Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1792: The Secrets of Happy People With Arthur C. Brooks

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with New York Times best selling author, Harvard professor and happiness expert, Arthur Brooks on what happiness is and how to achieve it. What is a social scientist? (3:33) Why does academia lack humility? (4:38) The massive human experiment that is the coronavirus pandemic. (7:58) Is fear or control the biggest deterrent to your pursuit of happiness? (10:23) Why there is fear-based polarity in the US. (16:32) The comparison trap, that is social media. (19:05) Why do parents tend to overprotect their children? (21:40) What motivated him to write his new book? (25:50) The commonalities of the happy as they age. (30:42) Why wisdom is knowing how to use what you know. (33:20) How life is not that interesting when you don’t have diversity. (36:50) The importance of having a spiritual practice. (41:05) The big problems created by the coronavirus and how to combat them. (45:14) When you hate, someone is profiting. (50:12) Arthur’s hopeful mindset for the future. (53:37) The Opposite Signal Strategy (OSS) to combat loneliness. (55:42) The thought experiment of understanding your intrinsic vs. extrinsic reward system. (57:39) Do not let success ruin your happiness! (1:03:13) How critical is the partner we choose to do this life with? (1:07:02) Beware of success addiction. (1:09:26) The practices of a healthy relationship. (1:16:50) Being the child of a social scientist. (1:21:33) Mind Pump, the happiness podcast. (1:26:40) What is the secret to communicating with people with opposing views? (1:27:47) Related Links/Products Mentioned NEW PROGRAM LAUNCH SPECIAL PROMOTION: Get MAPS Symmetry + 2 free eBooks for $97!! **Promo code “SYM50” at checkout** April Promotion: Get MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Prime and Prime Pro all for $99.99! Visit Chili Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life - Book by Arthur C. Brooks Good genes are nice, but joy is better Fluid Intelligence vs. Crystallized Intelligence Obesity One of the Biggest Risk Factors in COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Study Suggests Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail – Book by Ray Dalio The Problem With ‘No Regrets’ The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward – Book by Daniel Pink Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Arthur Brooks (@arthurcbrooks)  Instagram Arthur Brooks Website Ray Dalio (@raydalio)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? Today's episode is a treat. One of our favorite people in the world, social scientists, Arthur Brooks, great friend of ours, author of several books, but one of them just came out and made it to

the New York Times bestseller list. There's actually, I believe number one, called Strength to Strength. We love this guy. He's an expert on happiness. And in today's episode, we talk about the secrets of happy people. Like, what do happy people do on a regular basis that makes them so happy and feel good all the time? It's a very, very fun episode. Again, he's always so full of insight. He communicates so well. We know you're gonna love this episode.

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Arthur. Hey. Always great to have you on. I'm in person. Yeah. Welcome to our studio. Literally one of my favorite people in the world. Now, I want you to real quick kind of explain

what a social scientist is and what that's about because as we get into this, I want you to real quick kind of explain what a social scientist is and what that's about because as we get into this, I want people to understand kind of your background a little bit and how you know the stuff you do. Social science, well, it's a broad category of everything from psychology to economics and what it studies as human behavior. The idea of what people do and trying to understand it

using scientific, mostly statistical tools and experiments on human subjects. So, it's the same, more or less the same toolkit as if you were a natural scientist, but you're studying the humans, which is hard because the natural world is highly complicated. Humans are complex, meaning that you kind of know what they want, but you don't know what they're going to do. So, it's a tricky business for sure, but that's, but my, my laboratory is, you

know, the airplane, it's conversations, it's, you know, human interactions. I mean, that's, that's what I'm most interested in because love and happiness, that's what we all want. Yeah, you're, my favorite happiness expert for sure. So when you study this, then can you somewhat accurately predict what, how humans are going to feel or what makes them feel particular ways or are we so complex that it's almost impossible? Well, you have to have a lot of humility and one of the things that we don't have very much in academia is humility, which is a big problem. And so you don't get beyond what your data will allow you to predict or or even explain. But the truth is we know a lot more than we used to because it's's been such an explosion in the intersection of neuroscience and statistical methods of studying social behavior that we know a lot more than we did in the past So for example, we even 50 years ago people say you can study happiness. It's a feeling. Well, it's not a feeling

Happiness is not a feeling anymore than your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey Which is just evidence that there's something good going on in the kitchen. The Thanksgiving dinner is actually protein carbohydrates and fat, or if you're not, if you're a little bit more sentimental, it's the turkey and the stuffing and the vegetables, and that you're going to eat with a bunch of people that you love. And so you can actually study happiness much more like, we would study nutrition every minute of the past, which is a scientific approach to it,

but you don't want to get beyond the range of your headlights. You don't want to start saying things are absolutely settled as if it were the laws of gravity. So it's a lot we don't know. Why does academia lack humility? Academia lacks humility because we have a tendency to puff up our own egos and to say, since I know all this stuff, I must know everything. And I'm talking to people who know less, and they're expecting me to know the answers. And nobody wants to go to a big expert in any field and I'm going, oh, yeah. But the truth is that you guys do this too because you're experts.

I mean, this is the most popular podcast in fitness and culture and health in the world right now. And so anybody who is listening to this are going to be like, well, these guys, they know everything about fitness. But there's lots of stuff you don't know about fitness. Saying you don't know is a hard thing for human beings to do. This is less than one of social science. People don't like to say, I don't know.

Yeah, you know what's interesting about that? As trainers, it took me a couple of years to realize that if I said, I don't know, I actually got more respect for my clients. And they were more likely to take my advice when I did know. So, and that's the irony. At first, I was afraid of saying I don't know. And then afterwards, I was like, I was happy to say it.

And, because people, it was easy for me. I really didn't know, so it was, right? No, it's true, but the people who would the hell am I doing here? People don't want to display what looks like weakness. And this is a real problem that, even as a human foible, is that we don't want to display any sort of weakness.

But it's absolutely true. You get more credibility when you explain, you don't know. So when I'm lecturing my students, I mean, I have this big sections of MBA students at Harvard Business School taking this class on the science of happiness. And I'm just studying this stuff for decades.

And they're taking it for the first time and they're super into it. I mean, they're just like, and they're great. They're smart, they're applied, they're interested. And they'll be firing these questions at me. And I'll be talking at the posterior singular cortex. So I'll be talking about different parts of the brain. All questions at me and I'll be talking at the posterior singulate cortex. So we'll be talking about different parts of the brain. All this technical stuff, I'll be talking about the neural modulators and how it deals

with emotion, the limbic system, the yada yada yada. And so they think I know absolutely everything. They'll ask me a question that's relatively basic. Like, why do I love my dog so much? And be like, oh. I know I get all get back to you. But they actually have respect more when the somebody who's mastered the field or at least arguably has more mastery over the field than they do says, I don't know, because we

don't know everything, because we can't know everything is about online. So as somebody that studies human behavior, the last couple years must have been very interesting for you, because it's been somewhat unprecedented in my lifetime for sure. I never experienced anything like that before. Right. And the pressures and the changes and the stresses, what are the big things that stood out to you or is there anything that you learned or saw that was surprising? Well, it was a happiness experiment. It was a massive happiness experiment. Now, it's interesting, though, that people are always caught off guard. Every 10 years, there's a big thing like that

that happens to society, and it's uninvited, so it's unwelcome, which is worth keeping in mind. I mean, you can have a change, and if you invite it, even if it's really hard, like, you know, you quit your job, and you go through a period of relative insecurity, if it's at your volition, then it's not terrible. But if it's imposed upon you, then you really hate it because we don't like to lose control.

And this is what happens about every 10 years. And people forget that. That every 10 years is something as big as the coronavirus epidemic that happens to us as a systemically. So 10 years before this big crisis was the financial crisis. That's right. Maybe the ATM machines were going to stop working.

That's the level of dislocation that we had. People graduated from college not getting any work for stop working. That's the level of dislocation that we had, people graduated from college and not getting any work for two years, crazy. 10 years before that was 9.11. 10 years before that was the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Every 10 years there's something huge that fundamentally changes the way

that we live and the way that we see the world. 10 years from now it's going to be something else and we're going to be like, ah, I was paying attention to the next virus and financial meltdown and it was fill in the blank. The problem is, we as a society need to be better at involuntary change than we actually are. However, every time this happens,

it's a big experiment in the changes in human happiness. And you see how behavior changes, and you see how mood changes, and how people deal with it in different ways. So for me as a social scientist, been the most interesting thing. And by the way, I'm going through it like everybody else. At UNI, we text a lot, you know,

we talked to each other a lot about, you know, and I'm like, so, you know, you give me advice quite frankly. I mean, you know, my home gym, for example, that was a huge, huge part of my own personal happiness. And so I wound up doing research on why it is that, for example, resistance training is critically important in times of relative inactivity for inducing the neuromodulators in the brain

that will help you to deal with problems of loneliness and seclusion and isolation, for example. So even those types of things were learning experience for me. Would you say that fear or control are the biggest deterrence towards your pursuit of happiness? So fear is a huge one. And the reason for this is that fear is the opposite of love.

Love is the secret of happiness. As a matter of fact, at Harvard, we have a study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an 84 year longitudinal study of the same people starting in the late 1930s. It was Harvard graduates among them JFK, Ben Bradley, the publisher of the Washington Post, who's pretty famous guys, and then mixed it with people who had not gotten to Harvard because this is not exactly diverse.

You know, all white, up-class guys went to Harvard, but then people who didn't go to college and then their spouses and their descendants, so it's become demographically very diverse. And we looked at what they did over the course of their lives. And there's a bunch of things. You can find seven big patterns for things that they did voluntarily that led them to being happy and well when they got older, when they were old. But the number one by far,

and they sum up the whole studies that happiness is love full stop. So therefore, you wanna know not just to have more love in your life, but what is the greatest antagonistic force in the universe against love and the answer is it's cognitive opposite Which is fear people often think that hatred is the opposite of love Hatred is downstream from fear anytime somebody's expressing hatred is because they're fearful always fear is It actually takes up more brain tissue to process than any other

Basic emotion interesting. Yeah, and the reasons because it keeps you alive. Yeah it actually takes up more brain tissue to process than any other basic emotion. Interesting. I didn't know that. And the reason is because it keeps you alive. Yeah. This is the big thing. Without fear you're dead. You're dead hundreds of thousands of years ago. You're like, ah, it's a beautiful day.

I found some berries on a bush. That make life is really great. And there's the saber-to-diger thinking of behind you, twig snaps. You're like, it's just a twig. And you're his life. So how do we balance those two then? If it obviously serves us for survival reasons,

but then it also can cripple us because it's the opposite of love. How do you, well, you need fear to be sure, but you need to actually have it not be maladapted particularly to modern circumstances. The way that fear is supposed to be processed in the human brain is that it's episodic and intense. The problem that we have in modern societies is not episodic episodic and intense. The problem that we have in modern societies

is not episodic is chronic and mild. And the way this works, when fear is active at it, for example, you're walking across the word San Jose and you're walking across the street, mining your abyss in beautiful days, that was a beautiful day here. Somebody runs a red light and a car is coming straight toward you.

That's processed by the visual cortex of your brain without you being conscious of it. It's imprinted into the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system of your brain. This is a million years old, this part of the brain, which sends a signal through your hypothalamus to your pituitary glands in your brain, sends a signal to your adrenal glands, which sit right above your kidneys, and they pop out cortisol, epinephrine, and noripinephrine. This happens in 74 milliseconds. It's like three seconds later that you've already jumped out of the way and your heart is pounding,

and you're sweating, you've already flipped off the driver before you know even what's going on. That's why fear is so important. And you need that, but it has to be episodic and tense. The way that we use it now is you open up social media and you're just starting to tighten up. And you know If somebody's gonna trash me and I'm gonna get canceled or you know

Whatever it is that people are really freaked out about that's just a little drip of stress hormones drip drip drip drip drip And that's bad. So how do you deal with that? That's modern life and the way that you deal with that is that you don't just You can you know mindfulness meditation and Everybody should listen to mine pump and learn and get really good shape. I mean, there's all kinds of things that we should do. But fundamentally, the way for you to deal with your fear is more love. You go to the cognitive opposite. This is the key thing. Don't deal with it. I mean, you should deal with it directly as well. But go to its opposite and surround the fear with love. You need more love in your life. You need more romantic love. You need more family love, you need more real friendships, deal friendships are not the same. And you need, so you need faith, you

need love in the divine, you need love of your friends, you need love of your family, and you need romantic love. So give me an actionable thing that I can do. So I open up my social media instantly at the, like you said, the closing of the chest and I'm getting frustrated and fearful because of everything that I'm seeing, what's an actionable thing I can do? Obviously, shut it off. That's the first thing, but then I want to pursue love. What does that look like? Text Katrina, I love you.

Seriously, no, you're right. Seriously, because what that will do is that will actually stimulate your brain. I mean, you've got four negative basic emotions that are automatic, their fear, disgust, anger, and sadness, and three automatic positive emotions that happen to you automatically, which are joy, interest, and love.

Those are the big three, and you need to stimulate love in particular, and the way that you do that is by expressing love. Expressing true, authentic love. Talk about a challenge though for somebody, right? Who's stuck in the fearful mindset, and then to try and transition over to that. Especially since I know that I get a follow-up question whenever I send that. She knows to ask me, yeah, why did I say that? What are you thinking about?

Yeah, well, part of it is that you can have a deal with her. That when I'm feeling stressed, when I'm feeling, when there's trouble, I'm going to reach out to you and just tell you what's really important to me, which is that you're written on my heart. My love, you're written on my heart. Love that. Yeah, you know, I feel like sometimes I take for granted that you have to purposefully place yourself in love and seek it and not just seek it to give it,

almost like I just, I take for granted that it just happens. Like, oh yeah, love just happens. It's not something I have to actually work towards and seek out, but the way you talk about it is to make a conscious effort towards it. Give it, this is the key thing. If you want more of happiness or love, give more happiness and love.

So happiness is the thing. One of the reasons, why do I study, why do I teach happiness at Harvard? It's fun, awesome. It's, I mean, it's a cool gig. Why don't I write about the Atlantic? The best. The reason is because I want more happiness.

How do I get more happiness? I teach it. That's how you do it. And it's actually there's a whole brain process to this. This is really important. If you want to understand something in your, in your the big meaty part of your brain, that's the most human part called the prefrontal cortex,

the big part of your brain behind your forehead, you actually have to think about what you're doing and explain it to other people. Then you will own it forever. I kept, you know, I kept read about happiness and I'm really interested in happiness, but I wasn't happy until I taught it. It's a secret.

And that made the biggest difference. Big difference. Wow. Why are we seeing, because we have, I mean, objectively speaking, life is better in terms of safety and dangers and food and material things and entertainment and all of the stuff, but I keep reading statistics about people

are more depressed and more anxious. Especially kids, especially adolescents and teenagers. Do we have any ideas as to why kids are experiencing this more? I mean, I have two teenage kids, and I think about this a lot. Yeah, so the Justin's question is fear. It's fear, fear is the problem. We're in a fear-based polarity in our culture,

and there's a lot of reasons for this. I mean, there's a lot of, part of it is that we tend to oscillate between fear and love as the vehicular language of how we express ourselves. And we tend to be in a, and you look at politics today, it's all fear. It's like vote for me because the other guys are going to hurt you and come take your stuff and I'll protect you. And it doesn't matter if you're on the right of the left. This is the language that we actually get from national leaders. But you also see it every place else. You know, women are afraid of men, and men are afraid of women that we're afraid of

actually expressing our politics. And look, the freest, most upwardly mobile country in the history of the world, and we're actually afraid to express our politics. We're gonna get canceled on Instagram. I mean, and this is a fear-based polarity that we have in our culture today, which is hugely problematic.

We have as parents, we overprotect our kids. On social media, we actually are exposed to the criticisms of complete strangers and masked numbers. The result of this is this intense social fear that filtered itself down to the way that we conduct ourselves. You find that the people are about 30% less likely to say they're in love than they did in the 1980s when they were in their 20s. Kids in their 20 So kids in their 20s to the kids, young people in their 20s today are 30 percentage point percentage points less likely to say they're in love than I was when I was in my 20s.

That's too massive. It's unbelievable. You never see data like this. This is catastrophic. This is a cataclysm in human happiness. And so all of this, what we're talking about, the depression, I mean, and again, you can look for more proximate technical causes like the uptake in social media, which is the junk food of social life. In the same way, yeah, totally. I mean, it's like eating McDonald's every day,

and part of it is because there's a neuropeptide and a brain called oxytocin that functions as a hormone and you get it from eye contact and touch. You don't get it from social media. So you binge on it in the same way that you'll binge on burgers and fries when you're hungry, get too many calories, but you're hungry again and hour later

because you know, you're nutrient needs. Same thing is true for social media. And all of this leads to loneliness, leads to depression. And it's all in this brew of fear that we see as a society. Yeah, with social media, I mean, from a fitness perspective, the thing that I noticed a lot with body image issues is they get worse because, and I'd love your input on this, that you see all

these perfect bodies and your brain just unconsciously compares you to these people and you have this bias, like, oh, everybody looks like that. Well, guys, I know we're comparing ourselves to you. Oh, come on. You don't say that. I know how ripped you are, but it makes you without being conscious about you end up comparing yourself and you end up thinking, my God, everybody looks like this. And I look normal or whatever. And I feel like it does that with news, with scary things.

So you read on social media, and that's what obviously gets popular. So as a kid, oh my God, everything sucks. There's all the scary stuff. I can't do anything about it. Am I kind of heading down the right path? No, that's right. The comparison sets are too big for sure.

And so one of the problems with social media. Now, it's the lack of approval from other people, the criticism from complete strangers for sure. But then there's the social comparison issue. There's a completely different issue, but it's a really deleterious one nonetheless. Social comparison, you know, the Teddy Roosevelt, President of the United States, called Social Comparison the Thief of Joy. He was kind of a good social scientist. He understood humans pretty well. He's one of my favorite presidents.

Yeah, I found him. Yeah, yeah, he's a really interesting guy. He's a really and highly entertaining too, but he and he. And it really is the thief of joy. You know, when you compare yourself to other people, there's nothing good can come of that. I mean, we do that, the only way to do that is to surround yourself with people that you know in person and whom you admire. Then it's a really good thing to do

because then you want to become more virtuous, you want to become more admirable, you want to actually take on people's good qualities. So one of the things that I've done, actually, pursu pursuing to this research is I surround myself with people I admire, like you. It's like I'm gonna surround myself with people who have virtue.

Not, you know, somebody who's got just like better abs. That's not virtue per se. It's like good, it's fine. You know, it's just like having better abs, like having more money. Although as you will point out, there's more people with a million dollars than have visible abs in America today.

Which is a pretty interesting statistic I have to say. Because it wasn't that long ago when it was the reverse because we had no money and no food. Everybody had abs. That's right. The guy I was just like talking, that's called the Melner-ish. And so, but that's the key thing is you surround yourself

with people with whom you want to have your own comparisons because you want to elevate yourself morally in terms of virtue. But everything else is bad. Everything else is bad for your happiness, it's bad for your health, it's bad for your social life, it creates fear, and at least into the cycle of problems that we're talking about. You spoke about overprotecting our kids, and That resonates with me because I have that tendency. I have that tendency to want to just cover them up and make sure nothing ever happens. And I want to ask you a personal question. I know one of your sons is a Marine. Right.

And he's out there, I mean, in the front, danger. How did you handle that personally with that? Because I'm sure a party you wanted to be like, no, don't put yourself in danger. Like, how did that work out? Part of it is just knowing yourself. And so confronting this quite consciously. The problem with fear is when you don't know

you're being motivated by fear. Then you'll act according to it. When you make something conscious, you can manage it. So here's the deal. When something is limbic, that part of your brain that acts automatically with your basic emotions, we talked about that a minute ago, it will manage you. If you actually become conscious of it, you can manage it because you're literally processing

it in a different part of your brain. That's called metacognition. When you're afraid, you have to sit down and say to yourself, Sal is feeling fear. Why is Sal feeling fear right now? Oh, that. That's interesting. Sal always feels fear into those circumstances and you become the boss. fear. Why is South feeling fear right now? Oh, that. That's interesting. South always feels fear and of the circumstances and you become, you become the boss. You become

the boss of your fear. So this is the same thing with almost anything. If you're basically have this visceral kind of primeval caveman fear because something might hurt your, might conceivably hurt your child, then you'll do often the wrong thing. The truth is you shouldn't overprotect your kids. It's bad for them. My parents didn't over protect me on the contrary. You know, I had this paper out when I was 11 years old in this working class neighborhood in Seattle where I grew up,

in this lower middle class neighborhood in Seattle. It was the same neighborhood that Ted Bundy had been marauding. Right? A few years earlier for sure, but there was this like craze in the 1970s about... Serial killers, right?

Serial killers, right? Serial killers, right? And my mom was like, it was 430 in the morning at this paper out. And my mom says, you know, do you think we should let Arthur be walking around at 430 in the morning in the neighborhood with, you know, vicious dogs and serial killers about delivering papers? And my dad, you know, he wanted to protect my interest, because

I always had like $20 bills hanging out of my pockets. And so it was pretty entrepreneurial, kid. And my dad, so he had a, he had a PhD in biostatistics. And so he tried the scientific approach on my mom. He says, well, you know, I've been studying the data. And I don't think Arthur fits the core demographic profile of a series of them. They don't want to kill him.

He's fine. He's fine. They won't be going after him. She's like, and she says, what? She doesn't understand the thing he's saying. And finally, he says, he resorts to pure emotion. He says, well, even the perverts have to sleep some time. That's all I'm saying.

It was very different even when we were kids. I mean, I would go, I tell my mom, I'm going to go hang out with my friends or go, and what time do you going to be back? And then that was it. I was gone. I was disappeared. And you tell it. And yet we are different with our kids.

Totally. You know, I wouldn't have let my daughter, my baby, my perfect princess, you know, at 11, go walking around, go to the mall by yourself, even though crime is lower, the world is safer, but we have to be very careful about those impulses because our limbic system is playing us like a violin and we're managing it's managing us and we're managing our parent who had wrong under the circumstances and it's bad for our kids.

What are the consequences of that as parents? They get more fear. They get more, our kids become fearful because the parents say, you're right, you're motivating them to behave in a way that's not consistent with the love that you want to motivate them as people so that they can be happy and they can lift other people up. And the reason is because they take their cues from you. It's like a world's scary place because my dad scared. I mean, my dad scared. Did you tell me one time that you're like, when you were a kid, you thought that your dad could lift the house? Yes, yes. You told me that one time, right?

And that your dad is the, this is one of the really interesting things. The reason that the biggest that your dad is the, this is one of the really interesting things, the reason that the biggest predictor of going to church is seeing your dad on his knees. Because the strongest person in your life is on his knees for no man, but for a god. That's the reason people are like, yeah, it's not church because even my dad was on his knees for that, right? But if you're, but then now think of the dark side of this true. If the only time you see your dad afraid is because you might walk to the mall Then the walking to the mall is a scary dangerous thing. Wow, that makes a lot of sense. You're speaking to my dad, your book resonated with me because my dad retired a bit early

because he's arthritis up and down to spine. He's been working hard labor since he was nine years old. He went through a two two year depression period. Like I remember he stopped working and that's all he did for most of his life. And after that, he was like, and I remember my mom telling me, she's like, you gotta get your dad at the house

because he's mopped the floor five times and he's already rebuilt the backyard and he's the whole backyard. He's crazy. Yeah, because he did like a million, he didn't know what to do. And for like a couple of years, it was really tough for him.

So I'd like to go into your book a little bit, strength to strengthen. I'd like to start with the impetus. What motivated you to write this book? Because this is great story of what got you to go down this path. Yeah, so when I was about 50 years old, I realized that I needed to make some changes. I mean, my life was good. I'm a very lucky guy.

I was the CEO of Think Tank in Washington, DC. So for people who listen to Mind Pump, who have a life and don't know what a Think Tank is, which is a normal thing to not know. I think Tank is a research, like a university without students. And so it's a big research nonprofit in Washington, D.C., dedicated to helping politicians and policymakers make better decisions. And in our case, it was about how they could use the free enterprise system to lift people out of poverty,

how to get a better national security system would protect America and America's interests, et cetera. And I had like 300 some employees and I was raising $50 million a year. I was giving 100, 75 speeches. I was traveling around all the time. I was the king of the mombo, but I knew I couldn't keep it up, and I wasn't happy.

I wasn't happy. I mean, I had looked back, I'd found this bucket list, this is the stupidest I did, the bucket list, so dumb. And when I was, because all it does is it lowers your satisfaction, because every year you look at the things

you haven't done, you feel like a loser. And it's like, that can motivate me. I don't know. Anyway, so I'm 50. I'm looking at my bucket list when I was 40. I've done everything on the bucket list, and I wasn't happy. Oh, no.

I'm like, huh. Something I'm like, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And one time I'm sitting on an airplane from here, from California to DC. And it was like 11 o'clock at night. And I hear this couple talking behind me on the airplane. And I can tell they're old by the sound of their voices,

tell it's a man and a woman, I'm assuming they're married. And the guy is confessing the man, is confessing to the woman that he might as well be dead. And she's trying to console him. Oh, it's not true that nobody remembers you. And he's like, oh, I'm a has been, I'm washed up, no leave him take my calls anymore. And I'm thinking it's like a,

it's like that Nicholson movie about Schmidt, you know, where he's, he gets retired and gets a watch and they're throwing all his files away. And it's in this old joke, you know, that you go from who's who to who's he in like a month. And I'm thinking it's probably somebody who's kind of disappointed. And you kind of, he wanted to do a lot but never lived up to his own standards or capabilities or promise or whatever. And at the end of the flight, the flight, the lights go on and everybody stands up and I turn around as one of the most famous men in the world.

This is one of the most famous successful men in the world who for decades ago had these big achievements, like not controversially as a hero. And as we were leaving the plane, the pilot said, you know, recognize them, because everybody would, said, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And at that point, he's beaming with pride. But I heard him, I heard was the dialogue

on inside his head. Nobody hears this, because inside I'm thought, what am I gonna do? I mean, I'm like, I'm not gonna be that guy. I'm not a hero, I'm not famous. But what am I gonna be? I mean, I'm not gonna be that guy. I'm not a hero. I'm not famous. I mean, but what am I gonna be saying to my long suffering wife, Esther, at 85? Might be like, I might as well be dead.

Nobody remembers me. Nothing's good anymore. Or can I make some changes? What can I do for my happiness 401k plan? What can I do for the investments that I can make? Because I'm on the wrong track. I was lonely. I was working really super hard. I was not becoming more effective in my life. I was not cultivating the relationships that I need. I was not a very good husband.

Because I was on the road all the time. I'm thinking, you know, what, I mean, what's the deal? Who are the happy? What are the secrets of the happy people? And it turns out half the people get happier after 70 all the way to the end and half people get unhappy after 70 all the secrets of the happy people? And it turns out half the people get happier after 70, all the way to the end and half people get unhappy or after 70 all the way to the end. And if you will get unhappy or after 70, are the strivers. So the successful, the one that's excessively in life. Wow.

They're the ones who tend to be unhappier because they're disappointed with the contrast. See, look, if you don't do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. It's the same. If you do a lot, but it goes up, must come down. And so what do you do so that you can be you guys, 40 years old, killing it, and at 70 still be happy?

What can you do? And that's what this book is. It's your happiness 401k plans. My happiness, my happiness 401k plan, it's me search, not research. So what are some other things that you found in common with those two groups that obviously, at that that point before in the road, they go opposite directions. Obviously it was not directly connected to how much money or success

they had. There was other things. One of the common things between those two is not money and success at all. It turns out. So and we all want money and success. But the question is what do you do with the money and success? And if the money and success are an opportunity for you to invest in the things that really matter, your faith, your family life, your friendship, work that truly serves other people, then those things like money and power and pleasure and fame, then they're fine. But only as instrumental things to get to the stuff that really, really matters. And that's what happy people have in common. The second big point about the happiest people as a good older is that they recognize that their strengths

change. And that's what a guy in the plane didn't figure out. He had this incredible life early on. He was, he was the king. And, and he, he wanted to keep that forever. This is the thing you want to, you want to stay with us. They, they, they, this is Hindu theory of life, the balance of life. And when you're in your zone for work and success, it's called Grihastha. It's a work in Sanskrit for the house, you know, that you're the manager, the dad. You've got all this worldly success. But around age 50, according to this Hindu philosophy, you've got to move to a period called Vana Prastha, which means technically to retire into the forest, not literally.

But what it means is basically to start stepping back from these things, to start taking stock, to start investing in your relationships, to start teaching other people. This is entirely consistent with all of the best neuroscience research that shows that you get this curve of intelligence early on, and this is called fluid intelligence, which you get better and better and better at focusing and being an innovator, of being an entrepreneur, but working in defatically for these goals.

And you're really good at that through your 20s and 30s, and the more you do, the better you get. But it peaks, and you start to decline in that, in that energy, and that focus in your 40s. And it's just following like a rock in your 50s. But you get another curve behind it called your crystallized intelligence curve. That's increasing through your 40s and 50s and 60s

and stays high in your 70s and 80s. That's your wisdom curve. That's your ability to teach. That's your ability to share knowledge to build up other people, to create teams. And if you actually move from your, you know, high horsepower curve to your wisdom curve, then the world is yours. But if you're trying to stay on that superstar curve,

the first one through, it'll be like, you know, chaining yourself to a roller coaster that's going down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down. It doesn't come back up again. Well, that's what's going on. Explain wisdom then. So obviously knowledge is a part of it, knowing information. Right. But what makes someone, what's the difference between someone who knows stuff and someone who's wise? Wisdom is knowing how to use what you know. So knowledge is being able to answer questions. Wisdom is knowing which questions are worth asking and answering.

Is judgment is what it comes down to. It also has a whole lot of generosity in it. Wisdom to be wise to have this crystallized intelligence is to say, here's the knowledge that's important. Here's how to use it, and here's how we can serve other people with it. Is the key thing. You become other focused in a way that's deeply satisfying.

That's second intelligence curve, that crystallized intelligence curve. You can write it all the way into your life and get happier and happier and happier. And that's what the happiest people have. When do you know you achieve this crystallized intelligence? Is this all part of that whole 10,000 kind of a journey where you're getting an accumulation of hours

and you've be able to now see and predict patterns as they come? Yeah, what you find is that it gets a little bit harder to focus single-mindedly on a particular task in your 40s, but it gets easier for you to do the pattern recognition. And it gets easier for you. Yeah, it gets easier and easier. What you guys are going to find is this decade progresses because you're in your...

I'm 15 years older than you guys. And as this decade progresses, what you're going to see naturally because of the structure of your brain is that it's going to get easier and easier for you to explain highly complex concepts in this show. In this or whatever the show becomes because it's a more thing thing. This is a communication vehicle. It's not a podcast. It's not a YouTube show. It's a way that you're going to find that you're more and more and more professors, that

you guys are teachers, more and more. The whole thing is going to go from how you saw at the very beginning to build a company to actually sharing knowledge. You'll get better and better at it is the bottom line. Now there's a problem that we have in our culture which valorizes youth. Yes. Especially, we're sitting here in Silicon Valley. The problem is that this is the industry, tech industry for example, is revolutionized

our country. Revolutionized our country. Revolutionized our world. And yet it's not very trusted or respected. And the reason is because it's all flu intelligence, no crystallizing. Yes. You know, we don't have, you need more 70 year olds in tech companies,

is the bottom line again, it's made every mistake in the book. And I'm gonna say, you guys, we're making a product that hurts people. You guys, these are anti-competitive practices. Yet knuckleheads, don't do bro culture. It's exploitative and it's undignified, and it's gonna get us into a whole lot of trouble.

I mean, older people know these things, so they have this wisdom that they have, but when it's all kids, you got a problem. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, talking about fluid and going to crystalline. Justin was a very competitive football player in high school college, talks about it. I hear him talk about it.

Very happy when he talks about it, brings him a lot of joy. Just started coaching high school football team. Obviously, very busy guy. And all of us have recognized the spark and the happiness that it's coming. And it's exactly what you're talking about. He's teaching what he used to do, and it's really cool to see.

For a player to coach. A player to coach. It's a total evolution, right? Yeah. You sort of see that next chapter of how you can apply that knowledge and then see it, see it foster right in front of you. And 10 years ago, you wouldn't have been as good. Right.

And the reason is not because you didn't have the experience, you know, just as much about football 10 years ago as you know today. But for some reason, it's easier to explain now. And the reason is because you've got crystallized intelligence because of the changing structure you're right. Wow. And now you said something that's very interesting about us valuing youth so much and maybe not so much wisdom and you know as people get older. But other cultures seem to, a lot of older cultures seem to value wisdom and the elderly, for example. And you're very well traveled. What lessons can we learn from some of these other cultures

in terms of how we value wisdom? We see this, particularly in India and China, for example, there's a lot more respect that's given to older people and a lot more deference, and it's not just because it's the right thing to do. It's because it's smart. And so the way that we could adopt this is that you should have a 70 year old

never-seen sweet. You should, even if they don't quite understand, I don't have the hustle culture and the the acumen for the tech, you need more old people. You need more old people around as the bottom line. And you know, the, because the thing is 70 is the new 50. It's amazing. You know, that it, I feel like I'm 27. And part of the reason is because you train me. The success of mine pump is because of Doug for that exact reason right there. These are our old guy that would keep around just for that. But he still, he still, he still, he still younger than me.

Yeah, maybe a year. And it's really important. I mean, it's really important that we actually, the learn, that that's the sort of the technical lesson of these Eastern culture. But there's a moral lesson to it too. Look, life is not that interesting when you don't have any diversity.

You know, when everybody's the same, when we're all like clones, it's so boring, right? And we know that enough to know that it's important for men and women to work together for people with different races and different backgrounds, different cultures, that's all interesting. It just makes life better, right? Because different perspectives creates more quality.

But the single most undervalued part of diversity is age diversity. You know, it's crazy. And we set up our culture so you're all five year olds in kindergarten, you know, the cohort then chunk, chunk, going fall. We thought this is so weird because we know this. And we still, we still, our school structure is still. Yeah. And now we, and instead of, instead of having our elderly parents with us, we put them in a home Which is a huge mistake because you can get I mean I understand as a hassle Having your grumpy dad living, you know and in downstairs or whatever

But there's so much to that there's so much intergenerational Wisdom and interest that we can actually get from that if we were to value it differently and understand that that could enrich us in big ways. You know what? You just literally explain what I miss most about personal training. I stopped training about a year into Mind Pump. Obviously, this was taken off and we had to put our time and energy into it. And I missed a lot about training people, but what I missed the most, and I'm really realizing this now, when you train people, I train people who are 40s, 60s,

I had clients in their 70s, I had clients that were in tech, others that were entrepreneur, I just a wide variety of people, wide variety of ages, and you meet these people twice a week for years, so you develop a relationship with them, and it was so profound, they've got growth and stuff I learned, and now I'm starting to realize what it was.

It was just I was surrounded by lots of very different people and different ages. Right. And you were getting a big mix of different kinds of intelligence. Yes. That was, and it went early on when I started training, when I started lifting in most of my late 30s. And I, you know, I wasn't going to personal trainers.

I was just trying to get in shape. And what I figured out was I put together a little strategy, where I thought to myself, well, let's see, what do I want to do with this? I'm not gonna be in a bodybuilding contest. I don't know the genes or the possibility of doing anything like that. I don't know the goods.

What do I want to do? I want to be healthy. I want to feel good. And I want to be able to do, I want to be doing this one. I'm 80. So I started going to these old rusty iron gems where the old guys are.

Right, the guys who are lifting at their 75 years old and they're lifting, right? They're doing like dead lifts at 75. I mean, they're not afraid of that because they have good form, they know what they're doing. And I would go up to the old guys and the old guys will always give you advice. Yeah.

The old guys can say, how old are you? Like 76, I said, dang, I mean, you're dead lifting twice your weight. And, you know, and can you, can you give me a couple of pointers? And of course, they'll give you a couple of pointers. So almost everything I learned in my late 30s, I learned from people in their 60s and 70s, which was pure crystallized intelligence. Because when I was in my late, when I'm in my late 70s, I want to, I want to be going to the gym every day. Still Speaking of wisdom, how important is it for your high achievers out there to consider having an applying a spiritual practice?

It's hugely important to walk a transcendental path. So about half of your happiness is genetic. Your baseline happiness levels and your baseline mood, I mean, your baseline happiness levels and your baseline mood levels actually comes from your genetics. If you have gloomy parents, you'll have a gloomy baseline as the bottom line. Or vice versa.

So your mother literally did make you unhappy. You're not alive. And we're happy, you know. We say in my business, your results may vary, you know. And about a quarter of your happiness is circumstantial. You know, things go to things going on, bad things going on in your life that are bringing you up and down,

but those things never last. Everybody thinks that circumstances are everything. The thing that really matters the last quarter which is your habits and the four big happiness habits. There's a lot of little things. Like what makes me happier? Resistance training or cardio. Those are little things and they're not completely trivial,

but the biggies are faith, family, friendship, and work. Faith, family, friends, and work. And work has to only two characteristics. It has to be where you earn your success, which is why the free enterprise system is so incredibly valuable as an engine for letting us live up to our potential and serving other people, people who really, really need you. But the first one, faith doesn't necessarily mean my Catholic faith, although I recommend it to everybody. I love it. But what you find in the data is walking a transcendental path, whether it's traditionally religious or spiritual

or just philosophical, you need something that gives you a better metaphysical perspective on your life. And the reason for this is if you don't, it's just tedious and boring. You know, it's like, left your own devices, you will compulsively think, my job, my money, my car, my vacation, my money, me, me, my house, my friends, me, me, me, me. And it's just tedious. It's like watching the same episode of the same sitcom every single day over and over and over again. And whether you're reading the stoics or whether you're going to Roman Catholic mass or whether you're doing an Eastern meditation practice, something has got to daily give you relief from you as the bottom line.

And so one of the things that I recommend to everybody is to start walking a spiritual path as soon as they possibly can. Is that more challenging? I mean, you've been teaching for a long time. Do you see that become more challenging or younger people who are more open to it? It's harder for younger people. For sure, yeah, it's actually,

that's one of the things in the book that I write about is that people tend to after 40, that's when their interest in this starts to rise. And part of the reason is because, frankly, their fluid intelligence is in decline, so their focus on the here and now, the focus on the tedious is in decline. What fluid intelligence will make you do

is it'll allow you to focus intensely on something boring, like being a lawyer, right? And it's like, and again, I got, I got no, not to cast this version on lawyers, I'm glad that they're really, really good lawyers, but I mean, it's like when you're 60, you're just not gonna focus on on the on the minutia of a legal brief in the same way that you will and can when you're 30, your brain is built for that. And so what happens after 40, people are like,

man, I need some relief. I need something. I need to zoom out. I need perspective on this. This is one of the reasons they start getting much, much more interested in this. However, I find that my students every year are more interested in the metaphysical. Really? Yeah. Do you think is that, do you think there's a correlation between that and like their own, the youth being more anxious? Oh, yes, it has, it goes, it once again, it ties right back to what we were talking about 15 minutes ago, which is fear is there. And the fear, which is antagonistic to love. Remember that there are 30 percentage points less likely to be in love. They're less likely to be married, less likely

to cohabitate. They're having less sex. People in their 20s are having fundamentally less sex where than you when you were in your 20s. Yeah, yeah. And so, and again, you know, all of your morals around these things, not with standing, people just don't love each other as much. They have more fear, they have less love, and they're looking for some relief in their life. And so that's one of the reasons that they're asking spiritual questions. You know, talking about fear again, I want to circle back because we kind of just briefly went through the whole COVID thing.

And I just think that's still so top of mind for some of the people. And I also think that we haven't seen all of the consequences of what we all just write through. What are some of the things one that you learned, just kind of watching everything? And what are some things that maybe you predict is going to happen, and maybe that gives us some insight on how we can maybe combat it. Yeah, for sure. Well, it's interesting.

Early on in the coronavirus epidemic, when people were locked down, they were intensely uncomfortable. People would even say, I can't people were locked down, they were intensely uncomfortable. People would even say, I can't sleep, you know, I'm irritable, I'm restless all the time. A lot of that has to do with this hormone that we talked about a minute ago called oxytocin, which is produced by the human brain. It's the hormone of human bonding.

This is what you get when you, when you, I mean, we all have kids. And when you lay eyes, when eye contact with you, I mean, we all have kids. And when you lay eyes, when I contact with your baby for the first time, it's like fourth of July in your head. And you know, neurobiologists, evolutionary biologists say that's so you don't leave the baby on the bus or something. But the truth is, I think it's a gift from God.

I think that it is like, this is your baby. And this is, you know, for me as a Christian, this is like, this is the first time I truly understood my relationship with God was when I laid eyes on my first son. I said, oh, that's how God loves me. Unconditionally, for no reason, no merit of my own, and really put my life into perspective. Now, neurobiologically, that's oxytocin.

And when you don't have it, you're not going to be able to sleep right, you're not going to be able to sleep right. You're going to feel really uncomfortable. You're going to crave highly glycemic carbohydrate. All the stuff that everybody was doing. So 85% of people, when they had all the time in the world to exercise, got out of shape. So the fastest rise in obesity. It's unbelievable.

Everybody got fat. Everybody was sitting around. And people were eating hog and doth, while watching Netflix and cocooning on the couch by themselves feeling lonely and gross. Tiger King. Everybody was watching Tiger King. That's a trend. That's a trend. That's a train wreck. That's a neurological problem that people watch Tiger King. So that people like that as a matter of fact. So what we find is that people were getting into these really, really bad patterns of loneliness, of fear, of isolation,

and a lot of it had a neuroscientific basis to it, to be sure of it. But people were feeling this and happiness was just tanking all over the place. Now, the interesting part about that is that people didn't always take care of themselves. What happens is when you're lonely and you're fearful, that impairs your executive function. Your executive function is not your animal part of your brain.

It's the human part of your brain. It's the front lobes of your brain that make you make good decisions, notwithstanding your instincts. That's when you manage yourself as opposed to being managed by your feelings. That's impaired when you're lonely. That's impaired when you're fearful. So what happens with the big problem with the coronavirus epidemic is that people were involuntarily demobilized and they became fearful about getting sick or losing their jobs or having the economy melt down. And they were intensely lonely because of these crazy lockdowns and social

distancing, which was just unbelievably deleterious for mental health. And the result of that was they became incapable of doing what they need to do. So you'll still see people who are really not in danger of getting sick, who are still walking around with masks, because they're authentically fearful. The worst thing that we can possibly do who are not afraid is to make fun of them, because they're actually afraid, and their executive function is being impaired by the fear and the loneliness that they felt all the way through this virus.

And that's what we actually see. So people are making a big set of bad decisions about their own lives at this point, ordinarily under normal circumstances, before the virus, about 90 and a half percent of the population exhibit symptoms of clinical depression at any time, anytime the American population which is higher than most countries Right now is 28% wow. Yeah, that's still even though we're technically past anything like full lockdown I mean where I'm my life is completely normal except that and I fly every single week except that I have a Mask on the plane. That's the only meaningful difference in my life even here in California Yeah, which was lockdown central mask on the plane. That's the only meaningful difference in my life, even here in California,

which was locked down central. But you find that people are reacting very, very poorly to this. There's a huge rise in mental illness. So what we need to do, we need to help each other. We need to love each other more. We need to show each other as much understanding and patience as we possibly can. And the worst thing that we can do is to attack each other. Those of us that are very skeptical of a lot of, you know, the continuing, the most intrusive parts of these lockdown procedures that attacking people who disagree with us.

We should not make this political and we should love each other more. Wow. Yeah, I feel like you're just arguing with me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you too. I'm talking to me. I'm talking to me because it's very easy for me to like,

come on. Yeah. Come on, get with it. Don't keep telling me to lock down. It's not right. But the whole thing is these people are afraid and they need my love. It's like a meanwhile, I feel like we're the most politically divided I've ever, at least in my lifetime.

But my short 40 years, I have never felt like we were so divided as a country as we are. That's factually true. I've never seen extremism so popular. Sure. And just how polarized we are. Like it just, that sounds like amazing. But I just, I wonder how we can actually start implementing that on a grander scale and get leaders out there to actually like promote that instead of, you know, just feeding

to their base. I would question is extreme, is it really that popular or is it that's what we're being fed through social media and think that that that's what we think it is. Yeah, absolutely. I don't. Yeah, these are, yeah, these are, it's something like 93% of Americans hate how divided we become. That means 7% don't hate it. And when you hate somebody's profiting, there's the key thing. There's politicians, there's media, it's the click machines, the people who are getting their jollies or their followers that actually come from this stuff. I mean, hate is extremely profitable.

And by the way, it has huge, neurobiological implications to it. It's like you don't get it. You don't stimulate dopamine in somebody's brain by going, you know, we should all just love each other. You know, it's no. It's somebody you should be afraid. Somebody's got your stuff, I'm gonna get it back.

You know, these wily foreigners are gonna come steal your stuff, whatever it happens to be, or whoever the targeted population happens to be, that stimulates the brain chemistry of people, and it can lead to tons and tons of profits. So we need like a 70s all over again. So you're saying, it's funny, you know, it's funny because the 70s,

when the serial killers were running rampant. Well, and also the 70s were tricky. I mean, the 70s followed on a period of unbelievable political polarization. And Ken Burns told me in 1968, 1969, there was something like 700 domestic political bombings. Yeah. You know, we don't really like that today, right?

And so it for sure in our adult lifetime, this is the worst that's been, but arguably it was more violent back then. And that was followed on by a period in the 70s that was different in the 80s was a lot more positive. I mean, like her hate Reagan, my family thought he was terrible. I was the odd man out because I thought he was kind of awesome.

Because he loved me. I felt that he loved me. It kind of shifted the polarity in America from fear to love. That's ultimately what we have to do. And each one of us, look, you guys are leaders. You have millions of followers. But you're also leaders in your family and your leaders among your neighbors. And all of us have to be leaders with love all the time

and never falling prey to the culture of fear. Yeah, it sounds like fear and even loneliness, the combination is a, it becomes a positive feedback. Yeah. It's so it's like, you know, I'm lonely, I'm scared. That makes me less likely to wanna be around people so I get even lonelier and more scared. Right, okay.

That's exactly right. And it's, all it is is a self fulfilling prophecy of fear leads to fear and then you get more evidence of why that's the case. And then you got to break out and you got to clip the cycle someplace and each one of us can clip the cycle in our own way. Everybody listening to us is a leader. They have that if anybody is listening to mind pump, it's because you want to be better. You want to be a better person.

You want to be better. You want to be a better person. You want to be more excellent. And anybody who wants to be more excellent is a leader in some part of their life. So show that leadership by showing more love. Is the bottom line. And you will be part of the solution to the problem. Excellent. Arthur, you, by chance, read, read Dalio's latest book.

Yeah. I really would love to hear your take on like, what your thoughts are, where are we at? And the cycle right now and stuff. I know you like economics too. So I'm just curious to hear your take on like what your thoughts are and where we at in the cycle right now and stuff. I know that I know you like economics too. So I'm just curious to what you think. It's hard. It's you know the the predictions on that are notoriously impossible right and that's the reason for that is that we're we're it's a random walk

You know or as we say in the economics business. I'm actually an economist. It's a stochastic process You know, and if you were able to predict it, it would be neutralized before it actually even happened. As you get some people with, Ray Dalai has got a ton of alpha. And that just means, beta is the normal two and four of these markets and up and down and the random stuff.

Alpha is your sensibility, your ability to predict a little bit better than anybody else. And then you can actually calculate an alpha rating for hedge fund managers like Radalia. Really? Yeah, yeah. And so there are alpha ratings for these different hedge fund managers. His is guy high because he's got this acute, tiny little bit.

And all the takes is just a millimeter more alpha for you to be a billionaire in these particular markets, right? Because you don't have to be right, a tiny bit more than the other guys are right. That's right. And that's pure profit that accrues to you as the financial entrepreneur to be sure. So what Ray Dalio says, you'd be foolish to actually think that that's not the case.

I think more about sort of the political economy of what's going on in our society today. And I think there's good times coming. I actually am, I'm not optimistic. I'm just hopeful. I think it's a lot that we can actually do. And what typically happens in American life with periods of polarization,

and the polarization is manifest in our economics. You know, people, when we're against each other, we're against each other, you know, we're not working together. It's gonna, you're gonna see it. And I actually think that people are sick of it, and they're gonna, there's gonna be a time where politicians were notorious followers politicians who are notorious followers,

leaders are actually followers. Like what do people want? Oh yeah, that people want fear, okay, I'll do fear. When they actually figure out, when some politicians actually figure out that people want more love, that people want more positivity, we're gonna actually start seeing it.

So, from national leaders. I've heard you say that people often realize they're lonelyer than they thought they were. And there's been of an epidemic of loneliness. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit. So that's the key thing about when your executive function is impaired.

So you think, for example, I feel crummy today. I think what I'll do is I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do self-care. Or as like we say in the university, they call it radical self-care. I was like, what the? Radical self-care. Radical self-care. It's like, it sounds like indecent.

I don't know. And it sounds like, I shouldn't do that. You'll, you know, you'll go to hell. Anyway, self-care is, or they'll think about it as just kind of baby-ing myself. And what do you do when you baby yourself? You stay home. You, you know, you get a cuddly blanket, you lie down in the couch, you eat the stuff that you want, you maybe have a bottle of wine,

you watch, you binge something on Netflix. Exactly the wrong thing to do when. Exactly. And so what I teach my students is called the opposite signal strategy, OSS. The opposite signal strategy is when you are feeling lonely, do the opposite of what you wanna do. Wow. Is the key.

And that means get out, get fresh air, do some exercise, call a friend, see people. These are the things that you should be doing when you actually feel like cocooning. Oh, that's always the case. And now, so this makes perfect sense. Why love is the opposite of fear, because you have to be vulnerable to do that.

If I feel shitty, the last thing I want to do is call a friend and tell them, hey, what's up, man? I'm feeling like shit right now. Really? I thought everything was going great. So you have to be very vulnerable in order to do that. For sure. You basically, when you're feeling fearful, you bring fear to others.

That's the wrong thing to do. When you're feeling fearful, you need more love. For you to get more love, you need to give more love. That's an opposite signal strategy. When you're feeling crummy and afraid and lonely and sad and you don't quite know why, sweetheart, I just want you to know I just love you so much. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's great.

You shared a thought experiment that I don't want to mess up so please take it from me as soon as I trigger it for you. You know what I'm talking about where I think you said, you know, five, imagine five years from now, and you're the happiest you could possibly be, you know, what are like your five things that you value, and where they are, and then you ask, I guess, like, you know, how does that align with you now, or what are you doing right now about? Explain that. Yeah, so there's a bunch of experiments. This is on, it sounds technical, but it's actually really simple.

On what they call extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards. The extrinsic rewards are money power pleasure and fame. Those are the things that you get from the outside world. And that's what your brain, your animal brain says that's what you want, will make you permanently happy. You get like a boat, and they'll finally be happy.

Like they won't. You won't, finally be happy. Like they won't. They won't, I got the data, they won't. And the same thing with, and especially fame. It's a terrible person to go shopping with. I know, I know, I know. Dude, I want this, I know. Dude, you don't want that. That's just gonna be that.

It's gonna be a hassle. But and fame is the only one of those things that you can only ever be happy in spite of, which is really interesting. So yeah, your brain says, and you get all these, this rush of brain chemistry saying, if you actually get more followers, you get more clicks,

it's gonna give you actual happiness and it won't, what it's gonna just complicate your life. Yes. And so, a fame is a ton of research on this. The only thing you will be happy and spite of it if you have good perspective and you can use it for virtue and good, like you guys are doing, but as you'll never be happy,

like I'm actually happy because we've got a quarter million YouTube subscribers right now. And because of the fame per se, I mean you actually have more reach which is really important. Okay, so what you find is that, and those are extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are relationship focused.

Intrinsic rewards come from, yeah, faith, family, friends and work where you serve, love, love, love and more love is the bottom line. And when you take the population, so you take college people graduate from college, and you say five years from now, what do you want that would actually make you happy? Half of them will say extrinsic stuff and half of them will say intrinsic stuff. And then if you go and look at them, you'll find the ones who are intrinsically motivated, I want to be married, for example, I want to have a good relationship with my friends, I want to have a good relationship with my family, et cetera. These are the ones who are way happier.

I mean way happier, and they have fewer physical maladies and they're less stressed out, they have fewer cases of anxiety, less clinical depression, on and on and on, on stomach aches, less anger, everything. Okay, so now I go to my students and I say, imagine yourself in five years, because based on this research, you're happy. You know what that feels like? Happiness is not the feeling, but you know what it feels like.

You know what the turkey smells like, right? Okay. Anybody's like, what's that reference? Go back to the beginning of the episode. Yeah. Yeah. So call back. Yeah.

Okay. So imagine back. Right. So imagine yourself five years you're happy. Why are you happy? They'll have done the research my students will, but we all kind of know in our heart of hearts. Put them in order, the five reasons that you're happy in order, in order of importance. Okay, now you've got them,

and you're looking at them now, say come back to the present, which one of those things are you most actively managing? It's always four and five. It's always four and five. It's always four and five. I love that because it even shook me up a little bit because I felt like I had a good grasp. Oh, these are my five, but then when I ordered them

and I went, oh wow, you know, am I really spending the most time though working towards one and two? If I say that's one and two, I'm probably spending more time on four and five. Yeah, it's gonna be your family, it's gonna be your friendship, it's gonna be your faith. For example gonna be your friendship, it's gonna be your faith. For example, which is a classic,

and goals around these things, and then four and five is like my career and my money. And those are the easiest things for you to manage because the world says manage those things and tells you how to do it. And if you go to the Harvard Business School, that's what they're teaching you to manage is your money and your career.

They're not saying, except for my class, which is leadership and happiness, which is how to manage your love life, how to manage your relationships, in the same way that you would think about it, in the same organized way that you would think about it in the case of your career and your money. So start getting your priorities in order,

is the basic, is it, what is your, it doesn't mean you don't manage your career and your money. It's great that you're working hard, fantastic, but pay as much attention to the management of your marriage and the management of your friendships and the management of your spiritual walk as you are to mind pump in the bank account. And that's what it comes down to.

That's, look, that's super hard for me. Yeah, and it brings me back. And I think how we take that for granted because we think, oh, for work and money, I have to work every day, I have to work towards it and focus on it. Oh, love, family, stuff just happens. Totally.

But you gotta put effort and work into it in the same way, right? Yeah, and there's this thing that we often do, especially men, and they'll be like, yeah, the reason I'm working so hard, honey, I'm sorry, I know you're lonely. The reason I'm working so hard is because I'm doing it for you because I love you so much

It's absolutely classic yeah, I interviewed a guy for the book and he's like yeah my wife You know she's a get it. She doesn't get it. I mean she she's always complaining about the fact that I'm never home But she wants the nice things that the money will buy. It's like, she wants those things because she's lonely. She's lonely, she wants you. It's the bottom line. But what you want, you don't understand yourself. You only understand a facsimile of yourself. You're up self-objectifying, you're homo-economicous. You're the good one, you're the hard worker,

you're the successful one, you're a success addict. So many people are success addicts. And this is the, they get into this cycle of managing four and five and they get completely incompetent in one, two and three. How do we balance that? Because obviously there's some value in being focused in that direction, but not so focused that we... And you've said you were a success, or you identified that, actually.

It's my natural tendency. My natural tendency. And part of the reason is I just tracked myself from, I mean, I'm addictive. You know, I'm a success addict because I'm an addictive personality. And I, you know, and anybody who's an addict to anything, by the way, is self-medicating. This is what you find.

You know, people who get addicted to cigarettes when they're 13, 14 years old, the other kids are like, oh, I got a carton of cigarettes. Let's smoke these cigarettes. I'm like gross. And the one kid's like, actually kind of awesome. And becomes a smoker early on. Aren't we all in a sense, though?

I mean, isn't everybody so much? Well, depends on what your deficit is. So the thing about the smoking case is illustrative. So the kid who has insufficient dopamine to the prefrontal cortex has a hard time focusing and only feels focused and really effective when something artificially stimulates that and nicanoids are the best way to do that. So they smoke a cigarette for the first time like, oh wow, I feel a lot better.

I don't know why. And I can't even articulate it. And like, I want another one. And another one, they get addicted by 14. Well, the same thing is true of success addicts. There's a deficit in your understanding of yourself. You know, you don't feel like a full person. You don't feel like the person that you wanna be,

you can't indulge inously produce your happiness in the right way. And so the result is you're looking for outside validation. You're looking for extrinsic validation of you. It's like the outside version of Sal and what you need to work on is the interior version of Sal. That's the way the combat or just number one is knowledge.

And when I say Sal, I mean Arthur, by the way. It's like who's Arthur? He's that guy that people talk about. He's that guy who's got that job. He's that guy that somebody wrote that thing about, whatever happens to be. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the happens to be. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you, but we're, look, we all have the same problems. Because we're all just walking this path in the same way. Oh boy, that's challenging.

That's how I feel like, that's what I meant by that. Like, isn't everybody so much better? I feel like everybody has something that it just manifests itself different in everybody's life. Yeah, for sure. We all have different needs, we all have different, and some people are naturally better at this than others. I mean, I know some guys who are just like, they get it, and they get it, right? But our culture valorizes the most incomplete people. You know, because you, and when you meet really famous people, they're often extremely screwed up. Yeah. I always say, what it took them to be

so spectacular in this thing means they're most likely out of balance. They got famous for a reason. Yeah. They did what it took to get famous. It's incredibly hard work. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of famous people for my research. And they'll say staying famous is unbelievably hard work and extremely boring and is stressful. You know, it's like, could be a famous actor is 99% boredom and

1% terror. You know, it's like it's a famous actor is 99% boredom and 1% terror. You know, it's like it's a great combination of stuff that you've got to do, right? But there's a problem that you're that you're the original. Now, can you be happy and well in spite of being successful? Absolutely. That's what this book is for because everybody who's reading the book or who's watching this podcast or watching this podcast, who's watching this, what are we? Show the dishes.

Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes.

Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. Show the dishes. ruin your happiness. Because it doesn't have to. How important is the partner that we choose to do life with in this equation?

It's critical. It's really critical. You know, especially the most unfortunate of the people who forego love for worldly success, that is insanity. That is just as step-in over $100 bills to get to Nichols. Yeah. That is just nutty. And people do it all the time.

It's like, I talk to students, you know, business school students, like I don't have time for love. You don't have time for it. I mean, you can't, you can't forego this. That's like saying I don't have time to breathe or do it right or ultimately. Or you don't want to be happy. Yeah. Or you, or they've get, part of it is they get the formula all wrong.

Yeah. They actually think that they will find lasting satisfaction in the rewards of the world, and that will substitute for what they really want. In other words, four and five will suddenly grow and import, because I'll even do the exercise. It's like, yeah, one, two, three, I don't know. But I'm still gonna focus on four and five.

Yeah. We'll get four and five again, I become one and two. It's just so counter-cultural, though. Like, we're just so inundated with what success is, it means how hard you work and it means achieving this monetary goal and status and fame and to everything you're saying is so different than that. So how do people get into that mindset?

I mean, obviously your book's an amazing piece to that puzzle but I just feel like there's just not enough of that type of language out there. Yeah. Now, most people have, I mean, a lot of people have a really good sense of this and do pretty well. So I'm talking to strivers and you have a disproportionate striver audience. Sure.

Again, people who want to be excellent will judge their own excellence based on the standards of the outside world. This is the key. How do I know I'm excellent? I don't know. I'm gonna look on Instagram. I wanna have the Sal's apps. That's excellent, right? And they'll look at these standards of excellence.

And nobody's like, you know how to be excellent? I wanna have as much love as Sal has in his marriage. Because that's not Instagram worthy, right? It's the trivial stuff by cosmic terms that we put up and so people interpret that as the most important thing in their life. Go for it, do the good things, be excellent, absolutely, have success, but don't leave

the most important things behind is the bottom line. Because what you're doing is you're not nourishing yourself in a way where anything can even give you satisfaction in the long term. Yeah, you talk a lot about friendships and how challenging it is as you get older to make friends, especially for men. And I've heard you talk about this and I'm like, oh yeah. So true.

Oh, so true. I go to work and I go home and I would, you know, it would be cool if I had some friends, but like I do nothing to seek it out. And if you did, you'd be cheating your family. If you're like going away, I mean, I know you guys got this, like, you guys goof off of a pentaho. And you guys have authentic friendship, clearly, about anything friendship.

But a lot of guys, if you were working in an investment bank, for example, likely is not, you would not have close friendship with the people that are in the offices around you, because it would be a slightly different culture. And you wouldn't cultivate, especially if you were management, you wouldn't cultivate the outside friendships because you'd be cheating your wife and kids.

Because it's like, honey, yeah, I'm gonna go away with the boys, like, no, you're not. They're not. It's like, I'm gonna golf for five hours on Saturday, even though I already worked 75 hours over the week. Cause I've starved for friendship. It's like, so, work class, I mean, it's something's gotta give,

and what always winds up giving is love. You know, you take the 14th hour of work because I've starved for friendship. Well, it's like, so work class, I mean, it's something's gotta give him what always winds up giving is love. You take the 14th hour of work over the first hour with your friends or the first hour even with your kids sometimes and that's the big mistake that people make. They make bad trade-offs. Part of it is interesting.

I was interviewing this lady for the book, who's just like icon of Wall Street. I mean, she's just huge, really, really well known. Hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. She's a company founder, she's my age, and she's bummed out. I mean, she's burned out, and she doesn't have good relationships. She feels like roommates with her husband, and she has kind of a cordial relationship

with her adult kids, and she's drinking too much, and she's out of shape, and she's starting to get bad blood work back from the doctor, and all the stuff that happens when you're in late 50s, you're not taking care of yourself. I said, she said, what should I do? It's like, you don't need a guy with a PhD to tell you this. You know, you just told me, you should probably get a day,

you should probably, you should, you start walking your spiritual path, you should start going away with your husband, you should take a souvenir in your company and step back from the top management of the company. You told me what to do, why don't you do that? She's like, thanks about it. She says, I guess I prefer to be special than happy. Oh, wow.

Interesting. You know, and how many times have I talked to, I mean, I've done a lot of research on an addiction, and I've talked to people, they all know, look, if you have somebody who's addicted to drugs and alcohol, they know that they're not happy because of their addiction, but they prefer to be high than happy. They're making that decision. And the same thing is true for success addicts is the bottom line. So you've got to know yourself and you have to take this problem on his face. You don't have to be not successful.

What is neurologically happening there where you, they have the obvious awareness. Yeah, but they're not choosing it. But they still choose not to. Where's the disconnect or what's going on in the brain? So what's going on in the brain is that this neuromodulator dopamine that everybody knows about now. 30 years ago, you just said dopamine, nobody would know what you're talking about.

But dopamine is actually not, people think about it as this neurochemical of pleasure. It's not. It's anticipation of reward. It basically is like, you're gonna get the cookie. You're gonna get the cookie. to get the cookie, you're going to get the cookie. You want the cookie, right? And what happens is your brain gets better and better and better at pumping out this dopamine, which will make you into a fiend

for something that gives you the reward. Now, what's the reward? The reward is your crack, whatever it happens to be. And everybody's got their reward. You know, some people, it's gambling and some people, it's sex and some people, it's gambling and some people it's sex and some people it's alcohol and some people it's success. That's the cookie. And part of it, usually these tracks are laid down neurologically when we're kids. And so if your parents are like, you're so smart,

you're such a hard worker, you're so good, you're smarter than the other kids, you're always gonna succeed. And the kids like, oh, that's where I get my rewards pat on the head, hit the lever, get the success, get the promotion, get the grades, get, and they turn into these success machines where they get their dopamine and our brains are incredibly good at becoming attuned to producing this dopamine on Q for our particular reward. Six S success addicts are really dopamine addicts. And that's how

they get through dopamine is the bottom line. And you can even get away with, get away from it. This is one of the reasons that, that if you're, if you're an alcohol abuser, you could, you should probably never drink alcohol again for the rest of your life because it's like carving your initials into a tree. The tree will keep growing, but then it's like, Sal loves so and so. You so. And you come back 30 years later, mortified by what you carved in the tree. This is kind of how the brain lays down these dopamine tracks, your ability to process dopamine.

So you gotta be careful with the rest of your life. And by the way, people who are drug and alcohol addicts have to be careful about success addiction because that's the addiction that will put good right and trade one for the other. So what's the remedy look like? Is it a rip the band-aid off type of deal or slowly building habits and things into your life? What does that look like? It starts with knowledge. It starts with knowing it. Where and where and awareness is really, really critical. People under-emphasize this is to is self-analysis and sometimes it's actually important as they say,

talk to somebody about this because the key thing about good therapy for people who have used therapy properly is that it's a way for you to understand yourself. It's basically going to school in where the subject is you. If all you're getting is just like medication and 15 minutes or something like that, that, I mean, if you need the medication, you need the medication, but the key thing for a professional, whether it's a religious professional or a counselor or a psychotherapist, whatever it means to be, is understanding yourself better. And by the way, most of us can do that

without professional intervention, but we have to do the work in understanding ourselves. Second thing is saying, I want to be happier. And most people don't do that. They don't actually say, I want to be happier. I understand what's going on, and I want to be happier. You know why? Because it's admitting you're not right now. Yeah. It's also admitting that you're willing to be less special. Yeah. I'm willing to be less special to be happy. It's like, I'm not ready for that trade yet. It's that,

you know, it's a lot of people, when you talk to people who drink way, way, way too much, they'll say, I'm not happy and I'm drinking too much and screwing up my relationships and I might ruin my marriage and all that, but I'm not ready to stop drinking yet. And when you talk to people that they'll make a date to go into rehab, like two months later, and they'll drink more and more and more. All the way up to that date, preparing to go into rehab. Well, that's what a lot of people are doing with their any addiction, actually. Well, when we talk about self-awareness, we're talking about emotional intelligence, right? And is this more genetic or learn behavior? What would you say? It's, well, it's a combination of both. We don't understand the genetics very well in this yet. Oh, okay. The genetics,

I feel like some people are just kind of naturally have this ability to do it. And then others really have to actively work at this. Yeah. And part of it is kind of the way you're brought up, too. So some people just not very broad to be very introspective. Men tend to be worse at this. Yeah, and part of it is kind of the way you're brought up too. So some people just not very, broad to be very introspective, men tend to be worse at this than women. Men are pretty bad, men are not introspective creatures. It's like, I feel crummy.

I don't know, I think I'm just gonna go deadlift. Yeah. It's like you're that feeling. Pick up heavy things. Cover with heavy metal. Yeah, it's what I'm talking about. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, for sure.

And by the way, there's a lot of people who will, who are addicted to drugs and alcohol and they'll become orthorexic. Yeah. and have very, very improper behavior in the gym. Totally. And they'll just be like working out three hours a day or something. And, you know, I had a client who did that. She quit smoking and became addicted to exercise and I had to talk to her through the whole process.

Yeah, you can get all these weird behavior. It's like, so why are you trying to dump body fat? Why are you actually, why are you doing these things? Like, I don't know. I want to feel special. I just want to feel special. Wow. What, can you tell us about some practices

that you and Esther have, and your family has that helps with the kind of stuff? Because, I mean, from the outside, there's, you have, you travel a lot, you've got, you're very successful,. Lots of you meet with very important people. They ask you your advice. I mean, for all intents and purposes, that's an environment where a lot of stuff

you're talking about, could the success addict, the, you know, not spending time with your family. What kind of practice is you guys have? Well, part of it is that we're, yeah. I'm not always practicing what I preach. I mean, I'm'm book tour right now Six days a week or something And and my wife remind me of that yesterday. She's like, you know

If you read your book So, Jeff it's really good. You should try reading it. It's actually pretty effective book I think I think it's helping a lot of people. You might some theme might consider it. I get it. I get it. Yeah. So that's a problem because again, I wrote the book for me. And I didn't even know if I was going to publish it, but Esther found my notes.

So I think maybe you should write. I mean, it was a project for me to become happier. I was unhappy. And I thought, I don't know if he's being interested in getting happier as you get older. I don't want to write an old band book and whole thing. Does that really help us play out? Was it was like notes for you?

Oh wow. It was my strategic plan for my life. Oh, I didn't know. Yeah, that's really cool. And I didn't know if it'd be popular. So I wrote it up as an article. It was a feature article in the Atlantic, which is where I'm a columnist.

But it was a long, 7,000-word article. And it became one of the 50 most red essays in the world. I did not know that. For the year. I didn't know they kept data like this, I don't know. And it's like, I guess there's a market for this. And so then I wrote it up as a book and people want to read the book because we're all going through the same stuff in our lives.

So how do we practice it? Well, in the same way that I talk about in this book, we're deeply involved in our Christian faith and as Catholics. So I go to Mass every day, with my wife, which is really important. And the Mass is important for me. But it's also with my wife part is really important

for this because we're worshiping together. We pray together every day, which really locks us into our relationship in a big way. Because look, this is a non-negotiable thing. she's the person I'll look at as I take my dying breath. And this is the relationship that actually completes me as a person, critically. So I take that really super-seriously and much more seriously than I did 10 years ago. And that requires practice, that requires protocols, that requires daily activities, and it doesn't happen on its own. And that's the key point that I'm making. I'm cultivating one,

two, and three. My relationship with my kids is super different than my relationship with my parents. I mean, I had a pretty distant relationship with my parents, and I moved to Europe when I was in my mid-20s to marry my wife. When I was playing in an orchestra in Barcelona and doing my things in classical musician for a long time. I thought, I gotta get to know my parents better. My dad was a scientist. My mom was an artist and she was creative and they were interesting people. Yeah, I really got to get to know them and then they died.

They died young. My dad died at 66. My mom was already cognitively impaired by my age. So she was kind of gone. I thought it was a real source of regret for me for a long time. I thought, okay, regret's fine. What am I going to learn from? A Dan Paine gives a new book about regret.

It's a really good book. It's worth reading about how you can learn from it and how you can make it into a source of transcendence. Your regret is good for you. You should not tattoo no regrets on your body. So when people cringe, especially spelled wrong, yeah. No, right. If you're going to do it, at least spell it wrong. Because that's funnier.

And so I turned it into a lesson that's actually a protocol. And my kids are Hither and Yon. I mean, actually my oldest son, who's 23, he's engaged. He's living with us right now in our guest room. So I see him all the time. His brother is in the Marines at Camp Pendleton. I talk to him every day. I face time with him. I try to face time with him every day.

Even when he doesn't want to talk to me, he's going to hear from his dad. And my little girl, she's in college in Spain. When I go back and forth, I live in Spain a lot because my wife is Spanish. And, but she's in college in Spain, but we talk all the time. We've already, we've texted 15 times today already, and it's not even lunchtime yet. And it's nine hours later there.

And that's because I have learned from my regret to enter into a positive schematic protocol that cultivates love. I'm managing love in my life in the same way that I manage my money. Anything you're learning about yourself having a grown child, now man, living back with you. Yeah, big messy chick back in the nest. It's, boy, it's messy. He does not know how to put his shoes away. It's like, he knows how to work hard,

and he's a great kid. He's fantastic. He's mirrors back me to me. And it's funny because you're kids, how many kids do you have? I only have one. You have one. And you've got three and a half.

Yeah, three and a half. And you have two, right? And there are a combination of you in a weird way, right? And they, just sort of the good and the bad. And they helped me understand myself a little bit better. I see the young version of me, but what I learned is that I wished that I'd had more open conversations

about these things with my kids. And so I guess it's probably weird to be the child of a social scientist, because you know, it's like my little girl, she's like, yeah, analyzing their behavior. Yeah, if I'm bothering my little girl, it's like, daddy, daddy, you're not oxygenating my ventral straight-oom.

You're hard has to melt a little bit. No, it's like, oh, she understands me. You know, that just means that I'm not giving her good feelings. You know. That just means that I'm not giving her good feelings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, the key is actually, with them is seeing yourself and them and then being very, very clear about what the best life is. It's to say, you know, what's, what do I want for you? And not my middle son, the Marine, he had tough time in school. He wasn't a motorist, student. And I was spending all my time herringing him about that. And the reason is because I wanted him to have a good life, but then I realized that he could interpret that

as what I care about the most. I think that's a mistake. So I started saying, you know what I want for you? I want you to be honest, and I want you to be compassionate, and I want you to be faithful. That's what I want. Those are the three things. Everything else is gravy. I don't care if you live in my basement.

I'm going to do. But that wouldn't be optimal. But that's the key thing that I've actually learned from that. And I've learned as much from my kids as I've learned from any book that I've ever read. What about if I were to ask you if if you were to look at each child, because I'm sure each one was a different experience, what do you think that you did best with raising each individual one? Well, that's a good question, or when I wanted it worst,

which is the opposite side of the same coin, right? Right, right. I was trying to say positive. Yeah, no, but it's actually it, because you can take positive lessons from even negative. Yeah, I just, I love talking to somebody with your experience, your wisdom, further ahead than I am as far as fatherhood. So I can be thinking about these things as I'm raising

my son and potentially another one in the future. Yeah, you know, what I did is I cultivated a lot of the most, what I think are the most, what I think are really healthy interests in my first son, who has a lot of the same, who loves a lot of the same things that I do, a lot of the same books, a lot of the same music that I do. Now, I mean, he's super nerd, he goes to opera. And since he was 12 years old, he's been really into opera, Italian opera, right?

So I'm in opera, I think opera's great. I mean, it's beautiful. And we were gonna concerts in New York City, and he cultivated those particular interests, which has really, really made him a much happier person as a result of this. My second son is funny because he has a lot of the same appetites that I do, but not the same interests.

So I mean, his main interests are blowing stuff up. He's in the Marines. You know, he's a combat Marine. He's a sniper and a mortar man in the Marine Corps. He's six foot five, too, by the way. You've seen a picture of him. And he's super. And he's jacked. He's super sniper and a mortar man in the Marine Corps. He's six foot five, too, by the way. You've seen a picture of him. He's a, and he's super. And he's jacked.

He's super jacked. He's 200 pounds and 4.3% body fat. Whoa. Yeah, a machine. He's a machine. He's a machine. He's not going to be able to maintain that. It's all I can say because let me tell you when it's 57.

It's hard. This is not easy to stay in shape for sure. But actually figuring out what is best for him, given the fact that he's got very strong appetites and impulses, and those are the things that I share with him. And just being just completely upfront with him, completely upfront with him.

Carlos, you're gonna wanna do this, don't do that. Don't do that. And if he does, not freaking out. Here's the key thing I learned actually from my son who has my appetites. Don't freak out. That's probably the best piece of advice for fatherhood. Don't freak out because there's nothing worth freaking out.

Only things will only get worse and out literally everything has a solution. What's done is done. And it has a solution. Every problem actually has, if they rob a bank, there's a solution to that. It's not good. You don't want that for sure, but it's never worth freaking out. And my little girl is just pure love.

It's just pure love. I mean, she understands me and she just loves me and I just love her. And I'm telling her I love her all the time. And it's just this abundance. She's adopted by the way. So as soon as I got her, I thought, man, we should have gone outside the gene pool earlier. That's awesome.

She's just perfect. Yeah, you know, you know, I have to say, what you're saying is, I mean, this is how you are in real life. I know you personally and your wife and you have been so gracious to talk with Jessica and I, and I really look up to you and how you guys handle things. So, just want the audience to know this. It's very authentic.

This is not just a dude selling a book. Yeah, well, and I've been a pumphead before any of this, before you guys knew me. That's why I was listening to the podcast and getting all kinds of knowledge about how to get happier and healthier from you guys. I mean, you guys, it's very easy to think, you know, my purpose of fitness podcast, not as a happiness podcast. And it's really the reason that I bet you

that people are more interested in the first 45 minutes than the quads. That's actually true. I bet it's true, right? Especially after they become, yeah, that's awesome. And the reason is because you're modeling authentic friendship for each other. You're talking about things that have, they're fun, but they also have substance.

And they're a model of the kind of discourse that we can and should be having more of in our society, our desiccated society where we don't have that very much of it. And that's really brings a lot of happiness. And even before I knew you guys, I kind of knew you guys. And that's a beautiful thing. You're doing a good thing and I appreciate it a lot. You know, I want to, I know we're going a little long, but I have to ask you this because I've never met anybody as effective in this particular realm as you. You are so good

at talking to people who don't think the same things you do, who don't, don't have the same politics, but they all like you. And you do a good job of communicating with them. Like, what's the secret to that? And I think we need to learn a little bit of this right now because it's not happening. Everybody's so... We bridge that distance.

Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you. That's really kind of you. And not everybody likes me. You know, it's a... I don't know anybody. I know they say, if everyone did like you, you're not doing the right thing.

Yeah, and there's some people who are just so bound up in ideology that it becomes a religion and everything's a holy war. And so, I get protested sometimes. You know, I go on to, I've been on call. Really? Yeah, I go to college. I was like, get protested.

Well, part of it is just because it's such a highly charged ideological environment that, you know, it gets the chalk, the sidewalk. What do they have behind that? That's a scary sign of what the times. Yeah, so many of you are leading with the line. Now, I'm going to go down with the love and happiness. That's what I'm saying.

It's a bad look for protesters. You know, it's like for that for sure. But the whole point is that in an outrage culture, people are going to be outraged. It's the bottom line. And the key thing is that look, we're all sisters and brothers just no exceptions. And if that's the case, treat people as such.

You know, you will never, never persuade anybody to be better by using your values as a weapon. You can only use your values as a gift. Nobody has ever been insulted into agreement. And furthermore, it's not fun to do that. What's really fun is to bring love, even when love is not, you're not getting love. You know, this one was what warms your heart. I've had these experiences where I inadvertently answer hatred with love and I feel it changes my heart. Sometimes it changes their heart too, under the circumstances, but I've

just gotten better at it. You know, I've had missionaries on both sides of my family. And, and, you know, missionaries are constantly getting rejected. It's like nobody's ever said, hey, great news, there's missionaries on the porch. There's guys on bikes come on. Oh no, it's like for 10 we're not home. But they're full of happiness. And the reason is because they're sharing something

with love that they think is critically important, even if some people are not gonna take it. And that's what we can have. You guys are missionaries. Your missionaries for something that's good and healthy and happy and nutritious for everybody. I mean morally nutritious for everybody. And taking that out with the spirit of the missionary so that nobody has ever turned off to it. You know, nobody has ever where you is the vehicle for it or not alienating to people who are listening. That's such a beautiful opportunity. Is the key thing, and the more I do it,

the more you do that, the more you want it. Is the bottom line. So the secret is simple. Love everybody, and treat everybody like your sister or brother, and then go from there. And sometimes it doesn't turn out so great, but or nearly does.

Well, you're a passionate person. It's not like you're just naturally like, I mean, you're a pat, you have opinions, you're very passionate, but you have to practice this. I see that's what I fall prey to. I'm a very passionate person. I get very excited. And then afterwards, I go, oh man, I,

we had the best feed on Instagram. Yeah, well, you know, I used to, you know, I do, I know, I do, of course I know that. I noticed that the first day, like, I text you, just like, sell, are you not on Instagram? Where are you? Because you're the reason I opened up that app. Because it was, I know I do. Of course I know that. I noticed that the first day, like I protect you just like sell Are you not on Instagram? Because you're the reason I opened up that app? Oh, because it was I would openly laugh the more childish your jokes the more I laugh

Someone didn't like it. They kicked me off. So I'm on Twitter now, but I'm a little bit more aggressive there I need to after talking to you though. I really always always such a pleasure having you. Oh, I love your show I love what you guys are doing. What a privilege for me to be part of this in some small way. And I gotta say, if you got time, like find Arthur Brooks on YouTube, read his books, like they're very effective and positive and they make you feel good. And so if you wanna be a better person,

like I can't recommend, I can't recommend all your stuff enough. Like all of it makes you feel good. It's all very actionable. You're very good at communicating. Here's the steps that you can take. I appreciate that. I hope all our listeners take my advice there. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Love being with you. Thanks again. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check

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