Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:00
Arthur Brooks,

Arthur Brooks 00:01
how are you?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:02
I’m doing great. I’m so happy

Arthur Brooks 00:04
to see you. I’m so happy to be with you and here in the studio.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:06
Unbelievable! Long time coming. Lots of mutual friends. Yeah, you know,

Arthur Brooks 00:12
we’ve talked privately a whole bunch of times about so many things, but we’ve never sat down actually in front of the microphones to talk to your wonderful audience and your great show.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:19
Incredible.

Arthur Brooks 00:21
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:22
Tell me about happiness,

Arthur Brooks 00:23
yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:23
But define it for me,

Arthur Brooks 00:25
for sure. Now, happiness is something that I’ve been looking at over my whole career. I got my PhD almost 30 years ago, and I started by studying charitable giving and beauty, and and and I found that all the things I was studying were coming back to this tap root that people want to be happy, but nobody knew what it was, and so I, you know, I kind of worked on that obliquely a little bit off and on until about seven years ago, when I decided that I keep kind of talking about it, but but it’s it’s insufficiently defined, and I actually can’t dig in and dedicate myself to this completely until I have a working definition that people can actually use, and so so here’s kind of where the story starts. Most psychologists and behavioral scientists, like me, they they they talk about it as something that you feel and that you believe that you have, which is to say a non definition, right? Yeah, doesn’t help you at all. That makes

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:18
me very nervous as a scientist. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. I

Arthur Brooks 01:21
mean, it’s sort of circular, and like, tell me something I can use. So I went back to basics, and in the literature, you find that the people who have the highest level of well-being and happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. So that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Is unhappiness, which is super important and super interesting, and and and to be taken into consideration and not eliminated. So so we can talk about that too, but but well being per se is most correlated with three big phenomena, which are sort of the macronutrients of well being. So it’s the same kind of thing as if you you decomposed food into its macronutrients, and then you could figure out as a nutritionist how you know you know macros and balances are actually coming together in balance and abundance, so you can be a healthy person. The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:14
Enjoyment, satisfaction;

Arthur Brooks 02:16
those are the three things. So those are the things to pursue. So if good old Tom Jefferson had been you know had taken my class at Harvard. He would have been great. Yeah, he would have written that. Now it’s like what what hubris on my part. But the Declaration of Independence talks about pursuing happiness. That’s that’s hard to do. What you need to do is to pursue three things. You need in in the same way that you need to pursue a diet that’s balanced and abundant in protein, carbohydrates, and fat appropriately, mostly protein, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:43
Yes, yeah. Your biceps, exactly right.

Arthur Brooks 02:46
And especially when you get to when your muscle protein synthesis becomes inefficient, like after 60, like I am.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:53
You are doing great. More

Arthur Brooks 02:54
protein.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:55
You are doing great.

Arthur Brooks 02:55
So the three macronutrients that you actually need are enjoyment, which is not the same thing as pleasure. Is pleasure plus people plus memory. It’s it’s the the experience of pleasure, but using your prefrontal cortex, not just your limbic system, right? And the way that you do that is by making it social and memorable. And so, and and the the general rule is, if it feels really good and it could be for you, and everybody’s got their thing, whether it’s highly glycemic carbohydrates, or it’s internet use, or gambling, or alcohol. If you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 03:31
If you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong. If you’re seeking happiness with the pleasure, pleasure. If you’re seeking pleasure versus enjoyment,

Arthur Brooks 03:40
super important distinction, and so this is one of the things that I talk about with people. I mean, even eating, eating it’s it’s if you’re always eating alone, you’re probably actually not. It’s not going to be a source of happiness in your life. You you won’t because you won’t turn it into enjoyment. It won’t be social and it won’t be memorable. Humble sapiens in their ancestral environment in the you know the Middle Pleistocene, 250,000 years ago, when our brains were more or less how they are today, they they they were evolved to actually put you know chunks of yak meat into their mouths around a campfire when they talk to each other. Come over

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 04:11
to my house any time. It’s exactly what you’ll see. It’s yak

Arthur Brooks 04:14
meat, and and so eating is a highly social thing. Why? Because it’s supposed to be enjoyable, and that means that it’s memorable and it’s social, and that’s what it comes down to. So it’s not just eating; it’s almost anything. This is one of the reasons that pornography can be quite dangerous, actually, because it strips that experience down to just pleasure, and that’s why it tends to be more addictive. That’s why it tends to lead to more depression and anxiety.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 04:39
And pleasure is something you do, pleasure is just

Arthur Brooks 04:42
it’s yeah when and well pleasure is something that is sort of at the heart of enjoyment as well, but it’s it’s insufficient. So when when people say you know I want to feel good all the time, you know pleasure as your goal won’t lead you to happiness. It leads you to detox, and and you know that’s the problem. It’s it’s a it’s there’s nothing. Wrong with pleasure. The problem is that when you make it the central goal, it actually gets torqued. It gets it gets twisted, and it doesn’t actually the happiness. You need to complete it with people in memory, and that’s enjoyment. Now, it might sound like that’s trivial, like everybody knows how to enjoy their lives, but they don’t. I specialize in strivers. I’m kind of the striver whisperer. They’re bad at you don’t

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 05:19
you don’t say yeah. And how would you decide? These are people

Arthur Brooks 05:23
who know to put points on the board. Yeah, this is Gabrielle Lyon. I’m talking about, and the people who watch the show, you know, the people who are high performers and they’re watching the show because it’s really interesting, but they get an edge. I know the shows that performers watch, right? I was like, I got one of those shows. I talk about behavioral science every single week in in the public interest is what it comes down to, and so you know the people who are who are Huberman watchers. I mean, these are strivers, and strivers are great at a lot of things, but they tend to often be really bad at enjoyment because any moment that they’re enjoying their life, a sunset, you know, hanging out with friends, watching a game, they’re not putting points on the board.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:02
It’s also, would you say that it’s dangerous

Arthur Brooks 06:05
to to to not have enjoyment for sure?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:07
Well, for the striver, when they reach a level of enjoyment, does that set off red flags? All

Arthur Brooks 06:16
kinds of alarm bells for sure. All kinds of alarm bells. It’s like I’m. It’s like if I’m not moving forward, I’m drifting backward. You’re you’re swimming upstream. Strivers are swimming upstream all the time in their minds, and that means if they stop, you know, swimming hard, they’re going to start drifting backwards. That’s how they always feel. If it’s not points on the board, it’s actually not worth doing, and that’s antagonistic to enjoying your life.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:39
You know, I have two little kids,

Arthur Brooks 06:41
yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:41
five and six, and they’re bananas. But they couldn’t be more different from each other,

Arthur Brooks 06:46
yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:47
And I wonder, is there a genetic or a phenotype of happiness? You know those people, oh yeah,

Arthur Brooks 06:54
for sure,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:54
that are never happy, no matter what it is. And then there are those people that maybe a striver would look at and go, okay. I can’t believe they’re happy, but they’re totally happy. Yeah.

Arthur Brooks 07:05
So those are. It largely comes down to affect profiles. So this is a very famous body of work based on the positive affect, negative affect sequence, aka panis. I actually have a people go to my website and take a test that actually tells them what they are. But the affect profile is the intensity of positive and negative affect, which is largely genetic, and and so you can be high intensity positive affect, which is to say that you you have negative emotions that that that you feel and express very intensely, high or low negative affect, which is using different parts of your limbic system because positive negative emotions are not opposites from each other. There, there we literally have different parts of our limbic system dedicated to each one of our basic emotions for all kinds of evolutionary reasons. You need them to stay alive. These are alarms. These are threat and opportunity signals. That’s all emotions really are. I realize I eviscerated all the content of every country and Western song ever written. Right,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 07:58
you have eviscerate. I’m still going to listen.

Arthur Brooks 08:00
It’s the it’s the limbic system, and and that’s super important. But the whole point of it is that some people have negative emotions that are just naturally more intense. You’ll even find that people who tend to feel fear and anger more intensely they have literally larger amygdalas, amygdalae, and you’ve seen this. I’m sure that you actually done this research as well, which means that if if it’s a physically larger structure in your brain, it’s actually going to react. At least the data suggest more intensely.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:27
Overreact.

Arthur Brooks 08:28
Yeah, which means that you have to self manage more because that’s the key. Once you understand your affect profile, so based on that, you’ve got four mostly genetic affect profiles. You can be high positive, low negative. That’s called the cheerleader, right? The cheerleader’s like it’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be great, no matter what. Well, they feel positive affect really intensely, and they feel negative affect quite weakly, right? And so these people are, you know, they’re they’re I mean they’re cheerleaders. So would

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:55
that be, for example, my best friend? Let’s say I went traveling and this happened, and I forgot my shoe somewhere. And she’s like, “That’s amazing! You get to go shoe shopping? I’m like, “No, I have to go on stage. That’s terrible. No, no, no. I think that yeah,

Arthur Brooks 09:12
it would be yeah, and and even Maury would be like, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be don’t get worked up about it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 09:17
So it’s not the overemphasizing or over indexing on the positive actual thing, but it’s kind of like oh, underemphasizing

Arthur Brooks 09:27
the housing. It’s just you don’t feel the negative emotions very strongly, is what it comes down to. But you feel positive emotions very strongly. Everybody wants to be the cheerleader because the cheerleaders are highest in happiness, typically because they enjoyed their lives,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 09:40
and do other cheerleaders hang out together? They do. Birds of a feather fall. They

Arthur Brooks 09:44
don’t like to be around downers, and this is actually one of the great weaknesses of cheerleaders. And often, why they make bad CEOs? They make bad CEOs because they can’t give criticism, or they can, but they’re not very good at it. It’s uncomfortable for them. They don’t want to hear bad news, and so they say. Like don’t bring me down, man. Don’t bring me down. They’re also it’s very hard for them to live with people who have high negative affect. So my wife’s a cheerleader. I’m not. I’m not a cheer. I’m a mad scientist, which is high, high, high positive, high negative, which means I’m. It’s just a super high affect person. You’re probably a mad scientist too. I’m gonna. I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that. Which means that you have tons of positive affect, intense positive affect, but also you’re all about it when something’s not right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 10:25
Totally,

Arthur Brooks 10:26
and and that’s very common among entrepreneurs, very common among people who are just like, like, bring it on, bring it on right now. And you feel everything very deeply, but we’re hard to live with. We’re believe

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 10:38
for yourself. Let’s see. But now, do those people, the mad scientists, pick a cheerleader? What are the other two? So the other

Arthur Brooks 10:45
two are people who have are low, low, low affect people. They have emotions. They feel everything, but they have a low amplitude of these emotions. They don’t feel them super intensely. These are judges. They make really good surgeons. They make really good fighter pilots. They make really good hedge fund traders, the the the problem is they tend to look unenthusiastic. They’re unflappable. They’re sober.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:05
That’s what it comes to. That would be my husband.

Arthur Brooks 11:07
Yeah, and so he’s like, it’s cool. Totally cool. Now they’re great with a mad scientist if you can appreciate each other, which is super important. I mean, the key to a happy marriage is appreciating the other person for the other person. It’s mutual submission to what the other person needs, you submit to each other not on the basis of your needs, but the basis of the other person’s needs. It’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:25
really challenging. Yeah, especially if you’re saying that there’s a genetic component to the affect of a person. Exactly. The fourth one. The

Arthur Brooks 11:32
fourth one is the poet. That’s what nobody wants to be, but what we need in the world. That’s high negative affect and low positive affect. These are people who feel the ills of the world very intensely. These are people who tend toward anxiety, depression. I mean, mad scientists tend a lot toward anxiety too. They’re very anxious people.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:50
High in neuroticism.

Arthur Brooks 11:51
Yeah, very high in neuroticism. Which generally, that that Freudian idea of neuroticism it loads on just what we would call mood disorders, right? Just basic mood disorders, generalized anxiety, clinical depression, etc. etc. Poets they tend to be very high in this, and they tend to not see the beautiful things and not enjoy these particular things. Now, this really interesting science on people who have this affect profile-they tend to ruminate a lot, and rumination involves the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. You know, this this part of the brain dedicated to you know for when depressed people like I’m so stupid, nobody likes me. I’m going to get fired from my job. I’m never going to amount to anything. The wet

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 12:29
blanket. Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 12:30
it’s just that rumination, like sad ruminative sadness involves the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. It also is highly, highly activated when you’re falling in love, because you’re ruminating on another person, like I wonder if she’s going to send me a text. I wonder what she’s thinking about me right now, because you’re bonding to the other person neurochemically. Really important. It’s also for highly creative people, which you use when you can’t get over an idea. You know that feeling when you’re you’re writing your book, you’re just like I can’t stop. You wake up thinking about it. You go to sleep thinking that’s your prefront, your ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) in overdrive, and it’s all the same thing. Which is one of the reasons that poets they also tend to be romantic and creative, and we need them. But these are the four affect profiles, and this is the reason that you see some real differences between your kids. I mean, there’s like it’s not mapped to the human genome. It’s not like you that these are recessive or dominant traits, but but what we know is that you probably won’t move very much from your natural habitat,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:31
which is really important. You know the the meaning of your life. Your 16th book, which I have here, it’s wonderful. It really helps people, I think, open up to the idea of purpose, meaning, and happiness. Which is

Arthur Brooks 13:46
the meaning is the third macronutrient of happiness. It’s the protein of happiness, the most important macronutrient of happiness, the one that if you you don’t have it sufficiently, you’re going to get sick and you’re going to have trouble.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:57
Tell me more about that.

Arthur Brooks 13:59
So I’m not going to tell you about protein because I get all my information on protein from you. It’s like I know what to eat and when because of you, and and meaning really fulfills this role in in our well being, in our function of well being. It’s something that we probably need more of. It’s something that we understand a lot, but it’s this fundamental building block for the life that we want. The one that I skipped over is satisfaction, which is the joy of accomplishment with struggle.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:26
I was going to ask you what-that’s satisfaction. What percentage of we can’t just become happy,

Arthur Brooks 14:32
right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:33
There’s a level of, or is there a level of pain that’s required?

Arthur Brooks 14:38
For sure. No, we’re not going to be happy ever. Look, maybe I mean it’s a religious question, right? I mean, you know that one one of the biggest metaphysical arguments for the existence of the afterlife, believe it or not, is this craving for unremitting joy. You know, it’s it’s evidence of the existence of water is thirst. Evidence of

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:57
evidence of the existence of water is thirst. Is

Arthur Brooks 14:59
thirst is. That a desire implicates the existence of its object. That’s a very that’s a fundamental philosophical principle, and so people crave unremitting joy, but they can’t get it in this life. So maybe they can get it some other life. And people will say that that’s evidence that actually does exist on the in in in a different metaphysical dimension from what we experience above my pay grade. But it’s you know sort of worth thinking about. So we’re we’re not going to be happy. What we can get is happier, and that’s what is progress. We can make progress toward having the life that we want, that has more well being. And part of that, by the way, is bringing in the unhappiness side of the equation, becoming comfortable with it. Now everybody watching us is comfortable with pain? How do I know? Because they’re in the gym. Is there somebody watching us who never goes to the gym?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 15:46
Not in our show. Maybe, but if they’ve now done lots of push-ups, but they

Arthur Brooks 15:51
love the pain. They love the pain. The pain is generative,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 15:54
but that’s chosen pain. It

Arthur Brooks 15:56
is, and the truth is that the the the master stroke of somebody who’s truly in charge of their own life is to say that I not only accept the things I don’t like about my own life, I love the things that I don’t like.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:11
That is, I choose to love now. That if you were to give me a real life scenario of that, that seems near impossible. It’s

Arthur Brooks 16:17
so hard. It’s so hard. But you know that is what the great sages have always talked about in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam. That’s what they always talk about: is learning to love the will of the divine, even when you don’t like it. That’s what it comes down to. No, that’s the that’s the fundamental teaching: love your enemies, love your enemies. Don’t like your enemies. Jesus doesn’t say like your enemies. That’s sentimentalism. He says love your enemies notwithstanding your feelings, and this is the key of the disciplined life. Right? There are lots of days in my life where I’m like, it’s 430 in the morning. I’m tired. I got in late last night, but I get up and I go downstairs to the gym, right? Because I don’t, because I don’t like it, and that helps me feel fully alive. And that’s what the great sages throughout history have actually done in all different parts of their lives. Like, bring it on, bring it on. I mean, bring on something that is uncomfortable with me. Because only in the in the pain and the suffering do you actually have generativity. That’s the only way you grow as a person. You you don’t grow as a person because of that week at the beach in Ibiza. Nobody ever said, “Oh yeah, no Disneyland. When I was a kid, that’s where I really figured out who I was. It’s when my mom died. It’s when I got tossed out of school. It’s when my first business failed. Whatever it happens to be, that’s doesn’t have to be that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 17:38
extreme. Could it be okay?

Arthur Brooks 17:40
Because it is every single day. There is something you’re not going to like every single day, and we spend so much of our time and energy actually trying to eliminate that, which is the biggest mistake. It’s just it’s trying to eliminate pain. It’s a big problem. It’s interesting because you know the Buddhists talk about that. I’ve I’ve done a lot of work for the last 12 years for the Dalai Lama. I spent a lot of time, you know, in Dharamsala with, and we did a lot of conferences and writing and all that. And and one of the things that he’s impressed upon me is that suffering equals pain times resistance.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:10
Suffer. Wait, I have to think about this one. Suffering.

Arthur Brooks 18:12
Suffering

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:13
equals pain.

Arthur Brooks 18:14
Mental or physical, affective or sensory, as you physicians like to talk about, multiplied by resistance to that pain,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:23
meaning how much you push it away versus surrender.

Arthur Brooks 18:26
Yeah, and so you can have very high pain and very low suffering if your resistance to pain is low, which is what they tell you about back pain. By the way, you know most people at some point in their life, because of our fundamentally flawed engineering, have back pain. My back hurts a lot because I have 35 degree scoliosis, and so

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:43
is that true?

Arthur Brooks 18:44
Yes, true, and it hurts, right? But one of the things that I’ve learned is that when I wake up, and especially hurting me in the morning, I’m like, my back hurts today. Let’s go. Why? What have I just done? I’ve lowered my resistance to pain, and so even though my physical pain is high, my suffering’s low.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:58
And is this a way, as someone is listening to this that an individual could train happiness. I mean, I can’t. I

Arthur Brooks 19:05
because that puts meaning when you’re when you’re purposively of your own agency deciding to lower your resistance to pain and your suffering falls concomitantly. That is pure agency. That is the essence of finding meaning in that suffering. That’s how you find meaning in your suffering. And in point of fact, people who aren’t suffering are not finding meaning.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 19:27
Is that true? Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 19:28
it really is. It really is. And and and so my students will often say, “So, so, professor, he’s saying you have to go look for suffering and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll find you. It’ll find you. It’ll find you. And if it’ll find you every day, it’ll find you every day the real the the real sign of the disciplined person is your basic approach when it does find you. It’s like oh I’m about to learn something. I’m really about to learn something here, right? And and again, I’m not made of stone. It’s not like I like it every day either. But you get 90 years on this planet to figure. That one out, right? This is one of the reasons that 80-year-olds they tend to be much happier than 30-year-olds, is because even if they haven’t talked about this explicitly, they more or less have figured this out in a lot of cases.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:11
Does an individual have to? You know, we think about training. Yeah. With training, you have to increase the load, or change the tempo, or change the stimulus. If we become really good at suffering and we lower our resistance to it, do we have to find additional ways or put ourselves? Because I imagine that the striver gets to a point where they’ve conquered stages, they’ve conquered books, they’ve conquered whatever that next frontier is, right?

Arthur Brooks 20:42
They’re always looking for trouble. They’re always looking for trouble. Why? Because they’re doing progressive overload. That’s what they’re doing with their lives. They’re looking for a new problem. Bring me a new problem. And and even when they don’t think they want problems, once they’ve conquered a particular problem, they’re looking for a different problem. Is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:59
that self sabotage and a difficulty being able to be happy.

Arthur Brooks 21:04
Yes, it is. No, it’s a good strategy for becoming stronger. It is a good strategy for finding more meaning, but it is a terrible strategy for enjoying your life. And and and this is one of the cases where the macronutrients are antagonistic to each other. You know, the kind of thing where your protein and your carbohydrates are working against each other in a way, and and and it really sort of enjoyment is the carbohydrates of life, right? The carbohydrates of your happiness, and so the whole point is that you do need a balance. I mean, you’re you’re not some sort of super ultra keto radical. You need carbohydrates. I mean, you want a balanced diet is what it comes down to, and we need that too. And so, when you find somebody who has an incredibly restrictive diet that has all sorts of unintended consequences, typically for most people, and the same thing is true with strivers that are actually trying to work on their happiness equation toward the one thing they’re really, really, really, really good at, and they’re not getting a balanced a balanced meal.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 21:59
You know, you and I were chatting before the cameras were rolling, and you alluded to the idea that the mate a person chooses, yeah, or doesn’t choose, will then affect long term. Is it fair to say long term happiness?

Arthur Brooks 22:15
Yeah, for sure. It’s actually the basically the biggest predictor of of day to day happiness in a person’s life is a happy marriage,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 22:23
and if you make decisions when you are younger or continue to make poor decisions, does it become more difficult to find meaning and happiness? And again, meaning and happiness are not the same thing.

Arthur Brooks 22:36
Meaning is a is a component of happiness,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 22:38
right?

Arthur Brooks 22:38
Yeah. So, and and in early work on this that said that happiness and meaning were different because they were talking about happiness as a feeling, which it isn’t. I mean, any more than the smell of your turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. That’s what feelings are. They’re evidence of happiness, right? And and so it’s a it’s a good signal that is something going on here. And if you’re feeling very very low happiness, that’s when you need to go into your diet and find out what’s wrong nutritionally with what you’re actually doing. So the parallels work pretty well. It does. Yeah. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 23:04
so if someone has made poor life choices, and maybe they’re looking back and they’re going, “Gosh, you know, I feel so much regret that I didn’t go to medical school or I didn’t marry that nice girl. Right. How can they reorient themselves to a future?

Arthur Brooks 23:19
Well, the same way the people who come to you. So you have people who have made very poor dietary choices and very poor fitness choices for a long, long time, and they’re in their 40s or 50s, and they come to you and say, “Dr. Lyon, I mean, is it too late? And you say, “No, it’s not too late. I mean, it would have been better if we could wind back the clock and take you back to 22 and have you not be, you know, drinking every single night in college. But we are where we are, and you can get better. Let’s put you on a fitness program. Let’s put you on a dietary program. And one thing I know is you’re going to be better in a month than you are today, and better in a year than you are today as well.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 23:51
What are some of the biggest things that you see that sabotage happiness, or even just greatness in general?

Arthur Brooks 23:57
Yeah. So a lot of it is just these misconceptions that people actually have-the biggest problem for sabotaging your happiness is trying to feel happy. Is actually instead of doing something, you know, is trying. It’s like I want to feel happy. I sure hope I feel happier tomorrow. That’s a big problem because that that that’s basically saying I sure hope that you know the turkey dinner smells a particular way. It’s just it’s not it’s too amorphous it’s too unrelated to what you’re actually doing it’s kind of pushing on a string that you’re hoping that the that the that the the effect of something is is something that will then you know relate back to the cause you want to do it the other way which is to say I want to know exactly what happiness is and I want to work toward the things that will bring enjoyment satisfaction and meaning. So, so thinking about feelings, and by the way, this is also what wrecks greatness is: this feelings-based culture. You know, people who are thinking about their feelings all the time, they’re not going to the gym. People who are thinking about their feelings all the time are offended at work and quit. People who think about their feelings all the time, they can’t stay married. You know, if if love. A feeling. I wouldn’t have been married 35 years. I wouldn’t have been married 35 minutes. I’m married to a Spaniard. Our first fight was probably 28 minutes into the marriage, or 28

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 25:10
minutes into meeting, potentially for sure.

Arthur Brooks 25:12
And so that’s the whole thing. So number one is feelings. The second thing is this belief that Mother Nature wants us to be happy. You know, Mother Nature doesn’t care about our happiness. Mother Nature cares about our fitness and our survival, our our our our our ability to pass on our genes, our ability to get through the winter, our ability to survive the night. That’s what Mother Nature actually has has has made our brains to do. And and here’s the most amazing thing about this this extraordinary supercomputer called the prefrontal cortex; it gives us a range of options beyond our animal impulses. Whereas, you know, my dog Choo Choo sees the cookie and eats the cookie. I can say the cookie and say, “Good cookie, I’m not eating it, which is to say, I’m not living in the space of my animal impulse. I’m choosing to follow my moral aspiration. And when people don’t feel like they have that agency to choose something they don’t want.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:02
To choose something they don’t something

Arthur Brooks 26:03
that they do want. That’s powerful.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:06
How would someone choose something that they don’t want?

Arthur Brooks 26:08
They so I don’t want that pain, but I’m choosing it anyway. I don’t want that discomfort, but I I want I I you know what I don’t want the truth, but I’m going to seek it anyway. That’s moral aspiration over animal impulse is what it comes down to, and that when you don’t know that you’ve got that choice, when you think that if it feels good, do it. I mean, that led to a lot of ruined lives among the hippies, and today the way it’s ruining lives is the opposite, which is to say, if it feels bad, make it stop. That’s a big problem.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:38
A culture of comfort, a culture, yeah, a culture of

Arthur Brooks 26:41
eliminationism of discomfort. This idea that if something, it’s like I tell my students, you know, I say you’re you’re you’re studying at the Harvard Business School. If you’re not sad a lot and anxious a lot, you need therapy. You know, the whole idea that that that sadness and anxiety when you’re doing something hard, like when you were in medical school, you were doing a hard thing on purpose. Of course, you were getting aversive emotions. Of course, you were. And if you said, “Okay, something’s wrong with me. I’m I’m broken, that’s that’s the second big mistake is thinking that that that that we Mother Nature cares about our happiness, and so we’re not feeling happiness. Something is wrong. The third big mistake is that people think that they actually can be cosmically happy, and and they can’t because that’s not our lot. What we can do is actually make progress.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:33
It’s a hard pill to swallow. I mean,

Arthur Brooks 27:35
yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:35
for many of us, that happiness is not going to be. It’s it’s fleeting, and we push towards it, and it’s a mixed bag.

Arthur Brooks 27:42
It’s a mixed bag because life is a mixed bag, and you know we are on this. In this life is incredible adventure. I mean, it’s just don’t you think it’s so fun?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:52
Ask me in a couple months. Yeah, it’s but you know what? It has seasons.

Arthur Brooks 27:56
Yeah, for sure. But it’s always fascinating and scary, and there’s no breaks. That’s right, and there’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:03
no guarantees,

Speaker 1 28:03
right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:04
And there’s no soft place to land.

Arthur Brooks 28:06
And if there weren’t this discomfort, it would just be so boring.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:10
It would be really boring. Decision making,

Arthur Brooks 28:12
yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:13
And I don’t, I haven’t read all 16 of your books.

Arthur Brooks 28:17
Nobody, I have. I’m the only one on Earth,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:22
but no, there’s there’s definitely more more than that decision making. Yeah, is there a structure? You know, I think about this as the volume of information increases.

Speaker 2 28:33
Right,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:34
we likely need a system that we can filter out as to how a framework for how we make decisions. Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 28:41
yeah, yeah. I think about this a lot, and and there are a lot of behavioral science. There’s a lot of behavioral science research and decision making. But as far as I’m concerned, the the the so there’s a couple of ways to think about this. That a couple of formulas, because this is ultimately what you need. You need a heuristic, how to make a good decision. Now, here’s like two ways I’ll talk about this. Number one is the way that you and I have seen in our families. Why? Because you’re married to military. Two of my three kids are Marines. I know it’s amazing. I make Marines, and so and and and so I’ve seen this a lot. Right, the way that Marine officers. My daughter’s a Marine officer. You and I talked about her a lot. She’s a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and the way that they teach them at the basic school at Quantico to make decisions is to get as much information as you can until you have 80% situational awareness, and then actually go forward, then pull the trigger, then make your decision. Less than 80% This is an empirical observation. Less than 80% awareness of of concreteness of how sure you are people die more than 80% people die. Why? Because you’re waiting too long, and and this is the trade off: how much information you have that you’re accumulating, and how long it takes you to make that decision. Okay, so then the second part of the decision making. Framework is this: What are the data that you’re actually accumulating, right? And this goes to a different part of the literature. You have tons of data anytime you need to make a decision, especially if you’re over 30, because you’ve lived a long time. You can’t put your finger on it, but this is your episodic memory in your hippocampus, which is your. It’s I mean, it’s just the the it’s the hard drive, and and you can’t quite put your finger on why you know something, but you know something, and you have better pattern recognition. You know that it’s so weird, right? Competence. It’s a level of competence. There’s three pieces of data that you have when you have a hard decision. So a bunch of people watching us right now, they’re thinking: Should I marry him? Should I take that job? Should I move to Austin, Texas? These are the kinds of things, and they’re agonizing over it. When you have a big decision, you have three pieces of data. You have three basic sensations that are based on what you know and you’ve experienced. Those basic sensations are excitement, your level of excitement. Number two is your level of fear, and number three is your level of deadness, sense of emptiness. So, for example, you’ll say to a woman about a guy she doesn’t love, “How do you feel about marrying him? How does it make you feel? And she feels dead inside, right? That’s what I mean by deadness. These are the three sensations.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:15
So, a level of maybe neutrality, would you say? Well, it’s

Arthur Brooks 31:18
not even that. It’s kind of like I feel empty inside, you know. So if you ask me to be a college president or something, it’s an important job. I’m a lifelong academic. It makes me feel dead inside. Like I don’t want to. I’m glad people are doing it. I’ve got a great president. I’m glad I’m not doing it. It makes me feel dead inside.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:37
And would that still translate to smaller decisions? Like for example, you get asked to see. Well, here’s

Arthur Brooks 31:42
the here’s so here’s the proportion of it. Here’s the 80% situational awareness. The ideal combination of these sensations is 80% excitement for doing that thing, 20% fear, not less. Less than 20% fear, you’re going to be bored. Wait,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:57
less than 20 less than 20%

Arthur Brooks 32:00
as a general rule. Yeah, why? It has to be. It has to be a little risky, and that means 20% fear means real fear of of actual possibility of failure. If you do this thing right, you have to have a 20% fear factor, and you should be as close to 0% deadness as possible. 8020 zero, when you actually feel like you know that it’s a 20 zero at 80% sureness, go. That’s the decision making criterion. And and again, it’s not perfect. It’s not perfect, but this is a certain way of of saying should I leave my current job is because it’s fallen out of those proportions too much. It’s become like 10% excitement and and 5% fear and 85% deadness. You got to go. Is what it comes down to. But that’s the way to think about these things. So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:44
basically, for everyone listening, that frankly simplifies a lot of things. Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 32:48
it’s it’s sort of it seems sort of unscientific, but it has a lot of empirical backing because we know more than we understand. We have more data than we can more

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:57
than we understand.

Arthur Brooks 32:58
Yeah, yeah. We have a knowing about all the things in our lives, and so this is why your gut is so critically important that you be in touch with the knowledge that you have innately, and and so when you say to yourself, “Yeah, you know what? I think I’m I’m I’m pretty confident. I think I’m 80% confident that I am at I am not at 8020 zero, and so therefore I’m not going to do this thing, or I’m pretty close to that. I’m going to do this thing, but that’s kind of these. You’re tending toward these are all these things are heuristic benchmarks because we need to be able to make decisions in a particular way. And this is incredibly reassuring for a lot of people when I present this to my students. It helps them decide should I go to J.P. Morgan or go to Citibank, you know, or whatever it happens to be.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:39
I have been seeing something in clinic, and actually, I got a message from a very successful patient, and he said, “You know, I’ve been on a GLP one, and over the last eight months, I am not as excited about things.

Arthur Brooks 33:55
Yeah, I’m sure this is classic.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:58
I’m sure that you’ve seen that GLP one receptors are in the brain and the gut, obviously, and when you turn down the reward for food, there seems to also be a decrease in sexual desire, in motivation, and now we have we’re going to have millions of people on these medications that might even temper their fear, or addiction, or desire.

Arthur Brooks 34:24
Yeah, people stop just spontaneously stop smoking.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 34:27
So, how are we going to be able to make good decisions with within the era of pharmacological agents? Yeah.

Arthur Brooks 34:36
So, this is, and this is an older question, not just GLP ones. Johann Hari talks about the fact that it tends to significantly increase suicide is when people are on, which is not to say that people should stop taking GLP ones or they should be even afraid of this. What it means is that sometimes when life’s little rewards aren’t there, that it makes life feel you know less fun to live day to day. And if so, if you’re really really on the edge, and all that means. Is you got to be super conscious if you’re taking something that’s changing your brain. If something’s going to be affecting your brain, know that the knowledge is actually the power. So you’re not being. It’s like you know anybody who’s adjusting their hormones. Lots and lots of guys my age are are on TRT, and they don’t understand. They don’t feel like themselves, and they think it’s something wrong with their psychology. No man, it’s biology. And if you actually understand that that you know exogenous testosterone is going to change your mood, it’s going to change something’s good, but something’s not good. Then you have power over it because you understand that that’s actually happening, and that’s what comes down to it. So when people are taking GLP ones, they’re like, “I don’t feel like I’m digging in. I used to really like eating a Twinkie, now I don’t like to. I feel like these little rewards are missing from my life. Don’t get depressed. Then you understand this is important. Another case of this, by the way, is people who are on SSRIs. Now, what do SSRIs do? I mean, they they they they keep more serotonin in the synapse, which lowers your level of rumination and activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that we talked about before. It lowers your rumination level. Great. You don’t have as much ruminant of sadness, but people say it’s harder to fall in love because you’re not ruminating on another person in the same way. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:08
then, do people make different choices? If if we have these four type of not personalities, but we have these traits, right, that are necessary, like the poet or the striver, and we start to adjust them. Do you worry about the future’s decision-making capacity? A

Arthur Brooks 36:30
little bit. I mean, there are there are certain cases, you know, personal decision making. There’s really interesting research, no doubt. You see, you probably participated in this literature, where when when women from their teenage years are on hormonal birth control, and then they get married and they come off hormonal birth control for the first time in a decade and a half. They

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:48
don’t like their husbands. They don’t

Arthur Brooks 36:49
like their husbands, and the reason is because they’re attracted in a different hormonal you to a different kind of man, right? And so that’s the kind of personal decision making. You’re like, whoops! Now it’s not like, and again, we don’t want to alarm anybody who’s watching this. But if you know, then you have power. Is what it comes down to. So yeah, for sure. I mean, we’re altering our brains all the time, and the trouble is that you know, I mean, you’re telling your patients this. Most doctors aren’t. I’ll take this. You know, no, no, you’ll be fine.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 37:20
No, no, you’ll be fine, and that is not always. It’s not always the case. I mean, you

Arthur Brooks 37:26
might be fine, but it’s going to make you see the world differently.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 37:29
You have contributed a lot to this idea of happiness and loneliness, and really highlighting that. If you could change something for people, and Matt and I were talking about this before. We agreed that you wouldn’t want to eliminate their suffering or their push, but and you know it’s funny you’ve also developed marine officers. I mean, you producing. I mean, so you producing a certain type of human, what would you want other people if they are listening? They’re raising kids or they’re raising themselves. Again, the you’ve covered so much,

Arthur Brooks 38:10
yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:11
But

Arthur Brooks 38:12
what’s the one big thing I do? What do you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:13
need them to do? Yeah, or you the one

Arthur Brooks 38:15
big alteration today that I would recommend everybody is be paying more attention to the the way that people interact with tech. This is the one big thing that parents need to be paying more attention to. That all young adults need to be paying attention to. This book about meaning that that it’s basically in response to a crisis of meaning. That after 2008, the sense of meaninglessness in people’s lives skyrocketed. I mean, you couldn’t find that many people who said my life feels meaningless. Like French existentialists, I don’t know people smoking filterless cigarettes in cafes in Paris. You know, my life feels meaningless. I mean, it’s like, what does that even mean? It’s like a New Yorker cartoon or something, right? But after 2008, you found that that started to explode, and this is the biggest predictor of depression anxiety for young adults, particularly people in their 20s. People under 30 is what you see in the data. It’s like, whoa! What does it actually correspond to? It corresponds to screen use. It corresponds to the way that we use our brains, which is what you know. My main area research over the past couple of years has been on how this has affected hemispheric lateralization-the two sides of the brain that you need to be able to function, to be happy, to have a good life. The right side of the brain is all the why, the mystery, the meaning, the love and transcendence. The left side is the analysis, the engineering, the information, the data, the how to and what. You need both, or you’re incompetent. Either life doesn’t have any meaning, or you can’t get anything done. And and that’s how our brains were designed. I mean, they’re they’re they’re wonderfully miraculously designed. But when you basically turn one hemisphere off because of the way that you’re interacting with the culture and the culture of tech in particular, you’re going to suffer. And so, a lot of parents they don’t understand. It’s like, what’s wrong with my son? My son, he came back from college and he’s just like living in the basement, smoking weed, and and and and. You know, he’s just on the internet all day long, and what’s going wrong is his brain isn’t working right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:06
Do you think that we will ever adapt to? You know, I think about evolution, and I think about how species adapt to their environment. Yeah, at some, and you talk a lot about God and

Arthur Brooks 40:18
the metaphysical parts of life. Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:20
one would say that this is all part of a greater plan,

Arthur Brooks 40:26
right? Right, and and we are. I believe that human beings are made to do incredible things. That we’re generative creatures. That we’re searchers. We’re seekers by by nature. And and and religious people would say that’s because we’re made in God’s image and God is generative. That God’s a creator, and so He made little creators. That’s us. Sometimes we do it for you know good things in our lives, and sometimes we create things that are not so great. I mean, we we we we eliminate small problems and create major crises.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:55
We eliminate. I love that.

Arthur Brooks 40:57
Yeah, we do this all the time. And it’s like I got a headache, and I found that when I actually eat some of the bark off this tree that that I feel a little bit better, and then I turn it into aspirin, and then I make nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and then from there I have analgesic narcotics, and then pretty soon 100,000 people a year are dying of drug overdoses. Now I’m not saying that we’re evil. I’m just saying that there’s consequences of our generativity and our creativity sometimes, and the classic case is this incredible ingenuity that led to the elimination of boredom? You know, I’ve done.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 41:25
I know, I’ve read and I’ve heard you talk about how we should be bored.

Arthur Brooks 41:28
Yeah, and boredom is incredible because we are evolved to be bored. That turns on the default mode network in our brains, which leads to mind wandering flights of fancy meaning. But it’s boring, and we don’t like it, and so we’ve figured out ways to get rid of it, and and and the result of it is our brains don’t work properly. I mean, the Dan Gilbert at Harvard has done all these great boredom studies. You know these boredom studies where he brings students, the undergraduates, into his lab because they’ll do like anything for 20 bucks, and and they’ll sit them in these chairs and say, “You got nothing to do for 15 minutes. You can sit there and no sound, nothing to look at. Nothing. There’s only one option. If you don’t want to just sit there quietly, you can press this button. And if they do, they self-administer painful electric shocks. How he got that through IRB, I have no idea. I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:10
have no idea. Yeah, it’s impressive. And

Arthur Brooks 42:12
and it it turns out that 25 of the women shock themselves within 15 minutes, and two thirds of the guys, which is basically all you need to know about men. And one guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and got thrown out of the experiment because he was into it. Right, so so

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:28
bored. I

Arthur Brooks 42:29
know. So boredom is a classic case of you know we have figured it out. This is the way that we use smartphones largely to eliminate boredom, and in so doing, what we’ve done is we’ve largely we’ve we’ve we’ve we’ve turned off the right hemisphere of our brain. We we use our brains suboptimally in such a way that it’s all how to and what information we didn’t ask for, and we’re not even exploring the the why of our lives. And that’s what’s leading to the meaning crisis. So the one piece of advice I give to young people is is learn to have the right relationship with your with your devices, which you absolutely can’t. This book has protocols on how to do that based on science.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:07
Give me one

Arthur Brooks 43:07
for for example, tech free times, tech free times during the day. You don’t have to throw your smartphone in the ocean and join a monastery, unless that’s your thing. It just means sounds like a vacation. The neurocognitive programming that comes from the first hour of the day, use that. I mean, you and I, when we first wake up, you got to make sure nothing’s on fire. You look at it and put it down. Don’t look at it for the next hour. Don’t look at it the first hour of the day. So you’re cognitively programming your day to not be all about the screen every single second. You know, it’s interesting that research on nervous tics, which is Tourette tic syndrome, is so interesting because you can actually help people not actually do the tick in the first hour. They’re probably going to be free for the rest of the day. That’s how this neurocognitive programming works, right? Your your brain is funny. I mean, it’s path dependent, is what. So the first hour of the day, meal times, because we’re made to have this oxytocin exchange, this neuropeptide exchange while we’re eating. It’s part of evolutionary biology. Don’t eat alone. Don’t have your phone. Not even on the table, face down, because that will interrupt the oxytocin production in your brain. I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:11
do not know that.

Arthur Brooks 44:12
Yeah, so you look at it, you’ll think is there something on that, and it will interrupt the oxytocin exchange with your husband. And so, and so during meals, and your kids, the number one predictor of your kids looking at their phones during meals is you looking at your phone during meals, right? And number three is last hour of the day, and part of that is you know blue light and and pineal gland and melatonin and sleep architecture, all the stuff we already know. But part of it is really how we finish the day, how we understand the day, which is super important for relationships and a lot of other stuff, meaning that you shouldn’t be sleeping with your phone either. And just these little things can be and and there’s policies too, by the way. There shouldn’t be a single phone in a single classroom from kindergarten through PhD in America, and yet 28 states still have unfettered access to phones, even in elementary school. So these are the things that we can do, that parents can do, that young adults can do. This is not throwing your phone away. You’re not going to become lonely. You’re not going to become isolated. You’re simply going to take care of yourself with the same kind of protocols that you and I are talking about biologically. So people stay healthy in the morning, aren’t you? Yeah, yeah. Morning protocols are the most important thing. I have very strict morning protocols.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:20
Do you ever miss them?

Arthur Brooks 45:22
Very rarely, because I find that seven days a week is easier than four.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:25
It is.

Arthur Brooks 45:26
It’s so. I mean, it’s like for me. I don’t like

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:28
going on vacation. I don’t. Do you like going on vacation? You feel very at least I.

Arthur Brooks 45:32
Yeah, your kids are little too, so vacation is sort of stressful.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:36
Yes.

Arthur Brooks 45:36
Yeah, but vacation is supposed to be a break from your routines, but breaks from my routines are kind of hard. Now it is important because strivers struggle with with enjoyment, and and so trying to make sure you’re staying in protocol keeps you with satisfaction and meaning because you’re driving, driving, driving, driving, and making progress. How does somebody know if

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:57
they’re if they’re a driver? Maybe there’s a level below that, or Striver.

Arthur Brooks 46:02
Well, if actually the idea of doing things that people find to be really enjoyable bum you out, then you know. I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a pretty obvious self test. If you basically say I don’t like going on vacation, then we got to work on your we got to work on your enjoyment. And I’m right with you. I’m right with you. I completely understand that. But you know, I I’m on the road 48 weeks a year, you know, for my work. I’m constantly going. I’m I’m out between two and four nights a week, 48 weeks a year, and that means that I have to be really really strict about making sure that I can undertake my morning protocols, notwithstanding the jet lag or whatever the time change is or the hotels that I’m staying in. And boom, boom. And if you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:39
stopped that, what would happen?

Arthur Brooks 46:40
Probably, probably nothing. Do you think you would

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:44
be depressed? Do you? I

Arthur Brooks 46:45
think that it would. I think that it would be downstream implications because each of the things that I do plays into something that’s important to me in my life. And and were you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:54
able to make those decisions with the 8020?

Arthur Brooks 46:57
Yeah, yeah. A lot of it was 8020, but also it was just experimentation. So my life is a is a lab. I’m experimenting on myself constantly. So I I was um I I spent a few days last summer in Stockholm with Brian Johnson. I didn’t know him before, and he said something that really affected me. And you know you look at the stuff that he does, and you’re like really. But then he said something that actually convicted me a little bit. He said, “I’m doing these things. I don’t know if everything works. I’m doing them to me because I don’t want to experiment on you. And and so the the the I really respected that. And so the spirit of experimentation on oneself is really generative as long as you’re paying attention to the results. And and I just really, really, really like the results. Could I relax it? My wife asked me this a lot, and answers probably. I probably could, and at some point we’re gonna have to. At some point, I’m sure you’re thinking about that. I am thinking about it, and it’s actually quite disconcerting. You know, I I just turned 62, So that what does that mean? That means that in five years I’ll be 67, and five years I’ll be 72, and you’re not going to be able to do it forever. So it’s important to actually have a cadence to this kind of thing and to have a flexibility fundamentally, be able to alter these particular protocols and not to be rigid. Do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 48:17
you find you are most creative when you’re moving,

Arthur Brooks 48:22
yeah, for sure. And that’s that ambulation literature. That stuff is super interesting, right? But also

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 48:27
when you’re interacting, you said something about Brian Johnson versus being alone with your thoughts. You hear a lot about the way that these poets do it, or how people become creative.

Arthur Brooks 48:39
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And there’s that. What is that? That those papers that came out of was it Berkeley or Stanford? I can’t remember. That talked about you know people were asked to do a creative task when they were sitting versus when they were walking, and and then to make to control to make sure that it actually wasn’t just outside. They would they would roll people in a wheelchair and to see it and idea generation is like 60% higher. I mean, it’s it’s quite dramatic, and there have been times in my life when I actually needed a fundamental change, and I couldn’t get to that 80% threshold. I couldn’t get to 8020 zero with enough sureness that I actually had to do a long walk, and so twice I’ve actually done the Camino, which is a walk across northern Spain. Yeah, it’s day after day after day. It’s hundreds of miles, and and what I say, it’s a you break yourself down walking, and what you find is very interesting. It’s an ancient mystical tradition. It’s not that you find what you’re looking for; it’s that what you’re looking for finds you,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:34
and you feel very confident in that.

Arthur Brooks 49:36
Yeah, it’s it it’s man, it works. It’s so weird.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:40
The meaning of your life, as I was reading it, one of the anchors is your belief in God, your spirituality.

Arthur Brooks 49:50
Right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:51
If someone doesn’t have that, and you talk about that in the later part of the book, but if someone doesn’t have that, how? Do you think there are guardrails for operation? Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 50:03
this is part of an idea called transcendence. So transcendence, when it comes to happiness, is not dependent on a particular path. I have my own particular path. I was raised as a Christian, and I practice. I go to mass every day. It’s just part of my part of my protocol. Yeah, I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:17
thought that I misheard it. Yeah, no, I go to mass

Arthur Brooks 50:19
every day, and and you know that’s a Catholic thing. I mean, the great thing about being the being in the Catholic Church is like Starbucks. I mean, it’s just an it’s a franchise system. It’s a uniform product that’s excellent, and you find it almost any place. And so when

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:30
you’re traveling, yeah,

Arthur Brooks 50:30
like this morning here, you know, because we’re we’re recording this in Austin, Texas, and you know, and and I have you know, there’s an app. It’s like, where’s the next mass? It’s it’s and and so it’s actually not that hard for me to do it as long as I’m committed to doing it. Other people will do vipassana meditation every day. People have different particular practices. The whole point, however, the benefit when it comes to meaning and happiness, I’m not going to make the metaphysical claim about who’s right. That’s a different. I know. I read you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:55
say that you’re not doing that. I’m not doing that, but forever. When

Arthur Brooks 50:58
it comes to happiness, you have to get above yourself. You have to get out of what William James calls the me self into the I self, where you’re looking at out and standing in awe of something greater than yourself. And so, for some people, for our friend Ryan Holiday, he talks about the Stoic philosophers, and he has a very, very strong sense of transcendence based on Stoicism. Some people do vipassana. Some people will study the fugues of Bach. Some people will do the Brahma Muhurtā, which is walking for an hour before dawn, which I’ve done for years, and it’s really it’s a very very beautiful thing. A little hour long pilgrimages when the sun is coming up. Some people practice the faith of their youth, but the whole point is you need a transcendent practice. That’s that’s where the benefit comes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:43
Do you need to do that when you are young?

Arthur Brooks 51:45
No, no, no. People find it at different points in life. People change over the course of their lives too. There’s an interesting thing. There’s a guy named James Fowler, a sociologist, who talks about the cadence of people’s religious pilgrimage over the course of their life, and he finds that young adults they tend to, if they’re raised religious, a lot of them fall away. Were you raised in a religious family by any chance?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:05
Um, not particularly. Yeah. Our our kids, they go to chapel every week. I go with them to chapel every week.

Arthur Brooks 52:13
Right. So your kids, all right. Yeah. So they,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:16
I would say that they are raised in a more religious household now for sure. We pray before every male. Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 52:22
yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:23
I mean, there is my husband and I have fundamental beliefs. Yeah, and this is how we. And

Arthur Brooks 52:28
you’re probably more religious. You and your husband are more religious than your parents.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:31
Yes,

Arthur Brooks 52:32
which is pretty common and weird, isn’t that funny? Because people always think that that yet young people are less religious than their parents, but now you’re of the generation, so you’re 20 years behind me, and you’re more religious than people who are a little older than me. Typically, you know, especially if you’re from highly educated, you’re from New York City, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:50
I’m from Chicago, but yeah,

Arthur Brooks 52:51
Chicago, yeah, but in New York City, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the that what Fowler finds is that people tend to fall away, even if they’re from really religious backgrounds, because they come to this cognitive dissonance, or like, yeah, you know, this I’ve learned about a good God in Sunday school, or you know, and but I’m looking around. There’s kids who are sick, and there’s economic inequality, and there’s war, and there’s environmental degradation, and there’s injustice, and I don’t believe it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:18
How are you raising your kids? Were they raised? They’re they’re

Arthur Brooks 53:20
they’re being raised in a very orthodox family, and and that’s not to say that they won’t have their own journey and their own questions. People tend to come back to religion in their 40s.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:31
So you’re saying I’m doing the right thing. You’re doing the

Arthur Brooks 53:32
right thing, but you’re doing the natural thing. And part of the reason is because you’re at the point in your life now where, of course, things don’t make sense. I mean, they don’t make sense. It’s like nothing makes sense. Okay, well, since life is really messy and a lot, I don’t understand. I’m going to do that thing because I like that thing, even if it’s not completely consistent with everything that I read, and then everybody tells me that’s okay. You actually become comfortable with a messy world in your 40s when you weren’t in your 20s, is what it comes down to. Now, not everybody. Some people stay religious. All three of my kids are very traditionally religious, and I have one son, my oldest son, who has gone to mass most days since he was a teenager. As a matter of fact, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:10
this helps with the transcendence because

Arthur Brooks 54:12
this is a good way. It’s a very efficacious way to get it as traditional religion, but it’s not the only way.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:18
Would another way be military? Yeah. Well, it

Arthur Brooks 54:21
it can be military service is that it structures and regimens people’s lives. It makes people’s lives orderly, and so what that does is it sets a kind of a it creates a canvas on which you can do the painting of transcendence. So it it sets the stage more effectively. It’s not religion per se. I mean, I know people who think the Marine Corps is a cult, you know,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:42
or the SEAL teams. Yes, exactly right.

Arthur Brooks 54:45
Exactly right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:46
Matt, do you have any questions? I know you always have. You’ve had many questions.

Speaker 3 54:52
Well, I have a few, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:56
and I’ll I’ll ask it to him for you.

Speaker 3 54:58
But your routine. Yeah, same thing with programming. Yeah, you’re gonna become very balanced with it,

Speaker 2 55:06
right?

Speaker 3 55:07
Like as in, like you would you would need to do more. Yeah. So your routine. Yeah. Right. Whenever you give it to other people too, whenever you talk about it, do you also give direction of you can follow these rituals? Right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:23
I get where you’re going.

Speaker 3 55:24
Right. Right. Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:26
So basically, you go to mass every day.

Speaker 2 55:30
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:30
You are consistent. You train. You’re very good with your nutrition. I mean, look at you. For 62, you’re fitter than I would say easily 75% of Americans who are either overweight or obese or not training,

Arthur Brooks 55:45
and I’m in better shape than I was when I was in my 30s,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:48
which is extraordinary. Yeah, and the stimulus has to change. Do you ever get to a place as you think about how you are bringing the best version of yourself that you have to add, for example, another day where, in order to transcend, you have to up the ante.

Arthur Brooks 56:02
Sometimes I’m what I’m trying to do is I’m changing the stimulus as much as I’m actually adding to the stimulus. And part of the reason is because my my my my core life goals they don’t tend to they’re not revolving around what I’m doing in the gym. That’s really keeping the the saw sharp. That’s what it comes down to. So it’s not as if you know what I’m doing as part of these basic protocols with my my nutrition, for example. It’s not that that’s not where where my sense of life progress is coming in, but my life progress can’t occur unless those things are on point.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:33
How do you know if you’re making it?

Arthur Brooks 56:35
Yeah, if I’m here, you know, this is this is. Do people ask

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:38
you this?

Arthur Brooks 56:39
Yeah, yeah, and and and and and that’s that’s my problem, that’s my problem because there’s never enough, there’s never enough. I can’t stop. You know that’s the striver’s lament, right? And I’ve absolutely I’ve I see this in others. I don’t have a clinical practice like you, but I’m a teacher, and and and and I work with some of the most high performing people in the world. And what they struggle with is that there’s never enough. It’s not money. It’s the feeling of progress. It’s actually I want to. I see the beautiful city on the hill, and I got to make progress toward it. And and there’s a real sense of insecurity about actually stopping, which is one of the reasons that enjoyment is so hard for me and for many of the people that I actually work with, because enjoyment makes you feel like the city on the hill is getting further away, is what it comes down to. So that’s my weakness. Now that weakness, by the way, has an origin story with a lot of with a lot of people like us and watching us here, and it starts in childhood. The origin story is that when you’re a kid, I bet you got really good grades when you were a little girl. I did. I bet you were smart and motivated, hard work.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:42
Presidential fitness to us all this time.

Arthur Brooks 57:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I bet you got a lot of attention from your and a lot of a lot of and and your parents gave you a lot of love for that. I mean, they they were probably impressed by that. They gave you a lot of compliments for that, and probably a lot of adults said, “Gabrielle, you’re number one, and that made you feel really really good, and that’s that’s great. The trouble with that is there’s a dark side

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:04
to that. That we’re very careful about our kids, of course,

Arthur Brooks 58:06
because when your brain is really synaptically plastic, what you record is that love is earned. That I got attention from my parents and from my teachers when I did an extremely important thing, which makes you less of a human being and into a human doing, as they say, and and the problem with that is that love isn’t earned; it can’t be earned. Love is a free gift, freely given. Love is a grace, and and if you do that, there’s a tendency for you to surround yourself with people who will adore you, people who and who are effectively using you and making you earn their love. I know people who marry people who make them earn their love because that’s what they think love is. You know, the men will marry women who you know if you’re not bringing home more and more bacon, then see ya. You know, and that’s earning. That’s a love earning. And by the way, she doesn’t love you, guys. She doesn’t love you because she she should love you unemployed is what it comes down to. So that’s the problem that strivers have: is they spend their lives. It’s like, do you love me yet? Okay, let me go work harder. Do you am I lovable yet? Are enough people clapping? Do I have enough people watching my podcast? Did my book that make the list? You know, all those dumb metrics. All they are are these blunt instrument ways to gage whether or not we’ve earned the right to be loved. That’s the Shriver’s lament.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:24
Is it external or internal? And I, and the reason I ask this is because, you know, I look at my daughter, and she’s physically gifted. She’s good at everything, and when she has to try, she falls apart. If she’s not number

Speaker 2 59:38
one,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:39
unfortunately, this girl is a mess. My son Leonidas, he is smaller. Unfortunately, he’s my size, and that kid is tough as nails. He doesn’t expect to be good. He is aggressive. He knows that he has to try, and I just think that it has nothing to do with. Us giving or taking love, we tell them that we love them. We try not. We we try to always encourage the effort, not the outcome.

Arthur Brooks 1:00:11
Right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:12
But my daughter is externally driven, and my son is all. It’s all this intrinsic drive.

Arthur Brooks 1:00:18
No doubt, there is a natural component to this that some people you could you could have the most hardcore tiger parents you know that withhold love when you’re not actually achieving and they’re still fine.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:30
It’s like the emotional death. Yeah,

Arthur Brooks 1:00:32
no doubt. And just as the pandas profiles are highly genetic, no doubt there’s a competitive edge that actually sits on the genome someplace. You know, some people are just extremely competitive, and some people want the external validation. Some people are just craving extrinsic rewards, and what these people need the most, more than your daughter needs more than your son, is an understanding of intrinsic rewards and not the extrinsic rewards. And it’s very easy to motivate these extrinsic kids with extrinsic rewards. These are the kids who are like the that where you pass the marshmallow test. Yeah, so the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:04
marshmallow test. Yes, these are the kids who

Arthur Brooks 1:01:06
you know they will if you basically say I will give you a second cookie if you climb Mount Everest. They will go climb Mount Everest because of what that represents. Yeah, totally. That represents the love of the world. Actually, these are the people who have to get a million Instagram followers, even though a million Instagram followers is is a stupid metric, it’s a trivial metric. It’s writing your life in disappearing ink, and yet it’s like a tangible marker that I’m making progress in this life, and that I’m more meritorious than I was yesterday, and that maybe somebody loves me, and so people who are naturally like this. And look, we all have kids who are different. I got three kids, I have four grandkids. They’re all different, and and the result is you got to watch for the one who’s most extrinsically motivated, and these are the ones you have to apply the greatest intrinsic love to. Let them understand the most that love can’t be earned.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:02:01
And do you find that this is? How does someone do that? Even you know, as someone is listening to this, like

Arthur Brooks 1:02:08
parents. What? Like parents? How do parents do this? How do we do as our ourselves?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:02:14
Yeah. Yeah. As people listening to this, so we’ve got parents, we have physicians, we have all types of people. One thing is for sure: is they want to learn to be better.

Arthur Brooks 1:02:22
Yeah, they they they absolutely want to learn to be better for sure, and they tend to be super hard charging strivers for sure. But they won’t actually find the love that they seek until they can actually understand what the true nature of love is. So, and different people find it in different ways. I mean, this is so people wait because I work with married couples, and that’s your

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:02:40
next adventure is yeah

Arthur Brooks 1:02:42
yeah the next book is called Falling in Love and Staying in Love. It’s going to come out in 2028. You know the incredible science of romance, and you know how to find the right person, how to have the falling in love process be healthy and good, the neurochemical cascade that happens in our brains when we’re falling in love, and how to stay in love with the person that you’re that you’ve chosen to be

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:01
more important now than ever, especially with the social media landscape. Yeah, absolutely,

Arthur Brooks 1:03:05
and you know, and not to mention just whole the culture that’s Terran telling us that that militates against pair bond mating, which is how we not very romantically how we heard scientists talk about you know marriage, but we have all these dumb messages about ideas that don’t work. You know, things where I mean, what we want is to be pair bond mated for life. We want to love our person.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:26
That

Arthur Brooks 1:03:27
is, you know, there’s no evidence. I mean, it’s like what we what Homo sapiens in the environment are sort of serially pair bond mated, but the ideal is permanent pair bond mating. That’s why you don’t you don’t say. What do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:40
you mean by that?

Arthur Brooks 1:03:40
Well, because in your wedding day, your your so your your animal impulse is serial pair bond mating, but your moral aspiration is permanent. So on your wedding day, you don’t like

Speaker 2 1:03:49
yes.

Arthur Brooks 1:03:49
Let’s see how it goes. You don’t say that. You know, it’s like it’s like 15 years. That sounds about right. No, I mean it’s like till part. You said 3235, 3035, in in November. You know, and um, and so the the point of that is that it requires, given the fact that it’s in the space not just of animal impulse but of moral aspiration, which is what we really want. That that you got to you got to be good at it, and you have to take it seriously, and you have to not make stupid errors, and like anything else, it’s like taking care of your body.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:19
You practice it just like you talk about training, yeah, we have protocols.

Arthur Brooks 1:04:23
There’s protocols. Protocols. There are things that you can actually learn.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:27
Arthur Brooks, you are extraordinary. Really, you’re teaching the world things that we all need to know.

Arthur Brooks 1:04:34
Thank you. I’m such a fan of what you do, and I’ve been even before we met, before we talked for the first time. I’ve been listening to you and watching you for years, and you’ve really made my life better.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:42
I really appreciate that, and you make my life better, and all of the listeners and the viewers. Really, you’ve just been a tremendous voice for people. So, thank you so much.

Arthur Brooks 1:04:52
Thank you.