You Need To Be Bored. Here's Why. | Dr. Arthur Brooks

You're living in the Matrix. You're simulating love, sex, progress, but the one thing you can't simulate is meaning of your life. You can be an independent person. You cannot be a sheep, and that's the first step in actually taking back your autonomy in a world that doesn't want you to be independent. Dr. Arthur Brooks is the happiness scientist billionaires call when their success stops working. He's a Harvard professor of bestselling author. If you want to break your phone addiction, learn how to turn risk into adventure and how high performers can rebuild meaning instead of chasing emptiness, today's episode is for you. Your brain isn't working right. You're figuring away your time and not feeling good about it because your brain has been captured by algorithms. That's a weird thing when you think about it. It's the more we try to eliminate or boredom, the more boring our life gets. Can you tell us what is a resume or a eulogy achievement? Your resume virtues are your instrumental goals. I don't like this, but I'm getting to make a lot of money. That's why people actually stay in jobs that they actually hate. Your eulogy virtues, which is what you want people to say to your general. Those are the ultimate goals, not the intermediate goals. What is the biggest lie we tell ourselves that stops us from achieving the life that we want? Yeah, there is a big lie. And that is okay. I want to start with a quote from your book, which thank you for the advanced copy. It's amazing. And I actually read the entire thing. So did David. I know a lot of times people bring people bring people on and then don't actually follow the people that they are talking to on podcasts. Eat into chat. Yeah, exactly. But there's a quote that I loved. And it's to find the meaning of your life requires thinking and living differently from how you've been trained by school, work, media, entertainment, culture. And to find the meaning of your life, you have to pay attention to the aspects of your life. You've been trained to ignore the dark side of your consciousness. That was so interesting. So what happens if you never discover the meaning in your life? At the most obvious level, you'll become depressed and anxious. Depression has increased by about a factor of three for people under 30 anxiety by about a factor of two. The explanation for this is that we're using our brains wrong. And so that's the most obvious effect of this is that we become depressed, anxious and lonely and self-harming. And we fall for every kind of moral panic and every kind of cultural fad that comes along because we think it's actually going to give us meaning and it won't, because we're in the wrong side of our brain. So anytime that you're getting your questions answered and your cultural references from TikTok, you're not on the right side of your brain. And this is not going to give you what you need and you're going to follow these false lures again and again and again. That's the biggest problem. The underlying problem from all of that is because you're not getting what your heart desires, what you what you were built to understand, which is the meaning of your life. You're not going to develop the relationships that you need with your friends, with your family, your lesson less likely to develop a lifelong pair bond, which is what homo sapiens are built for. We're built for pair bond mating. All of the nonsense about, I don't know, polyamory that are coming right. That's all nonsense. It's all over Austin. And again, I mean, look, no judgment, different strokes, but look, I'm a behavioral scientist. And the truth of the matter is that we are built for pair bond mating and the way that you understand the deep chemistry with another person is the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brain. And if you and your pair bond or have those right hemispheres turned off, who knows what's going to happen. So all of these things, you're very much less likely to develop a relationship with the divine. You won't you won't actually pursue a spiritual life. And that's exactly what we're seeing. You have like three big questions that you think we have to ask ourselves to find the meaning of life. What are those? Well, the first question you have to ask is, you know, where do you find it? And the answer is not like the beach or even the church or even Italy. It's the right side of your brain. So you need to understand the science is the most important thing. Then the second thing to do is to open is to really open up the right side of your brain. And that's that really comes from these questions. And people ask me all the time about, you know, AI and happiness. So the most popular question that I get these days is AI and happiness. And the answer to that question is AI can make you happier, but it probably won't. The reason is because when you use AI as an adjunct to the left side of your brain to answer what and how to mechanical and technical questions, you can free up more time to spend in your relationships in real life. But if you use it as an adjunct to the right side of your brain for love and hap for love and happiness, you will become more miserable because it doesn't work. If you use AI as your therapist or your lover or your friend, it will leave you feeling empty, depressed and anxious. That's the bottom line. So the way that you need to, here's how to think about it. Quebec your question is about asking deep questions. Questions of meaning can't be asked to AI. This is the test. If you can ask a question and put it into a Google search bar and get an answer that's meaningful to you or that has significance to you, it's not a true meaning question of life. That's a left side question. Only left side questions. If you take a real like, imagine this question. Why am I alive? For what, what I give my life? Ask chat GPT there. You'll get hilarious stuff. You're just like, chat GPT is spitballing about why you would give your life. Well, many people say it's not meaningful to you. You know it can pass the touring test and kind of fool you a little bit, but not really. So think about all the questions in your life that you just can't Google those are the meaning questions. The really big ones come in kind of three categories. This is the way to start looking into the right, the deep right, to find the really deep meaning that we have in life. Number one is why do things happen the way they do in my life? And there are lots of ways of science, faith, conspiracy theories. I mean, then why am I doing these things that I'm doing every day? Why am I doing these things? That's your purpose. And this is really important for your philosophy, because one of the great parts of how you talk about happiness is progress. We're built for progress. We're not built for arrival. We're built for progress toward goals, right? But that requires understanding goals, understanding direction, et cetera. And that's why am I doing what I'm doing? And the last one is why does my life matter? And to whom those are deep meaning questions. And so I encourage my students and everybody at me to think deeply to get a mastermind around these types of questions, because then the aperture starts opening. And then you start getting interested in these right hemisphere behaviors, the things in your life that you do that don't have answers that you can articulate. They don't have problems that you can actually solve. Say, like your marriage, you can't solve that. You can only live it. And that's why you love your marriage. That's a great point. I've been thinking a lot about risk lately. It comes up again and again on the podcast, because what I found in the people that we tried to help when it comes to building or buying businesses is they really cannot progress without risk. And there's a lot of people today that want to de-risk everything. And I'm not so sure that a de-risk life is a good one. And so I'm wondering, you know, what does the research tell us about the kind of risk you have to take to build a meaningful life? Yeah. The first way to actually improve your life is to turn uncertainty into risk. Risk is where you can describe the possibilities. You can assign probabilities. And so you can manage contingencies. That's the reason that everybody gets happier after they buy insurance. Because insurance does exactly that. Insurance is a happiness business. It feels like Brussels sprouts. It's actually ice cream. Nobody buys life insurance policy that doesn't get happier when they do it. And the reason is because they said, like, I might die. These actuaries, they have numbers on when I might die. And if I do, my family's not left in poverty. And so that turns it into risk. And risk is way, way, way better. And then the important, the next step, and to actually making it into a really good part of your life, a meaningful part of your life is actually to start reframing risk as adventure. That's the important thing to do. It's like, this is so, this is so exciting. And, you know, thinking about, you know, what might happen and what the, you know, what will you do if these particular things happened? And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. Because a lot of things, for example, people start businesses with you. I mean, this is what you're enabling entrepreneurship for people who wouldn't have these opportunities, which is why it's so important what you're doing. But the risk really is is there's, there's an upside and there's a downside. I mean, you might go broke and you might get rich and you might just make a living and you might be doing something else in five years. And that adventure is sort of the adventure of life. Because that's a model of really, really good living on how that works. And you need to apply that same entrepreneurial mindset that goes from uncertainty to risk to adventure in every part of your life. That's not just your business, not just opening laundromats or, you know, running vending machines, the kinds of businesses that people actually wind up loving. And that you help people do, which is super important. It's also who you marry and where you live and whether you get an education and how you raise your kids, all of those things go from uncertainty to risk to adventure. And if you're living the adventurous lifestyle, then you're treating your life as a startup. You're not treating your businesses as a startup, you're treating your life as a startup. And that's the right way to live. That's so good. I had this one of my favorite economists of all time. His name is Brian Westbury. And he's had a company called First Trusted. He used to work at and like we took him down to Latin America when I used to run a business down there. And he went down to Patagonia and went rafting down a river and fished He's a big fisherman, kind of an older guy. And all of a sudden, Patagonia's pretty crazy weather. And so the weather kind of gets crazy, the storm clouds roll in. And it's not looking so good. And so Brian's trying to communicate with the driver of the boat, and he's yelling out him, it's Spanish. Brian doesn't speak Spanish. And Brian's like, are we gonna drown? It's freezing. This is glacial runoff. What are we doing? And the boat captain looks back at Brian and kind of perfect English says, do you want to know the difference between an adventure and a disaster? And Brian's like, what? And he says attitude. And Brian must have told this story 400 times. And every time he told it, I chuckled and I thought about how sometimes like the fisherman, the coal miners, the farmers, they have the best one liners, because it is so true. Right. Like if you go broke in business, will you die? Well, probably not. No. You know, and so what is really the difference? Right, right. I like that categorization a lot. It's really important. And you know, I work a lot with my students on this because they're super afraid of failure. And it's funny because everybody has a death fear, by the way. And your death fear is probably not your physical death. Only 20% of people really have a significant fear of their physical death. That's called thana-tophobia. It's that actual diagnosable malady. But 80% of us don't have that. But you still have a death fear, which is the threat to who you are in your own mind. And if you're a striver, if you're an achiever, if you're a winner, you're going to be afraid of failure. You just are. And if you've never gotten to be in school, right? And if you're super success addicted, and if you actually go through life, not as a human being, but as a human doing, then then fear of failure is going to haunt you. It's going to haunt you as a matter of fact. And those are the people that I've actually that show up in my classes because I teach MBA students at Harvard. I mean, they're, they've never, like, there's no bees in their background, right? And so the result of it is I have to make them, actually, take them through an exercise on how to deal with this, on how to such that they can actually live the adventure that is risk. Because the adventure that is risk requires that you take a serious chance on failure. Because otherwise there's no stakes. Otherwise, at six, I win and have a dozen you lose. It's not real. And there's no real upside of anything. So I have to take them through that. And it's actually a Buddhist death meditation that I take them through. There's a, there's a Theravada Buddhist monks Thailand, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. They have something called the Maranasati meditation, which they'll contemplate pictures of corpses in various states of decay. And it's a nine-step meditation. So a body that has just died. A body that has just started to decay. A body where the skin is, or is bloated and blue. A body that where the skin is peeling back. At the end is just a bunch of bones or dust where the bones were. And the monks stand up for the pictures and say, "That is me." And they contemplate and say, "That is me." And only when they, when they become familiar with the inevitability of their death can they fully be alive. Death gives them life. Failure gives you success. And so familiarity with your own failure only gives you the possibility of success. That's really what we're talking about. So I take my students through a nine-part meditation on their own professional failure. Starting with, I just failed to class at Harvard. I'm falling behind my classmates. I'm not getting interviews. I don't think I'm going to get the job that I want. I don't think I'm going to get any job after I graduate. I'm moving back in with mom. And there's this one step where they always cry. Step seven, where I think my parents feel sorry for me. Oh, that's awful. Because that's the worst for a success addict. Especially the very special, very junior, very special boy, very special girl who really never got attention and affection except when she got first chair in the orchestra or she got all straight as in the report card. And she learned that all love is earned. Love isn't earned. Love is a grace freely given. But if your parents do their best, they reward you for being special, then you'll go through life like that and you will develop these pathologies and you will never be free. Wow. So in practice, have you done the death? Meditation? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Did you cry? I wanted to start. No, no. I mean, the death meditation was a big success and failure. Well, both of them. Yeah. Never on the physical death. That's one question. That's not my problem in its way. I'm sort of afraid of different things. I am horribly afraid of failure. I'm horribly naturally afraid of failure. I'm afraid of not being loved. I'm afraid of losing my mind. Because my stock and trade is the stuff that's going on inside my head. And I have a lot of early onset dimension, my family. I'm so these are the fears that I have. And so those are the things that I have to look straight into where I have to design the Maranissa tea meditation and everybody watching us. Look, these are slackers. Don't watch you. That's very true. This is the striver cast. Like people are amazing. Yeah, totally. Yeah. But that means that they have fears of their own sense of self, which probably will revolve around their own performance. And that's the exercise that's worth doing. Oh, my God. It's hard for me, still, but I still do it. So do you ask yourself multiple questions? Then you ask yourself nine questions, kind of like all the way down to almost you feel yourself crying about the thing that you might be most scared about? Is that the process? It's not questions. It's putting myself in the position of these things actually happening. Yeah, so you're kind of like visualizing the most. Yeah, you're visualizing the worst possible thing. It's funny because the visualization exercise is based on manifestation, all those goofy self improvement techniques. It's manifest something really beautiful. No, no, no, no, no, that's for amateurs. Fine. Do it if you want, because that will change your behavior in a positive way. It's not going to change the universe. It's going to change you, which is how manifestation actually works, but also manifest the worst possible thing because you need to master that. You need to master your fears. You must and the only way that you can do this through exposure. If you're afraid of flying, you need to go see airplanes and then go get on an airplane. So do you think most people actually meditate wrong? Yeah, I think, well, it's funny because I've talked about this. I've worked for the last 12 years with Adali Lama and you and I've talked about this before. And we have a close relationship. He's been good to me and I love him for lots of reasons. He's really helped my life in a lot of ways. And one time he said something that was kind of negative about Americans who meditate. And I said, we're holding this. Why did you say that? Because he's not a negative person on the contrary. He's completely full of compassion and love. He's a bodhisattva. He has a Buddha nature. It's extraordinary. I've never met anybody like this. And he said, no, the problem is that Westerners meditate because they want the benefits of meditation and you only will get the benefits of meditation when you stop trying to get the benefits of meditation. And I said, tell me more. He said, Americans when they meditate is because they want to feel better. And the goal of meditation is the rest of the world feeling better. Do meditate so the rest of the world can feel better. That's you're meditating for them. And that's a very metaphysical thing. It's a very transcendent thing is the way that that works. And that's a lot of how we do things wrong in general. This is how people who start small businesses, they do best when they're trying to lift up everybody and everything. When something is motivated by love of others, it becomes transcendent and it becomes more successful. It's the same point. It's such a good point, actually. Literally, I was just thinking about this today. If you actually want to change your life, stop trying so hard to change your life. If you actually want to make a ton of money, stop trying to make so much money. Instead, try to go make somebody else money. That's the way you make money in business. You're in my business. Look, we're in the business of spreading ideas. We know tons of people. You and I both know tons of people that I do because you're so successful at influencing culture. And you've been a pioneer in a lot of this, which is fantastic. But you know a lot of people who really would like the level of popular. Millions and millions of followers on social media. They want that. The reason they can't get that to a certain, because we have a million ways to discern when somebody is not doing it for love of others. The motivation has to be other focused. That's a sense of transcendence about what you're doing, which is a key element of success. Yeah, it's so fascinating. It's very timely. I'm thinking about that right now with team, even. David knows for this podcast, like, you know, when I'm thinking about who was, you know, it's crazy. Somebody, one of our podcasts the other day was a million lessons across platforms. Another one was six million lessons across platforms. A lot. Yeah. And that's including short form content and stuff, not like straight up listening to the whole podcast. That'd be great. We're not there yet. Anyway. There aren't that many. Better get me those numbers. But at that point, I basically thought, oh my God. That is, you know, if that's six million people listening or if it's six million hours, that is so many hours of somebody's life. This thing better be fucking fantastic. Otherwise, what a travesty and we should shut it down. And so like every time somebody asks to be on the pod or like once or we've had to kill some episodes because they weren't good enough, I'm like, I know that sucks. But six million people are going to waste the most precious thing they have if this thing is bad. And they trust you. They trust you to be a steward of their time and energy and attention and affection. That's what they're trusting you to do. And that's a big responsibility. It's not like, hey, let the market decide. I mean, you're a gatekeeper into their attention and energy, and that's a covenant actually. - That's actually one of the reasons why I started a newsletter is because I didn't want just social posts that were there a second and then gone forever. And it made me think about Beehive and why I think the best newsletter writers, I know, have already switched to it because there is this difference between publishing and building, you know, most platforms let you do the former. Beehive is engineered for the latter for things that last and leave something behind. You know, the analytics show you exactly what's resonating, engagement tiers, revenue attribution by post, what's converting casual readers into pain subscribers. You can stop guessing. The ad network actually brings sponsors directly to you and just released on-demand ads which gives you access to countless ad opportunities. So you can have all things sales, reporting, invoicing handled because in order to keep writing things that matter, you need to earn money. That's why they have paid subscription boosts, referral programs, all native, all inside one dashboard, all working while you write. So if you're publishing a newsletter on a platform with thin analytics, limited monetization and growth tools that are just an afterthought, you're not gonna build something that lasts. You're gonna maintain something that decays at best. Beehive newsletter has actually grown 2.75x faster than the industry average. And that infrastructure is what helps people write things that stand the test of time. So if you wanna switch to Beehive today, like I do because I use it, use code code 30 for 30% off your first three months at beehive.com/codey. One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about that I've been obsessing on lately is like, so, you know, if you wanna lose weight, you should probably eat less, work out more. You know, if you wanna make more money, you could maybe work a little bit harder, increase your skill stack. Like, it's not that complicated in many ways. It may be hard, but it's like kind of simple. What do you think is the biggest reason why? Or like, what is the biggest lie we tell ourselves that stops us from achieving the life that we want? - Yeah, there is a big lie. And that is that suffering is bad. That's the big lie. People are trying to eliminate and avoid suffering. It's what it comes down to. And only when you understand that suffering is your teacher and suffering is sacred. Now, they could be dysregulated, but the truth of the matter is that it's a very interesting math about this, that the Zen Buddhists like to use in Japan, suffering equals your pain multiplied by the resistance to the pain, pain multiplied by resistance. Now, think about that, when we think about to our high school math, suffering is gonna go up when pain goes up or when resistance to it goes up. You can make your suffering go down by trying to get rid of your pain, but it's much better if you get rid of your resistance. That's a really important concept because when you're starting to open a business or you're going to college or your relationship is struggling, you can try to avoid the pain somehow by working less and by sleeping in and by avoiding your partner. That's pain avoidance. Or you can lower your resistance by trying to understand it, to engage it, to learn from it and grow from it. That's what it comes down to. The number one lie that holds people back is an unwillingness to suffer because of a misunderstanding the nature of suffering. That's a super important thing. And we've miscategorized all suffering as a melody. And if you go to campus counseling at my university and you say, "I'm sad and anxious." I'm sad and anxious. They're gonna say, "Well, we gotta fix that." If you come to my office hours and say, "I'm sad and anxious." I'm say, "Well, you know what? You're a student at Harvard. If you weren't sad and anxious, you need therapy." 'Cause you're doing a hard thing, congratulations. Now, it can be dysregulated. There are many medical issues with this. There's, you know, the, we know more and more about the neuromodulator's involved in clinical depression and anxiety. We understand that better. But for the most part, suffering is part of life. Negative emotions are the system that created in the limbic system of the brain that tell you that there's a threat. And those threats are translated into negative emotions and they get your attention you behave appropriately. Negative experiences help you learn and grow. And that's just evidence to your life. 'Cause, you know, you're gonna have, Cody, you're gonna have a negative interaction with somebody today. And it might be somebody you work with and it might be somebody on the phone or it might be your husband, or maybe all three. And that's how you learn and grow if you allow yourself. - Yeah, so good. Now, I wanna talk about suffering in a different way. Do you think that high performers suffer more from a lack of meaning of life and if so, why? - Yeah, so and the answer is it really, it very much depends on that, but they often do. So many high performers are driven in an unhealthy way. Now, this is not necessarily the case. This is not a necessity to be driven in the wrong kind of way to be a high performer. But it does mean that you have to, every striver has to be alert, vigilant toward workahelism, success addiction and kind of the self-objectification that goes into that. So, and I know a lot of people, and it really does start with the pathology we talked about a minute ago, where their childhood is all about achievement. And they learn in their little brains, which are highly synaptically plastic, that all love is earned. And so they're looking to earn love the rest of their life. And you have to stop trying to earn love. That's a really, really big error in life. It's one of the big errors of life as a matter of fact. If you're trying to earn your partner's love, as a woman, most likely you're gonna be trying to alter your appearance into your seventies. It's a big mistake. And if you're a man, you're gonna be, you know, trying to get the admiration of your wife for worldly accomplishments, to the extent that you're marginalizing her, not giving her the attention and energy and affection that she needs. And this is why couples break up, as they're trying to earn each other's love a lot of the time. This is not the only reason they break up, but it's a big reason that couples break up. And why workahelism destroys marriages for these reasons. It's a really important thing. And so I talk an awful lot about that, but that's a really important thing for people to keep in mind because strivers success addicted individuals, they're driven by a pathology and they can't quit. You actually have to be a well-balanced person to be a super striver and a really happy person. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that that's possibly a minority of strivers. I've met some who do it really, really well. And in my research, I'm trying to be that guy. I think we all are, but it is hard. I'm trying to be like, I bet it's hard because, you know, it's like, you know, when I'm weak, then I'm really afraid of failure. And I'm really driven by worldly rewards as opposed to the rewards that matter. And I'm trying to be special rather than happy. That's really what all very successful unhappy people haven't common is they will expend their happiness in search of specialness. So what do you do practically to stop that? Knowledge is power. Number one, knowledge is power is really, really important. Second is that the one barrier against that, the one your bull work against this is your relationships. And there's, you know, this family relationships that really has a lot to do with your romantic partnership. It's just why it's so, that's why marriage is the most important part of your startup. The most important thing that you do, that's your most important acquisition. - That's true. - It's really, really important. And then third is I strongly recommend that everybody watching us do spiritual work. Because you need a relationship with a metaphysical. For me, it's, I'm a Catholic. I mean, it's like, which, you know, the Catholic church is like Starbucks. It's a franchise system. It's very uniform. It's a really, really good way to get it done, right? For me, I'm not gonna say that my path is the only path for everybody. And I'm not actually talking about the metaphysical questions of, you know, what's true, what's not true. I have views about that too. But, you know, everybody needs to actually experience transcendence. You know, we need love. That's what we need. And if you're not, if you feel like your love is earned and you go through life like that, you're gonna have a bitter existence. And you need to experience the grace of pure love from people who love you, for truly actually love you, for who you are. That's the bulwark against these pathologies. - You know, if we were to take this about marriage a little bit, and we've been talking a lot about marriage lately. And I think it's for the same reason. I'm increasingly realizing, you know, in business and life, none of it matters if you don't have somebody to love. And marriage is such a beautiful challenge that I feel very privileged to be trying to live through, not solve for. So what is the secret that you found to a happy relationship or marriage? - Yeah, it's a, they, there's sort of two levels to that. If the earthly level is deep friendship. The secret to a happy marriage is deep friendship. And that's one of the reasons that you find that, just sort of psychologists talk about romantic love in two phases, passionate and companion it. And companion it love is the goal after three to five years in a relationship, which is like, I told that to one of my kids, and he's like, "Dad, that's not hot." (laughing) I got a companion it love. So like, you know, like, grandma and grandpa sitting on the porch and they're rocking chairs, you know? And which, by the way, isn't that bad? - Yeah, but when you're young, it feels like it sounds like giving up. - Yeah, it does. And in terms of the companion love is pretty hot, right? But the important thing is that the vehicular language of your marriage is deep friendship. And one of the reasons that couples that are super in love and then a year later hate each other is 'cause they never got to friendship. They never culminated. They never, they never consummated their relationship in terms of the real consummation, which is the friendship. And so that's the goal, is how that works. and there's a whole neurochemical process of bonding to each other in love in the last phase of which is a deep level of oxytocin release which is the neuropeptide and the brain of bonding and that's the basis of your deep friendship. I mean, it's the deep friendship that you have at a level even with your children, with your parents and certainly with your partner and with your closest friends and that's what you need at the deepest level with the person who knows you the best is what it comes down to. Then at the more metaphysical level with relationships that you find that the relationships that do the best and last the longest with the greatest amount of happiness is they feel divine. That's one of the reasons that the happiest marriage is one of the characteristics is that the partners get more religious across the decades together. They get more religious together. Maybe they're Buddhists and maybe they're Catholics and maybe they're Jews and maybe they're something. But they're getting more religious. They're more interested in this because they have this sense, this divine fusion. You know, they say marriage is one flesh and people sort of think of that in the sexual context. That's the least of it. That's the sort of the least intimate. The most intimate thing that you could do with your partners pray together. Most partners, even religious partners, don't pray in front of each other. It's too embarrassing. And the reason is because that opens up the right hemisphere of the brains together. The fusion, one flesh is the fusion of the right hemispheres of the brain. And that's when their relationship becomes like those old, you know, the nuclear subs where you couldn't launch the missiles until two guys had two keys. Are they put it in? Yeah, I've seen Las Vegas. And that's what the divine nature of marriage feels like to the most successful couples is two keys. Two keys to the divine. You turn yours, I turn mine and our marriage is becoming an antenna to God. Wow. That's so beautiful. I mean, I think it was, who was it? Was it, maybe it was Nietzsche who said like marriage is one long conversation. Yeah, that was Nietzsche, yeah. Right? And Nietzsche, by the way, he proposed to the same woman over and over and over again. It got shot down again and again and again. Did he ever win? No. And she said no forever. So really? Yeah, she was using it. Wow. So it was one long singular conversation. Yeah, it was just one long begging session for Nietzsche because he was hopelessly in all of this woman that he was in a social circle and hung out with. And she was like a sophisticated and also a philosopher and really smart. And he kept William Mary meat. No. Well, now William Mary meat? No. And by the, you know, in his 40s, he was in an insane asylum. Wow. Yeah, I mean, there were probably good reasons to not marry Nietzsche. Yeah, definitely having read most of his stuff. But there are these moments of brilliance. Maybe that's why we all think that like tortured poets and philosophers and artists. They have like Bukowski, a crazy man. Yeah, depending on what I had you listen to him, you'd be like, wow, that's one of your favorites. I know. But then you read some lines and they-- It's sublime. It's sublime. It's sublime. The problem is that it's hard to live with those people all the time. Anything with Schopenhauer. No. Like my theory of rational pessimism is like, oh man, I'm just trying to buy Christmas presents here. Oh. You know? It's very, very true. Yeah, I don't think nihilists are existentialists. It would probably be good companions. Not either. Not fun. Yes. I was wondering if somebody's listening right now. And maybe they're not in the relationship already. You know, they're like, okay, sounds great. Sign me up. I love all of that. But look at the world out here. It seems impossible. And I feel a little lost. And you know, all the things you hear. Women these days are ex. Men these days are why. We kind of have this compete competition of the sexes. Like, what would you tell somebody? What could they practically do if they feel a bit hopeless? But they want to find love. Live like the person you want to become. And look for the person that you want to be with for the rest of your life. That's what you do. I mean, the whole problem is that we compromise with respect to who we are. And we compromise with respect to the people that we date and potentially mate with. That's the problem is what it comes down to. Have standards and then go to the place where people have the same standards as you. You know, that's one of the reasons that dating apps, the dating apps are getting better as a matter of fact. Because some of them don't have time and app as the goal. Some dating apps are getting better for its time in person as the goal. And that's really good. But the truth of the matter is that meeting in person is critically important around shared ideas and values. So, one of the things when people come to me in office hours, they say, so how do I meet, you know, professor? You know, I want to audition for the role of husband. You know, but where do I, where's the audition? Yeah. And I say, were you raised in a religion? A lot of times it'll be like, yeah, but I don't practice my, I don't care. Go back. I don't believe it. I don't care. That's not the point. The point is not what you believe right now. People get religion all wrong, by the way. They think you have to, especially in the current generation, you have to feel something and then you'll believe something and then you'll practice something. That's exactly backwards when it comes to religion. First practice, then believe and occasionally feel. That's how religion is supposed to work. And so if you're looking for a goal of meeting somebody who's got conceivably values and aspirations that are similar to yours, somebody with whom you want to have your joint start up with, which by the way, the best marriages are start-ups. They're not mergers. They're certainly not acquisitions or hostile takeovers. All right. The best marriages are start-ups. And you want to go someplace where somebody has the same start-up mentality as you, even if you're a little unsure about these underlying values. That's perfectly fine. That's a really important way to do it. You know, it's fascinating because my husband and I have gotten more religious together over the years. Good sign. And when we go to church here in Austin, we go to two. We go to Austin Ridge and Red Rocks. And you can just tell on these people's faces. They're like young, they're happy, they're curious. They're, I'm sure there's moments of depression and anxiety and whatever. But I think faith does a really incredible job of pulling you out of one of the things you talk about a lot, which is like interrupting the doom loop. And so I have it here. I liked one of the quotes in your book where you talk about, "If you find yourself stuck in the distractions of modern life while feeling bereft of deep meaning, before doing anything else, you need to get unstuck to interrupt the doom loop. That requires declaring your independence by rebelling against the herd thinking that is creating the quiet desperation of millions, refusing to be just another statistic in the scourge of depression and anxiety and define the economic forces that productized and monetized every moment of your attention." I'm kind of a libertarian. What is, I'd like to like, it's probably why I like you. What is the meaning of this doom loop? So we have absolutely been productized. You know, in so many ways, I mean in so many ways that people don't quite realize, when you hate somebody for political reasons, you're the product. You're somebody's product. Somebody's making money. Somebody's getting clicks. Somebody's getting attention or just getting their jollies. When you hate your neighbor or your sister-in-law because she votes differently, that's an example of productization of actually what's happening to us. When you spent, when you fritter away three hours looking at YouTube shorts, I got nothing against YouTube shorts. I have tons of YouTube shorts. But when you're frittering away your time and not feeling good about it, the reason is because your brain has been captured by algorithms is what it comes down to. Productization is a major problem because we're getting better and better at it. Before you had to go to a casino and get stuck behind a slot machine. I shouldn't have done 23 hours on the slot machine or something. But now it's as close as the screen in your pocket when we're the dope of the energy pathways have been really captured by the way that these technologies work. When we're getting better and better at eliminating boredom because people hate boredom, but boredom is incredibly important for finding the meaning of your life. And we're doing it because that's actually putting money in people's pockets and popularity for people who just want your, they crave your attention, they feed off your attention. The first step in that is not just going to a detox program. The first step is what every addict does, which is they say, "Enough, I'm tired of being subjugated to this." You know, you and I know a lot of people who are in recovery. And one of the things that what was the day when you said, "I'm not going to, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. I'm not going to put up with this anymore. I'm being subjugated to this addiction. I'm being used by this dealer. And I'm part of a culture that doesn't love me. And I'm not going to do it anymore." So the first point is rebellion is the spirit of the rebel. It's so interesting because I've worked with college students forever. And I say, "Can't read your social media accounts. See how that feels." And it's like, "I feel alive." Not just because I'm not stuck on the social media, but because I'm a walking middle finger toward the, I'm standing up to the man is how they feel. That's a very beautiful thing. So I'm a whole section in this book about how to be a rebel. And it really gets back to my, I have a favorite philosopher, which is Rolf Waldo Emerson. And there's one essay that he wrote that everybody watching us needs to read is called "Self-Reliance." And you can find it in 100 places on the internet, probably a million places on the internet. And "Self-Reliance" is this declaration of independence on how you can be an independent person. How you cannot be a sheep. And that's the first step at actually taking back your autonomy in a world that doesn't want you to be independent. You know, I was thinking about it today. One of the, the woman who is now the youngest billionaire in the world. Who's that? One of the founders of a company called Kalshi. K-A-L-S-H-I. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. And I pretty much have a point of never talking badly about entrepreneurs because I think it's an incredibly hard game. And anybody building is better than somebody burning it down. And so like, I don't mean this in a disrespectful way. But it is a, and it is a predictions market, which is a fancy way of saying what? - Yeah, I'm one. - Gamblein. - And I've heard of this. I've heard about this. - I just think. - You can bet on anything. - It's just saying you can bet on anything. It's offshore, right? - I'm not even sure if it has, I don't know the legal ramifications. But I know that it was invested in by all the big players and we have a venture capital fund. And I just think that we have to be more of a society that doesn't hate each other. Like if you're that talented where you can build a billion dollar business, should we be building it on gambling? - Yeah. - Should you be going and building the next data map that's vying for screen time, the next social media app that's vying for more attention? Or should we actually be pushing back against this idea of us becoming the milk cows or to proverbably plugged into the milk machine? And so I thought this doom loop was so important because the epidemic of our attention seems to be awful. And the research that you have even shocked me. Like just how bad do you think this epidemic of phon addiction is? And it's worse. (laughing) - The average person checks their phone 205 times a day. The average kid in America under 12 spends between four and seven minutes a day in nature and between four and seven hours a day on screens. - Yeah, yeah, I mean it's insane. And here's basically what it comes down to. If this is anybody watching us, you're living in the matrix. You're living in a simulation. A simulation of a real life where you're simulating love. Maybe you're simulating sex. You're simulating progress with respect to games. You're simulating friendship on social media. You're simulating interaction at work on your Zoom screen. If this is how you're doing your job. And there's a lot you can simulate. But the one thing you can't simulate is the meaning of your life. You can't simulate it. You can pass the two ring tests. So it feels like it. You have the feeling of knowing, but your brain won't. Your brain says no. And you'll wonder, I have so many friends and I need more friends and you'll binge on the simulation and get more depressed and more anxious all along the way. So the whole point is kind of like in that famous movie, The Matrix, Rekiano Reeves is Neo. And he says, I'm going to, with a small band of rebels, they break out of the matrix and try to destroy the machine. Not because it's not pleasant on the contrary. It's the year 2199. Everybody thinks it's 1999 because they're living in these pods and having their energy sapped by an artificial intelligence. It's, it came true. The Matrix came true and a lot of people watching us are in it and you got to break out of the matrix if you're going to live a real life because only a real life is a life that has real meaning. It's funny because people say, so, you know, how is it so different than the past? Here's the difference. Your grandparents, the San Chaitra. Where do they live? Where do your grandparents live? Well, they moved here and lived in Texas. Oh, no, that's wrong. I mean, Texas now. In Arizona. They moved to Miami and Little Mining Town. They were minors from Spain. Okay. Minors from Spain. San Chaitra means that they were, they're from somewhere from the Castilian Heartland. That's right. Yeah. And that's a great Castilian. That's a, it's a venerable Castilian surname. Well, thanks. And, and there's one thing that grandpa San Chaitra has never said. Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. No. Because it wasn't a thing because the hypotherlamic pituitary axis adrenal axis, that HPA axis, couldn't, was not going to be suddenly, suddenly lit up by the vicissitudes of his life. He was just like work in the mind. His life was pretty boring. And it had a lot of things that weren't great about it. But his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. The left side was doing how and what and the right side was doing why. And that's why he didn't have the problem. That's why there was no matrix. That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, we just went back there not too long ago too. It's called Miami or Globe, Arizona. And it was fascinating watching what that town looked like. One is they were actually minors, they're copper minors. And so he would go and show me kind of what I think is called a slag pile, which is sort of all the runoff from the copper mine. And at the end of the slag pile was a little river that ran through it and a bunch of trees where they would collect walnuts that they ate from Arizona, which is not really a great idea to collect and eat walnuts and river water at the end of a slag pile from a copper mine, which is like-- We'll have a medal in that. Yeah. And so a lot of the him and his family got cancer, because it was spread everywhere. And at each day, at the end of the day, they had a light show. But the light show was actually just the runoff was actually-- it had some whatever component in it that would make it light up. And so they wanted you to go inside, they'd do a siren. Well, they thought that was sort of the announcement of the light show, but really you were supposed to go inside and sort of not be there for this portion of it. That'd be close to the radiation. Exactly. And so anyway, but when I went back and saw with him where he grew up, which was kind of a little shack on the side of the hill, and where he used to get the tortillas, which was in another little shack on the side of the hill, it was fascinating to me as what you said. He never once said life was really hard. It was really difficult. We were barely scraping by. But when I looked at that place, I thought, holy hell, somebody inhabited it, somebody lived there. And yet it was funny. He did this survey with me before he kind of now he has a dimension, so he's not quite with us. But before he really fell prey to that, we did a little happiness survey. And the happy-- it was something silly. I was looking up. I had done what online on accident, and it had told me you have ADHD and you should get pills. And I thought, this is hysterical. I seem pretty fine. Like, maybe I'm distracted, but I don't think I need pills for it. Life's pretty good. So we're going to skip that. I think I've done OK. And so I gave it to him and my grandma and a few other things. And they scored two to three levels higher than my cousins. And my cousins, which was his-- And happiness. And happiness. My cousins are a little bit younger than me, and grew up quite well. Cars when they hit 16, college degrees, all of the things. And so I thought a bit about that. And your research is fascinating because they had everything at their fingertips, every game, every activity. And my grandpa was probably bored a lot. And you talk about this idea that boredom is actually critical for meaning and maybe happiness. Can you talk about that a little bit? So there's research. There's great research on boredom. And it's absolutely true. Here's the thing to keep in mind. Your grandfather, no doubt, was bored a lot. But he would never-- but you've never heard him say, you know the problem with growing up in this shack? It was boring. He never said that his childhood was boring. But your cousins, they feel bored a lot, even though they have every device in the world to eliminate their boredom. Is the more we try to eliminate our boredom, the more boring our life gets. And the reason is because the things that we're actually doing to eliminate the normal boredom in life, what it gives us is a pathological kind of boredom. That's when you're scrolling social media, that's unbelievably boring. Your brain, it's painful and stressful for you to be doing that. Whereas when you're actually bored, like sitting on the train or in the car and looking out the window of the car, then what happens is your brain starts to use a set of structures called the default mode network. The default mode network is the way your brain is supposed to work and one of the big things that you think about is the meaning of your life. You just start to consider the meaning of your life. That's why proper boredom is one of the protocols for finding more meaning in your life. That's why you need time. That's one of the things that I recommend, for example, is work out without devices, work out without headphones. Now people are listening and going, "What? I can't do that." But that white, you're distracting yourself from 'cause you think your workout is boring. That's the point. Everybody watching us, they have their best ideas in the shower. Why? 'Cause your phone's not in there. That's why. And what happens is you get in the shower and this kind of warm, and then your default mode network goes, "It kind of turns on a little bit." And you have these weird thoughts that creative thoughts and linked up with different things that have happened. And you say, "Oh, right, do that in the gym." Or take an hour-long shower if you want. If that's your thing, you'll look kind of wrinkly, but, you know? - Not really clean. - But it's commute without your, without even the radio commute like in silence, and have these periods of proper boredom, of appropriate boredom. It's funny because it's not comfortable. We don't like it. We naturally have an aversion to it. My colleague, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, he's at the psychology department. He's a visionary psychologist. He's done these boredom experiments. Where they, have you heard about these experiments? - All I want because of you. - Yeah, yeah. And they bring these, call the students into the lab because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they have to sit in a room alone with nothing on the walls and nothing to do and nothing to look at for 15 minutes. They can only do one thing. They have a key fob. And if they press the button on the key fob, they self-administer a painful electric shock. That's all they can do. It's like boredom or a shock. So a quarter of the women shock themselves and two thirds of the dudes. 'Cause men and women, right? two thirds of the guys would prefer. to shock themselves painfully. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes had to be thrown out of the experiment for being a sick and twisted freak. So it's like, that's not what we're looking for, sir. And he's going to wait in life. Or who knows? That's going to be a jail. But this is a really important thing. So we have an aversion to boredom, but we need the right kind of boredom. And if we actually use our devices to distract ourselves, we get the wrong kind of boredom and no meaning, no growth, and we get the pathologies that we're talking about. You know, everybody says things like boredom is good and don't be so distracted. But I think the fascinating part about your research is once you start to practice it and do it. So I hope, you know, if you're listening, you attempt to do one thing, like go to the gym and not use devices, which quite honestly, I thought that sounds awful and I like Arthur a lot, but I'm not going to do that. Except I started doing it about six months ago. And the reason why this is like a little TMI, but apparently it's for a lot of women. And like modern day humans, we have rib flares. Have you heard about this? So essentially because we have one, we do this a lot. So we're sitting a lot. And we're short breathers. We don't take long deep breaths. We're like kind of, you know, anxious and end up breathing not through our whole diaphragm. And so because of this, all of this kind of gets like compressed and then our ribs kind of like flare out because we're not breathing properly. And so once you breathe properly, you kind of reframe your ribs and you're stacked as opposed to like a lot of women are kind of flared out. And so anyway, I got a trainer and the trainer started helping me think about how to work out. And basically what she said is that she sees most of the injuries that go wrong in working out are because people have headphones in. They're not paying attention to what they're doing. And the reason that that working out is good in a lot of different ways, right, like somatic regulation. And it's that our body actually needs to release some of these stress hormones like animals shake like this, right. And she goes, so when working out, we're actually not releasing it. We're like doing a movement without any muscle mind connection, actually at all. And we've lost a lot of body awareness. And she goes, half the reason women come to her today. Her specialty is getting them to recognize when a muscle is or is not firing, which is fascinating. If you think about it, we're so out of touch with our bodies that we don't even know if one part of it is functioning or not because we're completely distracted nonstop. And so now that I start working out and I do not listen to headphones, I don't listen to anything in the gym now, except if I'm on like a run or the bike or something, I might my body's completely changed by composition has changed. I'm not working out harder. I'm not lifting more. I'm not doing anything differently except breathing right and paying attention. Has it affecting your mood management? Oh, completely different. It's completely different. And I don't hate going to the gym. Actually, it's counterintuitive. You think no, no, no, working out is terrible. You're going to hate it. It hurts. And to be better if I could distract myself with the podcast. That'll be fun. But actually, what has happened is the complete opposite to me. No, that's the paradox of all these things. The more that you try to wipe out your try to wipe out your boredom, the more bored you get. One of the things that people in podcasts are great. You have one. I have one. And there's a lot of information. And it's really provided a learning opportunity for people who wouldn't learn things otherwise. I have a kid who doesn't like to read, for example, he knows everything in the world because of the internet. But the truth is when you're using it to distract yourself, you will become more bored. And what you'll find, how do you know this? You'll know this because you're like, I don't know what to listen to in the gym. These podcasts that I have are also boring. Now, if you actually listen to the podcast on purpose to learn something, it wouldn't be boring. But when you're using it to distract yourself, it's unbelievably boring. Isn't that ironic? And that's because our boredom is all screwed up. It's all upside down. We need to be bored more like your grandpa. Yeah. I want to end on this. You speak a lot about resume achievements and eulogy achievements. And I guess I want to start with, you encourage people to quit soul-sucking jobs. And that there's a telltale sign that someone is lying to themselves about why they're staying. And I think some of it has to do with this resume versus eulogy. Can you tell us first what is a resume or a eulogy achievement? And then why do people stay in soul-sucking jobs? So resume versus eulogy virtues. This is a term that was originated by David Brooks, my friend, not no relation to me, but an old friend of mine who he writes for the New York Times. And he wrote a book called The Road to Character. And in The Road to Character, he talks about your resume virtues, which is what you do to be more impressive to people while you're alive, and your eulogy virtues, which is what you'd want people to say at your funeral. He suggested people actually write their eulogies. Not the eulogy that you think you're going to get, but the one that you want to get. And that does not include had 5 million lifetime miles on delta. That's not, you know, nobody's going to say, you don't want your kids saying that because that means your kid didn't have a relationship with you is what it comes down to. If somebody's listing your professional achievements at your funeral, it means they didn't really know you and they weren't close to you. And that's a really important thing. So the eulogy achievements and virtues are all about love and relationships. That's really what they're about. And that requires that you actually think beyond the world's rewards. The world's rewards are money power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four. Those are the four things that you're always trying to get. But those are only, if you're going to be happy, intermediate goals. They're instrumental goals. What you really want to get to is faith, family, friendship, and meaning through what you do to earn your daily bread. Faith family friends and meaningful work. Now you can be happy with tons of money. I think it's great that people go to work and start businesses and make a make a fortune, the phenomenal. But if that's your primary goal, then you're going to suffer. You're going to have trouble. And fame, by the way, is the worst because fame is the only one of the goals that you can only ever be happy in spite of. And you have to, so most people who get famous, they become less happy because of the fame, which is, but everybody wants it for evolutionary reasons. Okay, so that's the whole point to keep in mind. Your eulogy virtues are the things that your ultimate goals, your resume virtues are your instrumental goals. Nothing wrong with them, but those are not your ultimate stopping points. And that's why people actually stay in jobs that they actually hate because they think they're going to be happy with the resume virtues. They think you're going to be happy. So it's like, yeah, but I don't like this, but I'm going to make a lot of money. And when I have a lot of money, I'm going to be happier. Why? Well, I'll be able to do more stuff. I'll have more freedom in my life. I'll have the house that I was wanted deep down. It's, I'm going to be more lovable. I'm going to be a more lovable individual because I have a lot more dollars in my bank account, which is complete insanity. And people don't actually think to the end of it as the way that that worked. And I've seen this a million times. I had a friend, great friend because I've been privileged to work with some of the little successful people in the world in my career. And I teach at HBS. And he's talk, I asked him because all often when you study happiness, people treat you like a psychiatrist. And I said, what was the biggest misapprehension that you had about getting rich? Could you grow up, Blorn in the class, and he wound up with billions of dollars? It's a great American success story. I said, what is the biggest mistake that you made? What do you think it was going to be like that it wasn't like? And he thought about it and he said, I thought, if I got really rich that my wife would love me. And I look at his hand and there's no ring. And I said, so. And he said, she didn't. That's an example. The Eulogy virtue is of glowing. It's the description of the relationship of your marriage by your widow. And the resume virtue is the money that you made along the way. And it was all about his resume virtues. And the reason he did what he did, even though he didn't release funny because Scott Galloway has this really funny line. He says that you always hear in your college graduation, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. And the speech is always being given by a donor who started an aluminum smelting company. That's true. That's the problem, right? And that's why people who are 22 years old will be like, yeah, if I can have that, the be filthy rich, like the aluminum smelter guy, then I would automatically be happy. And here's the truth that I tell my students. And this makes him panic, by the way, I say, Mother Nature tells you that if you're successful in worldly terms, happiness will come automatically. Here's the truth. You need to shoot for happiness and then you will be successful enough. Now the panic is the one word enough because enough isn't enough because there's never enough. And that's the great goal in life. It's having enough love in your life that there is enough stuff. That's the goal. It's so good. I think where I want to end is this. This book is first of all, it's incredible. I've read every one of your books by now. Thank you. We have multiple times. Well, thank you for writing them. That's a miserable job writing a book. I know this one took you five years. I know you're like, it's yeah, no, this one took me five years because the meaning of life. We were joking before he had about Like I was like, thank God, you know, you're not 20 anymore with, you know, very, very handsome gentlemen But like, you know, not, not 20 age adjusted Well somebody actually was on the stage the other day with a man by the name of Billy Parks who's amazing And he goes, I looked at my photo the other day and I thought that's a distinguished older gentleman Yeah, I thought that's a great. I like that. I know well what happens is every guy I'm 61 I'm 31 in my head and then I look in the mirror and I go Don't for women we stay at 24 so it's like it's only worse for us But but you know this book is so beautiful because I think a lot of times when first of all when you're younger You don't fucking understand any of this and it sounds ridiculous and you're like shut up I'll figure it out off. I make the money and I get the girl and I get the abs and whatever and so like maybe if any of this breaks through To a younger version of me or you today what a what a blessing and Second, you know, I love that it comes from somebody with life experience. I was telling you last time I saw you like you had already had three life transitions that I've probably been you know I don't know maybe eight or nine years since I've followed you and only four or so since I've actually known you or three and And so you've experienced all of these things not only having researched them but having experienced them and like I think it's beautiful because my joke is always like I'd love to have the confidence of a 25 year old life coach And I just don't because I just don't say I think that's comical at that point And so I'm glad you wrote it So I guess what I want to give you is I have all these things we can end with But if you got to talk to this this person today that you're trying to reach with this book Who are you trying to reach and like what do you want them to hear from our conversation today and this book of yours? I'm speaking to the person who has Everything and feels nothing I'm the person who's a striver who's done everything right Who's played by the rules made some mistakes but has been playing by the rules That has been promised everything and doesn't feel what they thought they would feel that life is busy but feels empty and They don't know what's happening and they're starting to wonder is this all there is is this it Am I going to be chasing my tail for the rest of my life? Is this all going in circles? Is it all nonsense or maybe do I just have to grind a little harder? Maybe I'll feel that thing if I have another million Instagram followers maybe I wrote this book to say that there is an answer to that there's an answer that's biological Because psychology is biology. It's not your fault It's what it's the simulation that you've been thrust into that's number one and number two The answer is right there you can break out. I mean this book has the six ways to break out of the simulation The six things that you can actually do that look an awful lot like grandpa Sanchez's life But that are extraordinary today that are rebellious today and and and to everybody who's 28 years old Starting to despair if you don't have to there. There is a solution There's an absolute solution and I'm completely convinced that it can work for every single person watching us Your life has meaning and you can find it Arthur Brooks. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cutie