces, that your right hemisphere is fundamentally illuminated.
You can train a gorilla to answer all kinds of questions, but not ask interesting fundamental
questions. That's humanity. That's God-like is to ask questions. It's to fall in love as a right
hemispheric experience. It's deep, deep mystery. It's like, that's the reason it's so scary.
no, I can't solve this problem.
Somebody answer this question for me.
No, man, you got to live it.
You got to live it for the end of your days.
That's why finding your calling,
why you and I were,
we have so much meaning for our work
because we're living our calling.
This is what we're meant to do.
That's why a calling is what you're meant to do.
It has the word meaning in it.
That's why worshiping God,
living in the luminescent divine,
§13Transcript — part 13
that's why trying to become a sannyasi,
as the Indians would say,
And that's why beauty, moral beauty, artistic beauty, natural beauty, these are right hemispheric experiences.
And that's why suffering is so important.
Because suffering helps you understand the meaning of your life per se.
Suffering is where everybody's like, when did you know who you really, really were?
How did you know what you were made of?
They'll tell you something bad.
Oh, that week at the beach in Ibiza.
No.
When my mom died, I loved her.
when somebody left me at the altar,
when I got fired,
when I lost my business,
God forbid, when I lost a child,
people look back and they say,
that was the moment.
That was when I knew.
Why?
Because that's when we were truly integrated.
That's when we became integrated human beings.
That's what it means to be fully alive,
to find meaning.
And ultimately, that is the path to happiness.
And let that sink in for people.
That's the real wisdom.
And I'm going to stop you
because I know you're super humble and you're going to pass it off onto someone else or something else, but you really
have a gift and it comes through. Thank you, Andrew. That means a lot coming from you. Yeah,
you really do because it like a lot of different ways people can say important things, but sometimes
things just land and they just need to sit for a sec. So I have some questions that were prompted
in your book, but I want to make sure that we return to this notion of faith. It's not something
we talk a lot about on this podcast. I've talked about it as a guest on other podcasts, but
But you and I had a conversation about that.
And I think probably by the time that this episode airs,
that conversation at Stanford will also be public.
And I recommend people watch it
because that was really moving for me
to have that conversation with you.
To talk about your journey and the...
I mean, it's really easy to get into
the physical fitness of life,
but the metaphysical fitness of life
is a different experience.
the real like eye opener the first one for me was oh like striving for perfection it might be
perfection in quotes might be the goal but like no one attains that no human attains that so
be careful to not ask humans for answers that are not possible to come from human beings and that's
where that eventually moved to a real faith, a belief in God, a prayer practice that is,
at least for me, it's the most consistent feature of my life for the last almost three years. And
it's been interesting to be in a relationship where we've like gone to church together and to pray
together or to just pray with somebody, right? And when we parted ways at Stanford after the
Veritas meeting, it was so interesting because we said goodbye. We did the usual like hug,
like see you soon brother look me up and you said i'll pray for you and you said and if you don't
mind pray for me too and i've been doing that and it's it's now some people might hear this and be
like oh boy here we go here we go a couple of scientists talking about but if one just like
entertains the possibility that maybe humans don't have all the answers yeah that's like a great vista
to like skeptically look out yeah that's kind of how i think they felt a lot like a couple of years
ago it's kind of like yeah and then you know over time i've migrated very far forward but i think
that the whole thing of being um like faith i realize isn't this thing that one necessarily
especially like me if you didn't grow up with a lot of it in your family you know just like
run and fall like in like like new best friend i know it takes some it it doesn't have to happen
that way but i think people see that. And if it does, it can be very brittle by the way and people see baptisms
and they assume, okay, like into the water
and you just like embrace, right?
Born again.
Right.
Born again.
Right.
It's this like thick black line
that you step over type thing.
And one thing that I've learned from observing you
and from conversations with you
is that like it's allowed to be gradual.
Yeah.
It's okay to be skeptical, to move forward,
to move back, to explore, to wonder,
because that's all the stuff of having a human brain.
And God probably wants that for us.
Yeah.
And so I've been very, very moved by your teachings at Veritas that day.
Because for those that haven't seen it yet and weren't there, it was very clear that there was like a seasoned pro in there.
Arthur grew up with a lot of structured religion and prayer practice in his home.
And I did not.
And coming to this rather late.
So I was like the newbie.
And it was so much, it was so liberating for me to be on a stage where in a room full of people where I was certain I was in the bottom 1% of knowledgeable about the topic.
And that was what I could talk about and not knowing.
It was so beautiful, the humility that you actually brought to that to say, I don't know.
I don't know, man.
I'm just fumbling around here.
I'm just doing my best.
What I have written on my heart is that there is something here and I want more.
And this is somebody who's.
That's it.
By the way, this is, according to the great sages, this is not proof of God, but it's evidence of something.
Evidence of the existence of water is thirst.
Evidence of the existence of sex is sexual desire.
We want, and there are no anthropologically any evidence of societies that are systematically secular.
On the contrary, all human societies that we've been able to ascertain have a sense of the divine,
have a sense of the things that we actually cannot see.
desire for it. Not every single person watching us and not everybody in the exact same way.
This is something that's characteristic of humanity. Otherwise, it would be absolutely
evolved out of us. And by the way, that's evidence that the divine exists, is that we want the divine.
It's like the desire. It's like the thirst. It's evidence of, an appetite is evidence of the
existence of its object. That's a classic philosophical argument. And again, that's not
evidence that God exists. That's not proof that God exists because you can't prove it. Faith is
belief in something that is fundamentally based on a non-testable hypothesis, which is super hard
for you and me because testable hypotheses, that's where the action is. That's how we got hired at
these fancy universities is testing testable hypotheses. And yet the essence of living on
the edge of the adventure of life as a scientist is to be in the realm of non-testable hypotheses
of things that you deeply know in your heart exist that's hardcore that's what i want that's the that's the bite out of life
that i want to take but in keeping with this analogy earlier about anorexia and i'm not trying
to insult anyone here i'm also speaking about well you know many many people who i deeply respect who
will say i don't have that craving i don't they don't have that that wish they don't have that
thirst right and i can imagine there are probably two responses to that one is that um something has
deftly slid in front of them to give them the illusion that they're getting that thing,
but it's not that thing, right? That they've made other aspects of life their, I don't want to say
their God, but it sort of filled in that hunger or thirst. Maybe the terror of death, all that
Ernest Becker stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Or at the other extreme, it could be a sort of spiritual anorexia,
right? Like the circuits have, like, let's give them some credit. Maybe the circuits have actually
modified to the point where the reward is in not wanting to satisfy the craving. Because the brain
will do this too. This is what's so weird about these reinforce, I prefer the word reinforcement
to reward because it involves, it's more accurate because it's about closing a loop with desire and
behavior, reset, desire, behavior. Yeah. That's the wanting, learning, liking cycle. It's based
on reinforcement. Right. So the reinforce, like dopamine and reinforcement always works. Dopamine
reward. It's complicated. Like you can stimulate dopamine through pain and no, and part of it is
the offset of pain. It's rewarding. It's just one of the reasons that heroin addicts like the feel
of the pinch of the needle going into the vein, right? That, that, that part of that is, but the
pain is part of the reward per se, because it's actually reinforcing the behavioral pattern.
Exactly your point. If there was such a thing as a, a mild spiritual anorexia, where people are
actually getting pleasure from the fact that they are not interested in any of that.
Right.
And they got enough and they feel good not knowing.
Right.
You hear this.
Sure.
And I want to give, in fairness, I want to acknowledge those people exist.
Right.
And they're like good with the fact that they don't have a relationship,
like a higher power relationship of belief in God.
They don't have faith.
They don't seem to have this thirst.
And the lack of it almost sounds in some cases like it's rewarding to them.
There's a pride that actually comes from being none, not an N-U-N, N-O-N-E.
It's a designation.
It's an identity, actually.
It's who I am as a person.
I don't actually need that.
And by the way, there are all very compelling explanations that are not consistent or necessarily consistent with the idea that there's an all-knowing, all-loving God.
I mean, Stephen Cave at Cambridge has a really beautiful book called Immortality.
Have you actually seen it?
Have you read it?
And he's a philosopher.
And he talks about the fact that the human brain is able to capture the concept of physical death.
You know you're going to die.
And you're completely comfortable in that knowledge.
You might not like it.
You might not want it now.
But you know you're going to die.
But your brain is incapable of understanding non-existence.
So you know you're going to die.
But you can't understand non-existence.
Because that goes beyond our cognitive capacities.
And so you've got to resolve it.
One way to deal with it is to not deal with it.
To never think about it.
Stay drunk and high, or stay busy and be a complete workaholic.
Stay busy.
Another way to deal with it is to create a resolution that
says, I'm going to die, but I'm going to continue to exist.
And so I can understand that.
And that would be a social explanation
for the concept of religion.
Some neurobiologists back in the day,
in the 1990s and early 2000s, were
doing work on the god module in the brain.
And they were using those magnetic helmets
that they were doing on this thing.
And what they would do is they would just
stimulate the same part of the brain that's touched with people who have, you know, grand mal seizures. And so a lot of people who
have epileptic seizures, events, that they'll have a mystical experience. And, you know, if you're,
for example, a Catholic nun and you have an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the protocol from the bishop is to check you for epilepsy first, because it might just be that you
had undiagnosed epilepsy and you had a seizure and it made you have a mystical experience, right?
Okay, I get it.
And these are ways to actually say that Andrew and Arthur are going off the reservation here.
They're not being good scientists.
There are plenty good philosophical and neuroscientific explanations for the experience of God per se.
For me, that is uncompelling.
And part of the reason that that's uncompelling for me is that I've been walking across the earth for the last 62 years,
and I can't get it out of my mind.
I'm not worried about the problem of nonexistence.
It's not that it's been resolved, but this is not a preoccupation of mine.
there are lots and lots and lots of times that I don't feel a single molecule of emotional faith.
On the contrary, but I have a strong sense of the existence of the creator, strong sense of the
divine. Do I understand him? No. I have a very imperfect physics from full disclosure. I'm a
Catholic and I go to mass every day. Why do I do that? I do that not because I feel it,
not even because I believe, but because I'm serving this intuition through practice.
And by the way, for everybody who's watching us who's like, I don't know, maybe, but I don't feel
it. So what? So what? You know, if I, if anybody who's married, they know that if you went according
§14Transcript — part 14
to your feelings, you will not stay married a month. You absolutely won't. You don't even go
according to your belief in the institution of marriage. You go, you stay married because you
practice marriage. And the same thing is true with your relationship with anybody, including with
God. Start with practice. Occasionally you'll believe, and very occasionally you'll feel it.
That's the way the whole relationship actually works. Andrew, that's the protocol.
I was happy to hear that the bishop has protocols.
They do. But the protocol for individual faith is not feeling, belief, practice. It's practice,
belief feeling. Without any attempt to take away from the depth and impact of what you just
described, I sat across this very table from Pavel Tsatsouline, who's one of the most revered
strength trainers in the world. And he said, as you, occasionally he'd say my name, Andrew,
and then he'd tell me something. And he said, you don't weight lift, you don't work out. He's like,
practice strength training.
And I was like, I don't know, I sort of get it.
Okay, yeah, we can call it one thing or another.
He's like, no, no, every time you do it,
you're practicing to get better at it.
And that changes the whole motivational structure,
is what he essentially was saying.
And that changes your expectation
of what you're gonna get out of it.
Right.
It's, yes, you expect to get stronger,
but it's this notion that you're always
the student of yourself.
You're always the student of this process.
And you never really expect to conquer it,
Because there's always more weight you could add.
Now, this is a very mechanical, physical analogy to what you're describing.
But there's an important, I think, elegance in what he said and what you said.
And the similarity there, I think, is synergistic, which is when something is a practice, we are not focused on the outcome as much as we are the process.
That's fairly straightforward.
but then there's this almost like higher order thing that comes from that because
it predicts with near certainty that you'll continue doing it whereas if you're trying to
obtain the like grab the ring get the prize get the ribbon lift the weight that has a ceiling to it
and so what you're really talking about in the the real form of the word is ascension
like through practice there's like ascension alt like otherwise like there's only there's the top
podium. There's in science, there's a Nobel prize, you know, like there are these awards,
like, you know, but like, those are things again, that are human. Like we set those levels, but the
laws of physics have an upper limit. Right. But what you're talking about doesn't have an
upper limit. Like, like we can't say this person experienced God more than anybody else. And that's
the goal. Yeah. Like there's, there, there is no ceiling to this, this relationship. The way that
that in Vedic wisdom,
the way that this is understood,
they have a very, very elegant way
of understanding this.
And by the way, the idea of practice,
no joke.
You practice your marriage.
You practice in your job.
You practice friendship.
And you practice your religion
for precisely the same reason
that you practice lifting weights
as opposed to just lifting weights.
You practice it because practice.
You get better.
The progress principle,
we've already talked about that.
But the way the Indians talk about that
over the course of a life is this. And it's based on this empirical regularity. This is a weird thing. People tend to
get more religious as they get older. And, you know, James Fowler, the sociologist wrote about this.
He says, people, you know, they wander away and they're in their twenties. And I'm like, yeah,
come on, man. I mean, an all knowing, all loving God. Well, explain kids getting sick and dying.
And so they're like, no, explain suffering, right? Explain suffering. And you and I have
talked about this before. You know, we were at Stanford, we talked about the problem with pain
and the problem of suffering.
But when they're in their 40s,
what Fowler notices is people get more religious
for the following reason.
When you're in the 40s, that's when you're like,
yeah, you know what?
Nothing makes sense.
Actually, nothing makes sense.
You've done enough that you can say that.
Yeah, you can actually,
I'm not going to resolve everything.
You want a closed form solution to life
all the way through your 20s and 30s.
You think that there's a kind of a calculus to it.
And you realize that these are computational methods
to everything that you're doing,
which means, no, there's no closed form solution.
You got to get a simulation going here.
I'm an old operations research analyst.
So yeah, there's no closed form solution to anything you really care about, which is,
you know, the result of it is everything's messy and you're much more comfortable with
the cognitive dissonance or the problem of pain.
And the result of it is that you actually look for something that has these transcendent
properties, notwithstanding the contradictions that you actually see around you.
The way that the Indians talk about that interest is as follows.
Life is in four quarters.
This is called the theory of the ashramas, which is a Sanskrit word for quarters of life.
And the ideal life is 100 years long, and each one of these is 25 years, but your results may vary.
The first quarter is brahmacharya, which means the student phase.
Learn, learn, learn, learn.
The second is grihastha, which is the householder phase.
Earn, build, earn, build, family, business.
That's up to 50.
That's up to 50.
Okay.
But at 50, you have a second adolescence that leads you into vana prastha, which is a word in Sanskrit that means it's from
two words, vana and prastha, meaning retiring into the forest, retirement and forest. And it's a
metaphor. You're back into the forest, right? And what you're doing is you're actually gradually
moving away from, not from doing your job, you know, not from your relationships, but from the
scoreboard, from the honors of the world. And what are you doing? You're getting into an elite
training for the last quarter, which is sannyasa, which that is the, to sit in the luminescence of the divine, of the
Godhead of Brahman in Hinduism is the whole idea. But that requires super elite training. You're not
going to get to 75 and, and, and experience time because time for people who are very religious or
very spiritual, time is completely different than the success addict. It's like time's running out.
Got to do more, more, more, more like hedonic treadmill for people who are very, very spiritual.
time becomes less forward moving and more sort of lateral. It kind of spreads out like the delta of a river
where it slows down and you can't tell where the ocean begins and the river finishes.
That's your life. That's what it means to sit in the luminescence of God. And when death comes,
it's simply, it's a process. It's gradual. It's not binary at all, notwithstanding the fact that
we can actually say where the electricity of the brain stops. It is a deeply, deeply spiritual and
comfortable thing. But that requires the elite training of vanaprastha. Not after 50 necessarily,
because most people listening to us, if they're enlightened, it might be they're 29 or they're 36.
But the elite training of, and the elite training is actually not, you know, memorizing the whole
Bible. It's asking the deep questions. Who am I? Who is God? Who created this? What is love?
Am I loved?
Can I love?
These are the deep metaphysical questions that actually lead us to the ultimate source of that love and the imperfect physics that is organized religion.
How are you as a 62-year-old exploring this third phase?
You described you go to mass every day.
Yeah.
Is that sometimes online or always in person?
Always in person.
And the great thing is the Catholic Church is like Starbucks.
it's like it's a very uniform available product with high quality and uh and so you know i go with
my wife at 6 30 in the morning every when i'm home and i'm home usually four days a week i'm on the
road 48 weeks a year but usually about three days a week that i'm out sometimes four days a week and
you know i've got an app click next mass it's great because it's literally the same product
every place in the world 450,000 times a day.
I'm very lucky in this way.
It's like finding a gym.
So you're up at 4.30 in the morning
and you're in the gym working out
for an hour.
Six, seven days a week?
Seven days a week.
Seven days a week.
Seven days a week.
But it's a four-day cycle.
I'm obviously not doing the same thing, right?
I have unbelievable stress injuries.
Push-pull legs, yoga.
Push-pull legs, zone two, and yoga.
Super impressive diligence.
And then you're in mass
and then you move about your day.
Yeah.
Do you have a prayer practice at the end of your day?
I pray the rosary over the course of the day.
Generally speaking, I pray the divine office with my wife,
which is an ancient monastic set of prayers
that monks have been saying since St. Benedict in the 6th century.
And that punctuates the day.
My wife and I, we do it on FaceTime or on the phone,
no matter where I am, almost any place in the world,
as a matter of fact, before the end of the day.
Sometimes if I'm in India, which I try to go every year,
while I'm going to sleep, she's saying the divine office
at lunchtime. But we do that and we do that together because that's a deep, deep right brain
melding. One flesh for a married couple should be the union of the right hemispheres where you have
a deep intuitive understanding of life itself that you can't quite explain, but you both understand.
That's the satisfaction of a marriage. So this right brain connection, you know,
Dr. Allan Schore, right? He's been a guest on this podcast and I loved his book. And I mean,
really emphasized the importance of this right brain
connection between especially mother and child,
but also father and child.
Husband and wife, close friends.
Yeah, that the joining, you know,
synchronizing the rise in like elation
and then also the troughs, right?
And then the calm piece of no need for excitement.
Like that as really the core,
he was mostly talking about the psychology
and neurobiology of what real connection is about.
And so beautiful to hear you talk about that
in the context of a romantic relationship.
And that's the nice thing about that.
And we talk about faith, family, friends, and work,
for example, the apex of family and friendship
is the spousal relationship.
That's the apex, because that's somebody
that you've adopted as your kin.
And it's the neurobiology of falling in love
is so interesting, starting with attraction and sex hormones.
But then when the catecholamines get involved
for intense desire and anticipation of reward
and the ebullience that comes from the norepinephrine release
that actually comes and wondering,
does that text from her?
It's one word.
Who cares?
And then the serotonin drop,
the deep serotonin drop that actually happens
when you start to ruminate on the other person,
the sweet misery that comes from the rumination
on the other person,
§15Transcript — part 15
which is pretty much indistinguishable
neurobiologically from clinical depression.
right? It's like, there's no serotonin in the synapse. And then last but not least is the,
is the, these neuropeptides like oxytocin, vasopressin, but especially, you know, that,
that, that bond you together in companionate love, which is what you actually want. You've adopted
that person. That's your person. That's your kin. That's your best friend. That's your lover.
That's the person who actually shares the right hemisphere of the deep meaning of your life. And
you know, one of the beautiful things about romantic love is it helps me understand how
the philosophy and the theology and the neuroscience and the psychology, it's all one thing, man.
It's all one thing. It all comes together in this beautiful way. That's why it's such a
powerful thing that you and I want in our lives, you and I need in our lives.
Anyone can really start to clearly understand how, while there are wonderful technologies and
things available in the world, that so much of what we're offered and fed and paying for with
our time, especially our time, are ways to short circuit the building of these things.
For sure.
Whether it's with a romantic partner or a vocation or with our friends or-
Workaholism, alcoholism, pornography, all these things they short circuit.
Pornography is sort of like, it literally short circuits the circuit that is supposed
to be this magnificent, immensely complicated cocktail of things that you would call a really, truly amazing relationship.
And it's just tapping into one thing.
I am sort of living in the land of analogies today, but not unlike when I had a guy on this podcast, Chris McCurdy, who studies plant-based medicines but not psychedelics.
And he was talking about how the problem in this country is that we learn to isolate and synthesize the most potent of the plant molecules and they become very addictive.
So whether they're painkillers or they're cocaine or they're kratom.
Right.
But that in the whole plant form, these things actually had balance.
Right.
There's a really, I think, an appropriate perhaps analogy there that like when we try and get one slice of this in high potency and not have to risk anything to get it, you lose the whole thing.
When you shear something off from the whole experience, that's when it actually becomes addictive.
That's when it becomes pathological.
Naturally speaking, a lot of these processes, a lot of the things that we actually experience are supposed to be there.
Look, I mean, we're so good at taking, at solving a little problem and creating a major crisis.
You know, like, man, that's like, I got a headache.
I need something stronger.
I need something stronger.
I need something stronger.
100,000 people died of, you know, opiate overdoses or something last year.
This is what actually happens.
And then there are other things that we do as well.
And by the way, you know, lest we look like we're, you know, holier than thou, workaholism is a classic case of this as well.
It's just that that particular addiction sheared off from the natural, you know, humane and even divine process of creating value on this earth.
When we become workaholics, the result is that people congratulate us for it.
You know, can you imagine somebody who said, Andrew, you are unbelievably good at drinking vodka.
You put away two 750 milliliter bottles of that last night and you were completely blacked out.
But I was amazed at how adroit you are.
You're a great drinker.
This was the college I went to.
Yeah.
You know, and I wasn't a big drinker there,
but people would try and impress each other
with how much they could drink.
By the time you're our age, however,
if you're doing that, people are,
you think that you're, you know, a pathetic drunk.
But if you're our age, my age,
and if I'm 62 years old,
completely neglecting my family
and doing only stuff to run up the scoreboard
on money and power and fame or whatever,
people are going to be like,
dude, you're good at your job.
You're awesome.
You know, it's like, yeah,
You know how many speeches I gave last year. You know how many frequent flyer miles I got? People are going to
be like, it's really, really impressive. But the whole point is that sheared off from the natural
human experience. It's an addictive behavior. It's dangerous. It's pathological. It's bad for us.
And it leads to misery. Yeah. I think what saved me was hearing the phrase, I don't know where I
heard it was, everyone loves a young drunk. And I was like, oh yeah, like this, this rolled forward
does not look good. How old were you when you saw it? In college. You stopped really early. No, I drank, but I noticed early on,
mostly because I was doing a lot of catch up
with my academics and then got into physical fitness.
And I drank basically until my early 40s,
but less and less and less and less.
Oh, you did, okay.
Yeah, and then finally was just like,
no more, I'm done, I'm done.
And I drank more and more and more and more
of this stuff until my late 30s.
It was very socially unacceptable and isolating
to not drink.
People would be like, academics would be like,
you're boring, but I'd kick their butt
the next day at the meeting
when they're all kind of like worked.
And then I'd see them.
And I'm not one of these people
oh aesthetics and muscle and leanness are all it but i'd see people get tenure and i was like you
look like shit you look like you age 25 years and your kids are miserable and all i hear are
complaints about this and i'm like you're not taking care of yourself so i don't want to be
like that yeah so i figured i'm not the smartest but i can work hard right um and if i get more
years then eventually i can catch up or get ahead but it wasn't really competitive for me i also just
didn't like how it felt. I lucked out. But in any case, with the workaholism, as you're describing
it, that is a very dangerous one. Yeah. That's usually a secondary affliction
based on success addiction, the addiction to success, which comes down to that reward,
that reinforcement, that reinforcement. You get that little reward, the reinforcement of your
goodness, the understanding of yourself. And so success addiction leads to workaholism.
Success addiction, once again, is really downstream from earning love, from the belief
that I can be enough if I do enough.
The human doing phenomenon, is that actually what we see.
The beautiful thing about this is that, you know,
I talk about the behavioral science principles.
We've touched on the philosophy.
We've talked about the theology.
You've talked so much about the mechanisms on this show
and in your writing and in your scholarship
about the neurobiology behind it.
And we're all wonderfully made.
This all ties up in the same area.
There's no, it's not like one thing leads in one direction
and something else leads in another.
there are many paths to these truths.
The real pity is when we're not looking for the truth.
The real pity is when we're distracting ourselves
from what it actually means to be the people
that we want to be,
which leads us to the very beginning of this conversation.
What if you were the person that you wanted to be?
And the fact that we can actually do so
by looking at this space of moral aspiration,
I think that's a miracle.
I think that's an incredible miracle.
Before we wrap, I have two things.
First, a question.
And then a consideration.
So I suppose both are questions because the consideration is for you.
The first question is for somebody listening to this conversation today.
I mean, earlier we were talking about exploring one's choices about and relationship to leisure.
And you touched on a number of other important points that people can return to because we timestamped these, of course.
But if there's a question or a small set of questions that anyone at any age can ask themselves that can help them redirect or just better orient in space and time and choice making, what are those?
I mean, do those sorts of questions exist?
Is there a self-assessment that actually does that?
No, well, just, you know, like if we were going to, if we shared this time on an airplane, I'm like, hey, thanks.
And we didn't have cell phones.
I'm like, anything else I should think about before we part ways?
Like, you got any suggestions?
Yeah.
recommend, whatever. So much of what you've said today is fodder for more questions.
Yeah.
Which means you've done, which is-
Our work is so awesome.
Yeah.
Our work is like a self-licking ice cream cone.
Nah, nah. Oh man, I haven't heard that analogy in a long time. That's how we used to describe
some grants that we were about to deny. So let's not do that. So asking about how one spends leisure,
understanding this relationship between pleasure and moral aspiration and seeking to fuse those,
wonderfully great thing to do. Who wouldn't want to do more of that? Are there any other sort of
probe questions that we might ask ourselves like once a day or once a week, you know, while we're
leaving the gym or mass or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. And there are certain things that, you know,
inventories that I actually try to take, you know, to make sure that my hygiene is appropriate,
right? Holding yourself to high account is unbelievably important. Holding yourself to
much higher account than anybody else would hold you. That's one of the reasons that the
happiest people are the people who have a strong sense of propriety that they practice when no one sees them.
You know, that's the essence of being honest with yourself. You know, it's one thing that you and I
know so many famous people and typically they have a public persona and a private persona just because
you have to separate those particular things. But the happiest of famous people, which is hard
because fame is the only one of the worldly rewards you can only ever be happy in spite of,
never because of right and yet people want it. That's the better answer to what i i was asked earlier about like yes opens
opportunities limits freedoms but you nailed it yeah those people the people who are happy in
spite of being famous are the same people when you're alone at dinner with them as they are in
front of 10 000 people in an arena they are and i know people like that i know people like oprah
winfrey is like that oprah winfrey is the same person at the dinner table as she is in a screaming
arena full of people. And she's a well-integrated person and she's happy in spite of the fact that
she's one of the probably five most famous people in the world. You know, it's extraordinary. I mean,
I just co-authored a book with her, which was incredible learning experience about my own field
by observing her life, right? But there aren't very many people like that. So the way to do that
is to subject yourself to, you know, the queries that you would use on somebody else. You know,
What are the probing questions?
And protocols that we have, it's usually based on asking people a set of questions.
I could walk through, what's my idol?
Am I serving my idols?
There are a bunch of things like that.
But fundamentally, for example, we all can fall into suffering about sort of the sense of emptiness,
the ennui that comes from the modern world.
We all feel depressed from time to time.
There is a set of questions.
Why questions?
that interrogates whether or not we actually are in touch
with the most important macronutrient of our own happiness,
which is the meaning of our lives.
Here are the three questions, the three big whys
that I ask myself continuously, that I probe,
and I have to answer honestly,
because being honest with myself is the essence
of getting into the moral space.
Number one, why do I think things actually happen
the way that they do?
And am I acting in accordance with that?
and for a religious person like me, if I say I think things happen the way they do because of
the will of God, but I'm not acting that way, that's going to be a source of misery. Am I acting
like I believe that the will of God exists and is true? Or am I acting like everything has to do
with me, which means I'm freaking out about everything. I'm super stressed out about,
you know, what's going to happen tomorrow that's completely out of my control. I'm anxious all the
time. I'm worrying continuously. Worry is evidence of a lack of faith. And so therefore, if I say I'm committing
to my faith, it immediately extinguishes worry, right? You shouldn't feel guilty about it. You
should act according to the person that you are. Number one, that's the coherence question
for philosophers. Why do things happen the way they do? Am I acting that way? Second,
why am I doing what I'm doing? That's the purpose question. You know, that's the purpose in life.
Purpose and meaning are not the same thing. Purpose is a subcategory of meaning.
Why am I doing the things that I am actually doing?
And then the next question beyond that is, is that in accord with my beliefs?
Am I doing the things that I'm doing in accord with my beliefs?
§16Transcript — part 16
But why am I doing them?
And by the way, for you and me, it might be because I'm chasing my idol.
Because I want more control.
Because I want more adoration of strangers.
Because I want more money.
Because I want to feel good.
Is that in accord with my beliefs?
And then the last part is, why does my life matter?
really to whom? Am I acting according to the people to whom my life actually matters? Am I
acting that way? Am I marginalizing? And by the way, Andrew, I've screwed this up so many times.
When I was a CEO running this big nonprofit organization, which was so important, right?
I was at one point at the very end of it, I was interviewing a bunch of very famous and rich
financial professionals for a book that I was starting to write that came out after I left.
and when I was already back in academia,
called From Strength to Strength.
It was a book about getting happier as you get older.
And this woman is like a billionaire.
I mean, unbelievable.
Named firm, famous.
And she's telling me about her achievements.
I'm like, congratulations, that's great.
She says, I'm so unhappy.
I said, well, talk to me, sister.
What gives?
She said, my husband and I were married,
but we're roommates, you know.
I have adult kids with a cordial relationship.
I think my employees are, they do what I say, but I think they're afraid of me.
I don't think my decision making is crisp anymore.
I don't love it, but I don't know what else to do.
She said, I go to the doctor and the doctor says, you need to stop drinking and get into the gym.
But I keep drinking and I don't go to the gym.
She said, when I grew up, I went to church when I was a little girl and I loved that.
I always wanted that.
And I don't go to church and I don't know why.
And she says, professor, what am I supposed to do?
I said, you don't need a Harvard professor.
You just wrote your own prescription.
take a souvenir in your company and step back, go away with your husband and get to know him,
go move closer to your kids, get into AA, go to the gym, go back to church. Look,
it's right there. She says, I know, I know, I know. I said, so why not? Why didn't you do that?
Why don't you? And she, and she was silent for a long time. And finally she said,
because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. And that was like a knife to my heart
because at that point in my life, me too.
You know how many Little League games I didn't go to?
Look, Little League games are boring.
Let's be honest.
But it's my kids.
You know how many birthdays that I missed
because I was trying to be special and successful
and adored by people who don't care about me?
And that specialness, that's an animal impulse
that is hardwired into us.
The moral aspiration is to choose happiness
over that particular specialness. And that's the, that's the significance question. Why does my life matter?
And to whom? And am I acting in accord and responsibly with my answer to that question?
That's the interrogation. You do not disappoint Professor Arthur Brooks.
It's awesome. Those are great, great questions that I will be asking over and over and that
that everyone should consider asking
and trying to answer over and over for themselves.
So I'm really moved.
Thank you.
Me too.
You know, I've been doing this podcasting thing a while now,
and every once in a while, someone sits down here
and takes us someplace else.
I knew you were that guy
because we had shared the conversation before,
but you've given me so much to think about.
I'm gonna be listening to this and taking notes
for my own reasons.
No, thank you.
What an honor it is.
you've blessed me again and again and again and again
with the scientific knowledge that you bring to it,
but the soul you actually bring to the science.
That's the magic formula
that you actually bring to all your work.
Well, thank you.
I have a couple of people in my life who are about,
I've always had a couple of people in my life
who are about 10 years older.
I really look up to you.
I look up to you.
I really do.
I admire you.
And it's a short list, but it's a potent one.
I won't tell you who else is on camera,
who else is on there,
an all-star team. I aspire to be more like you. And I say that with all the respect that you're
a human and you have your struggles. But I think it's important for anyone at a given developmental
stage to look at people who've migrated the path more or less that they're on but are ahead of them
and get some useful information. So I appreciate that. So whether you like it or not, you're a
mentor to me. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you. That means the world to me and we're all on the path.
We're all on the path.
We all have our...
Life is, you know, every religious tradition has pilgrimages.
Almost every religious tradition.
If you go across India, you see mendicants that are actually walking toward a holy city.
In the Christian faith, we have three big pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to Rome, and to Santiago de Compostela, which is the Camino de Santiago.
And these pilgrimages are metaphorical for what we're actually trying to do with our lives, which is why they're such deeply mystical and spiritual experiences.
I recommend that everybody go on a 500-mile walk across northern Spain from the French border to Santiago de Compostela.
You didn't do it on your knees, did you?
I did not do it on my knees, but I've done it just the last eight days two times because
my wife won't do more than eight days, and I love my wife.
But the point is you have that what you realize is that that's a metaphor for your life.
We're walking through this life.
We're all learning.
Andrew's on a pilgrimage.
Arthur is on a pilgrimage.
Every single person watching us is on a pilgrimage, and that means progress, but that actually
means the excellence that actually comes from making progress in little ways every single day
and being open to metaphysical truths. So it moves me a lot that I could be some little stone church
on the side of the road on your pilgrimage. Well, you absolutely are. And in sharing this
with other people, you are to them too. So I did say I had one more question slash consideration.
So I'm so inspired and struck by what you shared that I think it would be worth considering perhaps, and don't feel obligated to answer here.
Maybe we just leave it a cliffhanger and not answer on here, or if you want, you can.
People would really benefit from hearing from you more in the context of structured sets of questions.
I know you do this on your podcast.
We've touched on some of that today.
You have your books and so forth.
But it'd be fun to explore the possibility of doing like a self-exploration series with you at some point.
And we could figure out the venue if it's on here or it's elsewhere.
But if you'd be willing to consider like ways we could explore things more fully, also selfishly so I can learn more from you.
Likewise.
My answer is yes.
Awesome.
Let's do it, man.
All right.
Let's do it.
Let's get a band together.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
I love it.
God bless you.
God bless you too, Andrew.
and for all the people who are watching,
I'm honored to be part of this.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion
with Dr. Arthur Brooks.
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