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

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Or those performers who study world-class performers who pick out the meta patterns, the things that you can apply to your own lives, whether they be tools, favorite books, frameworks, rituals, annual reviews perhaps. Reverse bucket lists in the case of my guest today and that guest is Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery professor of the practice of public and non-profit leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at the Atlantic where he writes the popular "How to Build a Life column" "Mega Popular" and Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 #1 New York Times bestseller from "Strength to Strength," "Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose" and "Second Half of Life," which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter "Five Bullet Friday." His newest book is "Build the Life You Want," subtitled "The Art and Science of Getting Happier" with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. We cover a lot of ground. He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks and practices that he implements in his own life, and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many other projects. You can find him on Instagram @ArthurC. Brooks on Twitter @ArthurBrux. With a further ado, please enjoy my very thought-provoking and actionable, highly tactical conversation with Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur, so nice to have you here. Thanks for joining. Thank you, Sam. It's great to be with you. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. I feel like we've been looking forward to meeting and we've been warming up for this for a long time. We've so many friends in common. We have a lot of friends in common. I have read your prior work from "Strength to Strength," excellent book. I recommend to me by Peter Atia. People may know him as Dr. Peter Atia, a good friend. Proud Texan, also now. We're all the cool kids live. All the Texans are all the cool kids are. And I have more questions than we will have time. But I'm hoping to really explore broadly. And I wanted to start with something that I thought would peak the interest of many people listening and that is the reverse bucket list. Is this something you still do and what does it entail? The reverse bucket list is something I do. Oh boy, do I ever do it? And it took me too long to figure this one out. When I was 50, I'm 59 years old. When I was 50, I found my bucket list from when I was 40. You know, I was a classic thing. And on my birthday, I would make a list of my desires, my ambitions. And I would imagine myself, visualize myself, consuming or experiencing these things. And it would fire me up and make me, well, kind of feel like a loser or quite frankly. Because it was lowering my sense of satisfaction. I subsequently found out. And I looked at that list for when I was 40. And I checked everything off that list and I was less happy. No, no. At 50, then I was at 40. And so I thought I'm a social scientist. So I thought to myself, obviously, I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? And basically, this is the problem. This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package. I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in like a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your halves divided by your wants, that's the model. So I'll slow down because I know people watching you didn't like it. I'm going to write that down. Haves divided by wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more, or permanently and securely by wanting less. I thought to myself, what does that mean? And the answer to that, what does that mean? Is I need a reverse bucket list. Not that I'm like going to get nice things in my life. But I'm going to be consciously detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out. So on my birthday now, my 59th birthday a couple of months ago, I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever power, ambition, admiration, all these things that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and mother nature wires us to accumulate the rewards that will help us survive and pass on our genes. I got it. I know how evolutionary psychology works. And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals. But I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them. I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me. I want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive manager, the bumper of tissue right behind my forehead. And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying maybe I get it and maybe I don't. But I'm going to cross it out as an attachment. And I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free. And so you find that to work. It works. It does not because you don't care about it, but because you're not attached to it in the same way. You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire or a ghost in your head. You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain. So you go through this exercise, so you write down whatever it is, receive such and such an honor, sell so many copies of book X, whatever these are. All the stuff that guys like you and me do. Right. And then you have 37 charms in your case, possibly. You're incredibly fit. I'm not hitting on you. I'm just saying I aspire to your beautiful man to come. Well, we go to the same stylist for our haircuts, but I would say we will maybe get to like self-care and physical practice later. You go through this exercise. But those things down, you cross them out in a sort of idle worship, slight of hand move. Right. Then following that, I'm curious when there is, if there is the spark of this desire, whatever it might be. Do you have self-talk or something that acts as an interrupt? I keep the list. You keep the list. I keep the list and I go back and I look at the list just like I would look at my bucket list. And later, every six months, every year, every 10 years, whatever happened to be, I go back and look at my reverse bucket list and say, am I living up to this? Am I truly conscious? Am I living up to not being attached? Am I practicing the detachment that I committed myself to? And the truth is, usually, yeah, kind of. I mean, the phantasm will be back. It will be flying around in your head again. But you brought it to your prefrontal cortex for a reason and your prefrontal cortex is an adult and will govern the children. But sometimes you have to remind yourself. Remember, look, I mean, you're an adult here. And you look back on it and say, it is funny. Actually, it's pretty amusing when you look at it and you say, oh, I can't believe that thing is bugging me again. But you're not governed by it in the same way. You know what I actually put on my list? I was reading just for clarity. So it's okay to have the goal and to have it as a target and plan for it. Let's say, selling X number of copies, but not to have that hungry ghost attachment to it. It's nothing more than an intention. Intention is fine, but attachment is bad. This is what the Dalai Lama talks about, too. It talks about intention without attachment. There's a word in sailing the rum line in Spanish rumbo, which is a lot more common in normal everyday speech. What it means is it's the intention of your voyage. You have to have that. Even though you know it's not, you're not going to be true to it. Because if you don't know, you're just going to be going in circles. You know, you're just be like, I don't know. I've been out to see for a long time. Who knows where I am. You know, it'll be like one of your vacations. I was like, I don't know where I am. I'm just like doing nothing, man. And it can be therapeutically important, but it's actually not the way that you get from Europe to the Americas. You need a location and you need one. You need one. But if you're super attached to it, then you're going to freak out when something throws you off. Furthermore, you're not going to recognize the fact that it is the voyage itself that is the adventure of life, not actually reaching the particular destination, whether it's the original one or one that turns out to be better or worse or wherever you wind up. And that's the way you got to live your life. So it's intention without attachment. Now, there's another thing that I was thinking about this year because Ticknot Han died. You know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And I wrote his obituary in the Washington Post, actually. It was a really interesting experience because I talked about all what he's taught all of us. Ticknot Han said, and how has that impact on me, but I reflected on it upon his death, that one of the greatest attachments that people have in modern life is to their views and opinions. That's a real attachment. It can be as dangerous as your attachment to money or power. Why? Because people treat their opinions as if they were gold. They're jewels. You know, get between me and my political opinions. Man, I'll cancel you. I'll get you fired. I'll denounce you on social media. Who knows? Maybe I'll be violent. I mean, life is crazy these days. And so I looked at it and I thought, am I weighed down by attachment to my views, to my political views? So I wrote down five of my strongest political views and I crossed them out. This was after writing the obituary. Yeah. It was on my reverse bucket list on my turn 59. And I said, look, it's not that I don't have these views. I just don't have the attachment to these views. Look, man, I need more friends. And strong political opinions is not going to get me there. It's not going to get me there. Love is going to get me there. Tolerance is going to get me there. A sense of curiosity about other people is going to get me there. And strong political opinions is going to put me in the wrong direction. So man, dead, the attachment dead. So maybe this is a little too granular, but I'm curious. Tick not hot. This is a legendary figure. I would be very intimidated by the task of writing an obituary for such a person. I've read numbers of his books and very influenced by his thinking, how do you go about deciding what goes into an obituary for someone like that or for anyone for that matter, but in this particular case, the Germans talk about doing something called a fest-trift. It's a word that means kind of this in Comeoom. It's a celebration of the work of somebody. And which I will start when you do one of these things. It's typical sort of European intellectual deal. As you look at the things that they said and did that had the most impact, and it was most meaningful to them in the same way. Now I didn't know Tick not hot. I worked very closely with Adali Lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but the Theravada Buddhist tradition I've never penetrated personally, and so I didn't know Tick not hot. But I do know the things that he said and taught that really changed the way that Westerners think. So that's what I wanted to talk about. Not what did he do that changed Theravada Buddhism. I'm not a Theravada Buddhist. I'm not equipped to write that. But I can talk about the way he changed me as a Catholic. I can talk about how he changed me as a public policy person because I was reading Tick not hot when I was running a think tank in Washington, DC. How he influenced me as a happiness professor at Harvard. That's the stuff that I really wanted to focus on. That was the idea of attachment and detachment. That was the idea of the illusion of individuality. I mean, these are concepts that people didn't think about. He also was really behind the whole mindfulness revolution in the West. He starts off the miracle of mindfulness, that famous book, Big Bestseller, with this simple description of washing the dishes. And he says, when you're washing the dishes, you should be thinking about washing the dishes. Because if you don't think about washing the dishes, you're not really there washing the dishes, are you? And he persuades you with this kind of hypnotic prose to remember that if you don't think about washing the dishes, but you're thinking about doing something at work tomorrow or you're thinking about something that happened yesterday, that you're living in the future of the past and you've missed your life. Or if you're thinking about eating the juicy peach, which is a story, may not have been in that book that I remember him telling, but it was paired with the washing of the dishes. He said, if you're thinking about the peach while you're washing the dishes, when you're eating the peach, you'll probably be thinking of something else. Exactly right. And then what you're doing is while you're doing this, you're planning for a future existence that's better than now and when you reach it, it will be a phantasm as well. It will be nothing more than a mythical past while you're thinking about a new future that doesn't quite exist and you've missed your whole life. How did he change your influence you as a Catholic? And the Dalai Lama too, by the way. I mean, a lot of Buddhist thinking has been incredibly helpful to me to understand exactly what I'm trying to do as a person when I'm centering myself in prayer. So for example, Catholics, traditional Catholics, they generally pray what's called the rosary. And the rosary is a set of beads that you pray repetitive prayers. It's about a thousand year old Catholic meditation. I do it every day. And I noticed that I was having a hard time focusing. I was having a hard time understanding what I was trying to do for myself for this offering. I didn't know how to make it fruitful in its way. I didn't know exactly what the point was. And studying the work of Tick-Not-Hon and also studying at the Dalai Lama's monastery in Darmsala, India, sitting in meditation and studying meditation techniques with the Tibetan Buddhist monks. I actually learned what I was supposed to be doing as a Catholic praying my rosary, how I actually could center my prayer and make it deeply worshipful in a meaningful way. And perhaps God wanted me to learn that from my Buddhist sisters and brothers. This is going to be adjacent to this conversation, this topic. But I'm curious, do you believe that we can always cut this, but I'm very curious. Do you believe that direct transmission in some of these lines, which is very important in certain schools of we could call it mindfulness, but that is a real phenomenon or at least I suppose it's undeniably important in the tradition, but the idea that's sitting with someone in meditation with them, that there are teachings that are directly transmitted. What is your thought on that if you have any thoughts? I don't know the answer to that. I do know that you can deeply be in communion with somebody really intimately. My wife, Esther and I, we actually teach young couples that are engaged about, she teaches the theological part. I teach the social science because I'm just a total walk. What we do tell them is that according to the best science and our experience and common sense, that one of the most intimate things that you can do with your partner or spouse, pray together, it's super intimate. I know couples that have been married for 25 years that will have sex together but won't pray together because it's too embarrassing to pray together because praying together is just too intimate. They don't know how to do it. [BLANK_AUDIO] erasing to them. I imagine you'll get naked in front of somebody else, but you won't pray in front of them. And that's because it's such a deeply intimate thing. Okay. So when you cross the boundary of the greatest intimacy with another person, there's going to be some transmission. The idea of direct transmission rings true to me because of the nature and intensity of the intimacy that comes from that experience. We're going to take a hard left for second. Okay. And we're going to come back to a through line which I am tracking because it's just what is top of mind for me. And then we're going to come back to possible mystical/semi mystical experiences in Mexico. So I'm giving you an idea. All right. I can't wait. We're in my head. I get to go to Mexico. I can't wait to have mystical experience. The imitation is now formal. But first, for those who are not watching this video, I mean, you are incredibly physically fit. And I know that you have some very deliberate, consistent practices including weight training and so on blood occlusion training. Are you still using cuffs? I do. Yeah. And I recommend it for anybody over 40. Could you explain what this is and why you recommend it? So occlusion training, what it effectively does is it, it's not a tourniquet. But what it is, it's a band around your arms and or legs so that when you're lifting, you actually will get a much greater as, you know, in the vernacular of the burn from resistance training with lower weight. Now, the reason I recommend this very strongly is because the research suggests that it's very good for both strength and hypertrophy at lower weight levels. So it saves your joints, but gives you results. And that's what you need to do in your over 40. Save the joints. Yeah. And I really strongly encourage people to check this out. I've done some of it. Yeah. And to say that it increases the burn or the pump is certainly true. You got a lot of pain. Yeah. I would say exactly. I would say start conservative because you might feel weak, dialing back the way it's, but just wait. It hurts. It hurts. It really does. And you then, then you learn to love the pain. And you can travel with, there are cups you can travel with. I have them. I can't remember with me. I'll tell you how I'm on the road 48 weeks of year. They're particular type that you use. I don't actually remember the brand, but they're actually they use Velcro. And they're about two inches thick. So the two thick and actually can't get the kind of occlusion that I really want. So experiment with, you know, what works with, you know, the size and shape of your biceps and triceps and then, and then learn how to use them and then make them tighter and then, and then get in touch with the pain. And they're easy to travel with. Yeah. Do your homework and start conservative. Kelly star at a very famous performance coach and PTU's, a friend has been on show many times introduced me to that. Yeah. It's amazing. And he had a very similar argument, which is effectively, he doesn't say this, but I would say like you were kind of as old as your joints and connective tissue feel. I mean, there's certainly a cognitive component. And this is a really elegant way to preserve or build muscle mass without. I learned this from my friend, Al the Stefano, who started Mind Pump with his partners and Mind Pump. What do you have? Mind Pump itself, you know, fitness and culture podcast and scriven listening to it for years and years. And he taught me how to do it. He actually is, gives me training tips and good ideas and now it's great. It's been very helpful. And by the way, you know, when I was a younger man, you know, when I was in my 30s, I figured, you know, like what's my goal with fitness? And the answer is to still be lifting when I'm 80. Why? Because we know all the health benefits from it. But the truth is that physical fitness for me is a way to manage my negative effect. It's actually a happiness technique for me. It doesn't make me happier. It makes me less unhappy. That's what physical fitness will do. It will buy you less on happiness. And so I manage my negative effect that way. And I know when I'm 80, I'm going to need to manage my negative effects. I don't want to hurt myself. So I would go to the gym when I was 35 or 40 years old. And I would go to these iron gyms wherever I was traveling. And I would find that oldest dude, the old guy who's still lifting heavy things. And I would go up to him. I say, can I ask you advice? And they always want to give you advice. You know, the 76 year old guy who's he's like, don't bench press. It restricts your range of movement. And that's going to hurt. You're going to get impingement injuries along the way. So that's why as you get older, you should actually press with dumbbells and and then do higher rep to get volume, do higher reps with lower weight, etc. And just sensible stuff. But it's actually been incredibly helpful for me to not get hurt. And stay in the gym. Yeah. 100%. All right. So naturally, from the supplies to the ridiculous. Well, maybe ridiculous, maybe not. So not for me. It's not. That's true. Yeah. Could you please describe your experience? I think it was as a teenager. Is it as a teenager in Mexico? Oh, yeah. The Mexican. It was not out in the woods with a shaman in ayahuasca. When I was 15, I was on a band trip. I used to be a musician. And I started as a kid. I was a real serious musician. And I wound up being a professional musician for when I was 19 until I was 31 French horn. Yeah. I was a French horn player, a classical French horn player, all the way through my 20s. I didn't go to college until I was 30, but it was my gap decade. And when I was I need one of this. Yeah. Too late. And when I was 15 years old, I was on this trip with a group with a not a professional. It was like an amateur concert band, but you know, doing a tour through Mexico. And we're doing a lot of tourism. And one of the tourist activities was to go to the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City. And this is a famous place for Catholics because it's one of the great pilgrimages sites of the world. In Catholic teaching, this is where when the Spanish explorers came to Mexico and having a horrible time because their marketing was all goofed up for the Catholic church. I mean, converter dies. Not a very compelling bitch. It turns out, you know, it and racist and you know, everything that you possibly could want. What happens then is this weirdly miraculous thing for Catholics and fellow travelers. I mean, just it was a mystical experience. So there was a peasant man by the name of Juan Diego who's out on a hill outside of Mexico City and sees an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he on his poncho is imprinted the Blessed Virgin Mary's image on his tillma. He takes it back to the textile. It's sort of a poncho. It's the tillma is what they would wear. And it was based on a fabric made out of cactus. It's beautiful imprint in color. We've all seen the picture of almost everybody's seen the Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe on this. And if you google it, the version of Guadalupe and you see it's like, oh, I've seen that a million times because it's in every Latino church. For the Catholic church, she's the patroness of all the Americas, including the United States. I mean, this is a big deal for the church. So the bishop sees it. They take the tillma. They display the tillma in public. And for the first time, they start getting converts. In the next nine years, seven million people convert to the Catholic church. Now, why there's worldly explanation and there's divine explanations for it. Here's a worldly explanation that's pretty compelling. Our lady, Guadalupe, is not white. She's not Spanish. She's a mesitha. She's a woman of mixed race. Now, we don't realize today how incredibly subversive that is. How unbelievably culturally transgressive that would have been. The Blessed Virgin Mary is not not white. What are you talking about? No, no, no, no. She's us. She's us. She's every person in the world. She loves you. She loves me. And she's one of us because she's in all of us. And that was this weird message that nobody really would have thought of at the time. Or so, Laura goes. And that's why people start saying, "Oh, this actually is for me because she actually looks like me crazy." So I'm in this church in Mexico City, this shrine of Guadalupe. And I'm looking at the tillma. I was just sitting up there and thinking, "This is boring." But then I noticed she was looking at me. Now, to be sure, I didn't realize that you can look at Elvis on velvet and the eyes will follow you. Right. Okay. Fair is fair. But I couldn't get it out of my head. I couldn't get it out of my head. So worldly or divine or mystical or not, reasonable people can disagree. But I couldn't get the image out of my head. I couldn't. And I realized I needed more in my life. I needed a deeper sense of the metaphysical in my life. I needed the transcendent in my life. And every time I thought of it, I thought of that image. And so I became Catholic at 16 years old and I've been a Catholic man ever since. Did you have a family history of Catholicism? Zero. Zero. No, I grew up in a Christian family. So I had a little bit of wiring, but I literally knew no Catholics. It's just this thing. Okay. And my parents were like, "Ah, adolescent rebellion. I guess it's better than drugs." It is better than everyone. But and the point is, a lot of people watching a summer traditionally religious and some are spiritual and some are not. But the whole point is we have a sense that there's something else. We have a sense that there's something deeper. Let something in your life take you to the deeper place. Something needs to take you by the hand to the deeper place. There's a lot of research that suggests this is the case. Don't try to go to the deeper place to find it randomly on your own. Let someone take you. Now that insight is ambiguous. But once people start to say, "I'm ready to be taken to a deeper place, a more transcendent state." That person, that entity will appear. We may come back to that. Thank you. And I do think that many different paths touch corners of the same thing is my impression, which we may not have time for in this conversation, but to be continued. And the reason I'm asking about this experience for those people who are wondering how this ties into maybe the headline of the podcast is because I want to better understand the influences and experiences that have shaped you and your perceptual apparatus and your thinking. So another would be, you've had multiple wake-up calls in your life. And as you described, you didn't exactly have the linear path to Harvard prof that people might have envisioned. I got rejected from Harvard. Oh, Exeter, Harvard, McKinsey. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'd actually applied to Harvard for graduate school. And they're like, no, it took two weeks for them to reject. Part of it is, at the time I was 31, I was a college dropout. I had a degree from a correspondence school. I was a French horn player. These are not the core demographics of your typical Harvard graduate student. And so, yeah, I got rejected, which suggests, by the way, to him that our standards for faculty today are lower than our 10-core students, but be that as a baby. Maybe. I'm scubbed, go to New York, I guess. I'd like to talk about your dad. - Yeah. - So, who was your father? What was he like? And how did his life end? - My dad was a mathematician. He had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a lifelong college professor. Most of it at a small Christian college in Seattle, called Seattle Pacific University. He was born to missionary parents, evangelical missionary parents. He was born in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, where my grandfather ran a mission school, actually. And then my grandfather went on to become the dean of a very famous college outside Chicago, called Wheaton College, where all of our family members had gone. My aunt went there in the 40s and dated Billy Graham in college, as it turns out, yeah, yeah. So, and then my dad went on to another Christian college to the college where he ultimately taught. And he was just absolutely in love with the beauty of mathematics. As kids, my mother was an artist. My mother was a painter. My dad was a mathematician. And around the intertable, we would talk about art and we would talk about math. Those are the things my father would pull his math problems to us. He would say, okay, okay, boys, me and my brother. Imagine all of the integers between one and one hundred, one, two, three, four, okay. Add them all together, what's the result? And we'd be like, I don't know, I need a piece of paper. I say, no, you don't. Think in another way. Think of another way. The solution, by the way, is one plus a hundred equals a hundred and one, and two plus 99 equals a hundred and one, and three plus 98 equals a hundred and one, and there are 51 of those, which makes 51 combinations of a hundred and one, 5,000 and 50. That's what we would do. That's what my father would do. You're like, dad, I'm just trying to eat my macaroni. I know, I eat my macaroni and cheese. And they would say something like, see, isn't that beautiful? Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that evidence of God? That's what he or your mom would say. That's what he would say. My dad was a, the elegant of it. My dad believed. Not that what we know is what we should pay attention to, but the marvel at what we can do and still not know anything. So my father would explain, this was had a big impact on me, that there's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems and there's complex problems. It's a mathematical difference, but the technique doesn't matter. Complicated problems are all the things that you can solve with computational horsepower and tech. Complex problems are super easy to understand, which you can never solve them. Like, who's gonna win between the Patriots and the dolphins? I know what winning looks like. It's more points in the scoreboard, but I have no idea. And that's why it's beautiful to watch the game and you don't want to simulate it on the computer because it'll be inaccurate. Love is complex. A jet engine is complicated. A cat is complex. A toaster is complicated. And he said two kinds of problems. And this, he said, as a basic math problem, the reason that we're always unsatisfied in life is because we have complex problems we want love. And all we have is complicated solutions that the world is offering us like computers and the internet and social media and blah, blah, blah, blah, and you'll never be satisfied 'cause it's a wrong kind of solution for the wrong kind of problem. So that seems like a tremendously valuable insight. Would you describe your father as a happy man? No, my father was a gloomy man. And no doubt that had a lot to do with genetics because 50% of our emotional baseline is genetic. We know this from identical twin studies where twins are born and separated at birth into separate families. This is not an experiment that social scientists have done because that would be horribly an ethical but three identical strangers shows how that turns out. Yeah, well, yeah, which are brutal. And brutal doc. Uh-huh, oh yeah, that's a great document. It is great. But 50% of your baseline mood, your tendency toward, you know, abulliance or gloominess is sitting in your DNA. And this is the reason to him that I came to the happiness field because I saw my grandfather who was a wonderful man and gloomy and my father who was brilliant and a lovely person and an excellent ethical kind man who was gloomy and I said, no more man, no more. I'm gonna live on the other 50%. I am not gonna be governed by that 50% that made my father an unhappy man. And so he died young, 66, you know? I mean, he had cancer and they gave him 10 or 15 years or more and he died in two. And as a statistician, he explained it. He was a biostatistician by his graduate degree and I said, "Dad, it's terrible luck." And he said, "Look, there's gotta be people on that side of the curve too." (laughing) But he had a good sense of humor. But the whole point was, he wasn't prepared to fight for life because he didn't have that hygiene for his own happiness. And that example set me on the path to learn about this and to share these ideas and it has transformed my life. I'm grateful to my father and I will be for the rest of my life for the example that he gave me and the lesson he taught me, even through his own happiness. Hi everyone, Tim here, pardon the interruption. Just a quick announcement, the recording studio had a small glitch so the audio for the next two or so minutes is not perfect. But we correct it quickly, please bear with us. Thank you for understanding and now back to the conversation. - What were some decisions you made or things you began doing or stopped doing after your father's death? I started exercising. There is a little vanity to it but not that much. The whole point of the matter is, this is one of the single best ways to manage your negative affect is to be in the gym for an hour a day. It's a bit dated probably but there's a bit called Spark which also goes into sort of a lot of like BDNF and a lot of the circuitry and biochemical reasons for exercise for this explicit purpose. When I'm working with students, I put them through a battery of tests to look at whether the bigger challenge in their life is happiness or unhappiness. The world is really scarce in the definitions that it gives us and there's a big mistake that almost everybody makes about happiness which is not a lot of mistakes. Number one that is the absence of unhappiness, number two that it's a feeling. Both of those are wrong. Number three is that we can get it. So we can approach happiness but we can't get there because we actually need unhappiness and unhappiness and happiness are not opposites and can coexist. So there's a lot to get us a lot to unpack. So to begin with, happiness and unhappiness in terms of moods are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. A lot of neurosciences believe that unhappy cognitions and emotions are largely dominated by activity in the right side of the brain and the way that we know this, there's a terrific neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, and he's done work that shows that the left side of the musculature on your face is more active when you're unhappy, when you're experiencing negative emotions, anger, fear, disgust, sadness. And it's actually funny when you have, when my kids were a little, I would notice that, you know, when they fall down, you get a moment where you don't know what's gonna happen next. Are they gonna laugh and keep playing or are they gonna get the water works, right? And the way they tell on that, 'cause it's usually five or six seconds because the wiring in the brain is actually not complete. - It's a work in progress. - So what are the tests that I administer to my students? - And I put it in my new book as a matter of fact, 'cause it's so important for me and for understanding ourselves. It's called the Positive Effect, Negative Effect Series, PAN-S, P-A-N-A-S. It's on my website and it's easy to find. And I didn't create it. It's been psychometrically validated, a bunch of times a great test. And what it does is it helps you figure out if you're high positive, high negative or low positive, low negative, and there's four combinations, it's a two by two matrix. You can be a high positive affect person and a high negative affect person. That's a high affect person. It's got a lot of strong moods about everything. That's the mad scientist. That's the mad scientist profile. That's me. I'm at the 85th percentile and happy affect and I'm at the 85th percentile and negative affect. - So the highs are high on the level. - Right, so I don't have a happiness problem. I have an unhappiness problem. This is what I come to tell you. It's not a problem because unhappiness is really important. You won't be happy if you get rid of your unhappiness because you got to be fully alive to get happier. But you do need to manage yourself. Some people are really high positive and really low negative. Those are the cheerleaders. Those people can't stay in the gym. Why? Because they don't feel better when they go to the gym because their negative affect is already in the cellar. - The third is high negative and low positive. That's the poet. And the point nobody wants to be a poet, but the truth is that the part of the rainfall of the eventual water or prefrontal cortex is highly active for people who are sad and people who are creative. That's the reason when I say poet, you don't think about somebody who's skipping down the street. (laughing) - Right? - You think of a creative person to be like, "Yes, exactly, right, right." - Exactly right, you're in a French cafe, thinking about thinking nihilistic thoughts and writing poetry. So that's the poetic disposition. And the last is low, low. So you could be perfectly happy or unhappy, but you have low affect levels. That's called the judge, the sober judge. I wish you were otherwise, but I would put high confidence that I am right down the beret wearing way. - How would you advise someone, and I know this won't apply to everybody. - Yeah, yeah. - Listening, but just by way of a working example, what does someone do with, what are their options for how to act upon that? - Okay, so if you know that you're a poet, this is an affect level. It doesn't mean that you're cosmically happier, unhappy. It just means that this is your natural disposition. So this is important, right? So it also means, that you need to manage two lovers. You need to manage your happiness levels up and you need to manage your unhappiness levels, not to zero. There's nothing wrong with unhappiness. You need to mute them. You don't need to numb them. You need to manage them. Could you, and I may have already missed the plot, but just define those two, because I think a lot of people, myself, maybe included with think, if you remove unhappiness by default since it's unhappiness, they seem to be antonym, so you remove one, you have more of another. So how should we think about these two? That's a very good question. And by the way, the answer is not obvious. As a matter of fact, psychologists until about 50 years ago really believe that unhappiness was the absence of happiness. But it's not true, because we actually find that the basic negative and positive emotions are coming from different parts of the limbic system and can coexist. I see. So if you're thinking about it, you can think about it then neuroanatomically as opposed to semantically with the words. Yeah. Yeah. Not to have dumbed down too hard, but it's like, if your left hand performed x types of tasks and your right hand performed y type of tasks, it's like, okay, you can sort of decide what ratio, right? And your negative emotions are much more intense than your positive emotions. This is evolved to keep you alive. Positive emotions are kind of nice to have negative emotions or signals or alarms that something might kill you. A sweet smile from somebody across the room is very pleasant, but a frowning face might be somebody who wants to murder you. And so therefore, we've evolved to pay attention. This is called the negativity bias that we have. We also have mixed states that we go through all day long. So if you look, you ask people in surveys what they're feeling at any given moment. So you'll say, you know, in five minute increments, what are you feeling, positive or negative, you'll find that about 90% of the time people can tell you how they're feeling. In 40% of the time for the average person, it's really pure positive emotions at a low level. It's your idol as most of the time is like, it's okay. That's kind of Sunday today, whatever, whatever. Oh, good. About 16% of the time is pure negative emotion. And that usually means something's happening that you don't like. Now 33% of the time you've got both. And usually the way that this looks in people's lives is that you're in your positive idol, but something's intruding. So there's something bugging you that you don't always remember. You know, we go through life and you know, on a certain day, it's like, yeah, it's all good. Oh, yeah, that thing. And then you go back to kind of going back to your positive idol. And only the other thing, you know, that thing. And so that's the next state, like Twitter. Yeah. Totally. And by the way, I mean, it's an unhappiness machine. You mean X? Yes. Sorry. Exactly. That's a big black X. I mean, it's like X. It's so appropriate. You know, so this is important because we understand that these are separable phenomena. We need both these emotions, but we need to be able to manage our emotions like pros. And that's a lot of what I do. Yeah. So what are some options? So I go through the panace, end up poet. There are these two levers. What might be the process of thinking through how to pull these levers in different ways. So happiness side is what I spend a lot more time on because it's just so interesting on how we can pull the happiness lover. They start by actually a good definition, which is not feelings. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And thank God happiness isn't a feeling. Can you imagine going through life chasing a feeling? That's awful. It's like, it feels good. Do it. Or if it feels bad, make it stop. It's a terrible life strategy. Happiness and its feelings are associated with three tangible phenomena and our lives that we can actually understand, manage enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three things that we need in balance and abundance. Think of these as the macro nutrients of happiness. The protein carbohydrates and fat of happiness. If you don't have protein and carbohydrates and fat and balance and abundance, all kinds of weird things are going to happen to you. You're not going to be as healthy as you should be and you won't feel good. Same thing is true. You need to enjoy your life. You need to get satisfaction from your accomplishments and you need to have a deep sense of meaning. And each one of these is a big challenge. When I meet somebody through a series of structured questions, I can figure out if there's a problem along one of these macro nutrient dimensions. And it turns out that it's, there's some very easy interventions that we can make across all three. And I'll give you an example. The first one is enjoyment. I say, "You enjoy your life." And they'll think about their little pleasures. That's not it. Pleasure is not a secret of happiness. Pleasure is the fast road to obsessive, compulsive activity and addiction. Why? Because all pleasure is, is a phenomenon from the limbic system of your brain saying, "Do more of that thing because you're more likely to survive and pass on your genes if you get those calories, if you have that sex, whatever it happens to be." The way that you can actually turn that into a source of happiness is by mixing into ingredients with your pleasure. People and memory. Never do something that gives you pleasure alone. That's the rule of thumb. If you're doing it alone, it's a problem. So, Anheuser-Busch does a beer ad. They never have in the beer ad. I got it drinking in his closet. Yeah. I got it pounding a 12 pack into his own apartment alone. You know? Why? Because that's pleasure. And that actually leads to addiction is problematic. They always have an ad of a guy cracking a beer with his buddies, people, and doing something he's going to remember. Memory. That's the secret to it. So, I'll take a survey of people's habits. Now, this is the reason that pornography is a big problem. You're not consuming it in public with friends to make a memory. Forgot to say, "It's just sort of weird rarely." That's a pretty weird thing to do, right? I mean, it hits the dopamine lever. I mean, they all are neurophysiologically similar phenomena. They hit dopamine, dopamine, dopamine over and over and over again. And they ruin your life because they become addictive. They become monomonion coal. And they're not the secret of happiness. If you're at three o'clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the lever on the slot machine by yourself, that's not the secret of happiness to anybody I know. And I've never heard somebody say, "You know what gives my life happiness?" Methamphetamine. Never been said, right? And the reason for that is because these are drugs, people say drugs with abuse. No, no. They're drugs with pleasure. Just not lie about it. They give you pleasure. And pleasure alone without memory is a problem. This is a very practical example of how we can use the science and turn it into a set of guideposts for our life. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions. So few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can. But I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings. And that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now you can earn 4.8 APY. That's the annual percentage yield with the Wealthfront cash account. That's more than 11 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank according to FDIC.gov. So why wait? Earn 4.8% on your cash today. Plus it's up to $5 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks. And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more and build long term wealth. So why wait? Visit Wealthfront.com/tim to get started. That's Wealthfront.com/tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. And so you have enjoyment, which you clarify. Satisfaction. Satisfaction means. How would you make satisfaction granular? Because I think about satisfaction. I'm like, I might conflate being satisfied with doing, say, a large project with some form of meaning. I can see how I might get my wires crossed. Satisfaction is achieving something with struggle. It really is that project that you're talking about, which it will give you meaning as well. The project per se can actually cross the boundaries across the macronutrients, just like something that you eat has more than one macronutrient. But satisfaction per se is doing something that takes effort and expending the effort. So if my graduate students, they cheat to get an A and an exam in my class, they'll get the grade, but they won't get the satisfaction. The satisfaction comes from the pain. This is one of the paradoxes of life. You've got to suffer to get the satisfaction. You've got to defer the gratification. When somebody's on the pleasure mill, by the way, they also don't get satisfaction from anything because they can't defer the gratification anymore. These problems bleed into each other. So one of the things that you find is that people who are very accomplished, the people you are good at satisfaction because you can defer your gratification and do long-term projects. You're a satisfaction guy. The problem for you and me and a lot of people are going to watch your show because they want to be better. Nobody's watching this show just for giggles. They're watching this show because they're not funny enough. They're watching your show because they want to be better in their lives. So they're going to be good at deferring their gratification and doing hard things, if you're at least inspired. Totally. I mean, it's like, I read your books. It's interestingly deceptive. The four-hour fill in the blank, the early books. It makes it sound like it's a hack and it's easy. No. No, it's not. The four hours is hard is the point. Those four hours are going to hurt. Yeah. There's a lot of front loading. There's also hard work without forethought and planning. So there is built into any of those books a strategic deferral. Yeah, for sure. So that's what brings satisfaction. Here's the problem with satisfaction. And this goes back to where we started the conversation. Mix Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. That's wrong. You can't keep no satisfaction. That's why you try and you try and you try. And there's a reason for that. Neuroscientists talk about homeostasis, which is a phenomenon of always going back physically and emotionally to your base And there's a reason for that because you need to go back to the baseline in your life so you can be ready to react to the next set of circumstances. If emotionally you were going to be bummed out for the rest of your life, you'd become immobilized. And if you felt super happy when something good happened, you wouldn't be in the hunt anymore. Mother Nature wants you to think that you're going to feel this emotion for the rest of your life so that you will either avoid one thing or pursue something. But she wants to fool you and send you back again and again and again and have you never figured out, "Man, if I get that car, I'm going to love it." If I move to California, I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for the rest of my life. Turns out you get six months, by the way, of enjoying weather, but the taxes are forever. And that experience of never learning is called the hitonic treadmill and it's unbelievably painful. The way to solve that problem is halves divided by wants. The way to get real satisfaction is not having more but wanting less and that's the reverse bucket list, etc. That's the set of habits that helps you dominate that particular science and short circuit the loop that you're on because of Mother Nature's plans for you, which are not really in your happiness interest. She doesn't care if you're happy, by the way. No. Passing on, producing progeny is not dependent on big smiles. Yeah, it's like big smiles. DNA, man, it's all survival to pass on your genes. That's great for the propagation of the species. It's not good for pursuing the divine path. We are going to come back to meeting. I want to just take a sidebar on reducing wants for a second. Sure. And talk about exercises that you've had your students do in your classes. I'm pulling this from memory so I may not get the wording spot on but identifying their idols. If you could expand on what that looks like. We have a game. I have a game show in my class at Harvard. It's called What's My Idol. Now, you can tell how old I am. When I was a really little kid, there was a game show on TV called What's My Line. Your viewers can Google it. I'm sure there's some black and white grainy footage of it or something from what I was in the 70s or even back. What's My Idol is actually based on the insight of a medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas. Theologian but really a philosopher in the neoplatonic tradition. Aquinas is responsible for introducing Aristotle to the modern world. Up into that point, nobody read Aristotle. It was all Plato. Aristotle's teacher. St. Thomas Aquinas, he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, guys, read this one. This is the one." And he interpreted Aristotle for the modern world. It was the same thing more or less that Avarose was doing for the Muslim world and that the monides was doing for the Jewish world because they were coexisting in Southern Spain and this intellectual soup. That's hard for us to understand today. It was so deep what was going on. So St. Thomas Aquinas was an unbelievably adroit social scientist. He was also, by the way, phenomenally impressive figure. I mean, for people who aren't familiar, just go read The Wikipedia entry and a few other things. Yeah, right. And his magisterial work was the sumathology. And the way that he does it, by the way, it's a masterclass in the way that we should be thinking about big topics today, which is by saying, by starting the topic with the best objection. Here's the question. Here's the supposition. What's the best objection? Here's why I meet that objection. What's the second best objection? Here's why I meet the object. The whole book is written this way. It's unbelievable. And in the section on human happiness, which he pulls from Aristotle, who claims without any need for proof, but this is what we all want, whether we act that way or not, that there's four things that we do that distract us from happiness. Now his definition of happiness is seeking the divine. You know, this is what we all want. What do you want? The divine. Do you know that? Not necessarily. Is it hard? Yeah. That's the reason we don't actually act like we're pursuing the divine because, you know, pursuing God or the divine or the metaphysical singularity or exterior consciousness or what your thing is. Has a lot of one-sided conversations and a lot of inconvenient morality attached to it. So we take these divinity substitutes. These are the idols. Idols are biblically in mythology. What idols all have in common is that they're God-like, but they're not God. They're convenient substitutes for God. That's all an idol is. And St. Thomas Aquinas says there's four substitutes for God, which we can think of as the four substitutes for the real secret to happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame. A little things change. And when he said, "Faithy, actually, say fame," he said, "honor." But that has a different connotation in English. You know, I have a son who's a special forces in the military and he serves with honor. That's not what they mean. Honor means to be honored. It's fame. It's reputation. It's the admiration of other people. Maybe it's Instagram followers or something ridiculous. But it is something that we want in the opinion of other people and we see thirst after it. And he says, "Everybody is motivated by one thing." And it even throw away comments. Like communities, they coalesce around an idol is so true. You know, we're recording this podcast in New York. Money, baby. You go to a party in New York and everyone's like, "How's your fund this year? How you doing this year?" And like, "How much does this apartment cost? It's all about money." You go to LA? What's the idol? Well, I'm not going to even call it honor. Fame. Fame. Okay. Okay. Let's keep with the quiz. D.C. What's the idol? Power. Power, man. Is how close are you to the president? What senator do you know? Right? Vegas? Yeah. Right? I mean, communities will coalesce around this. But each one of us has our idol too. So here's the game. You want to play? Sure. Let's play the game. Okay. So the truth is none of us has all four. None of us is so vice-ridden. We don't have the energy or time. To be serving all four of these idols. I mean, come on, life is short. You underestimate me, sir. No. But we all have one or two that really animate us and we don't always know it because we're not paying attention to it. Now, Aquinas is point and modern psychology bears all this out that as a normal adult with a complicated life, if you know your idol, you will recognize the thing that always leads you astray and leads you to do the things that you later regret because you were following that idol. So it's very important to figure out which idol that is so that you can manage it. Not that you'll make it go away because you're human, but you can manage your idol. Okay. So I start by saying, what's not your idol? Because of the four, there's something that you could ditch. Yeah. Power is not a, yeah. Power. Immediate. I'll name one to start with. That's why you're not a CEO. I mean, you've got a company and you, you know, you, but you're not like trying to run a corporation. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are, and I know a lot of people who are power focused in a sense in one form or another. It just doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't like it. You actually dislike power. Like people having power over you and you having power over others. I don't dislike it necessarily. I mean, I think that it's an inherent dynamic in particularly chimpanzee politics, but just in nature in general. I was thinking of which, let me react to this phrase. Tim Ferris for Congress. No, you got absolutely not your answer is correct. You are not motivated by power is the first one to get rid of. Okay, you got three left. Money, pleasure, fame. You got to kick one out. You got to get rid of one. What's the next one to go? I can get rid of fame easily. I think that there was a point in my life where I sought a lot of social validation, but having seen the flip side. And the shadow elements of that it holds. But you got pretty famous young. As you saw the dark side of that, which is what social scientists and even neuroscientists will tell you with their research is that fame is really the only of the idols that you can ever be happy in spite of. You know, when Lady Gaga tweeted fame is prison and everybody derided that I'm thinking that's deeply adept. That is a deeply clarifying comment. And by the way, I mean, you know, John Milton wrote that in the 17th century that it is the idol that we thirst after and sacrifice the happiness of our days for that. And you learn that by experience, not because of disposition, because you did hunger after it and then experience it and you realize that it's a very, very, very bitter fruit. And a lot of footnotes and a lot of fine print in that. Fastian bargain. So I 46 year old Tim Ferriss. That's number two that goes out the door. Don't care. In fact, if I could put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube in numerous ways, I would do that. Right. Okay, you got two left and it's getting hot in here. Right. Money and pleasure. Yeah. Well, it's a which one you would say money I can in the hierarchy, I can get rid of the marginal utility of each additional dollars is just makes no difference in the things that I care about. And in a middle class life wouldn't freak you out. No, no, I'm not talking about poverty. I'm not talking about getting not getting three squares. I'm talking about not having the money for the nice stuff that people think is really wonderful to have the houses, the boats, the cars. Yeah, I don't, I don't really buy. Yeah, I don't really care. And I care less and less because also the more financial success you have the more time you spend with people who have even greater financial success. And I've seen no indication. In fact, might even be a contra indication that wealth produces. Yeah, the things I'm after and I think there are significant adverse side effects. Well, there's a lot of research that shows that there is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff. It's by buying experiences. It's by buying time and by giving it away. And you already figured that one out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, quick example of that for me in the last handful of years, I owe Tim urban a huge thank you for his article tail end. I ended up booking most years depending on. my family's health and so on. Right. A family trip once a year that we can look forward to for like six months and have group chats about and so on. And then even today was discussing a boys trip with some of my closest friends. Right. Probably like six months for now. Right. And the ROI on those is huge. But I would say money, I can get rid of money. So we found your idol. Yeah. Pleasure. You're the fairest likes to feel good. I do. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's nothing wrong with feeling good. But for you, we need to watch to make sure that you're getting enjoyment and not pleasure. Yeah. And very disciplined about enjoyment, not pleasure. And I would also add to this that I do think I'm pleasure, Jackie, for certain things. Sure. The sensual, the sexual being very high on the list. There's also I think a wrinkle to this like the sort of Mara sitting on my shoulder if anybody goes the reference would be given a history of depression. Right. I fear it's opposite. Right. So I chase pleasure as hopefully some inoculation against darkness. So there are many things contributing to that. Yeah. Well, pleasure tends to be numbing. It does tend to be numbing of negative emotion. So people will pursue pleasure because they're actually trying to it's fentanyl. There's a reason that there's nobody who enjoys fentanyl because it's not something you like, I want to go hang out with my buddies and take fentanyl and make a memory on the country. Eviscerate memory. And trying to get rid of memory with these types of things. So numbing things tend to work that way. And I understand, I mean, you've actually had history of mood disorders in your life. And you don't want them. You don't want them back. You don't want to invite them back. And so you do something that feels like an inoculation from those depths. The key thing is that the real insurance policy is enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. That's the real insurance policy. Okay. Because it doesn't eradicate the unhappiness, the darkness, but it puts it into context such that it's part of the quilt of your life. And so it's just one square in the quilt of your life and not the whole blanket. Yeah. So I want to expand on this. This is thread selfishly that I'd like to pull out. No, you're, I will add maybe just one thought, which is much of the pleasure that I pursue is not numbing. It's actually a volume competition in the sense that if I start to feel like there are whispers of the potential of an onset of a depressive episode, or maybe it's the ruminative thoughts and anxiety that comes with that. But let's just say those are at a two out of ten volume. There's fear because I worry that that is going to spiral. And so I seek out something on the positive side of the ledger where let me just say the pleasure side of the ledger that is higher volume. Yeah. You're trying to knock yourself out of a groove. It's like overcoming a dread of deadness with greater aliveness. Right. What's one possible strategy? It could be a substitute strategy for that. That's why I'm here, doctor. Yeah. So, and there are. Right. There are meditation and prayer. A seeking for the divine, a serious spiritual practice. These are the things that will actually do much the same things, but without the numbing and without the danger. Because it's tricky, right? I mean, hitting the dopamine lever has consequences. Sure. hitting it hard and often has desperate consequences for it. None of us need problems in our lives. We have plenty of those already. Yeah, totally. So, yes. And let's just say, spare meditate, prayer, spare, spare prayer. Name of my fourth time in book. I like your prayer and sound of it. Meditation, I can see the difference. It's easy for say a secular listener to consider. Right. What would you say to people who are perhaps secular, not necessarily militant atheists, who I think recognizes I do. In some ways, I am deeply just a layer on my sins here, envious of people who have strong religious compassion. I recognize the value. And from a, at least in the sort of monotheistic, Judeo-Christian traditions, I don't think I'm likely to join one of the bands. I'll work on you. So I recognize we can go do some blood occlusion training and you can just say rosary together now. In between, right, in between reps. Lay the prayer on thick. So what would you suggest to me or someone who recognized the value? I don't, I do not have a counter-argument, but I'm not sure how to embrace that. So there are alternatives. So I, I can tell you, it's a Catholic that that's my thing, but I can tell you, it's a social scientist that it's not the only thing that will actually bring the same neurophysiological and psychological benefits. What we need is a sense of the transcendent that makes us small. That's what we need. Why? Because we need perspective and peace. I mean, Tim, you're going to go through all day. It's like my podcast and it's my commute and my money and my friends and my mom and my me, me. It's so, man, it's just so, it's like watching the same episode every single night of better call Saul for the rest of your life. That's like having the seagulls from finding Nemo in your head. Yeah. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine. I mean, it's just, it's the worst. And so you have to find a way to get peace. But what we really need is to put ourselves in perspective. Now most people are afraid to be little, are really afraid to be insignificant. Perspective requires that we see reality and we get smaller and we stand in awe of the universe and what it can bring. There's lots of ways to do that. Meditation practices are very good for that. Prayer is very good for that. Religion, and most traditional circumstances, very good for that. But walking in nature without devices before dawn for an hour is incredibly good for that. For all sorts of reasons. And this is extremely well-validated in the social science literature. How important is the timing on that? Well, it's good because you start the day that way and it's the programming of it. And by the way, the experience of seeing the sunrise is incredibly inspiring. Plus, it's quiet and cool. Yeah, all pluses. Quiet and cool, for sure. And therefore you get just a bigger bolus of, you know, the benefits that you actually get from being in contact with the earth and being in contact with nature, et cetera. Another way to do this is to stand in awe of human genius that's way outside the realm of your experience. So learn about the fugs of Johann Sebastian Bach, read about his life, your favorite. And listen to a hundred of his contadas and learn how to analyze them. I mean, your life will never be the same. Or your neighbor and our mutual friend Ryan Holliday, read the stomachs. Read the stomachs. I mean, it's a quasi-religious experience. You will feel a deep satisfaction at your littleness. For the first time in years, as a matter of fact, there are many ways to get this, but you need to get small in front of Bach, in front of Epic Titus, in front of God. You need to get small is the whole point. I love that. It's easy to remember, right? Get small. Right. They're just to underscore that for myself. I mean, a few things that have been helpful, right? Nature, yes. Yes. For sure. Studying or could take the form of listening to say hardcore history and listening to kings of kings, the Syrians and really widening the aperture of your historic lens, just to put the problems of this week in perspective and also the impermanence of empires. Maybe relevant these days. This is a moment in time. Yeah. So going back and realizing some of the most powerful figures in the history of humankind, you will not recognize. It also, I think for me, has been very relieving and also has taken a lot of the earlier fixation on money away because I realize it's just ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's a completely ecclesiastical thing. That's right. Give me the full name of Alexander the Great. Most people can't. So rather than get fixed on some vague notion of legacy, like let's actually focus on other things, the getting small, looking at the stars, honestly, I did so much as a kid and I lost it and have reclaimed as this thing that can be used as such a tool for zooming out. And I have two friends. Ed Cook is one notable example who, when he thinks of his problems, and I'm going to paraphrase this, but he will look at stars and sort of zoom out from his neighborhood himself to the planet to the solar system. And when he then returns back to laying on the ground looking at the stars, like the problems that we're plaguing you just do not seem, that's the point. So significant. That's really the point. It's not just a question of minimizing your problems. It's also minimizing the scale of your hopes and dreams and opportunities and recognizing that what really matters, you're in that to be sure, but you're one part of that. It's okay. It's all okay. The grade is just okay and the bad is okay too. And that's so deeply comforting and it leads to so many improvements in mental health. I just don't know how you can put one foot in front of the other without doing something like this every day. Now people often ask, okay, how do we get started? How do I get started? Read 15 minutes a day. Pick up the brother's K. Brother's Kaira Masov. Yeah, am I saying that probably not? Yeah, brother's Kaira Masov by Fjordor Dostoevsky. If you like fiction, stop wasting your time on trivialities, go get the brother's K. Why? Because there's a deeply awe-inspiring experience about the human condition and the absurdity of it. It's beautiful. Get the meditations of Marcus Al-Ralius. Who, by the way, a world historical figure because he was a Roman emperor. Nobody remembers practically a single thing that happened as Roman emperor. We remember what was written in his private diary. - It's wild. - It's crazy last of the great emperors, mostly because he was dumb enough to leave his son in charge, his waist roll. - That's like the story of, of humankind also. - Speaking with, I think I want to leave my business to my kids. What do you think, Tom? You know, there's a long conversation. - My kids are awesome. I wonder if I can get him into the happiness. - Dad, I know you're always beating us over the head on this happiness business. - It's not my path, I'm sure about it. - I roll. (laughing) So I'm curious for you personally, having thought about this deeply, having tracked a lot of things also, what are some of the best uses of money that you have found personally? What types of things? Are there any concrete examples that you can give? - We rolled through that fast just a second ago. But it turns out there's a ton of research on this. My colleague Mike Norton and my colleague's Mike Dorn and Ashley Willens at the Harvard Business School. They've done this exhaustive research on how to buy happiness. How to buy happiness, right? Okay. Mother Nature says, "Get more stuff." Why? Because satisfaction comes from having more. What's the strategy for life? More. Mother Nature tells you that she lies. Lies and lies and laughs at you. That's not the strategy. You need to buy enough, but no possession will do anything beyond bringing you out of misery. That's the reason that the studies, you know, the famous conuminent and deepened study from Princeton shows that happiness flattens out after $75,000 a year. And Matt Killing's worth at Penn actually rerun the data and finds it is higher, but it's still flattens out. - Inflation adjusted. - Yeah. - Inflation adjusted or your results may vary or whatever it is. But the whole point is you just don't get happier and happier and happier is millions. The reason, by the way, that we think that is an illusion that comes from our experience. Most people have less than they perceive that they need when they're young. And the result of it is that a lot of people, and a lot of people listening to us, they suffer a lack of meeting some basic needs. And when I was 19 to 25, I was too poor for six years to go to the dentist for six years. No, of course I don't think everyone would have a day without cigarettes. So I guess it was priorities. But the point is that when I was breakfast at champions, I was living in Washington Heights in those days. And when I was 25, I took a job in the Barcelona Orchestra and moved to Barcelona, I had benefits. I had bannies, man. And I went to the dentist and he filled ten cavities and I felt a lot better. I thought, "Money does buy happiness." No, no, no, no, no. Money lowers unhappiness when you move out of deprivation. That's it. And so what happens is I made the mental link between feeling, getting money and feeling better. And people do that and they chase that feeling for the rest of their life. Because you're doing sums in your head of well-being, as happiness and unhappiness and all that. You can't tell the difference when you're just rolling through your life. And early on you felt a lot better. That's all you know when you had more money. And so you want that feeling and you chase the feeling. You chase the high. You chase the early hits. It's like drugs, like any other drugs in this way. So that doesn't work. Yeah. There are three ways you can buy happiness according to Willins and Norton, my colleagues at HBS. You can buy experiences. This is critically important because what are experiences that will you buy happiness really haven't come in? Add money, which is sort of my pleasure, but the really important parts are the people in the memory. People in memory are always part of experiences. Okay. Now, sometimes you want to do things alone, but generally speaking, the greatest happiness comes because it enhances love in your life. The best way to improve love in your life, if you want your love life with your partner to get better, go away together. Go away together. That's always the best way to do it. Or stay home together, but turn off the phone. In other words, get an experience with a person in the middle. That's a great way to spend money because it will reliably, unless you waste it, do something stupid. Like, I'm going to have a bender in Vegas and then get blackout drunk and sitting in front of the slot machine. That's not the secret. But being prudent, you can actually buy happiness through experiences. That's number one. Number two, I'm going to ask you for personal examples, but yes. Yeah. Observe. Yeah, for sure. Buy time. Buy time. Use the time correctly. If you have the money and you're cutting your lawn and you don't like cutting your lawn, improve GDP, hire a guy. Now, a lot of Americans don't like to do that because they have this kind of this weird, reverse, classist sense. Well, let me tell you, there's a lot of people who are making more money than you cutting lawns and running a gardening service. Spread the love. Give somebody a job and then use the time correctly. Don't fritter away your time scrolling social media in the house in the air conditioning. Don't know. Use the time specifically for something, ideally with somebody doing something that you enjoy and that will truly buy happiness. And last but not least, give your money away to somebody who needs it, who deserves it, and a cause that truly inspires you, something you really, really believe in. I've studied philanthropy long before I studied happiness. I was an academic beavering away and obscurity writing books on charity and philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. And the reason I initially got into happiness in the first place besides wanting to be happy was that I found that the more people gave the happier they got. So we don't have to tread into these waters, but I think it would be very helpful for people and I'm very curious. I'm happy to reciprocate also. Where have you landed for where to give your own money? I give money to things that I really care about that I think have an impact on people's lives in a big way. And a lot of what I do is I give to education to people who are at the margins of society. So I give a lot to primary and secondary education specifically to Catholic primary and secondary education because I think it is really, really well done. And it's an option that a lot of people don't have access to because it costs money. So a lot of what I do, probably 75% what I give away and I give away 10% of my income. So I do. Yeah, because it's not that hard to do. You just have to pay attention to it. And then there's structures. You get a charitable giving account. Do you think of that as a tie? Or yeah, I do think it was a tie that I really think of it as a privilege. I think of it a lot less as a duty and a lot more as a privilege of my wife and I we just look forward to it. And then we have a process in our family of, you know, should we give money to this? Or give money to that? Usually we give something kind of a big bolus one year and then in the smaller gifts to things that are ongoing sources of support that we really believe in. How do you decide what to give to? Well, we know the people and we do the work. So it's not just anybody. We get a letter in the mail and we respond to the big check. It's like, huh, seems worthy. No, we actually do the work. Part of it is to like teach one of the classes I teach at Harvard is on nonprofit management. And so I have a kind of a strong background and, you know, whether it's a reputable cause and what to look for into measuring the effectiveness of an organization. So I do the work. I do the background work. I see what kind of overhead rates that they're using, how they're using their money. A lot has to do with if I like the mission. Sometimes if it's going to be a substantial amount of money, I get to know the people and the organization. And it has to be something that I think is going to change people's lives for the better. Now, I've actually changed my view on this a little bit because early on, we'd write a lot of little checks, lots and lots and lots of little checks to great organizations. And then I found that you can have a lot more effect on your own well-being. And again, this is kind of selfish, but in your own well-being, by concentrating on turning the whole dial in one person's life. And there's an old Talmudic phrase from the book of Sanhedrin that says, "In every man is the whole world." In other words, turn the dial for one person who turned the dial for all of humanity because this is really had an impact. So I remember telling my wife about that. I was like, "Yeah, I think I've got these data." Then when you really help one person instead of a little bit for a lot, really anonymously, you can get all these benefits. She's like, "This is years ago." This is maybe 20 years ago now. She's like, "Why don't we adopt a baby?" And I'm like, "It's only a buck, man." But we did. We actually did. It was totally life-changing. So that's how you give. You got to do the work and think about it and put your heart into it. Could you say more about that? How did she come to the adoption? My wife. Yeah, how did she come to it? Because I was saying, you get a lot more benefits when you turn the whole dial on one person's life as opposed to just, you know, sprinkling this for $1,000. Yeah, she's like that. She's basically like, "Okay, buddy, you really? Really?" I was like, "I know. You got this interesting research. You know, fancy social scientists guy, let's see." Should we put our money where our mouth is? And by the way, she had also been having dreams about a little girl who was abandoned. Well, dreams and dreams and dreams at night. If you're able to, can you tell me more about your wife and how you guys met? Because I know a little bit of the background, but how did that happen since I am back on the playing field? You're back on the playing field, too. One of the things that I teach my students at HBS is that I would never invest in the firm of an entrepreneur who is unwilling to give her or his heart away. Because as the single, most risky entrepreneurial thing that you can do, putting every bit of capital at risk. If you're not willing to give your heart away, I'm not going to put my money in your fund. Now, and that takes the form of risk, man, loving someone wholeheartedly, giving your heart away. Okay. Giving your heart away. And the reason I believe this is because I've always had this sense that part of the journey of life is just like getting in it, getting in it. And entrepreneurs talk a lot about putting capital at risk and talking about money, how boring. The real capital of the enterprise, the startup of Tim Ferriss's life. Is this the ultimate enterprise? I mean, the enterprise is not the podcast and the books and the company and that's not it. Those are manifestations of Tim Ferriss' ink of you. The enterprise is you and the currency of you is not money. It's love and happiness. That's your currency. So how are you going to put that at risk for explosive, tectonic, inflectic? returns. What are you going to do to put it at risk? That's the question, right? Yeah. The answers are really tricky, but the one answer that's not right is don't put it at risk. Don't put it at risk. Right. So I'm with you. Now there are myriad ways that if you were to sort of take off your flat jacket and just walk into the oncoming traffic with like emotional oncoming traffic with someone who you've been on a dating app who you meet within five minutes in their kuku bananas, that could turn out poorly. Of course, that's just megas. That's not entrepreneurship. That's just gambling. Right. So how well first I want to hear you. So this gets back to the issue it had. And the reason I did that little prelude is because I don't want anybody to think that my screws are too loose. That's not not my goal. Yeah. That's not my goal. I'm not insanity. So okay. So I'm in the same man on the bod. Yes. Deeply unbalanced guest joins Tim Ferris. So when I was 24 years old, I was on a concert tour. And I was making my living as a classical French horn player. I was on a concert tour in the burgundy region of France. I'm going from town to town, playing concerts. And I was staying at this school. I don't know. It's just where we were housed during this. You know, we were going out from there. And at the same time, there was a music festival going on. And there were musicians from all over Europe that were studying at this music festival. And I was at this concert playing at this very school and playing, you know, playing my horn, looking out at the audience. And there was this girl smiling at me in the front row. Beautiful girl smiling at me. Just gorgeous. And I'm, you know, I'm a red blooded 24-year-old dude. And I'm like, obviously, I'm going to make a mental note to go talk to her. You know, so I go to talk to her later. And I find out two things. Number one, she's not French. You know, I was in France. And number two, that she doesn't speak a single word of English. And it was hard because you know, I was trying to talk to her in, you know, monosyllabic grunts and the fruitless search for cognates. And I said, are you single? I mean, this is like this basic. Are you single? And she says, yes, I'm divorced. I'm like, I'm not down with that. But what she meant was I just broke up with my boyfriend. But she couldn't come up with any Latin-based words besides divorce, which actually comes from Latin to try to get me to understand this point anyway. So it was a comedy of errors. And we went out to dinner and we went on some dates. And I left after a week and I went home and I called my dad and see out. I grew up in Seattle. And I was living in New York at the time. I said, Dad, I think I met the girl I'm going to marry. And where was she from? Barcelona. Mm-hmm. Barcelona. And he said, great. Let's meet her. And I said, I got problems. Problem number one is that she doesn't live in the United States. Problem number two, she doesn't speak a word of English. Problem number three is that she made me aware that she doesn't believe in marriage because she thinks it's an anachronistic institution and she's never going to get married. It's a hell of a, yeah. It's a concept to communicate in Tarzanis. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, we're together for a week. You know, you got there. We got there. And I couldn't get out of my head. It was like our lady of Guadalupe kind of. And I thought about it. I thought about it. We exchanged letters and weirdly somehow talked on the phone. She started taking English classes. I started studying Spanish. Who knows? I'll see you. I traveled to Barcelona. So her, she came to New York, and visited me just a little bit here and there. And what I didn't tell her is that I had quit my job in New York and I'd won an audition to be a member of the symphony in Barcelona because I wanted to go see if I could close that deal. If I could change her philosophy of marriage. It took me two years, but I closed the deal. And 32 years later, we have three adult kids and one grandson and I'm still in love. So how did you, how did you end up debate teaming that? I'm just curious like how did I just wore it out. You just wore it out. So, you know, we were, you know, as I was living in Barcelona, and she was in love with me. And so she's not like, get out. It's not like I was some weird stalker. She really wasn't in love with me. Right. And she wanted to be with me. But, you know, nobody in her family was married. I mean, this is not what you do in Barcelona. I didn't really say that. Because I mean, it's like a big Catholic country. It's a post-Christian country. Three percent of the population of Barcelona ever goes to mass. Three percent. I never would have guessed that. And then Marley and Mediterranean. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody does for sure. I mean, but, but, you know, there has a long tradition. She comes from a hard, red communist atheist family. So suffice it to say that our background is a little bit different. I mean, I, again, she was beautiful and smart, funny, and I was in love. Yeah. And it just, love will out. Love will out. And it finally, at the end of two years, I just finally, I said, I got that on one knee and I said, you ready to change your mind? She said, yes. All right. So, once again, NV is showed. It's ugly head. And I have to admit, my French horn game, very weak. Very weak. Turns out the French horn was the least. Tight pants. Tight pants. Big guns. In those days, I'm stuck to two and a hundred and forty two pounds. My wife said that it was like, hugging a tight sack of rocks. Now she says it's like a loose leather bag of ropes. So, you know, I've made some progress. Hey, yeah. Is that progress? It sounds like progress. Maybe that should be on my dating profile. If you hug me, I feel like maybe not makes that's a little too small. It's a little landspiding under a blanket. I don't know. And maybe you're so far removed that this doesn't make sense to ask, but what advice also you're coming from a different orientation with the Catholicism than I assume maybe wrongly, but I imagine your wife, not hers. Right now she fully abored the Catholic way. But that took a long time. Word down. Right. It took a lot of prayer. As they say, this is one of those problems that requires prayer and fasting. So you pray and she fasted. You're like, no food. They will put the rest of your eyes on it's wrist. Thoughts on how to find a partner. Yeah. No, I think about this an awful lot because this is the number one topic in my science of happiness class that HBS that they want to know about. It's got to be. It's got to be. Oh, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. Because you know, not only is it something that we all want that everybody wants, it's something that's getting harder. Yeah. All the traditional scaffolding is gone. Unless you perhaps you're part of say Jewish community where yeah, that type of yenta like matchmaking is a very esteemed. Yeah. But even then the modern world is encroaching on that. And you know, if you look at the comparison between in the 80s when I was in my 20s or the 90s when you were in your 20s, sorry, I didn't mean to shock you with that. Yeah, I know. It's much, much, much harder. I have the ring of Frodo. So I'm not planning on aging anymore from this point forward. Side note, you should look at photos of him now and 20 years ago. They're the same. The actor. Anyway, yeah, not me though. I mean, I was in the arsenal of symphony. I had this hair. It was like a great civilization. It's like the locks of Samson. I was unbelievable. And so, you know, then I start going bald and getting more and more bald. My brother, my older brother, he's very judgmental about these funny loves me. But he says you deserve it because of the life you've led. Oh, it's just a lot of DHT man. Anyway, so what are the guardrails? What are the mistakes that we make? What's actually making it harder? And there's a lot of things that go into it. The fact that we're using tech where we would have used humans is deeply problematic. The fact that we have so much deal flow is making it harder. The paradox of choice is a real thing. Better, better, better, better. Better. I mean, there's a ton of research on this, by the way. I mean, you've seen some of this research, for example, on car purchases where you give two groups. There's a treatment and control social science experiments, two groups, different car buying experiences. For the first, buys their car and there's no refund and there's no returns. And the other side can return it for any reason in the next six months. And the first group is much happier with their car because they're not thinking about it again and again and again. There's no more swiping on the car purchase. And so the same thing is when it's very easy to have a lot of selection, it gets much, much harder to attain satisfaction. You also exhaust it more easily because of the decision fatigue. Yeah, I mean, I can take your word for it. But I mean, that's certainly true. That's in the data. I would say outside of dating. Yeah, just in general. Yeah, right. But the bigger problem actually comes because we're looking for the wrong thing and a partner. The data suggests that what everybody wants in a partner that they can curate carefully because of the online presence, because of the platforms is they want compatibility. And they look for compatibility with sameness to them. I like this kind of food. You do too. Great. I vote like this. You do too. Great. On this religion or on the on no religion. I grew up here. I went to college. Where did you go to college, etc. They're not looking for someone who doesn't speak their language. They're looking for a sibling. And as my adult kids would say, that's not hot. The truth is we're way too compatible and we're sorting on compatibility with these technological means. And the biggest problem with dating today is we're less and less attracted to people. We're less and less attracted because they're too much like us. We need more complementarity and less compatibility. That can be all days. You say opposites attract. Not true. But you need a baseline of compatibility. But on top of that, you need difference. Differences. Hot. Differences. Fun. Differences in adventure. And you're just not going to find it because nobody's going to swipe on you. Quite frankly, if you're the other party, a lot of people curate on language and culture and race. It's insanity. That's the reason that good old fashioned human people who say they could fall in love. We need to talk about people who fix you up on a blind date or the old fashioned matchmakers. They're always looking about complementarity. This introvert and this extrovert can fill in the gaps in each other in a kind of a divine and cosmic way. That's how I always kind of felt. I felt like my wife was, you know, I don't believe in magical thinking on this. A magical thinking is a big problem because soulmates don't exist and there's no such thing as love at first sight. But I always do feel like my wife Esther was, she was picked for me. She was really picked for me. And because of the difference as much as anything else, I mean, she completes me. She makes me a better man. She knows when I'm going after the idol. She knows she can see it. Going after the Lord. She can see it. She's like, "Mm." Right? And that's 32 years of experience together. But it's also the deep complementarity that came to me because I was born in a particular time. And I accidentally had this kind of experience. And that's what we need. That's number one. This is clear. The second thing is goals. You know, when I ask people, you know, you're going to meet the person of your dreams or the good enough person or whatever. What do you want to have after five years? The good enough person. Two pairs of God. Two. The good enough life. Two passable relationships. Wife me up with someone good enough, man. Anyway, so yeah, I know. Because by the way, they're coming records. They're art. I don't know, man. I'm in a complementarity. Yeah, maybe. It's like you've been in prison. I haven't. We completely, surely, whatever I've been trying, isn't working. Maybe I'll skip Barcelona and do the prison circuit. All right. Yeah. But when you ask people, what do you want your relationship to look like in five years, they have kind of this magical notion of an ongoing passion. And that's the wrong goal. The right goal is what is called companion love. You want to be best friends in five years. Five years to best friends. That's the goal. And if you're righted out and if you actually make it the goal and then you have interim steps in a strategic plan, you might just get there. But if you're like, yeah, no, it's like if the magic feels like the magic's gone, obviously there's something wrong with it. I love, no, best friends who were married, they're going to have plenty of passion, but you can't live like that. Look, the neurophysiological cascade of the experience of falling in love is unbelievably intense. It's fourth of July in your head, the bolus of testosterone and estrogen at the very beginning of the relationship, massive increases in neuroponephrine and dopamine that give you euphoria and concentration and focus on the other person, the deep dip and serotonin. Your serotonin dips. Why? Because you want to ruminate on that person using the good old ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's the reason that falling in love isn't off a lot, like being clinically depressed. So you're both addicted to meth and depressed at the same time. That's what falling in love is like. And then you're going to get that big dose of oxytocin, which is the neuropeptide that links you to the other person in this almost magical, confusing way. Man, that's just too much. You don't want that for the rest of your life. Sounds like a lot. Well, you'll be institutionalized. All right. Let's pause there for a second. That was a lot. It was a lot. I want to go. I want to go from falling in love as metham depression to the lightness of death. And we haven't even talked about meaning yet, man. We're going to get there. We'll get there by the nine-thousand. Yeah, I'm keeping track. I'm having a bookmarked. Also, I have promised I made to listeners that I have not fulfilled, which is your personal examples for using money, for experiences, time, whatever comes to mind. So we'll get to that. But before that, death meditation. Could you please describe your death meditation and why you have the death meditation? Most people watching us are not afraid of death. Not pathologically afraid of death. Only about 20% of the population is pathologically afraid of death. And I bet you that it's less than 1% of Tim Ferriss followers. Because people watching this are in control of their lives, and they understand the contours of their lives, and they're looking at the truth of their lives. But they have a death fear. The death fear isn't physical death. And this is a problem. For some people, it's irrelevant, or some people is being forgotten. For a lot of your listeners, it's failure. Just straight on failure. Because they're strivers. They're achievers. Everybody has a death fear. What is it? It's an ego threat. It's a threat to who you see as yourself. If Tim Ferriss's Tim Ferrissness is threatened, that will provoke a panic in you. Because that's the ultimate death of who you see yourself. The way to get over that, and by the way, you have to get over that. We all have to get over that, or we won't be fully alive until we actually face the death that really matters to us. This is an insight that actually comes from the Theravada Buddhist across the southern tier of Asia, from Thailand and Myanmar to Vietnam and parts of Malaysia, and the Theravada, and Sri Lanka in particular. So the Theravada Buddhist monastery is often you'll go in and you'll see photos of cadavers in different states of decomposition. It's super, super macabre. I mean, you're like, what are these dudes all about here? And what they do is that usually there will be nine, nine states of decomposition, photos, bodies, decomposing, falling apart, bones, bloated corpses, and they stand in front of each one and they say, "That is me." And then they move to the next one after contemplating and saying, "And that is me." And what are they doing? They're familiarizing themselves with the truth of their future, such that they can be liberated from any fear of physical death. Only then can they be fully alive. That's an important insight from Theravada Buddhism. That's a meditation called Maranasati, the Maranasati death meditation. Now, when I read that, I thought it was interesting, but I thought it's a good thing to do because I shouldn't be making all of these decisions about when I'm old, when I'm retired, and when I die, and what's going to happen, and call the lawyer, and all that. I want to be free from all that stuff by understanding that life and death are in a very real way, in illusion, particularly because I believe in eternal life, but I have a death here. Oh yeah. You know what I'm afraid of? You know my death here? Who's going to take care of your cats? No, I don't know. That's good, man. Who's going to take care of my dog? Choo-choo. Sluising my mind on the way there. Yeah, because you know what Arthur Brooks is? Gray matter. Look, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I'm not a cleverest guy in the world, but I make my living and I support my family and I understand me in terms of my ideas. Literally, my company is called ACB Ideas. It was very revealing to me when I contemplated the fact that I could do say ACB. Yeah, it's my Arthur Charles Prox. Oh, okay, take me a second. I just can't remember the alphabet. Little is like, sick. It's like, XZY. So I'm Long Island. Sorry, guys. And my mother was showing signs of dementia in her early 50s. And she was quite demented by the time she was my age and it runs in families. It's genetic. And it doesn't mean I'm going to get the bullet. It doesn't mean I'm not being morbid about it. I'm not being fatalistic about it. Probably the answer in my favor, but I'm just terrified of that. And when I recognize that, I realized I need a Mernace-Atee meditation on that. And that's what I contemplate. I'll take two minutes and I'll think my memory is failing and I don't know why. And then I imagine going to the neurologist, the neurologist saying, "Well, I think you need to come into my office." And then I imagine myself telling my kids the future is going to be rough. And then I imagine my work slipping away, my inability to have this kind of conversation, to write a book, to share an idea, to help somebody with these ideas. And then I imagine myself not remembering what I don't remember. And then I imagine being a beloved son of God with no memory at all. Now, it's heavy, right? It seems like that ending point is important. It's the most important because you end on the truth. So if you're not religious, you just end up to use the parlance of the kids these days. Just depressed AF. I mean, are you just. No. Should I have luck? No. Okay. Because in the end of the day, in the Maranissahti meditation, you recognize the illusion of the tragedy that was your death in the first place. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. New life will emerge. Will it be you? Will it be somebody else? Do you care? See, when you look into the abyss, you can cope with it. You're stronger than that. My students, by the way, at Harvard, graduate students, Harvard Business School, best in the world. So we like to think. They're afraid of failure because they've never failed. They've never failed. I mean, you and I have struggled and we're older and, you know, I've failed a lot. But my students are deeply afraid of failure. I mean, I basically got kicked out of college when I was 19. It turns out you're not supposed to drop all your required classes and take nothing but Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming. Turns out, that's not the secret to academic success. Kids, you know, make a note of it. So I failed, right? But a lot of my students haven't. And so I asked them to do the Maranissahti meditation on their own academic and professional failure. Or one, two minutes. I think I'm falling behind academically. And the people around me are getting better grades. Two, I just got put on academic probation. This was my dream to come to this school and I'm not succeeding. Three, the job market is looking bad compared to other people. I can't believe it. Four, I think I need to move home for a while. Five, my parents feel sorry for me. That's when they cry. Right? Because all you want is for mom to be proud of you. That's all you want when you're a success addict. That's all you want. And imagine that. Look into that. Stay into it. and they do and they get over it and they can master it. That's the Mara Nassati death meditation on the self-objectification of the success addicts. So what do you see in those students because they come from all different backgrounds and different orientations, religious or not or somewhere in between? Some are some aren't. Yeah. What types of effects and how frequently do you personally do this type of death meditation? A lot. Because I have my own death meditation. I contemplate failure sometimes because I'm afraid of it, but I'm not deathly afraid of it. The truth of the matter is the great thing about being 46 as opposed to 26 for you, the great thing about being 59s that are 29 for me is that bad stuff is going to happen and it's going to be okay. Bad stuff is just going to happen, right? I mean, the truth is that we realize you and I both realize that the worst thing that's ever happened in life probably hasn't happened yet. [laughter] And okay, that's heavy, but it's not that heavy. We're going to survive. You've survived a lot and that's actually going to be okay. I don't want to fail. I've always got, you know, we have a book coming out. I have a big book coming out a few weeks from when we're taping this episode. And I deeply wanted to be successful, but I can't control that. And so I don't have to do much more than a couple of Marnasati and meditations on the market failure of a book. But I have to do it about losing my mind because that feels deeply existential to me. I have to do it a lot. I do it at least once a week, actually, because I want to remember. I need to remember. And if I don't, I'm going to be walking kind of on egg shells and just sort of wondering and having that kind of minor sense of dread. I don't want to live that way. I don't need to live that way. It's not important for me to live that way on the contrary. It's important for me not to live that way because I won't be fully alive now. I'll be living prospectively in a future and that future is dominated by fear and then I'm really not washing the dishes. I'm really not enjoying that juicy peach. On the contrary, I'm breaking my teeth on the pit. And it's not even a real pit. That's crazy. This is not yet really yet. Yeah. This is, I think, is a good tie-in to meaning. And I'm going to get there with a self-indulgent reference back to Marcus Aurelius for people who have not read meditations, read meditations. It was never intended for publication. Really? These are effectively the pocket musings of someone deeply conflicted but also incredibly impressive during war campaigns and otherwise. But lots of thoughts on death. And also for those interested, there's a. It's considered a stoic practice that exists in a lot of different varieties. But memento mori, there are these meditations, pre-meditatium malorum, which. It's the Greek mernusati for all the tests and purposes. Exactly. Or rumus. Exactly. And all he also thought very deeply on meaning, let's come to meaning. So we identified two, I guess, of the legs on the stool. On the stool. What? Meaning. How should we think about meaning? Meaning is a hard one. I mean, look. I mean, enjoyment is no joke and satisfaction takes work. But meaning eludes some people their entire lives. Because they don't know what they're looking for. They're fumbling around for something. They don't know exactly what it is. And a lot of people, they deeply suspect that it doesn't exist. And you look at a lot of 20th century and 19th century philosophers, and they say it doesn't exist. I mean, there's sort of three schools of thought about meaning. There's the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. It's all kind of based on meaning in the following way. Essence precedes existence. Meaning, you have meaning in life that precedes your actual life. And your job is to find it and live up to it. But it's already out there. You just need to go looking for it. In the 19th and 20th centuries, that was relaxed with two major schools of philosophical thought, nihilism and existentialism. Existentialism, you know, sartre, and even to a certain extent, Kirkagard would say that existence precedes essence. In other words, you're born and there is no meaning until you create it. Tabula Russa. Good luck. Good luck. Go go make it. And if it's no good, it's on you, man. And by the way, sartre, he has a very empowering, very muscular philosophy because he says, you have to live up to the responsibility of creating your essence and living according to it. It's sort of Freudian in his way. And then there's of course, there's Nietzsche, our old pal Friedrich. You know, a lot of young men love Nietzsche because, by the way, it's unbelievably beautiful prose. Gorgeous writer, including in English. You don't have to go learn German to read it. But you know, the gay science, which is one of his most famous texts where he said God is dead. And we killed him. It lands, right? But his whole point is existence is real, but essence is a figment of your imagination. So don't even try to find it. That's nihilism. We're struggling with these schools of thought. And we all suspect, it doesn't matter how religious you are, you know, it doesn't matter what your wiring actually happens to be. You kind of wonder if maybe Nietzsche and Sartre were right. So you go and search of it. And it turns out I want to go find a meeting of life is too big a question. You'll never find it by sitting at the mouth of the guru's cave or with the Ayahuasca shaman saying, "I just want to find meaning in life." You need to boil it down to really sub-questions, which are all about coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? I need to believe something about why things happen the way they do. It doesn't have to be religious. It can be completely secular. It might even be nihilistic. You need to purpose, you need to answer a purpose question, which is what's the purpose of my life and what direction am I going? What's the goal of my life? What's the end point of my life? And it lasts as significance, which is, why does it matter that I'm alive? Now I have a test to see if somebody has a meaning in crisis in their life. That's really just two questions. And to pass the test, you need incredibly true, honest, and compelling answers. There's no right answers. There's only wrong answers or no answers. So you want to take the test? Sure, why not? Let's go time. [laughter] Question number one. This is punish me for all that I wascaved of. Go for it. I didn't say this. There's something wrong with it. I just said that. [laughter] What do we say? It's necessary, but not sufficient. We just like cat and nine tell that. I don't know if it's day myself. I left it back at the hotel. Yeah. Damn. [laughter] Why are you alive? Do you have an answer to the question of why you're alive? I mean, I have a very clinical answer for you. Tell me. Well, I mean, there's the physical answer, but metaphysically, why are you alive? Which can be one of two things. Either who created you or what you're put on earth to do. You can answer that in one of two ways. Do you have a strong belief in why you're alive? I have a strong driver for taking advantage of the fact that I am alive, but I don't have a story of a creator or something along those lines. Or a strong purpose. It can be a creator or a purpose. I do feel like I have a strong purpose, but it doesn't relate to my birth. That's okay. You know, the why of your life. You know, our mutual friend Simon Sinek talks about this. You know, start with why. And the why of your life can be because of a creation. Or it can be because I exist to, you know, lift other people up and ring them together in bonds of happiness and love. Which by the way, is the why of my life. So that's number one. If it's there, but it's in co-ate, it's not quite clear enough. Find out the answer to that and write it down. And then perfect it over a six month period. Yeah, I would say that for me, I mean, it's looking at and experiencing things in unorthodox ways so that I can teach. And why do you want to teach? Mostly to alleviate suffering. Yeah. In other words, you want to lighten the load for other people. Yeah. And so in other words, you want to serve your sisters and brothers. Is that fair? Yeah, sure. Okay. That's a great why. That's a great way. That's a great answer to the first question why are you alive? Yeah, I don't feel conflicted about that. Okay. So the second one's harder. For what would you be willing to die today? I don't have a ready answer. It's a hard one. It's a hard one. I'll be able to tell you. What's your answer? A lot of people don't. For my faith, for my family, for my country and for you. I'm willing to die for others. That's the answer. I mean, I probably won't be called to it, but I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually willing to do it. And here's how I, I learn this from my son. I learn this actually from my son. I mean, I have theoretical answers that are politically correct in the Catholic sphere. I would die for the Catholic Church. I would die for my faith. These things are true, by the way. I really would. But it's too packed. Here's how I learn this from my son. I have three kids. 25, 23, and 20. And my middle son is named Carlos. And Carlos is, he's a kinetic boy. He's a fan of yours. He's probably watching us right now. Oh, yeah, he's going to talk about me right now. So Carlos, sorry, Carlos. And you know, Carlos was having a good old time in high school. We had substantial grade problems and academic issues. And my wife's like, at least we know he's not cheating. But the problem was, he wasn't really having fun. I think it was a meaning problem. And in search of the answers to the questions after high school, he really became an entrepreneur with his life. And you know, we have, I asked my kids to do a business plan on their high school because they're entrepreneurs. And I'm VC. I'm an investor. I deserve a business plan. And when they're not, when they weren't original, I'd send them back for religion to think of dead. Yeah. And I just really fun to be on my son. So Carlos's business plan for his life was by the time it went through several rounds of revisions was appropriately in Orthodox. He was going to go work on a farm by himself and find the answers to the questions. Work hard. And so he actually got a job on a wheat farm. an Idaho. A real job. Not some sort of, you know, hobby farm. No, no, no, it was a 8,000 acre working wheat farm. He lived in the farmer's basement for the first year. He picked rocks out of the soil. He started at the bottom, made minimum wage, fixed fences, cut down dead trees, ran a combine by himself 16 hours a day. Why did he choose this? How would he explain it? Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks away from his family away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were in co-aid. They were like, "Why am I live? I don't know. Maybe I'll find it in the cab of a combine. Maybe I'll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil and they'll find it by doing something hard with my hands." Then he joined the military. There's 19 years old, he joined the Marine Corps. And bootcamp is no walk in the park for the US Marine Corps as we've all heard. But then it got harder from there. He did infantry training battalion and the in dock for the Scout sniper platoon, which is a branch of the special forces and the Marines. Today, he's Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines 3, 5 Scout sniper platoon. And he's got answers. Now, that's a scary job from him, his mom. He goes on field trips, right? Field trips. And thank God, nothing's happened to him. He's getting out of the military in December of this year. But he's got answers. What types of answers? I mean, I don't know what you do. Here's his answers. Tell you his answers. Carlos, why are you alive? Because God made me. For what are you willing to die? For my faith and for my family and for my friends and for the United States of America? Boom. These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give. But these are super solid answers. I'm super proud of my son because he earned the answers to his meaning questions. But everybody watching us has got to earn it. Everybody who's watching us has got to go on a quest, a vision quest for the answers to the meaning questions. There's no other way to do it. Your dad can't tell you. Your priest can't tell you. The holy books can give you inklings. They can give you shadows on the cave wall to get back to the old playtonic metaphor. You need to live and to try things and to go through a process of discernment. And the way to do that is to do hard things is to challenge yourself and to say to yourself, I will not stop until I have answers to these questions to my own satisfaction. So hearing you describe Carlos's experience like Carlos. And congratulations on the trajectory. He's like, "Yeah, my dad embarrassed me, but that's not true." He said, "Hide me on his podcast." It's all good. It is not easy. I have some friends who are formerly Marine Force Recon. That is not an easy path. No, it is not of that is easy. Yeah. I think I was over processing the for what would you be willing to die tomorrow. I think it was the tomorrow piece that I fixated on. So family. You would answer family. Yeah, family and close friends. I can give that answer. I was thinking of it more hypothetically as a for what happening in the world would you be willing to basically off your self tomorrow? Is there an idea for which you're willing to die? Is there a truth? Because this is really where it gets super intense. Yeah, that's where it gets. Yeah. When Carlos says, "I am willing to die for my faith. I am willing to die for the United States of America," which for him is an ideal of liberty. He's, by the way, for those of you outside the United States, he's willing to die for our allies too. You know? Dying for an idea, that's super heavy. I mean, that's like pure grade meaning because people are going to say, "Are you kidding me? Are you nuts?" This is not "I'm willing to kill for an idea." That's like, you know, that's kindergarten stuff. That's kindergarten stuff. Now, I'm willing to die for something. I'm willing to give my own life. I'm willing to take yours. Yeah. You and every other half baked dark triad malignant narcissist, cancel culture, trait, psychopath. You're talking to me for like a nut. I was like, "I'm getting it all the sudden." Arthur works out really abusive on my pocket. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, tell my love you. I was willing to be a negative moment. That you're a beautiful man. But I mean, come on. I mean, everybody around the world is willing to kill for what they think or cancel or hurt people when they think, but the real question is, are you willing to sacrifice what you have for an idea? That's, that's really hard. Yeah, I'm not sure. That's a tough one for me to answer. I think also thinking about what you're willing to die for. Let me personalize it. Thinking about what I'm willing to die for. I also want to be very aware if there are things I would be willing to die for that could be manipulated to make me do things that I might not currently be morally aligned. Totally. Totally. So for sure. I think the allegiance, I get it. It needs to be very, or for me, I want to be aware of their things. Like for instance, faith has been manipulated by politicians. So has patriotism, of course, my goodness. Right. I mean, a lot of people listening say, you die for the United States of America, you're crazy, which is not to say that it's wrong. It's just very context dependent. Very context dependent. It requires a lot of updating and serious thought and it's not good enough to just be sort of raw, raw, raw, I'm taking it to face value. It takes serious discernment. So we have the why were you born or for what? Why are you alive? What would you be willing to die for? Yeah. Got any more? Those are the ones. I mean, what those do is that they really kind of wrap up coherence, purpose, and significance into two kind of handy, dandy questions. And the point is really this. I mean, it's easy for me to frame that up is, you know, once you find those, you're all good to go. All right. But the truth is you're going to go through the rest of your life contemplating these things. And these are the questions to ask on your birthday. Are these still the things that I believe have I updated my knowledge? Do I have a better sense of who I am? Have I gone backwards a little bit? Have I lost this sense of what I'm willing to die for? Do I need to go a little deeper at this point and touching up on those questions? Turns out to be really good. It's sort of the same thing when you go to the doctor and they do the same tests again and again and again and again. I have a series of tests that I do are these questions that I ask myself like that, you know, about the reverse bucket list and the meaning questions and am I pursuing my pleasures socially and making memory with my prefrontal cortex? I also have, by the way, a spreadsheet of 19 micronutrients that feed into my macronutrients and I grade myself on tenths of 1% and a 1 to 10 scale weighted with respect to what I've what my best estimate of my well-being. And when I'm going backwards on those things, I said a strategic plan for my year. So I'm, you know, I know. I'm getting crazy about the minute, right? I'm into it. I encourage it. I want to pour gasoline on the fire. Let's do it, man. So we already talked about death meditation. We talked about your experience in Mexico and in building life you want. Obviously, we're not going to go into all the micronutrients of each of the legs on the stool per se, but I'm curious whether it's meaning or one of the others, maybe meaning, but doesn't have to be. Could you give some examples of some of those, I don't say antecedents, but micronutrients, the cast of characters and ingredients that are important for sort of healthy functioning for sure. For sure. And, you know, you can break them up and it is very agitated ways you want. You can make 20,000 of them, but really there's four that we should be thinking about. So there's four fundamental micronutrients that I make it more varied than that. I've got 19 because because they're really about love and relationships. That's really what it's all about. And the big four are your search for the divine or your spiritual journey or your philosophical, you know, your faith, whatever that happens to be, religious or not, your love for something bigger than you so you can stand it off. It's your family relationships. This is the most mystical kinds of love that we get because we didn't choose the loves that were chosen for us. And sometimes we're like, yeah, I wouldn't have chosen that. Friendship, you know, and friendship when I'm talking about that, I talk a lot about loneliness because especially strivers, hardworking people, a lot of people watching us, they're, they have a lot of people around them, but what they have is deal friends, but not real friends. Your deal friends are super useful to you. Your real friends are useless, cosmically, beautifully useless. And so I go into a lot of detail with my students about how to build useless friendships. Not worthless. That's different. I've got those two. And last but not least, it's loving everybody's expressed through your work. And that means serving others with your work, your work should be a service profession no matter what you're doing. And so faith, family, friends, and work. And then there's, you know, we branch out from there, you know, and I'm talking about family. I'm talking about different branches of family that I'm trying to make sure I'm working on. When I'm talking about, you know, my marriage is critically important. It gets one of the absolute highest scores and importance, not always in terms of quality because I'm not the best husband, but in terms of importance for sure. And that's because that's the apex of two of those columns, both family and friendship. My best friend and also the adopted member of my family is my wife. And so therefore my marriage is really at the top of those two pillars. And so I'm thinking about that a lot. So I break it up into subcategories, but they all go into those silos of faith, family, friends, and work. Work this serves. Work this meaningful. Right? Earn my success. And then I say, okay, well, you know, what does it mean to earn my success? What does it mean to serve others? How do I know? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When I start, you know, getting down to brass tax, I start putting numbers on it and the numbers aren't, I'm going backwards in a particular year. I do it my birthday and my off birthday, by the way, your off birthday. Yeah, yeah, my six month birthday. November 21st. Got it. My birthday is May 21st. Yeah, the last 20 years. You got the Thanksgiving week. Yeah, I've got Thanksgiving week. And so it gives me, you know, a chance to actually think about these things in some detail to be sure. And then I've got it, you know, I've got the data going back to about the year 1999. I've got it going forward. And this system has gotten better along the way and change. What are the most important changes you've made to the system? Would you say? Yeah, the most important change, the single most important change I made of the system. was the recognition that I knew a lot about happiness, but wasn't happy because I was studying it, but I wasn't doing it. The biggest change to the system was using my knowledge to change my habits. That was number one, far and away. Right, it's one thing. I was giving people all this advice about friendships and about any good marriage. And like, I was looking to my life and I wasn't living these things. I was just like everybody else, you know, waking up going, sure hope I feel happy today. It was pathetic. It was pathetic. It was like a drug and alcohol counselor getting up and taking a bunch of bonk hits and having a six pack. It was craziness. And by the way, it was my wife who finally called me. She's like, you have a PhD, right? What are you using it for? Exactly. I mean, you're like, your English is going along. I'm gonna kill you, sweetheart. You're killing me. But, you know, I'm writing academic journal articles that 14 people read so I can get promotion in 10 years. It was ridiculous. So how did you, I imagine, even if you're not necessarily walking the walk as much as you would like, you believe in what you are sharing. So it wasn't necessarily a conviction issue. So how do you then translate it to action? Are you just like, you know what? If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. Let me commit to things that I block out so that they are unavoidable in a sense. How did you convert it? Well, I started by doing happens in practice as it were very, very specific. I mean, extremely specific. As specific is the stuff in the, you know, the four-hour body, specific. And I was writing stuff down to held whole notebooks of protocols and things that I was trying. I was trying things on myself based on science. And when it worked, I would keep it. And I would write it down, I would practice it. Turns out that wasn't good enough. You know, 'cause that was too hacky. You know, that wasn't really habits. To ingrain a habit, you gotta do one more step, which is that you gotta teach it. Mm-hmm. The reason I'm a happiness professor is because I wanna lash myself to the mask and I wanna be completely committed. Because look, I mean, if I'm doing something that's clearly at odds with what I'm teaching, I'm gonna hear about it. I'm gonna hear about it for my students. I'm gonna hear about it for my family. I'm gonna hear about it. Good Lord. I'm gonna hear about it on social media. Nothing I'm paying that much attention to that because I wanna be happy. And it's really, really important. So basically, there's a protocol in my life, which is number one, understand. Number two, practice. Number three, share. And that's the protocol that works for everybody when it comes to happiness. You gotta take those three steps. You gotta do the work and understand it. It's, that's funny because I've done all this work over the years of the Dalai Lama. And he always says the same thing. If you wanna be a spiritual adapt, think more, feel less. Think more, feel less. I would not expect that to be the framing. Okay, what is that? What does he mean by that? Well, he first wakes up in the morning and the first two hours of his meditation gets up at three or three thirty in the morning. The first thing that he does, after a little bit on his exercise bike and hanging out with his cat. The first thing that he does is two hours of analytical meditation, which Catholics call mental prayer. That means you take a couple of lines of sacred scripture and you analyze it and you think about it. Most learning doesn't happen when the professor talks about something. If you understand everything the professor says, it's not hard enough class and you don't have a very good professor. He has to blow your mind with something and you gotta go away and think about it and then you learn it through your own thinking. That's analytical meditation or mental prayer. And is the Dalai Lama using scripture in this sense? Or what do you bet in Buddhist scripture? So he's contemplating something for, you know words of the Buddha or Shanti Deva or any of the ancient. - Tactical questions. - Is he choosing it or is it flip open the book and which would not denigrate it? I'm just wondering. - Drop the needle. - Yeah. I mean, I know. He's, I mean, he's extraordinary. I mean, the Holy scripture is for Tibetan Buddhist or vast. There's a library in Darmsala that's just stack after stack after stack after stack. It's not a Bible. It's not like a collection of books in a little library called the Bible. It's just, it's enormous. And the monks are going through the scriptures again and again and again. So he has a, I'm sure he hasn't explained it to me but I'm sure that he has actually a regular rotation that he's going through to do his, and that's what we need to do. - He's got the equivalent of these 10 exercises when you go to the gym, skip the bench press. Like he's got his, yeah, kind of. He's greatest attention. - No doubt, yeah, no doubt. And so that's really important to do in the science of happiness is to look at what, you know, the best protocols. You know, what does it mean to stand up to your negativity bias by actually practicing gratitude when what you're feeling is resentment? How do you do that? You actually achieve a state of metacognition, awareness of your own feelings, such that you can choose reactions in the face of emotions. How can you get into the state of the eye self, which is the state in which you're observing the world as opposed to observing yourself? Well, it starts with knowledge of what these concepts are. And then you put it into practices, real exercises. I have a column in the Atlantic that comes out every Thursday morning. That's next on my list of questions. - The third part of every column is do these three things. Is taking the science and then applying to your life in these three ways. And so it's application and change of habits and a commitment to that. And the best way to cement in those ideas and by lashing yourself to the mast and that's by teaching these things to everybody else. And everybody, look, I have a lab at Harvard called the Leadership in Happiness Lab. The whole point of the lab is not bench science and pouring stuff into test tubes or doing new experiments. It's learning how we can all be happiness teachers. How can Tim Ferris be a happiness teacher? We already are by working on it. - Working on it. There's no reason that you have to be happy to be a happiness teacher. It's not like playing basketball. - Thank God. - Yeah, totally. I mean, on the contrary, people are struggling with the best of them. - I'm not as miserable as someone. - You're fine. - Pretending to be. - I mean, the point is that you're, but I do have struggles. I mean, I do have challenges. - How should you do this? - Others you sort of why? You're self-aware. You're self-aware. Part of your commitment, 'cause I know your work. Part of your commitment to lifting other people up is sharing your journey. This is what it comes down to. So you joke about you. But the truth of the matter is we're all, we all are, and sharing that is actually part of the way that you're practicing these protocols. You're not hacking anything. You're actually trying to build these habits, and then the teaching role, you're a teacher, by the way, because this is a teaching podcast. We're not shooting the breeze, and saying, "Would you see on TV?" And, "Oh, I went to a restaurant." "No, we're talking about heavy stuff." Because we actually want to teach these ideas and lift other people up. So that's the secret, man. Learn more. Think more. - Don't feel. - Learn. - Think. - Second. Turn this into habits, and practice as a habit. Third, share with others, and commit to other people through your teaching. That's the secret of happiness. Commit, commit in what sense, just energetically taking the magnifying glass off of yourself. And committing to actually these practices in your own life. - Right. - You know, and this can often be, I've been doing this thing wrong, and I don't want to keep doing this thing wrong. And me telling you, is making yourself accountable to another person, like all 12 step programs work this way, right? - Honestly, 12 step programs, some of the most important and impressive, decentralized organizations I've ever seen. - Yeah. - And I've never participated, but I'm so impressed. - But they require accountability. - Yeah. - Because basically what 12 step programs do, is knowledge of what's wrong with me, committing to new habits and sharing it with others. That's why AA works, is because of those three steps as well. - They do sneak some God in there. - Well, yeah, the higher power, for sure. The higher power, which is helpful. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna deny it. One facet that I really appreciate of your work and your writing is that you straddle the very old and the very new. (laughs) And you mentioned Aquinas earlier, again, everybody read a few pages at least on Wikipedia about Aquinas, and then Aristotle. - Yeah. - And one of your popular columns is about Aristotle's 10 secrets to happiness. I wonder if any, I do have them in front of me. - Did I just remember them? - Yeah, I was just gonna say, this is a lot of making my weekly copy. - Yeah, well, let me, how about this? How about I read through? - Yeah. - And then I would love for you to pick out one or two, perhaps, that have been particularly impacted for you or for your readers. - Right. - Here we go. Name your fears and face them. Two, know your appetites and control them. Three, be neither a cheapskate nor a spend-thrift. Four, give as generously as you can. Five, focus more on the transcendent disregard of your trivial. Six true strength is a controlled temper. Seven, never lie, especially to yourself. Eight, stop struggling for your fair share. Nine, forgive others and for bear their weaknesses. Ten, define your morality, live up to it, even in private. And I wanna take one off the table. - Sure. - Which is the last one, 'cause there's a, there's a recency bias here. Since we've been talking, I think, fairly, extensively about that. But, those are, there we go. So, start with number seven. All right, never lie. Be impeccable with your word, especially with you. Now, I know a lot of people who are pretty honest. Frankly, the reason my wife fell in love with me is not my, you know, my stunning good looks and, you know, my lousy accent. - And the great hair at the time. - Great hair. - No, great hair. - Great hair right now. I mean, there was this spectacular, if I do say so myself. But the reason she told me later is because I was the first man that never lied to her. I never lied. Now, that's part of my upbringing and, you know, that's, has to do with your family, et cetera. That was a really super important value in my home. You had to be honest. The only really, you know, dramatic and scary consequences with my parents are for lying. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. And so, the result is it was kind of, in a way easier for me, because the way that I was raised, but I was the first guy she'd ever met that didn't lie. She's like, what's up with this dude? He doesn't lie. And I've procured, you know, when my, when my oldest son, both of my sons, 25 and 23, they're both married. And when my 25 year old, 25 and 23, both married. They're both married. - Wow, I need to get relationship from advice from your son. - Well, my older son, he's a piece of work. I mean, he's, I learned a lot from him. He's literally one of the best. brightest native intelligence people that I've ever met, but he's also has this super Adroit moral instinct to him and he asked me he said Tell me one thing That I should never do because I'm in love with this girl that I should never do he asked you know good questions like that I thought about it. It's actually pretty easy never lie to her ever ever ever ever ever ever until you go to the grave never lie to her and Ask her never to lie to you no matter what the consequences. That's the secret to the pure oxygen of a true companion at love the mystical love of The romance where you feel truly chosen for each other has to be based on honesty It has to be and a lot of people are like yeah, yeah good luck with that right but And there are lots of things that doesn't mean you have to say by the way sweetheart your butt looks fat in that just gonna ask Yeah, no Volunteer every single thing that you're thinking because you're not insane But when when there's a direct question There's a direct answer. So I'm gonna tell you okay, that's fine, but that's You say in Spanish. That's pretty mad a course. Oh, that's that that's you know, that's table stakes Table stakes man. You want to really be in the game? Mm-hmm never lie yourself and we're doing it all the time We're doing it all the time. We don't want to face up to the truth We don't want to look really in a mirror and not so that we can you know think of greater hair looks or Whatever but so we can actually see the good and the bad and To say I'm a true human being that's a hard thing to do and people lie to themselves constantly and Aristotle talked about that and Aquinas and and the Buddha and you know one of the things that they all have in common is that they have this impeccable idea of self-honesty Which is that's taking a draft of the purest liquor of life like yeah, I'm I can drink that I'm gonna drink that really You tough enough to drink that and once you start doing that. I mean, it's just it's hard. It's really hard But it's life changing. Yeah, so I have a question about that and we also make me think about some of the scientists I respect most like Richard Feynman. Yeah, who You must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool rule off for sure And a lot of people would say because I'm religious that I'm fooling myself right well this leads not to a religion specific question But rather just to a fine slicing which is sometimes And I'm going off the cuff so this isn't gonna be polished but we lie to ourselves in the sense that we have a story About ourselves or the world right that we know isn't quite true But we repeated enough because we wanted to be true Then there are times when we lie to ourselves, but we are in the delusion It is because we have a lack of awareness or Who knows there are any number of factors that have fed into this belief which is simply Not accurate for whatever reason. So how do you catch? How do you catch yourself? Could you give examples hypothetical or otherwise of? So I think most people say I don't want to lie to myself, but When it comes down to actually Catching those self-lies that self-deception in the butterfly net so you can do something with that. How do you do that? Well, you commit yourself to being uncomfortable for one thing So there are a couple of different ways to do that. Number one is you seek outside counsel You ask people who really know you well You ask them to be committed to telling you the absolute truth and then you ask them incredibly hard questions about yourself Right and you should have friends that can do that for you This is one of the ways that you can do it your friends really have to be able to tell you being a good friend Usually means telling you convenient lies That's not the right criterion for your closest friends. You're real friends. Your real friends who should be like buddy I don't think you're being straightforward with that right now since I'm making I'm doing a fake Atlanta accent because my best friend Has a guy named Frank and he lives in Atlanta and he and we are committed to telling each other the truth And boy does he ever give it to me both barrels. Mm-hmm when he thinks I'm being full of it buddy I don't know I know you're saying that thing, but let's drill down on that a little bit shall we? Talk to me every week and that's super important every week Sure, I talk to you because he's a real friend and that takes work right now I understand but is that like you have a not a standing no, but he's somebody where we're committed to When the call comes in and says Frank I take the call Even if it's during work time I take the call But otherwise you you know you can't take every single call that comes in there are certain colleagues certain family members and Frank and Have you guys explicitly made some type of mutual commitment and the reason I ask is there are Environments also that I suppose I could join but I haven't up to this point for instance yPO forums these small groups Those are quite good. They are very good and I know people who have benefited from it tremendously and They're as I understand it based on my friend's stories that there are many hot seat moments where you get your beliefs and stories and approaches and strategies and Terrogated well, and you are committed in a yPO forum to have your BS called out. Yeah So if you're saying something I know is not true about you. There's some great rules people can study it also If you wanted to try to mimic or replicate it I guess for a lot of folks I hate to say it but I think especially men they may not have Sort of a codified setting like that men especially successful men tend to get Lonely or lonely as they get older. Yeah women tend to get less and less lonely But men tend to get lonely and lonely or so about 60% of 60 year old men say their best friends are wife about 30% of their wives Say their best friends are husband Sad story unrequited friendship Requited companion to love at home for sure But you know what that means is that a lot of women have very very close friends that they've cultivated usually through family life and community life and guys You know, it's like hey man It works so hard over the years and you know hanging out with my friends is stealing from my family I'm not gonna go golfing for five hours on Saturday You know when the kids are little it'll be terrible at home. I'll get yelled at and yada yada yada yada And all kinds of excuses and pretty soon they're lonely So we can and we might come back to this put the I mean the loneliness is a big big topic sure and the bonding and and this these types of communal relationships but as far as Cultivating a relationship with the friends that you have that unvarnished Feedback and interrogation. Mm-hmm. Might you have any suggestion for how to approach that? Well, there's two ways to do it. There's the organic way and there's the manual way The organic way is that you don't lose those true friends that you've had usually since you were a young adult And a lot of people do I mean they we move around a lot. We're really ambitious and our friends wind up being our deal friends And our real friends, you know people will say I mean I'll do an exercise where I'll say tell me the ten people that are closest to you Write them down real quick. I can do it easily. Yeah, yeah, I literally have it in a spreadsheet That's great and then put real or deal after each one of those names based on the fact that and for you is all real right because you have close friends Right. Yeah, I do a lot of high percentage from a long time ago and you travel with them and you do stuff with them, right? I put a lot of energy at time into ensuring that we spend time together which gets harder as people have Lives and kids and children and you know for sure family life tends to get in the way of that But you have to do it's like anything else you got to do the work. I'm unfettered by But direct family life since But you know and the data say that in 10 years you'll most likely be married Yeah, and have kids and it's gonna be harder, but you you'll have to put in a lot of kind of Uh-huh Folks, let's work on this shall we? Write in the comments your best. Yeah, yeah So there's the organic way. Yeah, there's a organic way which is you know is make sure that you don't lose track of your real friends And you have a commitment with your real friends to hold you to a standard of honesty in the friendship and with yourself Because that's what true friendship really entails The manual way is the ypo forum way where there's a bunch of guys that you know That are usually deal friends and you make a deal to make them into real friends You make a deal, you know, it's an arrangement For part of the friendship is actually going to be to go deeper to hold each other's secrets To be honest with each other and that can actually be incredibly effective because you've actually decided to do that And people will love those particular promises Psychological safety is really important in that too right because it's one thing to say I want you to be completely honest with me And say yeah, you're jerk. It's like not that honest Or you know don't express it in that particular way you have to have enough psychological safety where the rules of the road are clear That honesty is always wield is as a gift and never as a weapon That's also true in marriages by the way, Tim The best marriages are completely honest but the honesty is a gift and never a weapon Yep, you know one of the Montres at Facebook before it was meta was Facebook uh Facebook is a gift maybe Feedback is a gift feedback is a gift is repeated over and over We're gonna put all over the place to cultivate a culture of feedback. Yeah And I've thought about that just grabbing these little snippets make yourself small I mean these very pithy reminders that will have some stickiness in the mind And also doubling down on having your friends act as the best Mirrors available Very brief side note just to give people a scubi snack Mirrors reflections What are your thoughts get rid of them? Can I tell them? Tell me more. So I work with a guy he's fantastic He actually is a he's really really really helpful for me I've recommended him to you because he does incredible bodywork physical therapy is fantastic And uh, you know, he was a fitness model There's almost nothing you can do that's unhealthy or worse for your mental health and being a fitness model or fitness influencer Why because you're just looking at the mirror all day long and your physical appearances that on which you will be judged is very emotionally warping And he hated it He hated it. He hated he was unhappy. He never ate what he wanted for 10 years And the truth of the matter is as we all know you look great if your body fat is under 10% But you feel crummy and you want everybody to in the world to die. It can be really, really hard on you." And he said, "After a while, you know, there's a reason that 35% of people who lose a lot of weight, when they get to their goal, they keep going and a quarter of them develop an eating disorder. The reason is because you can't stop when you're looking in the mirror all the time. You can't stop. You can't stop. You don't know how to stop." So he had the presence of mind. He's in adept. He's a spiritual adept. He got rid of all of his mirrors and showered in the dark for a year. He got rid of all of the mirrors in his house. The showering in the dark needs to be an extrabs. I don't know that. But I get it. You got washboard abs here. You're looking at him going, "Yeah, man." But and bye-bye watching. Because if you can be watching the water cascade off your 12th back, like rocks in a waterfall. I know. And the truth of the matter is that, I hate when that happens. Extreme, but yes, I get it. Physical attractiveness ordinarily is something that you do because you want to be core more lovable. And you make that judgment on the basis of what you're seeing in the mirror and not the relationship that you're projecting to others in real life. It's really weird. You know, you talk to dudes who are trying to get to, you know, 6% body fat and get super jacked in the whole thing. And they have this, they imagine that women are going to be just super attracted to them. And the only people we've been saying anything are dudes. Oh, it's always dudes. It's like, it's like, I have friends who've single guys and they've been credible beard game for like mustache game. And nonstop, it's just dudes coming up and complimenting them. I mean, I'm sure they're women who like it too. But it's mostly guys. That's for sure. You know, and you know, no woman has ever said, "Nice car." I mean, it's just no. It's other guys is the whole thing. And what that is is the other guys are just a mirror. They're just a mirror. The other guys are saying the thing that you think, but it's profoundly unsatisfying, right? If you're actually in the heterosexual dating market, you have other guys saying, "How'd you get those abs?" Well, cares. Now to provide a counter example also, and this is just something I've seen on dating abs if you could talk about. But I have yet to meet a single guy I like in respect, who's like, "I love super intense lip fillers and all of this, you know, Franken Botox situation. I've not met a single one." I know. Have you ever said, I've never said to my wife one time, "That's such a cute little dress. Is it new?" I've never said that. All her friends say that. And she's always like, "I have a cute little dress and everybody noticed it, but you didn't." For the record, I'm in the cute little dress. I don't want people to mix up voices here. So why did you write this book? And how did it come to be? I know you have this long history with thinking about these catalyzing events and tracking. And I don't want to say pursuing, but analyzing, thinking deeply about happiness. So why now? And what do you hope that it will accomplish? So this new book is the most bread and butter book I've ever written about the science of happiness. It's two parts. Part one is how to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. Part two is once you've got that down, now you can actually build your life and not be distracted and figuring away your time with stupid things. Those are the two parts of the book. And it says, "Deep dive is I've ever actually written publicly about neuroscience." It was actually vetted by my colleague at Harvard Josh Green is one of the most distinguished neuroscientists in the world, just to make sure because I'm a social scientist. So I got to be careful getting into the biology side of this thing. I know enough to be dangerous to be sure, but I have to be very careful about that. So I realized, and by the way, this project was instigated to do a bread and butter owner's manual on you and your happiness. That's what it is. It's an owner's manual on your happiness. It wasn't my idea. It was Oprah Winfrey's idea. So you occupy so rarefied air. So from the Dalai Lama, how does it just bump into around the subway? His holding his dolly on it. Her holding his Oprah Winfrey. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's an Oprah Winfrey call. It's like, wait, put up. Yeah, I'm guessing she didn't get your phone. I'm around Zoom info. How did this happen? She calls on me like, "Yeah, I'm Batman." No, really. Who is this? No. Hi, it's Oprah calling again. Your company has been verified by Dunham Bradstreet. Oh, wait, I'm meant to. Anyway. So we got connected because she is a regular reader of my column in the Atlantic. And she was during the coronavirus epidemic when people were trying to use the time to learn new things, et cetera. She was actually a serious reader of the column. And she's a serious reader. I mean, she's a serious reader. When she has a book on her podcast, she reads the book. It's just amazing how exhaustive her knowledge is. And then when my book came out from strength of strength in February of 2022, she got it literally in the first week. She read it. That's when she called and she said, "Would you come on my podcast?" Her Super Soul, which is this book podcast, phenomenal. And we were like a house on fire from the very beginning because it's funny because, you know, you've met a lot of famous people. And, you know, I've met some famous people. And the they're usually not exactly like the American public, right? She's like, she appears in public. I mean, she's calm. She's smart. She's nice. She's funny. She's awesome. She's actually what people think she is. She's truly an authentic person. And so we really got along and we have the Synchronicity of Mission, which is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. But we have different platforms for doing it. I'm teaching this class on the science of happiness at Harvard University and writing in the Atlantic. She has been in mass media forever. And whenever she weighs in, she has millions and millions and millions of people around the world that trust her and want to hear what she has to say. And so her suggestion was, let's take that class that you teach at Harvard and that you're writing about in the Atlantic. Let's present that to a big audience. You want a big audience? I said, yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oprah, can I have a big audience, please? And she says, let's write a book together and we'll present this book together. And so we did. And you know, we got together at her home and we framed it up. We framed up the book over three or four days period last year in her T house in Montecito, California. It's like, you know, I was looking around going, you know, I'm just like the small town college professor who fell off the turnup truck in front of Oprah's T house. You never know. He's like, God bless America. You never know what's going to happen. And it was super fun. It was super interesting for people who want to work on. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So and she's the best case study in American success and working hard and believing in others and paying it forward possible. And then we went and we started working on our respective parts of the book and passing them back and forth. And I took a house in San Clemente in California for six weeks in the winter, largely to look at the Pacific Ocean and write the book and she was writing her parts. And then we got to this impasse at one point, not between us, but because the title didn't fit. The title now is how to build the life you want the art and science of getting happier. And it was called fully alive. And it wasn't fitting. And I didn't know. And finally, Oprah calls me and she says, got the wrong title. She's a genius. We got the wrong title. This is a how to book. This isn't owner's manual book. This is really a how to book on your own happiness. This should be called how to build a life you want and catching the whole thing fell into place. Because that's what happens as you know. And the course of writing a book, you think you have it, but you don't. And then when the title actually completes the book and allows you to finish the book and and make it all cohere. And we finished it up. And it was this amazing collaborative experience. A joy actually is the most fun. It was the most positive experience I've ever had writing a book because I got to write it with her and she's enriched my life. What a wild, incredible experience. It's nuts. That's nuts, man. You know that I told you my death fear is losing my mind. It's actually possible that I am. And that's just a hallucination. So then we had tea and we had crumpets. I know it's made a bridge for tea house. And I was like, but Tim, I know I want the pure truth. But if that's not true, don't tell me. Let me keep that one. Lying to me, baby. In this book, are there areas, because I know in my book, I can point to specific chapters where I'm like, man, I really wish people would pay more attention to X. Like maybe it didn't quite get the emphasis. So I can own that responsibility. But maybe they for whatever reason didn't pay enough attention to this one component. Is there something that comes to mind? I don't know yet because it hasn't come out. Oh, I know. But I'm just saying, so what do I think is what would hurt you the most if people missed? So I think what would bother me the most is the amount that Oprah and I emphasize the role of unhappiness and living a full life. So that one of the biggest mistakes that people make is we talked about before is that people say, I want to be happy, but then they talk about some source of unhappiness in their life that they think blocks their unhappiness. And that's the wrong way of thinking because you can get happier even if you're unhappy. Absolutely, 100% all day long because these are existing in different parts of your brain. Number one, but number two, happiness is not the goal and unhappiness is not the enemy. Getting happier is the goal. You know, Oprah coined this term in the book. She said, we got to stop talking about happiness because that's actually not the goal. The goal is happiness. That's really what we're going for is happiness. And to get happierness, you need unhappiness in your life. Look, you need negative emotions to keep you alive. But you also need the deferral of gratification to get your satisfaction. And you need to understand the nature of the frustration that comes such that you can start to manage your wants. You need like serious full-on suffering to find the answers to the questions of meaning that we talked about. You do. My son need a bootcamp. You and I need substantial problems with mood to put it euphemistically. We need no look. We need sadness. A young, Freud's greatest student, Carl Jung. So much greater in so many ways. Said, So you don't really understand happiness until you've experienced unhappiness because of the contrast, but more to the point, you've not been fully alive because unhappiness is what actually the suffering is what helps you understand what you're made of and what you can bear. And only then will you find the answers to the "why am I alive" for what I'd be willing to die questions. You don't find the meaning questions, the answers at the beach at the beach in Ibiza. You find it in the depths when somebody you love dies, when you're afraid of what your future holds, when you feel hopeless. That's when those moments become real and that suffering turns out to be an integral part in your journey to happiness. So the number one thing that O'Parenti will be very disappointed about is that people don't actually become more fully alive through the transcendent passage of both happiness and the unhappiness that is a part of what it means to be a real person. It is a diverse and ever-changing tapestry. That is for sure. It is. And you know, I think about it, one of the biggest mistakes that I think that my students make, by the way, right now. If I were to go back to 1968 or 1969 Woodstock, you know, and the hippies said, "If it feels good, do it!" I remember my dad heard that for the first time and he was like, "That's the end of America." He was kind of right. Anyway, if we had a Woodstock today, it might be, if it feels bad, make it stop. If I'm suffering, treat it. If there's pain, it's evidence that I'm defective, that I'm broken, something's got to change. That's wrong. That's wrong thinking. Look, the Tim Ferriss I'm talking to you right now had to suffer. I mean, these messages that you're giving are dramatically different than what you were writing 15 and 20 years ago. They're dramatically different. It doesn't mean it was wrong 15 or 20 years ago, but it was incomplete. It wasn't deep in the same way. And the depth actually comes from the, not just from the good. It also comes from the bad. This is Andrew Solomon who wrote the Noonday Demon. Have you read that book? No. It's the best book I've ever read about anxiety and depression. You know, Andrew Solomon is a phenomenal writer. All right. So what is the title again? The Noonday Demon, which was an ancient way of talking about depression, which comes over you like a Noonday Demon. It's like the Black Dog. It's like Winston Churchill's Black Dog for sure. The Noonday Demon in the end. It's an incredible book. It's a total page turner for anybody who's actually had anything close to his story. That's the face that does not sound like a page. No, it's phenomenal. It's so interesting. It's just beautiful writing. But in the end, he said, in the sum and final balance, I have to conclude that I love my depression because it's part of who I am as a person and it's allowed me to learn what my life is all about. I don't wish it on anybody. I don't want it to come back. But it is who I am. And so therefore I have no choice but to love it. I'm paraphrasing. But it's, you know, his words are more beautiful than anything I could remember. But it's really an important thing for us to remember. And anybody who's watching you and who follows you and who admires you and gets a lot of sustenance from the dollars that you bring to this podcast, what they have to realize is that they are beneficiaries of Tim Ferriss's suffering. And if they want to lift up the world, they have to suffer too. Food for thought. Yeah. Food for thought may not be candy bars. Might be high fiber. But it is important food for thought. It's a philosophical cliff bar. And, you know, people love those. I don't mean to, not to cast this version. My friend's a cliff. You know, but I have thought about this very deliberately. And I don't wish suffering upon anyone, but I had someone give me very good advice at one point. And the words can be substituted, of course, but she said to maybe after I'd gone through very gifted therapist with a lot of experience, a lot of mileage with different types of patients, including some very tragic and difficult cases. And she said, take your pain, make it part of your medicine. And I was like, okay, meaning the medicine, in my case, the way I think of that is what I can teach or provide or just the perspective through which I can speak and explore, given that I have the history that I have. But understand, this is what the best therapists do. They teach you about yourself. They help you to learn and grow from your pain. And they help you to treat yourself and serve others. That's what the great therapists do. The worst therapists is like, yeah, I'll help you take care of that. We'll make that problem go away. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I want to learn, I want to grow, and I want to serve. Surf part has been very critical to the tether of meaning that has given the suffering, meaning exactly, meaning made it, I don't want to say irrelevant, like the greater the potency of the meaning, the less the suffering incapacitates you. This is really, really ask you, is it possible you're not afraid to suffer more? Now, because you said, you know, pleasure and, you know, as a defense, et cetera, et cetera, but I don't feel like I'm sitting with somebody who's afraid of suffering. It's certainly less than it was. I also think that they're just pleasurable things that I really like. Yeah. Well, there's that. There's that. Weird. Yeah, yeah. There is that. I remember reading about one of your, you know, a sexual experience in the, you know, in the four-hour body, where it was like, to get more testosterone and then I ate a single Brazil nut. Oh, yeah, it was lots of Brazil nuts, cholesterol loading. I did lots of crazy stuff in the four-hour body, but it was, it was somebody who knew that I had fun. Oh, yeah, that chap here. How old were you? What, 34 or something in your own 30? Yeah, early 30s. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, no, I respect the fact that you like to have fun and you like to feel good. I get that. Don't sense fear from you. Yeah, I would also say what I have done is I've built into my life a lot of premeditated, deliberate discomfort to inoculate myself against the fear of unpredictable discomfort. And it's not a cure all, but I have found that it's exposure therapy. It's exposure therapy. So just like waiting into some of the deep waters psychologically and psychos emotionally that I would be prone to fearing, learning how to take swimming lessons in some of those deep waters, I would say, is also an approach. So it resembles exposure therapy, but there's also a skill development piece on top of that, which is combined with the exposure, I would say, which I know is a bit nebulous that I can get to. No, no, but it makes perfect sense. And there's actually a way that we can all get better at that because I know a lot of people are watching this like, yeah, how do we get better at that? Here's one way to do that. That actually is very practical way to do it. Start each day with a statement of fact and then an aspiration. The statement of fact is, I don't know what's going to happen this day. I don't know. I learned this from a pediatric oncologist, by the way. Somebody who has bad cancer diagnosis to kids. He says he tells the parents to every day start the day saying, I don't know what's going to happen in my future. But I do know I am alive this day and I'm deeply grateful for everything that happens for good and for bad. It takes Kalhanes, man. It's hard because you're like, you catch your little bit, right? Because what Mother Nature wants you to do is to look for the good feelings and to avoid the bad feelings because that's the evolutionary imperative to avoid the disgust and anger and sadness and the grief and the loneliness and to avoid those things, not to embrace those things to just say, it's inevitable. Bring it on. But if you can actually do that to steal yourself, to steal, as they say in Isaiah, I steal my face like flint. And that's how to do it. Look, I don't know what's going to happen today. But I do know I'm alive right now. I'm not going to waste this day. In a way, I don't waste this day. It's being grateful for every single thing that happens. Good and bad. Bring it on. Here we go. The gift I received quite a while ago, but actually, steal my face like flint. It is a piece of, I think it is steal and it's engraved with a quote from, I think it is Neil Donald Walsh. I may be getting that off. Someone can fact check. But the quote is the struggle ends when the gratitude begins. And it's such good advice. Yeah. You have to be grateful only for the obviously good things. No, no, no, no, no, no. In the contrary. And that's really, that's what separates, you know, first course gratitude from PhD level stuff. And by the way, here's a practical way to do that. To be grateful for bad things. It's a very practical way to do it. I ask my students to make a failure journal. And so what that is is that every time bad thing happens, something bad happens frequently. And you're 28 years old. You know, somebody breaks your heart today and tomorrow you get to be on a test. And the next day after that, you know, you don't get the interview for that job you hoped for. And it's just a constant string of disappointments and thrills. So every time something happens that really frustrates and disappoints you or you screw up or whatever you take out your failure journal and you're right in your failure journal, what happened? And then you leave two lines open behind it and you put reminders on your phone, ding, one month from now. You got to go back and six months from now. One month from now, you got to go back and say what you learned from that thing that you would forget otherwise. And six months from now, you got to go back and say a good thing that happened because of that thing. And there's always entries, always, always, always. And so it's like, I went into my performance review and I thought I was doing a really good job. My boss basically told me that I'm a B player at best. This happens constantly. That bums me out. And I just want to put it behind me. I want to go hang out with my friends and have a couple of beers and complain about my boss and move on right no Write it on your failure journal one month from now remember it and go back Huh, you know what I learned from that is I thought I was gonna be super bummed about that for a long time And it bothered me for like a week. It's interesting. Now that's homeostasis. There's a lot of brain science in that six months later You come back and you say When I thought about that I realized that that probably wasn't the perfect fit for my career and I went on the market and I have a better job now. I think that the job I have now is a better fit and every single thing that happens that you put into your failure journal You were realized that there's something generative that happens from this in terms of learning and in terms of gratitude And you will turn that thing into something and sooner later when something really bad happens to you You'd be like oh good to get to put in the failure journal It'll really change your perspective on it because it failure and disappointment and frustration and sacrifice and pain Will take on their proper perspective, which is part of your full life. Mm-hmm. We shall see. That's great. We shall see that's We shall see that famous So true. Yeah, well, this has been so much fun. Now the title of the book is build the life you want the art and science of getting happier And by the times comes out, you will be able to certainly find it. Yeah, and purchase it. Yeah, and we're all fine books or so We're all in also if people like Oprah and I will read it to you You mean I'm guessing in audiobook form not a copy of look No, we'll come to your house And with a dulcet tones of Oprah's voice will you'll lull you to sleep now? I mean we read it. I could raise a lot of my Yeah, that's right. Sorry Oprah. I kind of committed us to this thing, you know Let's just say the book tour was taken on new dimensions now the But we know we read the book for Penguin Random House and I'm really super happy with the way that it turned out mostly because My voice is interspersed with her beautiful voice one of the most famous voices in America. What an incredible experience Congratulations. Thank you. So people can find the book where all fine books are sold I just love saying that yeah And is there anything else you'd like to point people to whether it's a social profile or a request of the audience and Ask of the audience something you'd like to close with anything at all that you'd like to add before we yeah I mean this is really a teaching experience both for me and Oprah and just part of my life Which is dedicated to writing speaking and teaching about love and happiness to bring people together in bonds of love Using the science and ideas. That's really my mission statement for the rest of my life And that really is a teaching mission just like yours is a teaching mission. So there's a lot of stuff that I'm doing Ancillary to books and columns etc have classes like video classes and things that people can watch and my goal in doing those things That's some all of my website or through Rucksack combat when people do those things my goal is training them to be happiness teachers This is really what it's all about because remember it's understand Change your habits share with others and so to learn more about exactly how to do that We're developing a lot of resources that make that possible and I think a pretty effective way and I would love people to do that for the single reason that I want a movement I want to be part of a movement of people who's hobby is The science of happiness and bringing it to others You know There's a lot of people who are broken in this world and who are sad and who are suffering and if we had people who are Warriors for greater happiness for themselves through others through real knowledge and a commitment to change I'm truly convinced that this is the one thing that I can do that could have an impact on the world that needs to be a lot happier are there so glad that we were able to find the time have this conversation and I admire the work you do I respect the work you do I value the work you put out in the world it does help people so I wanted to Also just simply thank you or Putting out what you put out and spending time on the things you spend time on likewise Tim I've only met you today in person, but I feel like I've known you for a long time because I've been consuming your work like so many Millions of other people and you enrich my life a lot. Thank you for that. Thanks, man I really appreciate it. This is really sparked a lot in me. I've taken copious notes so I have a Number of things that I'll be focusing on getting small brothers K muscular philosophies. I just love the phrasing So I wrote it down Aristotle Aquinas all things that can lead you to build the life that you want and for everybody listening We will have extensive show notes links to everything as usual at Tim. Blog such podcast and until next time We just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself Thanks for tuning in Hey guys, this is Tim again Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday Easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week kind of like my diary of cool things It often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you So if that sounds fun again, it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about If you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog/friday type that into your browser tim.blog/ Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. 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