Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Try to understand how to enjoy your life, how to achieve satisfaction in your achievements and accomplishments, and understand deeply the why of your existence. And then happiness will find you. The biggest mistake people make about enjoyment is thinking that it's the same thing as pleasure. And the pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness. The pursuit of pleasure leads to rehab. A lot of young people today will go for every crazy activist scheme because they're screaming out for meaning, because they don't naturally experience it. They're completely numb. And so what they get involved in forms of very, very performative activism, because it puts, it makes them feel alive, maybe for the first time in a long time. The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called What's My Idol, and they usually are wrong. They think it's one thing that it isn't. But if you know you have unbelievable power, why? Because you know it will be a guy or you, and it will distract you from what you truly want. You want to play? Yeah. Let's play. Arthur Brooks. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. I love the show. That's. That's a regular. That long time listener, first time guest. Yes. And you being happiness sex, but we talk about a lot of depressing shit on the show. It's a bit shocking to me that you watch the show. Can you listen to the show? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a listener to the show. I do watch your beautiful mugs sometimes, but I mostly listen to them on Apple Podcasts. And there's a couple of different reasons that I do that. Number one is because I'm looking as a happiness entrepreneur, I'm looking for problems to solve. And so, and you dig in very, very effectively in what's actually on the hearts and minds of a lot of people. You know, the things that are irritating people, the things that are holding them back. But in a very incisive way, I mean, you guys are serious about taking on these things and not sweeping them under the rug. And I want to know about that. As a happiness expert, I don't want to go where people are already happy. If I were a missionary, I wouldn't go into neighborhoods where everybody already has the faith. So, I want to see what's actually keeping people up. And that's the first reason. But here's the second reason. Your comedians. And you have rhythm. I'm a public speaker. I learn from people who have natural rhythm. I've learned when I started doing a lot of public speaking, hundred times a year. I'm not going to learn from the great orators in history. And certainly not from politicians. I learn from standard comedians how to keep people's attention, how long a module should actually be. And so I can tell when people are doing media, if they actually have the right rhythm and I actually have learned a great deal from you. That's really interesting. I've always thought, particularly when public speaking, that humor is like you're buying in another 10 seconds of people's attention. And then they wait for the next joke or the next bit of interesting information. But anyway, enough about that. It's fascinating to have you on. Happiness is obviously, I think most people, if you ask them, what do you actually want to be in life? What do you want? That's actually somewhere very high up on the pecking order there. What is happiness? Yeah. So that's where the problem begins. Everybody wants to be happy, but they can't figure out how to become happy. Right. And there's a lot of metaphysics to that too. I mean, the fact that we can't be happy, but we believe that we can and we strive all of our lives, suggests that it does exist, that true unremitting happiness actually exists, just not in this life. In much the same way that thirst presupposes the existence of water. But you know, that metaphysics aside, people want it. One of the reasons they can't find it in this life is because they don't know what it is. They think it's a feeling and they want this feeling of happiness. And that's where we actually all go astray. I want to feel happy all the time. The limbic system of your brain is not made for you to feel happiness all the time. It's made for you to feel misery a lot, as a matter of fact, negative emotions of which there's only four fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. They exist to keep you alive and out of the jaws of a tiger sadness. So you won't say those things inside your head and have your wife leave you summarily. You know, this is what is behind your survival is actually negative experiences and negative emotions, and yet people don't want them and that conflict. I want something I can't get. I want that particular feeling. That's the problem. So you have to define it in the right way. And the right definition of happiness is much like you would say, what's the right definition of food? And that's protein carbohydrates and fat happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the macronutrients of happiness. So try to pursue happiness, try to understand how to enjoy your life, how to achieve satisfaction in your achievements and accomplishments, and understand deeply the why of your existence. Can you break down those three a little bit more as well? Yeah, sure. So say them again, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Okay. What do they mean? So enjoyment is, believe it or not, most many, many people, especially strivers, very successful in people listened to this program. Many of them don't know how to enjoy their lives. Now the biggest mistake people make about enjoyment is thinking that it's the same thing as pleasure. And so, and there's a reason for that is which is because it's a, it's a primal urge. You tap the ventral tegmental area and the ventral strade on part of the limbic system of the brain. And you say, and you can get that in a lot of ways. You can get that when your wife says, constantly, and I love you, or you can get that from a bump of cocaine. We have very thrifty brains. The pursuit of pleasure is not the right pursuit, but you add people and memory to that. And then you deliver that experience to the conscious executive centers of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And then it becomes enjoyment, which truly is part of happiness. Many people don't know how to pursue that. Either they're, they're, they're, they're have the old hippy dictum, if it feels good, do it, which is problematic and actually disastrous in a lot of people's lives. Or they just, they feel bad about enjoying their lives because they feel like they're going backwards and they're not putting points on the board. So I have to give a lot of very successful people enjoyment lessons. That's part one. And so can I dive in that a little bit? So enjoyment is not a bag of cocaine, but it is having a drink with your buddies. Is that, is that what you're kind of saying? So if you're doing something that gives you pleasure and could be addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's what it comes down to. That's a pretty good rule. If I find you at four o'clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the, the one, the, the, the lever on the one-arm bandit, we'll have a conversation. This has become pleasure and not enjoyment. But if you're at the blackjack table, prudently wagering money that you can afford with your best friends, that's enjoyment. Good for you. You should be careful with addictive things in general. But this is why, you know, this is why the internet is so dangerously addictive. For example, this is why pornography is so bad. I know nobody who looks socially at pornography. Hey, let's get our friends and, you know, no, I mean, that's, it's a solitary shameful thing to do because it's pleasure never enjoyment. So the same thing is true, by the way, even with highly glycemic carbohydrates, which are highly addictive, people tend to snack and eat them alone. Wow. And they, you know, stressed out, you go home and you eat by yourself. And so there should be, it's a good rule of thumb, not to even eat alone, as a matter of fact, such that you're eating, which is, should be inherently social and enjoyable thing to do, leads to happiness. Okay. So that's enjoyment, enjoyment, satisfaction, satisfaction is a really paradoxical and satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle, only homo sapiens want pain, only homo sapiens want suffering because that's how you understand what's proportional to your accomplishment. If you don't have to get something out for what you're doing, you will get no sweetness from it. If my students, they, if they cheat on my exams, they will get no satisfaction from the A. And you, you look back on your life and you think about the hard things that you've done and you, you ponder the hardness and that gives you the sweetness. That's how satisfaction works. That's why you, your kids are little, right? Yeah. And your kids are a little older. I don't have kids. You don't have kids. Okay. So they're really little. They're, they're very small and there's a lot of them, yeah. So how old are you children? Four and a few weeks. Okay. I know you just had a baby, right? Your wife just had a baby. So four is just old enough that you can tell them to wait until dinner. Yeah. Right? That's right. When you start doing it three, if they're hungry, you take the opportunity to give them some food. But four, you're starting to space out their meals a little bit for proper nutrition. Yeah. And, and you tell, and, but the big lesson from that is that you want them to come to dinner hungry because they're learning about life. If you, you're teaching them the good things come to those who wait, you don't enjoy your food if you snack all day. Right. This is actually one of the big reasons that, that how we sacrifice happiness is through snacking, snacking destroys the satisfaction that we actually get from meals and putting food in our mouth is one of the great sources of happiness for people has the enjoyment part with the social part, but there's the anticipation part with the satisfaction part of eating. And so that's why you say, no, you can't have an ice cream for 30 in the afternoon. And what you're really saying to junior is I want you to suffer. It's just so good. And so that's important. And because then they're a little synaptically plastic brains learn this lesson that, that they should put out, they should defer the gratifications. That's part of being a mature person who actually knows how to produce satisfaction and this happiness. Now, it gets weirder when you get the thing that you're deferring your gratification for. Because your primeval brain says that then you'll be super happy, but you're not. And that's called the arrival foul. In behavioral science the arrival fallacy is that if it was really fun to make progress It's going to be bliss when I hit my goal and it never is which is why people when they win an Olympic gold medal They tend to fall into a clinical depression Because it doesn't work that way your emotions don't work to give you a permanently good day because that would put you in danger of The tiger sneaking up behind you. It has to be Transitory as a signal that something is either good or bad for you So when something feels really good, it should be very momentary, but we don't figure that out And the reason we don't figure that out is because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled again and again and again So we stay in the hunt That's why the Kisins passed on their genes is because they made that mistake over and over again But that's maladapted and so I have to work with a lot of people about how to maintain a higher sense of satisfaction Not by having everything that they want but by wanting what they have So in other words your satisfaction is sort of all your halves divided by your wants You need to work the denominator more than the numerator and that goes against your animal impulses that speaks to your moral aspirations That's what every religion teaches Which is why ultimately people of faith and of serious philosophy they can maintain satisfaction by the people who just go from That's from fun to fun to fun thing That's fascinating I really wanted to dig into that later, but just to lay out the groundwork fully and complete it the third portion is meaning meaning That's the biggie. That's the big one And part of the reason that's the big one is because that's the one that's missing from most young people's lives today That's what we have vacated largely to the way that we've used and misused technology Now, that's what I have this new book out the meaning of your life and the reason I wrote that book is because that's as As a as a behavioral scientist what I saw was the most urgent problem facing young people today The way that technology has affected our brains is as largely vacated important activity in the right hemisphere Which you've had Ian McGill crystal in the show right we have what we will it's really he's really he's really a genius on this He talks about hemispheric lateralization where the right set of the brain is all the complex problems of mystery and meaning in love And the left side of the brain is the complicated problems of information and things and technology We check our phones on average 205 times a day which just shoves us into the left side of a brain Where not only do we not know the meaning of our lives? We don't even ask the questions that's Why young people are depressed than anxious today? It has to do with how we're using our brains That's why a lot of young people today will go for every crazy Activist scheme because they're screaming out for meaning because they don't naturally experience it This really is is at the doorstep of small screens in our pockets and This meaning crisis people free community tied to religion particularly on the show our religious people therefore happier than non-religious Yes, yes, no people religious people who practice their religion. I mean we all know a lot of people You know, you know look you're in our Catholics, right? You're actually you're not are you I was raised Catholic? You're a kid you struggling Catholic I can help you back We get the steel done right now on the show I'm gonna take off now you guys crack on There's a brochure on your seat That people there are a lot of there are a lot of Catholics who don't practice and and one of the things that you find is they have no better sense of meaning than people Have no religion at all, but people who believe that they have a concept a concept of the divine a transcendence Who have not just physical but metaphysical fitness which requires that you practice something these people have a much Much deeper sense of the why they're wise now the why part is important Meaning is really the answer to the questions of why things happen the way they do which is coherence? Why I'm doing what I'm doing which is purpose and why my life matters which is significance the three big wise of life and Religion's really good for answering that what are things happen the way they do mind of God? Why am I doing what I'm doing because I'm trying to live up to God's will? Why does my life matter because I'm a child of God? I mean, that's perfectly answers the three why questions of meaning if you take it seriously Is that the reason you think why we're seeing a resurgence particularly of Catholicism amongst young people It's actually happening in the UK, but very much so in the United States. Yeah. So I'm super interested in these data as you can imagine and There's a problem with these data which is it tends to be quite anecdotal So you go out to a lot of diocese and parishes and say all bigger class at the you know the returning Order of Catholics coming in ever that we've seen in 15 years 20 years 30 years and I want that to be true I mean, I deeply want that to be true, but I also look at the pew data that say that 840 Catholics leave the church each year for every hundred who come in That's not good now an explanation might be that the hundred who come in are on fire and 840 who leave are boomers like me when we're signing up in parishes and they chose not to attend in the first place They're just disaffiliating, but they weren't they were lukewarm to begin with at best. That's a possible explanation But we need to know more now young men who take particularly under 30 for the first time in the past two years have upticked in their designation as none and o and e so this idea that you would be what's your religion? Hulk much of categories or none nobody ever said none when I was born in the mid sixties one percent of Americans said none And now it's about 32% of young adults say none and for the first time young males have sort of the say none less They started to come back just for the past years a little fish or come to the bottom of that line and you know I'm hoping for the best and fostering it as well as I can hard to pun Because to me when I see this uptick and religion it makes perfect sense If you look at what society values if you look at what's as our society says will make you happy right invariably It's these things won't make you happy right look the career is important money is important no one's disputing that But the idea that this is going to give you ultimate fulfillment is a lie surely for sure Now that's that's as old as Aristotle who talked about you know The things that we think will make us happy that don't and really through the lens of of a coinous When the 13th century was an unbelievably astute social scientist a coin is talked about in his sumathology in 1265 He wrote about the idols that baguial us and that there it was ever thus The four idols the baguial as he said and each one of us has a particular idol That if we know what it is we have power But if we don't know what it is will always in retrospect be the cause of our regret the four idols are money power pleasure and fame That's and each one of us. I mean like they're all nice. Oh great And I please I teach MBA students and Harvard and I have a game called what's my idol? They don't know right they don't know but if you know you have unbelievable power Why because you know it will baguial you and it will distract you from what you truly want faith family friendship Satisfying meaningful work which are the kind of the four virtuous Parts of the happiness 401k plan if you want but but but if you know it's really important So I play this game, you know so that we can uncover their own idol and they're usually wrong They think it's one thing and it isn't and I have a series of questions that I go through to figure out which it is You know you won't play. Yeah, yeah, let's play I'd love to The people who watch this show have generally done more thinking about how governments operate the most But there's a difference between understanding the problem and having actually built insulation against it That's a world Michele Thorough up operates in he's been living as an expat for over 25 years visiting more than 110 countries And calling nine of them home He founded expat money nearly a decade ago to help others do the same When he helps someone build an international plan be the knowledge he brings is entirely first and every recommendation comes from something He has already done himself Expat money works specifically with freedom-minded families and investors who want to reduce their exposure on any one government or any one system Second residency second citizenship to offshore banking international real estate Legal structures that spread your life across borders Michele has put together a free report called plan B Residencies and instant citizenships it covers five routes to a second passport Including one that almost never gets discussed our foreign residency functions as genuine political insurance Which countries actually make sense depending on what you're trying to protect and what it realistically costs go to expat money dot com slash trigger or click the link in the description of this episode to download the report There's no charge no catch. That's expat money dot com slash trigger Which one you want us to play first? France. Okay. Okay. It's like that. Let's hear it for our first contestant That's the uh So here's how What's my idol works in in social science? You never I never give you a survey and say pick one I eliminate the things that is not it's a much much more accurate way of getting at the whole I've just realized this is going out on the internet. This is going out on the internet, but it's insane Be allowed be proud. Yeah, well, yeah, don't worry. I'll do it too if you want I'll tell you what my idol is in the end of the day But so of the four and I'll repeat them Tell me I'm going to want you to tell me the one that you're least Beguiled by that you're least attracted to but that doesn't mean you don't have it at all So for example, if you say I don't care about money. That doesn't mean you have no money. You're not in poverty What that means is that you go to the population average and if it's your idol, that's torture Being normal is the worst if it's your idol. Okay, so here the four Money wealth resources power, which is influenced some of the people. It's not evil. It's not Hugo Chamez. they can be very, very good, but people are beguiled by it. Pleasure, which either means feeling good or comfort or security, right? So if you check your stock portfolio every day, you've got a pleasure, you've got a pleasure item, right? Or if you have a hard time getting out of bed, not just if you get high a lot, okay? And last is, and last is fame. And fame doesn't necessarily mean internet fame. It might be prestige. It might be just like status. Well regarded and for the right people. You know what I mean, it's like for professors, it's like that most professors don't, they don't want to be, you know, Taylor Swift. But most professors want is to walk into the room of that conference that everybody says, that's professor kissing, you know? It's like he wrote that paper, right? You know, I'm on the seven dimensional disappearing manifold. Yeah, I definitely don't want that. But you do want prestige in your field, right? Okay, so that's fame can mean all sorts of things. Now you're thinking about these things, Francis. You've got to get rid of one. Which one do you get rid of first? Okay, so we've got fame. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Money, power, pleasure, fame. Or honor, you know, honor, which is, that's the old word. That's the word that a coin is used as an honor. Instead of, instead of fame. Okay, yeah, that's kind of a connotation. You know, I have two of my kids or Marines, they serve with honor, that's not what I mean. Right, right, right. I'd say power. Power, tell me why. And by the way, I believe you, but tell me why. Tell me. Look, I kind of see it like the through kind of an addict's lens. And I'll tell you why. It's because whenever I've been gambling with friends, I'm like, this does nothing for me. That little in my brain, well, I might get more, more, more. I get nothing from it. Yeah. So power, I'm like, I don't, what's important to me is that I am satisfied with what I'm doing. That's what matters to me. Like, have I done my best? Have I produced work that I'm genuinely proud of? At the end of the day, do I look back and go? That was a good day. It matters to me what my friends and family think. But everybody else, I don't really care that much about it. You know how our people around snap your fingers and people do what you want? No. You don't want to be a CEO? No. So let me make a supposition about you. Do you have libertarian political tendencies? Yeah. I kind of want to be left alone. Yeah. Do you hate it when people tell you what to do? I fucking hate it. Yeah. There you go. And when people who hate actually seeing having other people have power over them don't like power. Here's the thing. When you see somebody who has a particular idol, they admire somebody who has the same idol, but more of it. So if you see a politician who admires dictators, look out. That person wants to be a dictator. Look at who you admire. If you admire rich people, if you admire famous people, that's your idol almost certainly. You despise powerful people who wielded arbitrarily, right? Yeah. I mean, from Venezuela for Pete's sake. I mean, you've actually seen the fruits of that. So I totally believe you. Now, you've just gotten rid of an idol that's not an idol, so there's no virtue. Okay, you've got three left. Money, pleasure, and fame. You got to get rid of one more. And this is going to get harder now, because these are all kind of nice, right? A few weeks ago, we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on the Odyssey. 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I know enough about myself that I know pleasure. I know pleasure. You know where you're driving with us, right? OK, now, the reason I say this is because-- I mean, it might perfectly well be the case that it doesn't matter to you at all when people recognize you in the airport, because I'm sure they do. Because you've got millions and millions and millions of viewers. I think I want to say, oh, I love triggering armetry, and it feels kind of good, but you don't care. I still don't care. I'm glad it provides them with value, and I'm glad that I'm doing something that makes people feel good and it teaches them and it educates them all the rest of it. But it's third in that list. I wouldn't pretend it doesn't matter, because it does, but if I'm being honest, it's third. What you're saying is that the other two are more important. And I know what you're going to get rid of next, which is money. Yeah. And that's because what's left is pleasure. Yes. Tell me about the pleasure, Raidl. I could have told you this from the moment we spoke. Frances, are you a porn addict? I'm kidding. [LAUGHTER] That's right. I lost episode of triggering armetry. I just-- I have-- there is a family history. I was obviously my family with alcoholism. Alcoholism, yeah. I know that I have those tendencies, which is why I don't drink. It's why I have to be very regimented with my life. I meditate every morning. I plan and I structure my day, because I know that if I don't have those guardrails, I can easily veer off. I have depressive tendencies. And when I indulge those depressive tendencies, it either goes-- it can go-- it goes very quickly down a dark path. And you try to alleviate those tendencies with immediate pleasures, which ultimately make the problem worse. Like every comedian, I got diagnosed with ADHD. And I know that I have those trying to ameliorate those best set of behaviors, whatever you want to call them, and ameliorate it with substances and various different behaviors. I know it deeply destructive. Yeah. I completely believe you. And I completely believe that. And it's interesting, because I've actually studied how humor works, and humor is all based on surprise. And so you're usually really good at being surprised, or you're good at surprising people. So humor works on a part of the limbic system called a hippocampal gyrus. And you flick it, and it creates surprise which you resolve by laughing. And so any stupid dad joke does this. And the reason that little kids laugh-- your four-year-old laughs-- or when your four-year-old was two, and you did this, and flick the hippocampal gyrus of your baby. And so they laugh like crazy. And even now, I'll tell you a stupid joke. I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming in terror, like his passengers. That's the name of Philip Schoen. That's dumb, for sure. I mean, that's my father's favorite joke. But here's the interesting thing. Most people are either good at flicking that thing to change the mood, because they're depressed, which is most comedians, or they're really good at having it flicked by somebody else, which means they actually enjoy humor, those are the two aspects of humor. You're unusual, because you laugh a lot. Most comedians don't laugh that much, because they're only good at one part of that. They're really good at changing the tenor. It's called emotional substitution. And so you find out when you're depressed kid, that you're funny, and you say a funny thing in everybody laughs, and it makes things better inside your brain. So it's a strange thing, right? But you actually-- you enjoy jokes, too. I love jokes. Yeah, I mean, good jokes, not the one I joke. I like him, I'm Philip's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's-- anyway, sorry, I didn't need to take us off that path. What were we talking about? Pleasure is desidil. Pleasure is my life. Pleasure is your idol, and pleasure is your idol. And I actually believe that. And so you have to be very, very careful about the fact that you'll self-administer pleasure for mood management, because it's an ineffective mood management technique. Yeah, it's why I-- one of the things that I spend my money on is, like, personal training, because I know that I'm physically lazy, and if I go to the gym, I'm just going to mess about, which is why I need a very angry South African man to basically shout at me and get me to list heavy things three to four times a week. Lift, lift, lift, lift. Yeah, I don't like it. But I just know that if I do that, that, again, I see my life essentially and my behavior and the way I plan my life as a series of guardrails. If I don't have the guardrails in place, we go somewhere very dark, very quickly. Right, right, right. You ready? Yeah. All right, so now you-- It's going to be difficult. I can't eliminate any of them. You can, you can. Well, having a balanced portfolio of idols is actually pretty healthy, and so far, is that you're probably not-- you're probably not managed by any of them really vigorously. But give them to me again. You've got to get rid of one of them first. And that means going to the population mean, which one do you get rid of first? Going to the population means, if I eliminate money, I make what an average. You're the most average Brit ever, which, by the way, is getting worse and worse. Yeah, tell me about it. Tell me about it. I can't believe I'm saying this, but power and fame, I definitely eliminate. You would. Yeah, you would. I mean, you're pretty libertarian too. I'm very libertarian. I fucking hate people telling me what to do. But I am CEO of trigonometry, and I do Yeah, right. Because it must be done because it must be done when someone's like, I'd rather not do it. But if people start calling you boss, it's going to make you uncomfortable. Yeah, I told everyone to stop it. Yeah, it's king. Yeah, yeah. So you're a hierarchical organization that has the, that has the, that's flatter than it could be because you don't like it when people call you by your last name and that stuff really bones you out. Okay. And fame, it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't draw you in at all. So if I don't like them, if literally nobody recognized you on the street, I'd prefer that. You'd prefer that. So to me, fame is a, is an unpleasant byproduct of what we do. Yeah, really? Yeah. Like when people come up to me in the street and they want a chat, I sort of, I want a chat to them to give them what they want. But for me, it's awkward and a bit of a distraction. It's not oxygen for you. No, not at all. I haven't said that. I don't want people to walk away from the thinking like, I, you know, I'm being superior in some way or whatever, like I enjoy having that conversation. But if I could just walk around and people didn't recognize me, that would definitely be my problem. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Introvert. You are an introvert. Which means that when you do something big like arc that you're trained to energy. Yeah, absolutely. I need to rest for a week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First. So an extrovert would be the wire after that. That's really how you find out because introverts can be very public. Yeah. But they don't get energy from. I get tired from being with lots of other people. Okay. So you like solitude. I love solitude. You like being alone or being alone with just with your family. Yeah. That's absolutely good. I'm interested. Alone. Okay. I've got two young kids you can tell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're just two left, which is, which is money and pleasure. Well, I really value comfort. Right. And the thing with money is it's like, I'm not someone who wants to make lots of money for the sake of making money. But I do need a lot of money to do the things in my life that I want. I don't, maybe that doesn't make a sense. It makes a lot of sense because you just say this pleasure not money. You need the money to give you to give you the comfort that you want. Yeah. That's really what it comes down to. And for me, comfort is peace is what I mean. Like I want to be left alone in a comfortable space. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what you want to eliminate sources of discomfort. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually one of the things that we find a lot of people, they don't, you know, they want, they don't want noisy neighbors. For example, they don't want to wait in a queue to go to the doctor. I didn't want to win. They don't want to be in traffic. I didn't want to be in traffic. Those things cost money. Right. And so that's a pleasure. Right. That's a pleasure. Right. And what that means is that it's very, very easy to kind of fall into patterns. And again, there's nothing wrong with these things. These things are not evil. There's nothing wrong with pleasure. It's just the misuse of pleasure. It's just the elevation of pleasure. When you're doing this at the expense of your family, it's like, I want peace. Get the kids out of here. Then you'll actually sacrifice your relationship. You'll do things that you ultimately regret as a result of that. And so knowing that is super important. For most of my students, they think they have a money idol. I mean, they're MBA students at the Harvard business. Well, they're married. But it's not that. They have they actually have an honor idol. They have a they're not even a fame idol. It's said, it's to be beloved. They want to be adored. And the reason is because my students and by the way, me too is my problem too. They're really, really, really good at something when they're kids. Like really good at something when they're kids. And they learn that they only get love and attention from their parents when they do that thing. And they're little synaptically plastic brains is really important to dad. I'm a dad. I'm a grandfather. My kid, my grandkids, the same age as your kids, that they only get attention when they do that thing, which makes them conclude in their synaptic plasticity that love is earned. And then go through life, trying to get that feeling. I want that feeling by doing the thing and they become sort of human doings as opposed to human beings. And what they want is they want adoration and they want to earn it. They want to earn. They'll earn their spouses love. They'll earn their friends love. They'll try to earn God's love. They'll go through their lives trying to earn love. And what that that's really that's an honor idol. And it's a that's an idol of the adoration that you're trying to earn. And love can't be earned. Love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. And so this is one of the most important things we have to get strivers, super successful accomplishment people off of that idol because they'll never be happy. They'll never have a happy marriage. They'll never have true friendships. They'll never have an order of relationship with the divine as long as they're trying to earn love. It's a lot of comedians have that. I can see that. The moment you started talking about that, I was like, yeah, that's a bit of you mate. I know a lot of comedians. I work with a lot of comedians and part of it is I learn from them. You know, I think I'm the only social scientist that ever done Mike Burbigley's show. Oh, really? Yeah. Working it out. That's a great show. Yeah. I listened to that show sometimes because I'm working things out all the time because I'm always on tour. It's just doing public speaking. And so and I went on to talk about how I work out my material on a on a comedian podcast, but it's true. It's true. They want to be loved. They're like laugh at my joke. I just want you to laugh at my joke. That's points on the board. It makes me feel like I'm worth something for Pete's sake and deep in my heart, I don't feel like I'm worth anything. I feel worthless until somebody's loving me. Yeah. That's really insane. You call it joke coke. Yeah. It's a joke coke. Yeah totally. Since things, I never really enjoyed being a comedian. I like making jokes. It's one of my speeches or doing this, but the life of a comedian, like it's very hard. It's a hard life. Yeah. The travel a little bit. And I was very happy to not do it anymore when COVID came along and everything shifted. Really? Yeah. Oh, I hated being taken out the road. I hated it. I love being on tour. I started going on tour when I was 19 because I was a professional classical musician all the way through my 20s. And I started going on chamber music tours. I toured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird who was a Boston over guitar player. And I love tour. I love the touring life. It's just the best. Yeah. And it's not a well balanced, healthy life, which means that you know, married life and family life actually saved me. But left to my devices, I would be out seven days. Right. Right. I want to come back to something you said. And obviously the the meaning issue is something we've talked about a lot. And the activism issue is something we've talked about a lot. I know on this show. Really well too. Well, thank you. Because we're really trying to get to the bottom of it. I think it's very easy and tempting for people who, you know, who've maybe got their life together a little bit and they've successful in some ways to just look at people who are, you know, throwing soup on paintings to save the planner or whatever. And, you know, it's kind of silly and you make fun of it. But I think I've always seen that within that is the drive to be to have meaning. Right. And it's the drive to be significant as well. And it's the drive to live in a significant time. I think there's a huge appeal to the idea that we are living in some kind of time that is immediately before an imminent catastrophe. And if, and if I just go out and I, and I have the right placard at the right protest and we'll save the planet. Otherwise, you know, everything's going to go haywire. And what I wanted to ask you is, why is it that people pursue forms of activism that are not actually effective? Because if you wanted meaning, like I get a lot of meaning from doing trigonometry because I feel like we're contributing to the cultural discussions and shaping them in a way that we think is true and matters a lot. And from the feedback we get from people, I hear that it makes a meaningful impact on their lives. And that, to me, is meaning. That's real meaning. But if I was engaged in something that was not producing any outcome and was in fact not geared to producing any outcome, it was simply attending protests for the sake of feeling like I am with other people who are achieving effectively nothing. I wouldn't find that meaningful. Why do, why do people pursue forms of activism that don't actually achieve anything at all? We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use a trigonometry? The answer is simply cyber ghost VPN. Cyber ghost isn't some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over 20,000 five star reviews on trust pilot, which frankly is rare for any tech product. Let alone a VPN. Cyber ghost encrypts your internet traffic, which means your provider, your employer, your school, or anyone else on public Wi-Fi cannot see what you're doing online. It routes your connection through secure servers in a hundred countries, hide your IP address and keeps no logs at all. So your activity isn't being tracked or stored. On top of that, it unlocks regional content from 40 streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+. And it works on up to seven devices at once, phones, laptops, tablets, even your smart TV. You can share it with your family if you want. We rely on it when we're traveling for the show because it's simple, fast, and it just works. Right now you can get cyber ghosts for about two bucks a month with four months free, a 45 day money back guarantee and 24/7 support. That's protection for your browsing data and access to blocked content online for two bucks a month. Totally risk-free. To grab the offer, go to cybergoesvpn.com/triggernometry or click the link in the description of this episode. It's completely risk-free. So check it out today. Well, one answer, which is an incomplete answer, is that it's performative. But it's not performative to others. It's performative to yourself. The meaning comes from showing that you care about something enough to be angry about it to have, to put yourself into a hot, hedonic state, to feel intense levels of negative emotionality. It just shows that you can actually feel something for Pete's sake, you're to look at you're doing the show, really, really good, really good. But you're not in a hot, hedonic state. On the contrary, it'd be terrible if you were just yelling the whole time. I mean, there are people who try to do that in media, but there would be a less effective medium if you were doing that. But there are a lot of people who just can't feel anything, they're not feeling anything, they're completely numb. And it's a really extraordinary thing. I mean, they're spending their time scrolling and, you know, dating online and just incredibly numbing behaviors. They kind of wiped out all sense of boredom, but their lives are grindingly boring. And so the result of it is they want to feel something, maybe for the first time in a long time. The second problem is that a lot of young people today have been effectively conscripted into a culture war by baby boomers and help, and they've been made to understand that their identity is in a form of grievance. And this is very common. This is the best way to manipulate people is to help them give, is to create a victim identity. That's identity politics. But the most single toxic kind of identity that you can have is that I'm a victim. This is what. Why is it toxic? Because you're looking in the mirror and saying, I'm aggrieved. I don't know who I am if I'm not feeling bad. You know, and this is the exact antithesis of Christianity or any good, serious, nutritious religion, which is to look in the mirror and say, I'm a blow of a child of God. What's my identity? Child of God. It's profoundly positive. But if you look in the mirror and you say, I'm the victim of discrimination. I'm somebody who's actually suffered marginalization. I'm somebody who's on a short end in the stick. That's terrible as an identity. That's the recipe for anxiety and depression, which of course it has produced. And what if, what would you say to people who will say to you, well, I have been a victim of this or my people have been victim of this for a long time or now, you know, you get the same on other parts of the public's perspective. We have been a victim of DEI or whatever. And these are all things that are historically accurate. May the walk right is doing exactly the same thing today. I don't know. Is on trigger nonventry do we talk about that? We use this term of art? I was one of the people that pioneered it. You did. You coined this, didn't you? Yeah. He's got me lots of love and the gratitude on the Internet. Yeah. He's come for a drink now. He's here. He's here on to something. Concentrate. You're on to something. But the truth is that you will find, again, this is not the exclusive ecosystem of the left. The left got really, really good at this of conscripting people into the culture war with victim identity, but the right has picked this up like crazy because it's incredibly powerful. And why should, I mean, you should acknowledge the fact that there are injustices in the world. That's the right thing to do. But you don't identify yourself with injustice per se. That's the perfect recipe for misery to do something like that. In the contrary, you should be joyful. There's something that you can actually do. I mean, the message of most religions is notwithstanding all the hard things in your life, you're beloved. Notwithstanding that you can have a good life, you know, that's the whole idea that the good life is open to absolutely everybody. As opposed to, I know you grew up in some, you know, you grew up in a first world country with all kinds of prosperity, but you're still on it now. Yeah. I mean, that's a hell of a way to live. But of course, that makes you, that makes you really a putty in the hands of the dark triad activist boomer. You know, the person who's a narcissist, person who's Machiavellian, the person who has psychopathic tendencies, which by the way, the research is very clear, describes most real activist leaders today in the political environment. They have these tendencies. That's 7% of the population is dark triad, but they're disproportionately represented in the activist community and they want soldiers. How do you get that by freaking them out? By making them think that the world is actually against them as opposed to helping them understand how they can take control, how they can have agency, how life can be joyful, how life can be good, which is the responsible thing for all of us to do with young people today. Do you think part of the problem as well, Arthur, is they say comparison is a thief of joy and with social media, we live in a perpetual state comparison? Yeah. No, that's absolutely the case. And that quote is frequently attributed to President theater Roosevelt and all people. And whether he said, he said it on the internet. So it may or may not be his, but it's certainly manifestly true. And I've got data and all kinds of experiments from the literature that show that's exactly the case. As much as if you take photographs on your vacation, you will enjoy the vacation 16% less. Wow. And about 25% less if you post them to the internet. So for example, that's just, and all that is a sort of empirical verification of the fact that when you're doing something and you're living for other people, when you're trying to hold yourself up to the standards of others, when you're not fully present in the joy that is your life, you're not going to enjoy your life is what it comes down to. But sure, I mean, you're going to, but fundamentally, the problem is in social comparison. Fundamentally, the problem is that our brains are broken, our brains are broken. We're being shoved 205 times a day on average, which is the number of times that the average American looks at her, his phone into the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is mystery and meaning and significance and purpose and love and hope with the right side of the brain. But no, no, you're over there in the world of information you didn't ask for for things that actually promise you everything and deliver nothing. And it was the complicated problems of engineering and analysis as opposed to the complex issues of meaning and mystery. And if you're just never there, well, that's what you're going to be sad and angry. And if that sadness and anger, particularly when you've got young men who are more prone to extremes of emotion, that tends to lead towards extremism, doesn't it? It can, absolutely. Although I would contest that it's mostly men on the contrary, what we find is that, and this comes from the work of John Height, who's just the best on this and Jean Twengie and a lot of other people, Brad Wilcox down in University of Virginia, who show that there's incredible problems of depression and anxiety of mood disorders of diagnosed mental illness, particularly for progressive women under 30. Progressive women under 30 have a 56% chance of having been formally diagnosed with at least one mental illness. Why? Well, because of this, because this is how it's manifest. You know, when depression is largely, it's largely shown among women with sadness and men with anger. I'll say you see it. A lot of women don't understand that about their husbands, like my husband's so grumpy all of a sudden. He's depressed. He's depressed. Well, you're not crying. Of course not. That's not how men do it. Men do it in a different way. So you're going to see this manifest in different ways and in classic mood disorders with sadness, especially sadness, you know, depression, rumination with women and with unhealthy, disordered forms of anger for men. And the worrying thing is, is the way we're going in society where if you look at it, men are less and less likely to get married, less and less likely to be in relationships, less and less likely to have deep friendships, which are incredibly important for men. You do worry where this is going to go because we're less and less happy. And as a result, young men and young women, they're veering away from each other as well. Right. And, you know, effectively what the great awokeening has done, but what that really is, is it is the manifestation of modern technology has done is it's driven us away from the thing that's best for us in the right hemissurism or brain, which is romantic love. This is the ultimate mystery of life. It's a problem that can't be solved. So are you married, Francis? No. You're not married. So I'll talk to you as a married man. I've been married 35 years. There's lots of complicated left hemisphere problems in my life, like my car. My car is the classic left hemisphere problem, complicated problem. I can solve it, but I don't, I haven't, I don't have the slightest idea how it works. I'm competent, but I could solve it, right? My marriage is a complex problem in the right hemisphere of my brain. I will never solve my marriage. It's so complex. Right. I mean, that's because it's dynamic, you know, you want a cat because you have right hemospheric needs. A mechanical cat, which would be a left hemisphere simulation for it. We're living in the world of simulations, which don't, which don't satisfy us is what it comes about. Furthermore, when we're living over there, we're going to drive people apart from even being able to comprehend that mystery. I talked to men in their 20s all the time who've never been on a date. I mean, in my 20s, that was the point. That was the point. I mean, I wanted a career and I wanted to make money and wanted to be successful. I wanted love. I wanted to find the love of my life when I was 23 years old, like, yep, I'm looking for my wife. That's, I mean, again, I was like that as well. And that's your 20 years younger than me. So I've been married 23 years, got married to 20, met at 18, married 20. Nice. I admire that a lot. I met my wife when I was 24 and I couldn't close the deal for two years because she didn't believe in marriage. She, I mean, she's in Barcelona. Okay. Like Denmark on the Mediterranean, when you know, they're all very modern, you know, hard red, you know, atheists, et cetera, et cetera. But I had to set about, this is a big, big, big project. Now, of course, she leads me in pounds of righteousness. I mean, she's a true believer in all these things. And she leads me. But the whole point is that, you know, this is the mystery of life. And if we've eradicated that, we've broken the brains of young people because of how technology has changed our lives. How culture, the culture that everything has a complicated solution, the culture of technology and engineering, where there's an app for that. All that does is it ruins mystery. And the ultimate mystery, of course, is love. And so if you're freaking people out in activism, turning the genders against each other systematically, if you're making it harder for people to meet, if you're taking out all the joy from the way that they meet because they're meeting on apps, for example, if you're making it such that they don't even know how to date in real life, guess what you're going to get? A baby bust, you're going to get a love depression, which is exactly what we have. Well, technology seems like such a huge part of it. And I think because people feel that people feel, it may not be true, that they can't control that part. We focus so much on culture and politics and all this other stuff, where it seems to me, quite obvious that, for example, the pill and other elements of the sexual revolution drive so much of the stuff that people think is cultural. And likewise, I think Francis was saying before we started happiness peak in 1992. Well, yeah, the internet comes along, right? Is that fair? That's fair, but really the biggest, that is true, that there's been a kind of a climatic change in happiness since about 1990. But then you have the storms, the hurricanes, the weather of happiness has been a lot more severe, and that's been since 2008, right? Social media. Yeah. And at the beginning of that, when I saw the biggest down draft in happiness in my data, I thought it was the financial crisis. No, that was the introduction of the smartphone, is what that was. And then the introduction of apps on the smartphone and then the introduction of dating apps. I'm not against dating apps. That's the way that the world is going to work. I do scientific advice to dating apps, as a matter of fact, I want them to be better because they're not going to go away. And the way that you do that is by adding the human element into the algorithm, adding the right hemisphere into the left hemisphere, and then you can actually make them productive. We learn how to use the machines. By the way, we're going to figure this out. People are really ingenious and we're going to figure this out. I know the end of the story. We're fine. The problem is we lose a lot of people in the meantime. And that's what I want to avoid. And the other thing I have noticed in the time that we've been doing the show, I think we started tricking on them during 2018, by this point, you know, go Rogan and other people were already really big. But there was, it felt like a bit of a renaissance because for the first time you were hearing long-form conversations, often about difficult issues. They were conducted with mutual respect and all the rest of it. And I very naively thought, you know, this is it now. We found the magic formula for discussion. And now I see that that very thing is becoming what we saw in the mainstream media, which is typically for a podcast. The thing that will be most consumed is a short clip that totally misrepresents the conversation that goes viral because somebody said something out of context that can be made to look offensive and triggering and whatever. So we keep reverting to this very bad mean. Why is that? Well, because people want they want the immediate emotional hit. I mean, but because something that actually gets you into this hedonic state, it gives you a lot of dopamine. I mean, the idea that somebody said something that triggers you, something that offends you, that actually gives you the sense that you're right and they're wrong. And that's really, really satisfying. It feels good to be right and to hear somebody that you don't like saying something that you think is wrong. That's why you'll pass it on. That's why you kind of know it's out of context, but that's no fun. You'll actually pass that on. It's satisfying. That's why it's more satisfying that putting something into context and getting the nuance is that the least satisfying thing ever. That's a drag, man. What do we do about that? Well, I mean, what we do about that is adhering to truth. It's being serious about truth. There's always been this problem. There's nothing new under the sun. People have misrepresented each other and lied about each other. Calumny is nothing new. If you go back to the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and the pamphlets that we're coming out from John Adams that were defaming Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson was sniping at John Adams and they were taking lies about each other. There were people that were lying about we look back into the glory days. Everybody loved George Washington. No. I mean, if you look at the second term of George Washington, he literally wouldn't read the newspapers because they were so columnists about him. They were lying about him and saying terrible things about him. The newspapers in those days were all completely aligned with one particular political party and so the ones that were against him in New York or whatever. There's nothing new in the sun. This is the way that this works. What we're dedicated to is the long game of truth and love and beauty and all of these good things but that's always the long game. You'll always lose the short game to the quick hit and to the negative emotion but the long game has got to belong to us ultimately because if it doesn't then there is no hope. This is a question I really wanted to ask which is does take him risk make us happier? So the answer is maybe depends what happens. No, it doesn't actually depend on the outcome so much as with the nature of the risk. So entrepreneurs take a lot of risk but so do compulsive gamblers. And so risk per se isn't good but risk in search of an explosive reward and done prudently and managed in the right way can be the most rewarding thing possible. Now that now we could go and talk about Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford who took incredible risks in search of these entrepreneurial results that were outsized and the wonderful things they were able to do but that's actually not the best example. The best example of the biggest entrepreneurial risk that leads them to the biggest rewards falling in love. That is the ultimate enterprise, a family, a marriage, babies, that's an enterprise. That's way bigger deal than Apple computer. That's a way bigger deal and it's a little explosion boom, boom, boom, boom happening all over the place less than it was which is problematic but that's risk in the enterprise of life. And I talked to my students about this all the time I say you want to be an entrepreneur. Yeah, good. Go raise $25 million in venture and throw it behind your crazy scheme and I don't care. You want to be a real entrepreneur? Give your heart away. Go give your heart away. Tell that girl that you're secretly in love with her and let her stomp all over it maybe or maybe say I like you too. That's risk that really, really matters. And when you take risk with a sense of prudential judgment which is to say that you're doing and by the way, prudence in the classical sense is not not taking risk. It's taking the right amount of risk. Sometimes risking your life is the prudent thing to do. That's that Yosya Piper talks about that in the four cardinal virtues. He writes about prudence in the best way. So taking prudent risk in search of explosive returns or things that really matter to the risk is the best thing ever. Because the enemy I think of happiness and correct me if I'm wrong is a desire to seek comfort. Well, I mean the an enemy of happiness is actually never living in an entrepreneurial way. Absolute. I mean, this is one of the things and this is one of the biggest problems. You could live in this kind of cocoon of and really what the cocoon is is the matrix that movie that came out 27 years ago and that shocking. But what that is is that nobody, people lived in a pleasant simulation because they were being controlled by an artificial intelligence that fed off human energy. Francis, we're literally in the matrix. This actually happening to us right now. And the way that you keep people pacified is by the pleasant simulation, the kind of the curve fit of a right hemispheric life that's actually a left hemispheric experience. And so doing that comfort, it's a comfortable thing that's actually awful. That's a dystopian nightmare is the way that that works out. And the way that you break out is by taking all kinds of IRL risks, especially with your heart. 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You know, the glory of God is a man fully alive, the St. Irenaeus in the 3rd century, 2nd century. The glory of God is a person fully alive. What's a person fully alive? That's a person in pain, you know, you sell it well. You sell it well. I mean, you can tell he's a Catholic. And I know, but you go into a Catholic church, you're literally worshipping a guy represented in the front of the church who's being tortured to death. That's, I don't want that. But I need that. I need that. I need that suffering. I need that full experience. I want to bite out of life. I want to be fully alive. And this is one of the reasons that suffering, which is a largely right hemispheric experience, makes people understand the meaning of their lives. If I go back through your life, if we went back, if I were your therapist, and I don't do clinical work, if we went back, you know, year after year after year, and I would say, tell me the formative moments. You wouldn't say, oh, yeah, that beach vacation in Ibiza, no, you tell me about when that person passed away, when that woman that you loved wasn't there, when, when, when something that you wanted didn't happen. And then you understood who you were because you survived and you understood something through your suffering. It's critically, critically important and there's no suffering in the matrix. We, I mean, we need to, I make my students say, my suffering is sacred, and they have this little mantra that I give them to wake up each morning, whether they're on their knees or not, and to say, I'm truly grateful for the things that are going to happen this day. You know, the, the Psalm, this is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it. But I will also rejoice and be glad in the suffering I'm going to face this day and the setbacks I'm going to face this day, bring it on. It's a life fully alive. Yeah. It's what, I love what the French call heartbreak. They call it la de l'oeil exquisite, which means the, the exquisite pain. And there's something to that, isn't there? There's something to that. People are not afraid of breaking up because of the pain it's going to bring, but because they're afraid of the pain per se. I mean, it's, it's, it's, I just say that right. You know, pain isn't a problem. Our fear of pain is the problem. And, and by the way, we're involved for that. I mean, social pain or rejection, it actually implicates a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior singular cortex, but the size of the end of your index finger. And we have it so that we have a verse, we're a verse to losing something or someone that we love because we didn't, you know, 250,000 years ago in the middle place to see and we, you'd wind up walking the savanna and dying alone because you'd be rejected from your tribe because you wouldn't be afraid of rejection. You wouldn't be afraid of loss. It's maladapted today to a certain extent, but also when you learn to live with the hyperactivation of the dorsal anterior singular cortex, then you get that, that meaning you say, okay, this is why I'm still alive. This is how I'm actually surviving. That's by the way, why you listen to sad music when you're, when you're heartbroken because it puts into perspective that aliveness that's in you right now, it helps you understand the emotions that you're actually feeling. You're saying, I want to understand this emotion. I want meaning. That's the reason you're listening to Taylor Swift over and over and over and over again, right? How did you know? How did you know? How did you know? How did you know? How did you know? Only when I work out. It's interesting, you say that particularly about suffering because I think as Buddhists, you say life is suffering. Yeah. That's the first novel through the Buddhism. And also in the Matrix, interestingly, I don't know if you remember the scene where Agents Smith is talking about the history of the Matrix to Morpheus when he's got him captured in tantcos and he says, we made a bunch of versions of the Matrix and they all failed because there was not enough suffering. And what you just did is you explained how suffering is part of what makes life meaningful. And that's a very powerful framing of it because I think it's fair to say suffering is inevitable. It is. What's actually what's inevitable is pain. So suffering equals pain times resistance to pain. So that's sort of the right formula. So suffering is, you know, mental suffering, et cetera, et cetera, equals pain which has both sensory and affective components. The sensory pain has to do with inflammation and nerve endings and it's processed in one part of the cortex. Effective pain is part of the dorsal anterior single cortex that I just talked about a minute ago. That's the, I hate it part. You get affective pain after you touch a hot stove and you feel the sensory part and then you feel the affective part. I don't want to do that anymore. I hate that. When you have mental pain, it's only the affective portion, which is by the way the reason that that acetaminophen, you call it paracetamol over here, Tylenol, it affects sense affective pain. It doesn't make you feel less pain, it makes you care less. That's how Tylenol works. That's why a blend when you have physical pain, both Advil and Tylenol work so well together because you're working on the both sides of the pain mechanism, it's important to keep that in mind. That's pain. Pain is super important. It's how you learn, it's how you learn not to do things, et cetera, and it's inevitable. But when you multiply it by resistance, then you understand that suffering is not inevitable and that's how meaning comes into the picture. If you have high, high, high pain, but low, low, low resistance, you can actually have very manageable suffering, and that's how in non-resistance, how the Buddhists understand suffering versus pain itself. That's so interesting. I had an experience where the place I was living, there was a lot of noise coming in. I was really angry about it the whole time, it's why it's happening. Your resistance was sky high. My resistance was sky high, and the moment I just accepted that it's happening and started just managing around it, you know, going, you know, just doing what I could, and I couldn't eliminate the problem, but what I could do is just accept it. My level of suffering when, not zero, but close, almost zero, I would say. That is Catholicism. It is. It's like, I will, it's like not my will be done, but thine said the master in the Garden of Guestemini. That's what he said, right? And that was to say, this is going to hurt. This is, our Lord did not say this is going to suck, but he was thinking that, and he said, but thine will be done, not mine is the active non-resistance, which is the lesson for us. I mean, so, so the first novel truth of Buddhism, and I've worked a lot with it all along. Over the past 13 years, I go to Darmsala every year to do conferences and projects with this holiness. It's been very helpful to me. The first novel truth of Buddhism is Dukkha, which technically means the sticky craving from inadequate things, and sort of dissatisfaction is really the first novel truth of Buddhism. It comes from attachment. Attachment is a form of resistance to not getting what you want. The second novel truth of Buddhism is that is the attachment per se, is that explanation. The third novel truth of Buddhism is that the solution is detachment, non-resistance, and the way to get that is the fourth novel truth of Buddhism, which is where it gets complicated. The Eightfold Path. So, it's like, yes, yes, yes, and you get the Eightfold Path, and you're like, "No, that's a lot of work." What is that? Well, the Eightfold Path is the way that the Buddhist teach you to live such that you can live in non-resistance, that you can live to non-resistance, to ego, to non-resistance, to suffering, sorry, to pain, non-resistance to the things in life such that you can be integrated into a life that has inevitable pain, but not inevitable suffering. This is what seemed to me like a contradiction with me that I've always wanted to ask someone who's as smart and knowledgeable as you about it. It's like, I just gave you the example where my suffering went to zero because I let go. But then also, isn't having ambition to do things and create things and to build things and have conversations that, isn't that ego in that? Yes. And so, here's the thing. This is the balance. If I were a Buddhist, which I'm not, I might say you should always have complete non-resistance and disregard pain, I'm not a Buddhist, I'm a capitalist, non-American, right? I think there are lots of cases when you should actually try to lower the pain. I mean, I take a Tylenol, if I wake up, my back hurts a lot, I got like back issues. And I take Advil because I want an anti-inflammatory, by the way, I also am very familiar with the clinical research on back pain, which shows that you should alleviate the pain, manage it a little bit, but you shouldn't take a narcotic analgesic because that's eliminating the pain. I should manage the pain and then have non-resistance to the fundamental presence of it in my life, which will actually co-occur with my life every day for the rest of my life. It's okay. It's okay to say, I'm a guy with back pain. I can manage it a little bit because Advil's pretty good, but I can also live a really, really good life. And I can focus on the things that I like. And so what I'm doing is I'm combining the lowering of pain with non-resistance in a way where the suffering is where I needed to be in my life. If I'm running a company and I see some problem and I can avoid, I have a problematic, loud mouth, lawyers lighting me up on the Slack channel. I'll fire them. I'm getting rid of pain. I'm not going to have non-resistance to that because that's it's not right for me to practice non-resistance in the lives of other people, right? There's all kinds of cases where judgment requires that you understand which lever you're going to try to work. But if you only think there's one lever, which we are telling young people that there's only one lever that pain, that depression, that sadness, that melancholy, that anxiety, that loneliness, is evidence that you're broken? No. It's evidence you're alive. It's evidence that you're. I told my students, "Look, you're studying at Harvard University. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy." The truth is, that's a really good and normal thing. And so don't go to somebody who says, "Oh, you're sad and anxious. We got to fix that." No. You got to manage that. You got to live with that. You have to understand the balance between pain and non-resistance to pain, such that the suffering is what it's supposed to be. And how much does gratitude play into this? I saw this amazing interview with a football manager called Luis Enrique, and he was talking about his 12-year-old daughter who died. And they were saying to him, "How do you cope?" And he said, "The only way I learned how to cope was to be grateful that I had 12 years with this person." Yeah. And just saying it, and I've never had kids, and I'm welling up, and I'm thinking, that is the ultimate way to cope with probably the most tragic loss of human being can suffer. Yeah, for sure. That is the hardest thing, by the way. That is the hardest thing. And people do deal with it with gratitude. The ultimate long-term way to deal with that grief, grief is the unremitting sadness. Unremitting sadness. It's remitting, ultimately. The way that people accelerate their healing is by helping people who are fresher in their grief. So the best way, if you lose a child for you to heal faster and better is for you to find somebody else who's more recently lost a child and help that person, which is one of the laws of love that you will actually heal more when you give more. That your injury is actually, it actually has a purpose because you can share what has happened in your life with somebody else and help that person heal in their fresher wounds. So it sounds like a karmic truth, but I think it's a fundamental truth of a beautiful truth about humanity as the way that this works. Now, as a way to deal with the fact that we have this horrible tragedy, gratitude is great, and there's a reason for that. We have a negativity bias. Homostapiens have a negativity bias. You know, you don't want to be focusing on grateful you are to find those berries on that bush. 250,000 years ago, while there's a saber to tiger sneaking up behind you, you need to be focused on the saber to tiger, not on the good things, bad things. You know, if you're sitting at a party and somebody's smiling sweetly at you from across the room, it's nice, but if somebody's frowning angrily at you, take note, that might be a big problem once you get outside on the street. And so we do. We notice all the terrible things that are happening to us. And that's amplified in the environment of grief. So what do we do? We have to manually turn up the part that's less natural, which is positive affect about naturally good things. And it's funny how we do this. It's a religious people sort of do this naturally. We almost lost one of our children many years ago in 1999 or so. Our oldest was one, and he fell out of the third story window. And it was horrible. It was horrible. And he was going to die. He was going to die. And so we're at the hospital. My wife and I, and we start praying. We're praying. We're praying. We're praying. We're praying. What do we pray? Keep them alive, obviously. But then we were praying. Thank you for giving us our son. That's what we pray. Naturally, not on purpose. Why? Because that's what we've been trained. This Christian people is to thank God for the good things and not just curse God. It's just funny. So this is the book of Job. Job 127, 128, 127 or 128. See how illiterate I am in this. That the jokes all, you know, God and Satan are throwing dice. And the Satan says, you know your boy, Job? I bet I can get him. And God says, no, you can't. He says, watch. And so he goes and kills all Job's kids and he takes all his animals and he takes everything away from Job. You know what Job says? Before the whole story starts, he said, the Lord giveeth and the Lord takeeth away. But then the real part comes that nobody remembers. Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's the end of that scripture. See that's, that's what a supernatural view of life can bring you. That's why it's so critical important. No, it goes on to three of Job's buddies show up and the entire book of Job, which is tiresome or they're trying to tell them, like, here's all what happened. You must have done a bad thing. You probably send a lot, you know, and it's just this sort of rabbinical exegesis on why it's sort of like Kushner's why bad things happen to good people, but, you know, boring. Then in the 38th chapter of Job, Job gets to talk to God about suffering because God comes in a whirlwind. It's one of the times in the Old Testament where somebody actually talks to God comes in the whirlwind. And Job puts God in the dock. He's like, I'm your boy. You said I was, that was a righteous man. And, and, and you did all this stuff to me. Explain yourself, sir. And, and God says, here's the, this is the funniest part of the Old Testament of the Bible. It's actually genius comedy. God says, Oh, yeah, I'll tell you, I mean, you're so smart. You deserve it. You deserve it and explanation, of course. But, but since you're so smart, first you tell me, why did I create the heaven and the earth? You're so smart, tell me. And then I'll tell you why you suffered. You're so smart. Tell me why I put the stars in the sky and the fishes in the ocean. You're so smart. I'm sure you know. But tell me why then I'll tell you why you suffered. Here's the point. It's a mystery. It's part of the mystery of life itself and life itself is a miracle. And if we want, do we, do you want part of the miracle or do you want the whole miracle? That, that requires that we embrace the mystery, that we love the mystery itself. And they're the bad parts. And that's the struggle. You get about 90 years to figure that one out. Arthur, what a pleasure. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface. So perhaps we'll, we'll carry on the conversation another time. You're going to end it after Job. Yeah. Well, we depressed people. That's what we do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not this one. Actually, I thought it was a very unusual and special episode of our show. So thank you. Thank you for making that. Thank you for what you're doing. And you've really enriched my life a lot with a show. Well, this was amazing for us. Thank you. The last question, as you know, as I was the same, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? We touched on it. We touched on it here. But I think that the story of our civilization today is the lack of romantic love. I think that the lack of relationships, this is not a sentimental issue. This is an existential issue that we're actually getting in here. And I think that we need to have a better scientific understanding of what exactly is happening and what's going to happen. This is not just demography. This is the question of whether life is actually worth living going forward. Not whether life is going to be worth and not whether life is going to continue going forward. So that's what I think we should talk about more, which is the deep physics of romantic love. Arthur Brooks, thank you for being here. Thank you, guys. Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount. So check it out today.