280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more | Arthur Brooks Ph.D.

1. 0:00 – 1:11

   Intro

   1. ABArthur Brooks0:00

      This is the salient theme. Take charge, man. Take charge. Don't, don't leave your health up to what feels good right now. Take charge of it. I mean, you're the boss. You're... This is, the startup is you. You're the entrepreneur. You're the, the guy in charge of the enterprise. You're the CEO. Treat it as such. You know, the CEO doesn't do what feels good all the time. The CEO does what's right, notwithstanding her or his feelings. And that's the secret to happiness, is treating your life like a startup. It's like, it's living, it's your philosophy of health and longevity is my philosophy of happiness because it's all one thing. You know, when you talk about better, happier years or, you know, healthspan, I'm talking about happy span. That's what it comes down to. And you're just not gonna do it by doing what feels good in the moment. It's just not, you're not gonna discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this divine path that can give you this thing that you actually seek. Is it perfect? No. But it, can you learn and grow and have progress all throughout the journey? Absolutely. Absolutely.

   2. PAPeter Attia1:02

      [upbeat music] Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia.

2. 1:11 – 4:55

   Happiness vs. happy feelings, and how happiness and unhappiness can coexist

   1. PAPeter Attia1:12

      Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin, although maybe it's only partially to see me.

   2. ABArthur Brooks1:16

      It's mostly to see you, Peter.

   3. PAPeter Attia1:17

      All right.

   4. ABArthur Brooks1:17

      I love seeing you.

   5. PAPeter Attia1:18

      There you go.

   6. ABArthur Brooks1:18

      It's, that's the best.

   7. PAPeter Attia1:19

      Yeah.

   8. ABArthur Brooks1:19

      And, you know, you're doing this in person. It's great. Last time we did it by Zoom.

   9. PAPeter Attia1:22

      Yeah.

   10. ABArthur Brooks1:22

       This is better.

   11. PAPeter Attia1:23

       Um, congrats on the book.

   12. ABArthur Brooks1:25

       Thanks.

   13. PAPeter Attia1:25

       This is your, not your first, second, or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a what's the world gonna think?

   14. ABArthur Brooks1:33

       Oh, yeah. No, no, it's like having a child. I mean, well, it's not... I mean, y- a child you live with for a super long time, and they torture you decade after decade. But a book is something where you, as you bring it into the world, you know, y- you go through... You remember Elisabeth Kubler-Ross?

   15. PAPeter Attia1:47

       Yeah.

   16. ABArthur Brooks1:47

       The Swiss psychiatrist who wrote that, you know, famous book about death and dying.

   17. PAPeter Attia1:49

       On Death and Dying.

   18. ABArthur Brooks1:50

       And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that, that, that research has been questioned since then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through, you know, bargaining and denial and rage and all. That's like, as you know, when a book is coming out. You're going through, or you're writing a book, and you denial and bargaining and rage. And finally, there's acceptance [laughs] , but you're still nervous, for sure.

   19. PAPeter Attia2:08

       Look, there's a, there's a lot of stuff I wanna, I wanna kinda talk about with, w- with you on this topic. Um, but let's begin with a, a question, which is what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write about-

   20. ABArthur Brooks2:21

       Right

   21. PAPeter Attia2:21

       ... and happy feelings?

   22. ABArthur Brooks2:23

       Yeah.

   23. PAPeter Attia2:23

       Are they the same thing?

   24. ABArthur Brooks2:25

       They're not, and this is a really important misconception that a- all of my students and most of us actually have. We live in the era of feelings. If you'd talk to my parents or, God knows, my grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head. You know, "W- What are you talking about?" I mean, talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera of feeling seems so counterproductive. And in point of fact, our grandparents were right about that. Feelings are not happiness any more than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness, and that's incredibly good news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect.

   25. PAPeter Attia2:58

       Hmm.

   26. ABArthur Brooks2:58

       There's a, there are many better technical definitions of happiness. But they produce a lot of feelings. They're associated with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain, a 40-million-year evolutionary process that d- developed the limbic system to create emotions. That's signals. Information is what it comes from. And so i- if you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of happiness, you're gonna be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts. Now, what I, how I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast, if my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's gonna determine my happiness. And then you become... You, you're, you're, you wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing your own happiness. And so that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings.

   27. PAPeter Attia3:40

       It's hard to differentiate, though.

   28. ABArthur Brooks3:41

       Yeah.

   29. PAPeter Attia3:42

       I mean, it, e- having read this stuff several times, it's... You, you have to remind yourself when you're in the throes of what I just referred to as negatively valenced feelings-

   30. ABArthur Brooks3:53

       Right
3. 4:55 – 15:29

   The six fundamental emotions

   1. ABArthur Brooks4:55

      you don't.

   2. PAPeter Attia4:55

      So what, what are some of those, if you think about this evolutionarily. And, and, and not even going back to, you know, millions of years ago, but just going back hundreds of thousands of years ago to the origin of our species as Homo sapiens. W- what are, what, what do we think are some of the most powerful negative emotions that would drive action, and why?

   3. ABArthur Brooks5:12

      So there's basically six f- Uh, uh, uh, uh, w- they're fundamental emotions. They're basic emotions. They're, th- these are the building blocks of all emotional life that are produced by the limbic system of the brain: four negative and two positive. The four negative emotions are, are sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. All four of those have a, a very strong evolutionary basis. Fear and anger, of course, have to do with threat, and they, they, they involve the amygdala of the brain. You know, when, when a, a car is about to run you over and you're a pedestrian in a crosswalk, that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded by the, in the occipital lobe of your brain as a, as an enormous predator. That signals to your, to your amygdala to send a, you know, the signal through the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys to spit out stress hormones. That happens in 74 milliseconds. And by that time, you're sweating, your, your heart is pumping, you've jumped out of the way, and you've flipped off the driver, a combination of fear and anger in response to the enormous predator. Three seconds later, your prefrontal cortex catches up and you say, "I shouldn't have flipped him off. That's not my values," or whatever it happens to be.

   4. PAPeter Attia6:19

      Yeah.

   5. ABArthur Brooks6:19

      So that's your limbic system keeping you alive. That's fear and anger. Then, of course, there's disgust, which involves the insular cortex of the brain, also part of the limbic system. That's when you pull something out of the back of your fridge you forgot about a few weeks ago, and you hold it, and you're like, "Ugh." Th- that signals, "Don't eat it."

   6. PAPeter Attia6:35

      Mm-hmm.

   7. ABArthur Brooks6:35

      And so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic negative emotion of disgust to you. Now, it can be, it can be misattributed to people. That's what demagogic politicians always do. That's what the media does to us. It tries to reprogram the insular cortex, the insula of the limbic system of the brain, so that y- when somebody disagrees with you politically, you look at them like a cockroach. That's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done for time immemorial so that people will undertake, you know, barbaric acts against people in their own countries, lease us a war, et cetera. And then last but not least is sadness. Sadness has also evolved. Sadness is the, the, i- is the, what you feel largely in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, another part of the limbic system, that has, that's mental pain, usually when you're either socially excluded or you're separated from a loved one.

   8. PAPeter Attia7:27

      Hmm.

   9. ABArthur Brooks7:28

      Now, that's something that's evolved because you don't wanna be, you don't wanna be, uh, separated from your tribe. You don't wanna walk the frozen tundra and die alone. But what happens, for example, in grief, grief is, is un-remediated sadness. And the reason is because your brain is saying, you know, "Make this separation go away," and you can't because the other person is permanently gone, as, AKA dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be. And so the grief is just this pulsating activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain saying, "I must be re- reunited with that person, but I can't be." And it takes a lot of time in, in many cases for the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to stop registering that, that, that sadness, that pain.

   10. PAPeter Attia8:12

       So, so the, the, the sadness we feel when a person dies, which would be the ultimate form-

   11. ABArthur Brooks8:16

       Mm-hmm

   12. PAPeter Attia8:16

       ... of separation-

   13. ABArthur Brooks8:17

       Right

   14. PAPeter Attia8:18

       ... is in a, uh, a more extreme version of, say, a social isolation that you might feel, like what a kid feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away?

   15. ABArthur Brooks8:27

       Yeah. And there's interesting studies that actually look at how the, how that, that, that registers in the brain. So, um, the brain is so thrifty, as, as we all know. The neuroscience of this is super interesting. So when you stub your toe, there's actually two processes going. There's sensory pain and affective pain. Sensory pain means, you know, you can feel it in the nerve endings, and it's, you know, it's very unpleasant. Affective pain is, "I hate this," right? And you feel both in physical pain. The affective component involves the same part of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, when you have something that emotionally bothers you, when you're being excluded. And we know that because there's these interesting studies that, that people are simula- they're in an fMRI machine. They're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated, and they're, they're being subjected to, to being rejected by somebody else, and they can see the part of the brain that's actually illuminated.

   16. PAPeter Attia9:16

       And isn't there a way to kind of... And is there a... I guess there is a way to do it, but is there, is there a benefit to the reverse, right? So, uh, I, I love going into cold plunges.

   17. ABArthur Brooks9:23

       Mm-hmm.

   18. PAPeter Attia9:23

       So I do it almost every day.

   19. ABArthur Brooks9:24

       Mm-hmm.

   20. PAPeter Attia9:25

       And it's insanely uncomfortable. Like, there's not a day that I step into that 42-degree ice bath with jets shooting-

   21. ABArthur Brooks9:34

       Right

   22. PAPeter Attia9:34

       ... water around me that I'm like, "This doesn't hurt."

   23. ABArthur Brooks9:37

       Right.

   24. PAPeter Attia9:38

       Um, but it doesn't come with the, "I hate this," because I'm choosing to do it, and I think-

   25. ABArthur Brooks9:43

       Right

   26. PAPeter Attia9:43

       ... there's value in it. W- what, y- uh... Does the brain treat that differently? Does that, uh... How would we think of that as an emotion?

   27. ABArthur Brooks9:49

       So y- what it is is a controlled aversive emotion under your own, under your own power. And so for example, if you go to a haunted house on, on Halloween-

   28. PAPeter Attia9:58

       And get scared

   29. ABArthur Brooks9:58

       ... and get scared, you're controlling the fear. If you're on a, on a really radical amusement park ride, it's the same sort of thing. And so what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little bit of the stress hormones and the experience of the aversive emotion. But since it's under your own control, you actually use it in a way that, that you enjoy. And so people who do extreme sports, this is the k- same kind of thing that they do. They like to feel a little bit in danger. One of my kids is, is somebody who likes this. He really likes this a lot. He likes to expose himself to things that actually hurt as long as he's under control. He's-

   30. PAPeter Attia10:28

       Any evidence that other species do this?
4. 15:29 – 22:15

   The evolution and heritability of happiness, and the four personality patterns with respect to positive and negative emotions

   1. PAPeter Attia15:29

      So when, when you think about the sort of arc of evolution, um, a, a, a pure we, a, a purely Darwinian approach to our existence would be-

   2. ABArthur Brooks15:38

      Right

   3. PAPeter Attia15:38

      ... uh, evolutionary fitness.

   4. ABArthur Brooks15:40

      Mm-hmm.

   5. PAPeter Attia15:40

      Where does happiness fit into that?

   6. ABArthur Brooks15:45

      Now, that's a question that I've dealt with or thought about for a long, long time, and [clears throat] a lot of people sort of assume that evolution would favor happiness, and the reason is basically this. Um, evolution gives me a bunch of desires. It gives me desires for calories and, and, and interesting things and, and, and sexual partners, and all those things that evolution wires into me. And there's certain things that I want, and one of the things that I want is those things, but also I want to be a happy person. So therefore, evolution must favor happiness. That's wrong. There's no indication that Mother Nature cares about your happiness. She cares really about two things, survival and gene propagation.

   7. PAPeter Attia16:24

      Right.

   8. ABArthur Brooks16:24

      That's what Mother Nature ... Mother Nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes. You being happy, does that help that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't. I mean, we find that dark triad personalities, malignant narcissists, they tend to be way unhappier than normal, and they're extremely sexually attractive to the opposite sex. What's up with that? You know, people are finding terrible mates that make them miserable, and they have extremely high levels of success in mating markets. And that militates against the idea that happiness would be evolved. And so I'm, I've, I've become persuaded that happiness is sort of the divine path versus the animal path, and it's many times you need to stand up to Mother Nature's imperatives so that you can be happy. And I w- I give a lot of examples in my own research of actually how that's the case.

   9. PAPeter Attia17:10

      Let, let's talk about a bit of them.

   10. ABArthur Brooks17:11

       Yeah.

   11. PAPeter Attia17:11

       Because w- you know, in part where I wanna be able to, to go with this is the heritability of happiness.

   12. ABArthur Brooks17:16

       Right.

   13. PAPeter Attia17:16

       Right? So, um-

   14. ABArthur Brooks17:18

       Which we know about, yeah.

   15. PAPeter Attia17:19

       Yeah. So l- let, let's, let's talk about both of those things, right?

   16. ABArthur Brooks17:22

       Mm-hmm.

   17. PAPeter Attia17:22

       What can we, what can we learn about the genetics of happiness?

   18. ABArthur Brooks17:25

       Mm-hmm.

   19. PAPeter Attia17:27

       And talk maybe a little bit about your research as well.

   20. ABArthur Brooks17:29

       Yeah, so the, we know that, that, well, happy that the, the baseline levels of mood balance, which is not the same thing as happiness, it's the, the extent to which you feel positive and negative emotions, um, over the course of the day varies a lot between individuals. There's sort of four, four personality patterns with respect to positive and negative emotions over the course of your day, and it has to do with the intensity and the frequency of negative and positive emotions. There are four equal-sized groups. There are people who are-

   21. PAPeter Attia18:00

       Yeah, let's talk about them and, uh-

   22. ABArthur Brooks18:01

       Yeah

   23. PAPeter Attia18:01

       ... I haven't taken the test yet, but I'm positive I know which one I am.

   24. ABArthur Brooks18:04

       I know it you are, too. So, so there, there are people who have extremely intense positive emotions and extremely intense negative emotions. Now, it doesn't have to be extreme. In my case, it is. It has to be above average to be in a quadrant called the mad scientist quadrant. That's a quarter of the population. They're above average positive intensity and mood and above average negative. There are some who, and this is the one that everybody wants to be, is above average positive and below average negative in intensity. These are the cheerleaders, right? There's a quarter of the population that's above average negative and below average positive. Those are the poets, and that's a really interesting, from a neuroscientific perspective, these people. That's a quarter of the population as well. And then there's the low low, people who are low affect people, people who have low intensity positive, low intensity negative. It doesn't mean they're un- not unhappy or happy. It means the intensity of their feelings puts them in that bottom quadrant, and those are the judges. Those are the unflappable people with enormously good judgment who don't get freaked out about anything. Each one of us is one of those quadrants.

   25. PAPeter Attia19:06

       And this is roughly a quarter.

   26. ABArthur Brooks19:08

       Yeah, it's, uh, it, it's actually by construction a quarter because it's above and below average-

   27. PAPeter Attia19:12

       Oh

   28. ABArthur Brooks19:12

       ... across the population.

   29. PAPeter Attia19:13

       Sure. Yeah.

   30. ABArthur Brooks19:13

       So it has to be in those quarters. And I have a thing on my website where people can take the test. You can just go take the test. We don't keep the data, just so that people can know who they are because you need to know who you are to manage yourself.
5. 22:15 – 24:28

   Navigating relationships: the power of complementarity over compatibility

   1. PAPeter Attia22:15

      What do we know about compatibility of those types-

   2. ABArthur Brooks22:18

      Yeah

   3. PAPeter Attia22:19

      ... in friendships and partnerships?

   4. ABArthur Brooks22:20

      Yeah, so this is the interesting thing, one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of young people make today. My average, the average age of my students is 28. I teach graduate students. And they've been told that to find a good romantic partnership, you have to find maximum compatibility, and that's wrong. You need minimum, a minimum baseline of compatibility on top of which you need complementarity. So back in the day, the matchmaker in your village would find somebody, they're the same religion, you know, they live in the same place, they're basically, they're both sort of a match on, on, on, on physical attractiveness. Now, let's find one completing the other. This is one of the reasons that introverts and extroverts make very good marriage partners typically. Two extroverts can be a real problem. It's daggers drawn. They're competing with each other all the time. Two introverts, there's not enough t- t- typically, there's not enough conversation. There's not enough human connection. They'll be isolated too much. They'll drift apart is what we find. And when it comes to these, these personality profiles with respect to affect, you need to find somebody who completes you. So but you have to appreciate differences. So mad scientists do really well with judges because judges mellow them out. can help themse-- two mad scientists, it's like, it's craziness. It's a, it's a hurricane all the time. Because what'll happen is you'll get into a vortex of getting more and more spun up and then going all the way back down again. It can be, it can turn into, you can, you can be an accelerant to each other.

   5. PAPeter Attia23:44

      Yeah.

   6. ABArthur Brooks23:44

      And that can be really a big problem. So look for somebody different than you. Now, the problem with dating [chuckles] is that the platforms that people use, I mean, you don't meet somebody in a restaurant anymore. You don't... And, and, and, and young people aren't going to church very much. So where do you meet? Online. You're like a stalker or serial killer if you're not pe- meeting people online.

   7. PAPeter Attia24:03

      [laughs]

   8. ABArthur Brooks24:03

      And they curate their profiles to find somebody who's like a sibling, which is, you know, as my adult kids remind me, not hot.

   9. PAPeter Attia24:11

      [laughs]

   10. ABArthur Brooks24:13

       What's hot is complementarity, is the adventure of somebody different than you, somebody that you're discovering something. You love somebody because of their differences, not despite their differences, and you can find a lot of that, and it's especially productive when we come to these personality

6. 24:28 – 31:31

   The importance of self-managing your mental habits

   1. ABArthur Brooks24:28

      profiles.

   2. PAPeter Attia24:29

      What do you do with your, with your knowledge base? So as a mad scientist, what, what are the, what are the, what are the tools you use from that to manage yourself? Which is, it's kind of a recurring theme here. I mean, as we-

   3. ABArthur Brooks24:41

      Yeah

   4. PAPeter Attia24:41

      ... we keep coming back to it, and I want to come back to it more-

   5. ABArthur Brooks24:43

      Right

   6. PAPeter Attia24:43

      ... formally to talk about metacognition. But just, you know, briefly maybe, what are, what are the, you know, most important things that you think about as a mad scientist to regulate your own emotions and to presumably keep the balance more on the positive versus negative valence?

   7. ABArthur Brooks25:01

      For the longest time, uh, I mean, the reason I've done this research, Peter, is because I need it. This is me search. That's really what it is.

   8. PAPeter Attia25:09

      Yeah.

   9. ABArthur Brooks25:10

      And I know you do, too. I mean, you do this work because you want to live a long time and have a high quality of life, is what it comes down to. It's not, there's, there's no... In our community of health and wellness and fitness and longevity, and we're all doing the best we can for our own lives and then sharing it with other people, and this is absolutely the case with me. If you're a mad scientist and you don't self-manage, you're gonna be, you're gonna be all over the place. You're gonna be a big mess. You're gonna have difficult relationships, and you're, a lot of the time, you're gonna be miserable. And it's avoidable. It's, it's actually unconstructive not to self-manage. But self-management is not, it's not one weird trick, as they like to say on the internet. It's not, there's no hacks. It's really all about mental habits. It starts with the knowledge of the science. It goes into specific practices, and then a lot of it has to do with the, with, with teaching other people, as you know. The, the best way for you to live better is to teach other people how to live better. That's, [laughs] you know. Like, if you wanna be healthy, start a health podcast or something and, and make sure you've got good science on your side. So when it comes to mad science, that we're, the, the mad scientist profile that's hard to manage otherwise, the mistake that people get into is they try to stay on the positive side, right? I mean, it's funny.

   10. PAPeter Attia26:18

       Makes sense.

   11. ABArthur Brooks26:19

       Yeah, I mean, it's like-

   12. PAPeter Attia26:20

       That's, that's, that's a logical thing to do

   13. ABArthur Brooks26:21

       ... bipolar disorder, you know, um, uh, we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds because they like the manic, and they don't like the depression. But they can't time it, and so you actually have to stabilize your mood so that you're not sh- seeking the highs and trying to avoid the lows. But that's, that's the first reason. The second... And, and by the way, I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder. I'm just saying that they tend to have mania. They tend to have a little bit of a, a h- hyper-

   14. PAPeter Attia26:49

       Hypomania

   15. ABArthur Brooks26:49

       ... this kind of hypermanic-

   16. PAPeter Attia26:51

       Yeah

   17. ABArthur Brooks26:51

       ... as, you know, John Gartner talks about, right? The hypermanic edge, and that's what most mad scientists have a little bit of. That's why they tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs like you. Um, but they fall prey to a lot of, you know, mood issues that, that are pretty avoidable. The, the, at the pro level [laughs] of self-management in the mad scientist category is to not seek the highs 'cause the highs don't help you that much. What you actually need to be is a full person, not riding the wave of your emotions. You need to manage your emotions and never let them manage you, and that gets into the whole topic you're talking about, which is metacognition. That is, to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex as opposed to living according to your limbic system. Never be managed by your limbic system. Your limbic system is nothing more than the, than the factory for your emotions. [laughs] That's really what it's doing. And if you're basically taking raw factory materials and trying to live according to them as opposed to assembling them, making them into a set of experiences, learning from them, growing from them, you're not fully alive. You're subject to something. You're subject to a crazy machine all the time. And so that's a lot of what I write about, is actually how do you experience emotions more fully in the, in the, in the prefrontal cortex of your brain? What are the techniques for doing so? And when you're doing that, what, what is the repertoire of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state?

   18. PAPeter Attia28:14

       And are there any folks where, uh, for example, uh, the poet, where you actually push them to be more in that limbic system, or is it the same for everyone? 'Cause the poet, of course, is the one who's disproportionately down, right? These are the great artists.

   19. ABArthur Brooks28:30

       Yeah. So poets, um, [clears throat] there's interesting research that parallel to this, that doesn't, doesn't use the same PANAS test, but, but it's, it's pretty provocative nonetheless, that people who have a tendency toward, um, depression, um, not bipolar, but, you know, depression, um, they tend to be more creative. They're ruminate, they're ruminators, you know. And, and they also tend to be kind of romantics. And, you know, this follows a pattern, a popula- sort of a, a, a person, uh... You've met people like this, that have this pattern of, you know, romantic, creative, depressive, poetic people. Really interesting neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially, uh, uh, active for these people. It's called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and this is the part of the brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something, which depressive people do, is they think about the thing, and think about the thing, and think... This is also what's going on when you're in love with somebody. You can't stop thinking. You're ruminating on another person. This is the same thing that's going on when you're working on a business plan, or writing a symphony, or actually writing a poem. So that's what they're really good at, but also what they're really bad at. They can't stop thinking about things, which is good for them and really bad for them. Their strength is their weakness. And, and Peter, this is the same thing a- all across all the profiles. Your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength. Learn to manage it. Wire to the strengths, remediate the weaknesses, and complete yourself. So I encourage everybody to be more metacognitive, everybody, so that you're a poet. You can be really, really poetic, but it won't ruin your life.

   20. PAPeter Attia30:04

       Do we think that, and this is, uh, tangential and maybe not relevant, but do we think that the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen, like, the, the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen as a species always come from extremes in these categories?

   21. ABArthur Brooks30:22

       It's almost certainly not true. It's actually not, certainly not the case.

   22. PAPeter Attia30:25

       It's a, it's sort of a caricature of what we think to be true.

   23. ABArthur Brooks30:27

       It's a caricature.

   24. PAPeter Attia30:27

       Yeah.

   25. ABArthur Brooks30:27

       Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases. You see somebody who's unbelievably good at something and who's weird, you focus on their weirdness. There are tons of people who are extremely accomplished and not that weird.

   26. PAPeter Attia30:38

       [laughs]

   27. ABArthur Brooks30:39

       You don't have to be weird. I mean, it's the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, I guess to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be the kind of person that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about.

   28. PAPeter Attia30:47

       [laughs]

   29. ABArthur Brooks30:48

       If Walter Isaacson is writing your biography, get help. [laughs]

   30. PAPeter Attia30:51

       Right.
7. 31:31 – 44:25

   Enjoyment: one of the three macronutrients of happiness

   1. PAPeter Attia31:31

      Okay, so let's now talk about these three components of happiness.

   2. ABArthur Brooks31:36

      Yeah.

   3. PAPeter Attia31:36

      You wrote about this in, uh, f- uh, Strength to Strength.

   4. ABArthur Brooks31:39

      Right.

   5. PAPeter Attia31:39

      But, but let's go over them again and talk about what, what each one means.

   6. ABArthur Brooks31:42

      So happiness is not a feeling. We've established that.

   7. PAPeter Attia31:45

      Yep.

   8. ABArthur Brooks31:46

      Feelings are evidence of happiness. When we look at the happiest people, and the way that we do that typically, there's some indirect ways to figure that out. You know, I could ask your wife, um, "How happy is Peter?" And you're not there, and I would get some, um, really probably very accurate information. I could... There's some tests, they're not very good, but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under fMRI. But the really, the best way to do it, the most cost-effective and efficient way to do that is for you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this. Imagine all the people you know, where the happiest person you've ever met, I mean, really happy, is 10, and, and the most miserable SOB you've ever met is a one. All things considered, at this period of your life, not this moment, this period of your life, all things considered, thinking of those people, what's your number? And that turns out to be incredibly accurate. You gotta have a large sample because some people answer it in a wonky way.

   9. PAPeter Attia32:42

      Mm-hmm.

   10. ABArthur Brooks32:42

       And it has to be anonymous because y- you know, if you answer this in front of Jill, you'll probably lie, right? Because people, they, they don't tell the truth in front of their spouses [laughs] necessarily, in front of their friends.

   11. PAPeter Attia32:52

       Yeah.

   12. ABArthur Brooks32:52

       'Cause they give answers that people wanna hear. But if it's really honest and you're by yourself, I'll get extremely, um, effective data from that. Note with, based on these data, you find that the happiest people, they have three macronutrients in balance and abundance.

   13. PAPeter Attia33:08

       By the way, before we get to those, are those responses normally distributed?

   14. ABArthur Brooks33:14

       They are normally distributed, but the mean is not five.

   15. PAPeter Attia33:17

       Oh. What is the mean?

   16. ABArthur Brooks33:18

       Yeah, the mean is m- is more like seven and a half. So there's a bias-

   17. PAPeter Attia33:22

       So a mean of seven and a half

   18. ABArthur Brooks33:23

       ... toward the top part of the scale.

   19. PAPeter Attia33:24

       Okay.

   20. ABArthur Brooks33:24

       And with the reason, the reason for the skew is because, you know, you feel like if it were a f- it would be better if it were a five, right? Because then we would, if it were a five, we would be saying that a three is, you know, within one standard deviation. There's nothing wrong with being a three. Nobody wants to be a three. Numbers have, numbers have cultural valence.

   21. PAPeter Attia33:41

       Yeah.

   22. ABArthur Brooks33:42

       Right? They, they really do. And so people will kinda, "Uh, yeah." It's like, you know, being normal happy, that's like seven, eight, right? And what you find is that most people over the course of their adult lives, early 20s to early 50s, they, they, they're between seven and nine. Most people are from seven to nine. Most of the people that I talk to, that I work with, especially the, the executives that I work with one-on-one who are threes, they're depressed. They're actually suffering from, from clinical issues. They're behind the line of scrimmage. There's nobody who's like, "Yeah, I'm pretty normal. I'm like, you know, probably the 40th percentile. That probably makes me a three and a half." 40th percentile is probably a five [laughs] is the way that that works.

   23. PAPeter Attia34:20

       Yeah. Okay.

   24. ABArthur Brooks34:20

       And they're, they, they would like to be better, and they feel like they're not as good as they should be, despite the fact that in the, in the scale, that looks like the middle of the scale. It's not the middle of the scale. Okay?

   25. PAPeter Attia34:30

       Got it.

   26. ABArthur Brooks34:30

       So what do you find? That the people who are in the upper end, the eights and nines, and like my wife, nine and a half, um, I don't get it, but there you go, um, they tend to, they tend to be really healthy, and healthy means they have balance and abundance across what I often refer to as the happiness's macronutrients. And I do this, you know, it's very easy in, you know, the, your audience, because everybody knows it's protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And the best diets are those that have all of them in balance and abundance. And the r- and you have to get your, your, your macros, and you're not gonna have, you know, 100% protein. That sounds good for somebody for a week until they become miserable and, and-

   27. PAPeter Attia35:08

       [laughs]

   28. ABArthur Brooks35:09

       So the three macronutrients are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. And, and none of those, by the way, is straightforward any more than protein, carbohydrates, and fat is straightforward. You know, it's like, "I'll, I'll be fine. I'm gonna eat a chicken and a stick of butter and a, and a Ho Ho, and then I'm gonna eat that exclusively for the rest of my life, and it meets my macros, so I should be fine." No, no, no, it doesn't work that way. [laughs] You actually have to understand that, understand what each one of those things are, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and you have to have strategies to understand why they're so hard to attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more skillful at attaining each one.

   29. PAPeter Attia35:48

       So let's start with enjoyment then.

   30. ABArthur Brooks35:49

       Yeah. So enjoyment seems sort of straightforward. I want to enjoy my life, get a lot of pleasure. That's wrong. Pleasure is limbic. Enjoyment is, is part of the, is, involves the prefrontal cortex.
8. 44:25 – 52:14

   Satisfaction: one of the three macronutrients of happiness

   1. PAPeter Attia44:25

      Okay, so what is satisfaction then?

   2. ABArthur Brooks44:28

      Again, I mean, people are like, "Wow, that was, enjoyment's complicated." And it's all complicated. That's why the, you need to, that's why the knowledge is so critically important. I mean, that's why happiness is a serious business. Satisfaction is the joy after struggle. That's what satisfaction really is. You struggled for it. You worked for it. You got it. It feels awesome. Um, if my students cheat to get an A on my exam, there's no satisfaction. But if they worked really hard, you might say chump, stupid. You know, "Brooks probably gave the same exam last year. Go find last year's exam." But if they actually struggle for it and they study for it, they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A because that's how we're wired. We're wired to, after you struggle for something a lot, that, again, this comes back to the evolutionary psychology, even biology, is that you go looking hard for something and you get it, you want that to be reinforced as a good thing to do. That's why Mother Nature really wants that to happen, and that's why we have that evolutionary imperative. Okay, so that's great, but here's this little twist that Mother Nature throws into it. If you knew that that satisfaction, that joy wasn't gonna last, you'd think twice before going through the struggle. You'd, you'd think twice about the cost-benefit analysis. Like, if you said to yourself, you know, like that watch, it's a nice watch. That's a, like, I don't know what kind of watch that is. That's a, it's a Seamaster or something, right?

   3. PAPeter Attia45:50

      GMT.

   4. ABArthur Brooks45:51

      That's a GMT. Um, it's a nice watch. But if you'd thought to yourself, like, "This is a pretty expensive watch. I'm gonna really, really like it for a week," you'd think, you'd think twice about it. S- Trivial example, but there's all kinds of things that we do, you know, that relationship, that conquest, that business plan, that, you know, fill in the blanks. I'm not gonna enjoy it for very long. Um, Mo- so Mother Nature shields you from that truth. Now, you have to, y- you have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing. If you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after a long hike, that's incredibly satisfying. That gives you a bunch of joy. But if you sat there enjoying them for the next week, you'd be a saber-toothed tiger's dinner. You have to be ready for the next set of emotions. That's homeostasis. You go back to the baseline, physical baseline, emotional baseline. You always go back. But if you realize that, you won't make the effort in the first place. So Mother Nature in- tantalizes you with the joy that's gonna come after the struggle and, and, and then, and then veils the knowledge that you're not gonna enjoy it forever. So people actually think, "If I move to California, I'm gonna be happy for the rest of my life because of the sunshine." I got the data. It's a few months. The taxes are forever. [laughs]

   5. PAPeter Attia47:09

      [laughs]

   6. ABArthur Brooks47:10

      I mean, I see this constantly with people. You know, they think that ... My students, the reason they think they're gonna be happier at 38 than 28, which is generally not true. Generally, your happiness is lower at 38 than it is at 28, and lower at 48 than it was at 38. The reason they don't know that, they get it exactly upside down, is 'cause they think that they're gonna get things they want and they're gonna be satisfied forever with them. When they get married, they'll be permanently happier.

   7. PAPeter Attia47:35

      Have you been able to quantify the length of satisfaction, the duration of satisfaction when they get admitted to Harvard Business School?

   8. ABArthur Brooks47:45

      There are some studies on that, and it shows that the satisfaction that they get is usually a few weeks.

   9. PAPeter Attia47:49

      So before they even matriculate

   10. ABArthur Brooks47:51

       Oh yeah, for sure. So there's interesting studies that ask this question: when you get a bonus at your job, when do you enjoy it the most? When it hits your check or the day you find out? It's a question that answers itself.

   11. PAPeter Attia48:02

       Yeah.

   12. ABArthur Brooks48:02

       You go home 'cause your boss says, "Man, you're, you're the linchpin in this company."

   13. PAPeter Attia48:07

       [laughs]

   14. ABArthur Brooks48:07

       "What a great job you're doing. 40% bonus. Boom. Dollars." You don't have the dollars, but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse. "Ah, I earned it. It's great." Three weeks later, it shows up in your check, and you're like, "Huh. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, good. Good. I can do something with that." But that's not where the real satisfaction happens because of the homeostasis. Now, the fact that that surprises you leads to deeply suboptimal behavior. If you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again, the satisfaction doesn't last, the con- natural conclusion is that you just needed more. It just wasn't enough. So go get more and more and more, and this leads to this chase, what we call it in my business the hedonic treadmill, that a lot of people know that expression at this point. Hedonic means feelings. The treadmill is you're, you're running, running, running, and running to keep, maintain, and to get more of certain feelings, and you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress. The homeostasis is that you, you catch up immediately with you get ahead by two inches, and immediately it starts running you backwards. Un- unless you keep running, running, running, running, then you're gonna be going the wrong direction, and that's terrifying and terrible. So people not figuring out Mother Nature's cruel little hoax, they wind up on the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more, more, more, have more.

   15. PAPeter Attia49:23

       But why are we fooled by this? I mean-

   16. ABArthur Brooks49:25

       'Cause Mother Nature wires it into fool... Uh, is, is wants us to be fooled. I mean, we're born to be fools when it comes to this satisfaction problem.

   17. PAPeter Attia49:34

       So this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully-

   18. ABArthur Brooks49:40

       Yeah

   19. PAPeter Attia49:40

       ... engaged.

   20. ABArthur Brooks49:41

       Yeah.

   21. PAPeter Attia49:41

       Unlike, I mean, clearly evolution favors, um, pleasure over enjoyment.

   22. ABArthur Brooks49:47

       Mm-hmm.

   23. PAPeter Attia49:48

       But evolution is all for satisfaction.

   24. ABArthur Brooks49:51

       All for satisfaction, and-

   25. PAPeter Attia49:52

       And all for fooling you into believing-

   26. ABArthur Brooks49:54

       Right

   27. PAPeter Attia49:55

       ... this is the one that's gonna be the eternal satisfaction.

   28. ABArthur Brooks49:57

       That is the animal path, absolutely. But there is, there is a glitch in that matrix that we can exploit if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses. So this is where... And, and this is where every philosophical and religious tradition comes in 'cause most... I mean, life is suffering according to the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, right? That doesn't mean life has to be suffering. It means life is naturally suffering. What the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices, you're gonna suffer. And, and, and the word for suffering in that first Noble Truth of Buddhism is not... It's, it's mistranslated. The word in Sanskrit is dukkha, and dukkha actually means dissatisfaction. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is, is unsatisfying-

   29. PAPeter Attia50:39

       Mm

   30. ABArthur Brooks50:39

       ... because of the hedonic treadmill, because of homeostasis. And how do you get beyond that? Well, you recognize that the course of, the, the, the, the, the reason for your dissatisfaction, this is the second truth, is, is, is attachment. And the third Noble Truth is that you need to detach, and the fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path, which is entirely contrary to nature. The Eightfold Path is not natural. That's why it's hard. So here's the way to think about it, just in sort of Drive listener terms, right? Mother Nature says satisfaction will come and stay if you have more, more, more. What's your life strategy? More. More money, more power, more pleasure, more admiration, more Instagram followers, more, more. [laughs] Actually, the right model, a model that better satisfies, that, that gives you more satisfaction that lasts, is haves divided by wants. All the things you have divided by all the things that you want. The way to... And, and this is basically kind of what the Eightfold Path of Buddhism comes into. This is a, this is a baby version, so I apologize to the Buddhists who are listening to us, is that you don't need to have more strategy. You need to want less strategy. The Eightfold Path is a want less strategy. We need to want less. We need to manage our wants in this life. And in so doing, then, holy mackerel, then satisfaction hangs around, man. That's why the Dalai Lama always says, "You shouldn't, you shouldn't have what you want. You should want what you have." [laughs] Really, which is another way

9. 52:14 – 59:15

   The reverse bucket list, metacognition, and other techniques to protect yourself from your limbic system

   1. ABArthur Brooks52:14

      of talking about this. And there's all kinds of techniques. There's visualizations. One of the things that I like for doing this is that because I have an arts background. My mother was a painter, and I was a musician for many years professionally. And, um, we have a tendency to think of our lives that we're building, especially the hustlers, the go-getters, the strivers who listen to you, that your life is like a beautiful painting, and you're the artist with a brush, and that canvas is your life, and you're putting the brushstrokes on the canvas. The problem is by the time you're 45 and you're a striver, that canvas is full, man. It's dense. I defy people to add another brushstroke. You need to use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture that you're chipping away, that you are in there, but there's too much stuff stuck to you. You need less, less, less. Want less. D- uh, strip away the detritus. Get out the chisel. So the way that's... The exercise I give my stu- 'cause this has to be practical. Here's the exercise I give my students. They will hear that the way for them to be successful is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list, right? The bucket list. On your birthday, you list all your ambitions and all your desires and your cravings, and you imagine yourself getting all these things. You visualize yourself getting these things. That's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a complete loser.

   2. PAPeter Attia53:32

      [laughs]

   3. ABArthur Brooks53:32

      You need a reverse bucket list, where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments, and you cross them out. Not that you won't get them, but that now they're not limbic. Now they're in your prefrontal cortex, now that you can actually manage those cravings in an entirely different way, and this absolutely works. I do this on my birthday every year now.

   4. PAPeter Attia53:52

      So give me an example.

   5. ABArthur Brooks53:53

      So this last year on my birthday, I thought, "What are my attachments that are holding me down?" And I realized it was a lot of my political opinions. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who started the, uh, Plum Village community of Western Buddhists, um, he said that the greatest source, source of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions.

   6. PAPeter Attia54:13

      Hmm.

   7. ABArthur Brooks54:13

      You know, we're so attached to our opinions, it's like we're hoarding our gold. And if you get between me and my opinions, you're stupid and evil, and I'm gonna cancel you or, you know, whatever dumb thing that we're doing today. And I thought to myself, "My political opinions are too strong. I'm too attached to them." So I wrote down about half of my political opinions. I still have them, but I crossed them out, which, which negated their importance, their moral importance in my life. I mean, I need fewer opinions 'cause I need more friends [laughs] is really what it comes down to, and I'm way lighter. I'm way freer.

   8. PAPeter Attia54:45

      Tell me, is the act of acknowledging the opinions the exercise, crossing them out the exercise, and how does that translate to you act- I mean, we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy-

   9. ABArthur Brooks54:59

      Right

   10. PAPeter Attia54:59

       ... that took place very recently, a terrorist attack, and it's a very dividing, um, uh, it's a very dividing event politically.

   11. ABArthur Brooks55:09

       Right.

   12. PAPeter Attia55:10

       Um, it's hard for me to say, even though I'm not a political person, I don't talk about my political views publicly, I have very strong views. And as a result of that, I'm prone to be very judgmental of those who hold opposing views, uh, especially the stronger my view. So there's certain views where I'm like all about nuance.

   13. ABArthur Brooks55:33

       Mm-hmm.

   14. PAPeter Attia55:33

       And then there's some views where I'm like, "Nope, this is black and white."

   15. ABArthur Brooks55:36

       Right.

   16. PAPeter Attia55:36

       Um, so how would that exercise help in this situation?

   17. ABArthur Brooks55:41

       So this gets back to metacognition. Metacognition, once again, is not being limbic, but rather experiencing emotions and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where you can make conscious executive decisions. It's letting your CEO do it as opposed to, you know, the kids do it. Um, and so what you do is when you have a, an opinion, a, a strong, volatile political opinion, which is not just terrorism is bad, okay? It's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular situation is a moron. That's what goes on the list. And what you do is you cross that out, not because you don't think that, but because you're willing to consider that. You're willing to let your CEO think about that as opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that, that it's no longer a limbic opinion, where you see something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion, where your insular cortex engages because you have a sense of disgust. On the contrary.

   18. PAPeter Attia56:37

       And so do you think that that's a better strategy than my strategy, which is to tune all of that out, right? Is to basically say, "I'm not going... I'm going to do something that feels cowardly-"

   19. ABArthur Brooks56:52

       Right

   20. PAPeter Attia56:53

       ... which is I'm not going to engage in any of this by reading any of it, by watching any of it, by participating. I'm gonna focus on what I do best.

   21. ABArthur Brooks57:02

       Yeah.

   22. PAPeter Attia57:03

       I'm gonna do my job and not become a spectator.

   23. ABArthur Brooks57:06

       You... Well, there's a lot to that because you should specialize in what you can do well. You should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the things that you can't. So these are two different phenomena. The fact is-

   24. PAPeter Attia57:15

       Although you could argue my strategy is a dangerous strategy s- from a societal perspective because then if everybody-

   25. ABArthur Brooks57:22

       Sure

   26. PAPeter Attia57:22

       ... took that approach, nobody would do anything.

   27. ABArthur Brooks57:23

       Absolutely. You wouldn't, we wouldn't, you wouldn't have any collective action.

   28. PAPeter Attia57:26

       Right.

   29. ABArthur Brooks57:26

       Everybody would be ignorant for sure. But what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limbic system, right? When you're, when you block out information and, you know, this is basically, "I don't like the news, so I'm gonna cancel the newspaper." Is, you know, c- I'm, I'm no longer gonna get the news from the newspaper. You shouldn't be afraid of information, and that's all your limbic system is delivering to you, is information. You should learn how to use information. So ideally, you don't have to do that. Ideally, what you do is you metacognitively, you process the information, make decisions on how to use the information. Sometimes that's not efficient. Sometimes that's suboptimal because you don't have time to do it. Now, I have found that I use a combination of the, of the, of the two techniques. Um, I used, I was the president of a think tank in Washington, DC for almost 11 years, and so I was, man, I was sadly in the know. I was so aware all the time of everything everybody was saying and doing, and I knew what was going on, and I knew if there was gonna be a budget resolution. I could tell you what was going on with the farm bill, the whole deal. Now I know a lot less, and the reason is I, I ration my access to news. I read a little, I use, I read a total of 15 to 30 minutes of news per day all at once because I, I need more bandwidth for my work, right? And I don't want it to intrude on my work. But I'm not afraid of my limbic system. I'm not afraid of what this information will actually do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when I do have this information, I can process it in, in executive ways as opposed to childlike ways. It's no longer ghosts in the machine. Then I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it. I can, I can choose my reactions to my emotions. I can use substitute emotions. I can act as if I had different emotions, and I can disregard my emotions.

   30. PAPeter Attia59:08

       Hmm.
10. 59:15 – 1:07:55

    Meaning: one of the three macronutrients of happiness

    1. ABArthur Brooks59:15

       Right.

    2. PAPeter Attia59:17

       Um...

    3. ABArthur Brooks59:19

       Meaning.

    4. PAPeter Attia59:20

       Yeah.

    5. ABArthur Brooks59:20

       Meaning.

    6. PAPeter Attia59:21

       To, and, and obviously it extends far beyond, quote-unquote, work.

    7. ABArthur Brooks59:25

       Yeah, for sure. So meaning is the most important because you, it's the protein. You know? You, you'll die.

    8. PAPeter Attia59:32

       Right. You can vary carbs and fat a lot.

    9. ABArthur Brooks59:34

       A lot.

    10. PAPeter Attia59:34

        You can't mess with protein too much.

    11. ABArthur Brooks59:36

        You can't mess with protein. It's a basic building block, and you're in big, big trouble when you become protein deprived because there's no other way to get it. It's not like your carbs are gonna transform into proteins, right? So meaning, the first... And, and everybody knows when they don't have a sense of meaning 'cause their life is empty. They're the most miserable when they don't have a sense of meaning. But nobody knows exactly what it is.

    12. PAPeter Attia59:57

        Hmm.

    13. ABArthur Brooks59:57

        It's like, I need this thing, but I don't know what it is. So philosophers And psychologists, by the way, define meaning as actually a combination of three things: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. That's the first, that's the first part of meaning. I believe that things happen for a particular reason. That doesn't mean my way is the right way, and it might be randomness. My father was a PhD biostatistician, also very religious, and he used to say that the greatest miracle in the world was randomness, that God built the universe with randomness and, and, and regular distributions of events. It's just such an extraordinary thing. He thought that miracles were events on, uh, extreme tail events-

    14. PAPeter Attia1:00:42

        Mm-hmm

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:00:42

        ... on, in, in random distributions, and God loved randomness. He, uh-- in other words, this is, there's lots and lots of different ways to understand the coherence part, why things are coherent, right? The second is, is purpose, which is direction. Your life has direction. I have-- in, there's a, there's a word in, in sa- you're, you're not a sailor, are you? I can't really, I can't... There's a word called the rhumb line, R-H-U-M line. It's actually a much more common word in Spanish, el rumbo, and it's actually part of common parlance. Rumbo means, means the, the endpoint toward which your, your voyage is tending.

    16. PAPeter Attia1:01:16

        Yep.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:01:17

        You're not gonna get there, and you're gonna vary from it, but you have to have a direction.

    18. PAPeter Attia1:01:20

        A North Star. You have to have something you're navigating onto.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:01:23

        You have to have something-

    20. PAPeter Attia1:01:23

        Yeah

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:01:23

        ... right, navigationally. And the last is, is significance. It would matter if I weren't alive. It would matter if I'm not here. So these are the component parts. Now, these are worth thinking about in detail in our lives, but here's the way-- I have a kind of a diagnostic test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis. [clears throat] And the reason this is useful, it's a two-question exam. [chuckles] And, and if somebody doesn't have real answers-- everybody's got PC answers, you know, answers you give your mom or whatever.

    22. PAPeter Attia1:01:54

        [laughs]

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:01:54

        But if you don't have real answers to this, the good news is these are the two questions to go looking for answers to in your life. This is your vision quest, is to find the answers to these by reading, by experiencing, by meditating, by spending time by yourself, by praying, by asking people's advice, by therapy. I don't know. Do your thing, right? Question number one is why are you alive? Why are you alive? You gotta have an answer. Not my answer, your answer, a real answer. Question number two is for what are you willing to die today? Now, the wr- the-- you flunk this quiz by saying, "I don't know." That's how you flunk the quiz. But then the adventure actually begins after you flunk the quiz 'cause, like, I'm gonna figure that out. I'm gonna go find those answers. I'm gonna read. I'm gonna consider. I'm gonna do all the things that you do metacognitively to find the answer to these questions.

    24. PAPeter Attia1:02:45

        But let's think about that for a second. There are probably a lot of people who cannot answer one, who can answer two.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:02:54

        Or who can answer one but can't answer two. I'm alive because, you know, the, some biological process, et cetera, et cetera, but number two is I don't know what I'm willing to die for.

    26. PAPeter Attia1:03:03

        Okay. So I wanna-- c- let's clarify that, right? So are you asking one through the lens of biology?

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:03:11

        It depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning. So the fir- the way to answer the first question, why are you alive, is either-

    28. PAPeter Attia1:03:16

        'Cause a, a spiritual person or a religious person would have a divine response-

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:03:20

        Right

    30. PAPeter Attia1:03:20

        ... to the first question.
11. 1:07:55 – 1:12:03

    The four quarters of your life and how that relates to the meaning of your life

    1. PAPeter Attia1:07:55

       It's definitely something I've spent much more time thinking about in the past year than, than certainly any time before.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:08:02

       People typically do around age 50.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:08:04

       Yeah.

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:08:04

       People typically do. You know, the, um, our, the, in ancient Vedic physics, there's a, uh, the theory of the four quarters of life.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:08:14

       Mm-hmm.

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:08:15

       You know, we think about, you know, adult and kid and adult and all that, and, you know, we talked, last time we talked, we were talking about From Strength to Strength, which is my last book and, but, uh, which was, is a lot about that. But the f- and according to this ancient Hindu thinking, you've got brahmacharya, which is your student phase, the first quarter of your life. The second quarter of your life is called grihastha, which is the householder phase where you're, you know, you're hustling and you're starting your family and your work. The third quarter, going in from the second to the third, is the second adolescence into something called vanaprastha, which means these two Sanskrit words, to retire into the forest, and it's supposed to happen around age 50. And what happens is that, that certain things fade and other things become more salient to you. Um, m- more transcendental things start to become more important to you, and part of this has to do with the change in your brain, change in your strengths, the change in your crystallized intelligence. These are real phenomena that neuroscientists have i- identified and social psychologists as well. But as a spiritual matter, it means, what is my retirement into the forest? What does that actually mean? It means I need to... Certain things are more important to me than they used to be. These are important questions, not 'cause I'm gonna die, but because I just wanna know. You know, what does this actually mean about... And, and a lot of people wind up coming back to the faith of their youth when this happens. A lot of people will develop a meditation practice. Some people will find that they will get deeply, deeply into fitness in ways they hadn't before and doing things that are super hard for them, that challenge them as human beings. Some people will change careers, um, do something that they've always wanted to do, but something that has more artistic significance than it, the more creative significance than it had before. But all of that is this vanaprastha, and the whole point of that is to get to the fourth quarter, which is called sannyasa, and that's enlightenment. To sit at the feet of the guru and to, and to bask in the glow of the master is kind of how the Hindus will talk about it, but you gotta do the work to get there. You gotta ask the questions and be on the quest, and that's your third quarter around age 50.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:10:21

       And do you think that each of these quarters, which I recall from our first discussion, don't necessarily reflect equal chunks of time on the calendar, um, but do you think that they require an emphasis on different elements of those three macronutrients of happiness?

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:10:39

       I do. I do. And, and, and again, this is, um, this is mixing, you know, neuroscience plus social psychology plus Vedic wisdom, and this is, like, where no man has gone before. Um, but I do, and I've actually asked this to some teachers that I haven't, um, you know, every, every n- I go to India every year, and I study with, you know, various gurus and, and spiritual teachers, which is outside my tradition. I'm a Catholic. But it makes me a better Catholic, and it makes me a better social scientist too, quite frankly. And I have a teacher in, uh, uh, Palakkad, which is in southern India, a guy named Nocher Venkataraman, a Tamil guy, and I was asking him about, you know, precisely these sets of questions. And he said that people pass through these phases, you know, depending on how adroit they are spiritually at different times and different periods of time. But you have to do all the learning from each one. You need to be a student. You need to develop your life. Then you need to retire into the forest and contemplate these questions such that you can get to the, the ultimate destination, which is this, this period of enlightenment in your life. And, and in so doing, you need to develop these different parts of your life. You, you can't do this without the love that you share with other people, which is inherently enjoyable. You can't do this without achieving certain things and understanding that your life requires a certain amount of satisfaction, and that has achievement, that has earned success involved in it. And of course, you can't do that without understanding what meaning is to you and what the meaning of your life really is.

12. 1:12:03 – 1:20:55

    Putting metacognition into practice

    1. PAPeter Attia1:12:03

       So we've talked about metacognition. Let's, let's, let's talk about it a bit more. You've already very quickly rattled off the components of it, but-

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:12:10

       Or the techniques.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:12:10

       Yeah.

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:12:11

       Yeah.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:12:11

       But, but let's go into it in a bit more detail. Um- There were basically four techniques associated. Is that-

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:12:17

       Yeah, more or less

    7. PAPeter Attia1:12:18

       ... yeah

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:12:18

       I mean, you can break them up into sub techniques, et cetera-

    9. PAPeter Attia1:12:20

       Right

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:12:20

        ... et cetera, and this is, this is an artificial distinction between them. But again, what you're trying to do is get space. You know when your grandmother said, "Peter, when you're angry, count to 10." Everybody's grandmother did that. The research suggests, by the way, count to 30 when you're angry, and while you're counting to 30, envision the consequences of what you're, what you're thinking of doing, and then you will be fully metacognitive. Then you will be processing the information-

    11. PAPeter Attia1:12:46

        Mm-hmm

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:12:46

        ... in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. So that was really good advice from grandma, and we can put a finer point on it. Other ways to do that, what, what you want is space between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. You want space so that your executive brain can experience emotions and deal with them appropriately. If you don't give it space, you'll be reactive, and your limbic system will manage you. That's the problem that a lot of people have in life. It's like, [clears throat] "I'm sad, I cry. I'm angry, I yell. I'm happy, I laugh." You know, whatever it happens to be, but that's no way to live because then the, then the kids are in charge of the, of the family budget. Big problem. [laughs]

    13. PAPeter Attia1:13:23

        [laughs]

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:13:23

        Big problem. Depends on the kids obviously, but that can be a big problem. And that, that kind of spontaneity comes at an enormous cost. How do you put space in it? [clears throat] Therapy's a good way for some people. It's not my thing. Some people do. Some people get a lot of ... Uh, they learn about their emotions this way. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is super useful for a lot of people. Meditation can do that because most meditation techniques, they will allow you to, no, require that you analyze yourself at a certain remove. "Peter's feeling sad right now. How interesting that Peter is feeling sad." It's just information. It's just information, just analyzing information, being a scientist about yourself. Prayer is really good for this. Why? Because you're bringing in a higher power to help you manage these things, and in so doing, you're experiencing them very consciously in, in the executive, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead, where that's where you want, that's where you want it to reside. That's where you can make ... Some people do this through intensive exposure to nature, you know, walking before dawn for an hour without devices. Some people will do this indirectly by, I don't know, studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and learning how to analyze them, you know, whatever it happens to be. One way or the other, you don't want the limbic system in charge. And then when you get this distance, then when you really have it in the executive, when you, when, when-

    15. PAPeter Attia1:14:43

        But ju- so just be clear, you feel that this can be done without a mindfulness-based meditation practice-

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:14:49

        Yes

    17. PAPeter Attia1:14:50

        ... which is clearly the, the, the, the potent exercise that one uses to distance-

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:14:55

        Right

    19. PAPeter Attia1:14:56

        ... self from thought.

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:14:57

        Exactly right. Well, for example, one of the most effective ways to do this that has nothing to do with meditation at all is journaling. Journaling. If you write down your ... For, for example, uh, a lot of people suffer from anxiety. A lot of people listening to us suffer from anxiety. Anxiety is basically unfocused fear. That's what it is. It's a bombardment of stress hormones-

    21. PAPeter Attia1:15:17

        Mm

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:15:17

        ... having to do with the fact that there's a sense of, pervasive sense of doom that's undefined. Undefined fear, unfocused fear. That's what anxiety, generalized anxiety is really all about. And so you can do a lot of things. You can take, you know, pharmaceuticals to, to, or you can take benzodiazepines that will, you know, mute the, the stress response, et cetera, et cetera. But the whole point of metacognition and journaling when it comes to anxiety is that you force your prefrontal cortex to take over by writing down the five things you're most afraid of right now. It's like, "God, I'm freaking out, man. I'm freaking out. My heart is fluttering. I've got the butterflies in my stomach. I can't sleep, or I wake up too early. I don't know what's going on." It's like, "I'm feeling like I'm under threat." Okay. Get out the pad and paper. Number one, what am I actually afraid of? Number two, what am I actually afraid of? Put it... And what you've done is you've, you've taken the sense of anxiety. It's not perfect, but this as a strategic technique will work miracles in your life. If you s- consistently journal about your emotions and then, by the way, throw it away afterward because you don't want everybody in your family to find it, um, because who knows, maybe you're thinking forbidden thoughts or have forbidden fears, that you can, you absolutely determine the things. And that's ... Anxiety's a maladapted kind of fear. You know, "Ugh, I'm doomed," is not the way cavemen were supposed to feel fear. Fear is so that you can run away from a tiger. Fear is supposed to be extremely episodic. You know, our forebearers in the Pleistocene, they were mostly hanging out all day, and then occasionally something bad would happen and they'd have to run really fast and climb a tree. That's what fear is for.

    23. PAPeter Attia1:16:55

        Yeah, it seems like it was 99% boredom, 1% extreme panic.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:16:59

        Yeah, or it was 99% fellowship, 99% hanging out, 99% with your friends-

    25. PAPeter Attia1:17:05

        Mm

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:17:05

        ... 99% with your tribe, making jokes and, you know, popping a grub in your mouth from time to time. That's really what it was. It was a w- w- You know, some anthropologists think that the quality of life has dramatically fallen in the modern era [laughs] uh, in what we have today. But it's also one of the components of modern life is this generalized anxiety where we're processing outside stimuli as minor threats, and we get a little drip of cortisol into our system constantly, constantly, constantly.

    27. PAPeter Attia1:17:30

        Yeah.

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:17:30

        And it's really unfocused. So focus it. Focus it. Write down the five things, and they suddenly will feel a lot less threatening, and they'll be more bounded, and they'll be determined in a way where you can actually deal with them and, and, and start getting some solutions as opposed to just feeling afraid. That's what that's really... So that's an example of non-mindful meditation metacognition, as simple as a pad and paper.

    29. PAPeter Attia1:17:56

        What about this idea of journaling positive experiences as kind of a database?

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:18:00

        [clears throat] I like doing that, but what I like doing better is I like journaling negative experiences and learning from them.
13. 1:20:55 – 1:36:07

    What might explain the societal downdrift in happiness over the last few decades?

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:20:55

       .

    2. PAPeter Attia1:20:55

       Let's talk about the difference between optimism and hope.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:20:57

       Yeah.

    4. PAPeter Attia1:20:58

       You comment on this.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:21:00

       Yeah. It's a, people use them interchangeably. There's so much, you know, um, uh, empathy and compassion. You know, it's like they, they're not the same. These things are never the same. One of the things I do in my class is I always have a distinction between two things that seem the same, and then see what the distinction will actually do for l- our lives if we understand them. And optimism and hope are, it's a classic case. Optimism is nothing more than a prediction. "Things will be okay. It'll be okay. Everything's gonna be all right." Maybe yes, maybe not. Hope is, "No matter what happens, I can do something. Something can be done, and I can do something about it." Hope is empowering. You can be a very pessimistic but very hopeful person. You can be an optimist who's hopeless. You know, "I think things are gonna be okay, thank God, because there's nothing I can do." Right? Hope actually is tied to happiness. Optimism generally is not. Optimism is something, it's just kind of a sunny predictor. You might be an optimist because you're a happy person, but the optimism itself doesn't make you happier. Hope is a-

    6. PAPeter Attia1:22:00

       What is the opposite of hope? Despair?

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:22:03

       Is despair, is hopelessness. To be hopeless about it, to say, "There's n- there's nothing I can do. Nothing can be done, and there's nothing I can do." Right? That's almost never true.

    8. PAPeter Attia1:22:14

       And what is the root of that feeling or belief system?

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:22:18

       Despair usually is the, is an extreme form of disempowerment. And, you know, people get it from childhood trauma. I mean, there's some research that suggests that the way that people are brought up can make them inherently hopeless. But people actually can get into kind of a hopeless stance, and part of it is self-definition. For example, you know, we have a real tendency in our culture to want people to live on the basis of victimhood and grievance. People will actually, their identity will be victim. "I'm a victim." And, and their identity will be grievance against the people who have power over me. And I get it. I mean, there are people who have power over us, and there's legitimate grievance, and people are victims. But to identify v- as a victim is the recipe for hopelessness and despair.

    10. PAPeter Attia1:22:58

        And why is that becoming more prevalent, or does it just seem that way?

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:23:02

        Well, it, it, it goes in waves. And what happens is in, in we have an identity culture at this point. And, and one of the, one of the things that you typically find is that, that especially manipulative leaders will tell people that they can be virtuous on the basis of victimhood, that victimhood is inherently virtuous. That's called virt- and literally in the social science literature, it's called virtuous victimhood. And it's incredibly disempowering for the followers. It's incredibly manipulative, um, and malignant on the part of leaders who are actually doing this, and we're in a period in our culture of polarization and hatred and contempt where there's just a lot of that going around.

    12. PAPeter Attia1:23:39

        And it seems that both sides have a m- you know, h- have agency in this, just different flavors of it.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:23:45

        Oh, totally. Oh, totally. You, you look at the most manipulative leaders, and those, these manipulative leaders, they have the characteristic almost always of what we call the dark triad of, of personality, which is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. That happens in 7% of the population, according to Scott Barry Kaufman. He's done the best work on the dark triad. So and that means trait psychopathy. It doesn't mean you're an ax murderer. It means you have tr- that means you, you're, you're way less remorseful about your negative actions than people in the population. If you're narcissistic, Machiavellianism, and have trait psychopathy, you're a dark triad. You're most likely gonna wanna disempower people- create a movement of people who are relatively disempowered because you want to manipulate people.

    14. PAPeter Attia1:24:25

        And do we see that more concentrated in politics?

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:24:28

        Yes, right now in particular. So what politics does this where we reward dark triads, and what we're doing is we're rewarding dark triads on both sides of the political spectrum right now. So it's a war of dark triads, and their followers are being systematically disempowered into a climate of virtuous victimhood. That's what we actually see. How do-- You know, what's, what's the source of my virtue? The fact that I'm getting screwed is the source of my, is the source of my virtue. That's, uh... Okay, I mean, uh, agree or disagree that that's a, a hell of a way to run a country, right? But for sure, this is why happiness is in decline. [laughs]

    16. PAPeter Attia1:25:02

        Yeah. Where do we think we are on the long arc of happiness? So I, uh, I'm not... Again, I, I'm prob- I would probably be less optimistic that our ancestors were, were that happy. I think they, uh, I think it would be hard for us to relate to what they went through, depending on how far back we wanna go. But, um, I have the feeling that most people would much prefer to be alive today than to have been alive 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago-

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:25:30

        Right

    18. PAPeter Attia1:25:31

        ... or 100,000 years ago.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:25:32

        Of course, you'd choose it. Of course.

    20. PAPeter Attia1:25:33

        So, so, so on the one hand, we all have this amazing good luck, which is, as you said, there's eight billion people on the planet. Um, 100 billion have already died. In the last hundred, in the last 250,000 years, 100 billion people have died.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:25:49

        Right.

    22. PAPeter Attia1:25:49

        So how lucky are we that we were born right now?

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:25:52

        Or you could say, "Well, it should be a lot better if I were born 200 years from now," perhaps. [laughs] Who knows?

    24. PAPeter Attia1:25:57

        Maybe. Um-

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:25:58

        There's a sense of dread. [laughs]

    26. PAPeter Attia1:25:59

        Yeah.

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:26:00

        But I, I don't know.

    28. PAPeter Attia1:26:00

        I don't, I don't know.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:26:01

        Yeah.

    30. PAPeter Attia1:26:01

        I, I kinda wish I, I, I kind of... Yeah, I don't know. I've, I've thought about this a little bit. But regardless, it is what it is. And yet there are probably objective data that would say we are... What, what's our happiness today relative to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Like, if you go back to immediately following World War II, what has been the trajectory of happiness?
14. 1:36:07 – 1:49:17

    Taking charge of your happiness: discipline, transcendent experiences, and other deliberate actions for happiness

    1. PAPeter Attia1:36:07

       So as individuals now thinking about some of those things, um, I, I, I just based on my own personal experience would agree that, you know, social media usually does not produce a feeling that is a positive one. It's usually a negative one. Um- What, what do you think are now... If we're gonna put on our, our me- metacognitive hats and self-manage, right? So, so if we're, if we, if we think of ourselves as capable to self-manage through difficulty as opposed to saying, "Look, we're all gonna move to India-"

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:36:45

       Right

    3. PAPeter Attia1:36:45

       ... and we're, we're gonna, you know-

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:36:46

       [laughs]

    5. PAPeter Attia1:36:46

       ... take up, take up a amongst tradition."

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:36:48

       Take sitar lessons or something, right?

    7. PAPeter Attia1:36:50

       Yeah.

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:36:50

       Yeah.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:36:50

       I mean, a- a- again, most of us have, don't have that luxury, and we still want to coexist in this world. What, what are the, what are the steps we wanna take to minimize the damage of these things, um, and at the same time, you know, sort of try to find this, this, th- this, this semblance of happiness?

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:37:09

        So that's the reason I do my work, is precisely because greater happiness, not perfect happiness, that's not the goal. It's not even desirable. You know, people say, "I wanna be happy." No, you don't. Pure happiness, that would mean the eradication of your negative feelings, and you'd be dead. That'd be the eradication of negative experiences. You wouldn't learn and grow, right?

    11. PAPeter Attia1:37:28

        Well, also, I would argue we would get back to the same problem with satisfaction.

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:37:34

        Yeah.

    13. PAPeter Attia1:37:34

        Wouldn't we?

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:37:34

        For sure.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:37:35

        If, I mean, if-

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:37:35

        I mean, it's, it's impossible to begin with.

    17. PAPeter Attia1:37:36

        Yeah.

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:37:37

        It's a moot point.

    19. PAPeter Attia1:37:37

        Yeah.

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:37:38

        The, the point is, is that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction, and we wanna get happier. It's, Oprah Winfrey calls it happierness. That's the goal. It's a, it's a good neologism to actually get the point across. So to do that, you need information. That's why I teach about the science of happiness, because it's just, it's a super interesting body of knowledge. I write about it every week because it's fascinating. People like to learn about it. Then you have to make, do the work to change your habits, and then you need to share it with other people so it, it becomes permanent in your consciousness. You know, that's really what it's all about, and everybody can do that. I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness aficionados and teachers. That's what I want. I want a movement of people saying, "My hobby, my hobby's learning about happiness, and in my job, I'm a happiness teacher." Whatever your job is, whether you're, you know, managing a family or managing a company or just trying to manage yourself is what I talk about. And to do that, you have to know the facts on this. There's certain things you need to protect yourself from, and there's certain things you need to do. You need to be, you need to, you need aversion, and you need approach. There's certain things you need to approach. You need to take seriously your spiritual life. You need to take it seriously. Doesn't mean you, now, you have to-

    21. PAPeter Attia1:38:47

        Let's talk about that for the non-religious-

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:38:49

        Right

    23. PAPeter Attia1:38:49

        ... person.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:38:50

        So-

    25. PAPeter Attia1:38:50

        Which is, I guess, I mean, w- most people listening to us are not religious.

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:38:53

        Right. Right. For sure.

    27. PAPeter Attia1:38:54

        Um, and by the way, I think most people would look at someone like you and be a bit confused because on the one hand, you're a scientist, you're a serious intellectual guy, and yet you describe yourself as having a very strong religious faith.

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:39:07

        Right.

    29. PAPeter Attia1:39:08

        And yet you don't have a hard time talking about things that occurred, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of years ago.

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:39:13

        Right.
15. 1:49:17 – 1:57:52

    Tracking happiness: biomarkers and micronutrients behind the macronutrients of happiness

    1. PAPeter Attia1:49:17

       So finally, how, how would you think about the biomarkers of happiness?

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:49:21

       Hmm.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:49:21

       Right? So if we, if we think about my world, we have so many biomarkers. It's one of the things that makes our job relatively straightforward. We have blood-based biomarkers. We have biomarkers of performance, you know, your VO2 max, strength. We can look at body composition, all of these things. If, if, if someone comes to you, and you were the doctor in this sense, and they, they, they wanna, they wanna obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness, and then they wanna be able to track their progress. I mean, does that, is that a silly idea here because it's so self-evident?

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:49:56

       No, it's not a silly idea at all, and I've t- I've thought about it so much, and I've had dozens of entrepreneurs wanna, wanna engineer the idea and app-ize it, you know? Because, like, I could... Popular class, Harvard, you know, you gotta be able to turn it into some sort of a product, and the way that you would do that is by having relatively complicated but measurable phenomenon that you could look at and get better at. And, and that's what would be a proxy marker for the underlying construct, which is happy- happiness. Here's the problem with that. Here's the fundamental problem. It's a different species of challenge. We talked about this one time before, about the difference between two... There's two types of problems in human life. There's complicated problems and complex problems. And for those who didn't actually listen to the last time that we did our show, did your, your show together, the complicated problems are really, really tricky and take a lot of computational horsepower and, and learning, but once you solve them, you can replicate the solution with effortless ease forever, right? You can, you can do the biomarkers. Complex problems are incredibly easy to understand but impossible to solve, right? They're impossible to solve because there, there are too many permutations of what can actually happen. So you're, you're like Formula 1 racing, right? And so I'm gonna set up this unbelievable-- I'm gonna take a bunch of Unix machines, and I'm gonna wire them together, and I'm gonna, you know, 250,000 lines of code, and I'm gonna simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year. You're like, "You're an idiot." Why? Because F1 is complex. That's why it's interesting and you wanna watch it. That's why it's so exciting to watch a Formula 1 race, because it's complex. I know what winning looks like. You cross the finish line before the other guys. It's the simplest thing in the world. But a million different things can happen. A quadrillion things can actually happen. That's the fun of it. All of life's joys are complex problems. Most of the solutions that we get from technology and science are complicated solutions. The biggest problems that we have right now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love, and we're trying to do it with complicated solutions like Instagram. A complex, a complicated solutions to a, to, to a complex problem will always leave you cold and make you worse off. You know, basically, I say I'm gonna get rid of all the Formula 1 races 'cause it's dangerous, and I'm gonna have nothing more than computer simulations of it. It's like, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I've actually ever heard, right? So that's the key thing for us to understand, and that's the reason I can't app-ize this. Happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon, and you can only get it by living it and working on it and making progress and failing, just like your marriage. I just described your marriage.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:52:32

       Now, in that sense, at least I get feedback in my marriage because, you know, when I screw up and I apologize, I see that my wife forgives me.

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:52:43

       Right.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:52:43

       When I, you know, w- when I, when I make a mistake, I feel the lenience and the love.

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:52:50

       Right.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:52:50

       When I need the help, the help is there.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:52:52

        Right.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:52:53

        Um, so indirectly, I'm getting really good feedback. And conversely, if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize, like, we're two ships passing and, you know, we don't fight, but we don't have anything in common. You know, if they were thoughtful enough, they'd recognize things are not well. So they'd have a barometer there. Um, do you think that using others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness, or do we rely on our own internal assessment?

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:53:22

        We wind up with our own internal assessment, but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric. How happy am I? Hmm. So we have three so far today in the conversation: levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning. We can know whether or not we have those things on the basis of the science that we've talked about and the ways that we can get better at it and practice it. The techniques for getting more of those things are your faith, family, friends, and satisfying work. I break it down even further, by the way. I don't try to make it complicated. It's still complex. But I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own happiness that are the micronutrients behind the macronutrients, dozens of dimensions, and I'm rating myself. I weight those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macro, the macronutrients. And then I have scores on those dimensions, and I wanna make progress every year. I do it on my birthday and half birthday. My half birthday's coming up in November. November 21st is my half birthday, and I'm gonna fill out my spreadsheet and say, "I'm not on pace to get the progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May when my birthday comes round again. What are the things I need to actually touch up?" So what am I doing? I'm kind of doing a curve fit to the complex problem I'm trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated solution. I give all those dimensions to my students, and I say, "Look, do the reading. Do the work. You know, I've read 10,000 articles about this, so you don't have to." But I do try to break it down a little bit so that I can have a multidimensional problem. One of the things that we know with complex problems is the more multidimensional you make it, the more likely you are to get better solutions. The worst thing that you can do is like, "How do I feel today?" That's, that's, that's... You're not gonna make progress under those circumstances.

    13. PAPeter Attia1:55:02

        What are, what are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you?

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:55:05

        It'll be the warmth of my marriage, the relationship with my kids, how well things are going with respect to the, the, the, the value I'm trying to create with my career, you know, the stability that I have in my friendships, the degree to which I think-- I feel like I'm properly philanthropic, right? The interest I'm taking in my professional life. You know, the closeness that I have with, um, you know, certain intimates in my life. The extent to which I'm avoiding or finding, um, um, conflict in my work relationships. All these things go into my spreadsheet, right? 'Cause I know that they really matter across these three dimensions. The extent to which I'm, I'm, I'm enjoying my life over the course of each day. Um, I'm... and, and I do these particular ratings, and then I put them together with a weighted sum across them, and I've messed with a weighted sum, and I've messed with it and experimented with it until I said, "Yep, that seems about right. That seems about right with respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life." So you make it a multidimensional problem. There's a huge body of social science that talked about imperfect linear models, where you take big problems and make them into a bunch of little, tiny problems, and that curve fits to the complex thing you're trying to solve.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:56:13

        Now, you evaluate that twice a year-

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:56:15

        Yeah

    17. PAPeter Attia1:56:15

        ... and therefore, you can't have it be dependent on the technical noise of the day or the week.

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:56:19

        Yeah.

    19. PAPeter Attia1:56:20

        You're trying to answer these questions through the lens of the last half of the year.

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:56:23

        Yeah, and if I'm having, like, a big conflict with my wife on my birthday, I don't do it that day.

    21. PAPeter Attia1:56:27

        Don't do it that day.

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:56:28

        Yeah, I don't do it that way. I do it 'cause I don't want the noise, is what it comes down to, right? And if something really, really great happens to me, "The book is doing great," I don't answer it that day either because I don't want my, my, you know, the neurochemistry to be affecting it unduly. Although, at this point in my life, I've been doing it for 25 years. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty, I'm pretty cold and calculating.

    23. PAPeter Attia1:56:49

        I think that would be a reasonable app to start with.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:56:51

        Could be. Could be. Yeah, and that's very different than the biomarkers-

    25. PAPeter Attia1:56:54

        Yeah

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:56:54

        ... for sure, because I don't actually know what you would look at in-- I mean, look, what are the biomarkers? I wanna make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol, right? I, I wanna make sure that, you know, I'm, my hormones are balanced. I wanna make sure that my adrenal system is not-

    27. PAPeter Attia1:57:07

        Oh, yeah, yeah, but when I went biomarkers-

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:57:08

        ... overtaxed. But that's not what we're talking about.

    29. PAPeter Attia1:57:09

        Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, when I went biomarkers, I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers. I, I mean anything that is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for-

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:57:22

        Yeah
16. 1:57:52 – 2:02:23

    The value in minimizing the self and looking outward

    1. PAPeter Attia1:57:52

       very interesting. I'll tell you the last thing I, I, I, I, I, I think that's very powerful and worth talking about, and, and I'm curious if you think this is something valuable for everyone or just a subset of people is, is kind of the, uh, less self.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:58:08

       Yeah. The what?

    3. PAPeter Attia1:58:09

       Right? Take away the mirrors.

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:58:10

       Oh, yeah.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:58:11

       Yeah.

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:58:11

       Yeah.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:58:12

       I, I, I found that to be a very interesting-

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:58:13

       Yeah

    9. PAPeter Attia1:58:13

       ... discussion.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:58:14

        Yeah, yeah.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:58:15

        Uh, because you even talked about that literally. Like, some people will literally minimize their, their view of themself in a mirror, and then, of course, you talk about broader versions of that-

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:58:26

        Right

    13. PAPeter Attia1:58:26

        ... such as social media and things like that. Do you think everybody would benefit from this?

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:58:30

        Yeah. So William James talked about the I self versus the me self. You must have both. When you're looking in the mirror, you're two people. You're the looker and the lookee, right? And you need both because you need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you, but you need to have a reflection of yourself to understand who you are. I need to see, but I need to be seen by me so I can understand my context, I can understand my place in the world. If you don't do that, you'll get, you know, run over by a car if you don't have the I self, or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended them repeatedly because you don't understand the me self is the way that this works out. The problem is, in our society, it's all me self, no I self. Most people are not observing the world very much at all. They're being observed, and they're observing themselves.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:59:09

        Mm.

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:59:10

        Right? They're trying to be observed, and they're observing themselves. So social media is a classic case of this. Checking your notifications is nothing more than a me self obsession. Like, "What are they saying about me? How-- What kind of im-im-impact am I having on other people?" And, and I get, I get it why we do it. We're evolved to wanna understand where we are in the hierarchy. Social comparison, even envy, are evolved phenomena because it helps keeps us, keep us alive and make progress. But it's misery when it takes over and when technology supercharges our ability to be in the me self state. There are moments when you can be really confused about the I self and the me self, right? Um, one time, I was, um, really thinking deeply about something, and I was kind of obsessed. My daughter and I were in the car, and I put gas in my car. I filled up the car, the car with gas, and then, you know, took off from the gas station. I'm just kind of lost in thought. And about a block later, I hear this weird ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I was like, "What's going on? Somebody's dragging a muffler." And then I'm, like, looking for somebody who's dragging a muffler around me, and then I notice that cars are honking at me and pointing at me. And I'm like, "What the hell?" So I stop the car. It turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car, out of the, out of the pump. And I was dragging-- I pulled it out of the pump, and I was, I was dragging the gas pump down the road, right? [chuckles] The, the, the hose. And I had to go back to the gas station. I find out, you know, h-how happy they are when you do that, which is not, and how expensive it is when you have to replace part of a gas pump. [chuckles] You know, it's pretty bad. But the whole point was I was the I self and the me self all at once, and it was this weird disequilibrating experience. One of the ways to get much happier is to be more in the I self and less in the me self state, is to minimize the reflection, is to think a lot less of what other people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less, and there are different ways to do that. So, um, in the book, I talk about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model. I mean, imagine that. I mean, you're living by your abs What a way to live.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:01:08

        [laughs]

    18. ABArthur Brooks2:01:09

        I mean, you're ... I mean, if you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult, that means you're never eating anything you like ever, and you're not getting enough enjoyment from your life, [laughs] right? And he was miserable for 10 years. He didn't eat what he liked. He always had headaches. He didn't feel good. He didn't have normal relationships. And, and he was ... And so he decided he had to make a change in his life. He, he wasn't living. So he literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year so he couldn't see his own abs, and his life completely changed just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors. When people are miserable in my classes, I say, "Take off, number one, take the notifications off your social media. Take the notifica- d- turn off the notifications so you're not getting notifications. Don't look at your mentions. Under any circumstances, don't pay attention to that. And then actually literally start getting rid of some of your mirrors, your literal mirrors. And what you'll do is you'll get into more of a state of looking outward, and the more you look outward, the happier you'll be, the better off your life will be when you're walking around going, 'Man, that's amazing.'" Right? And you're not, you're just not ... You know what's not amazing? Me.

    19. PAPeter Attia2:02:19

        [laughs]

    20. ABArthur Brooks2:02:21

        [laughs]

    21. PAPeter Attia2:02:22

        Indeed.

17. 2:02:23 – 2:06:03

    How Arthur surprised himself with his ability to improve his happiness

    1. PAPeter Attia2:02:24

       Arthur, what surprised you the most when you set out to write this? You know, you're writing a book on a topic that you've studied for decades. You've been writing column after column after column weekly in The Atlantic. You're, you've, you've written other books that touch on similar themes. But, uh, uh, uh, I have to believe that there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before, or vice versa.

    2. ABArthur Brooks2:02:47

       Yeah, I mean, I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten clearer and my knowledge has gotten deeper. You know, a lot of things that I would've thought, and I could come up with a lot of little examples, but the, here's the biggie [clears throat] that my, my paradigm has been shifted. I've have been studying happiness for a long time. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008. But it was kind of like a book on astronomy. It was, um, it was observing happiness from a distance. Who are the happy people? Who are the unhappy people? It never really occurred to me that with the science I could change my own life. And I'm not a fundamentally happy person. Mad scientists struggle. They just do, because negative affect is so much, it gets your attention so much more strongly than positive affect does. If you're high positive and high negative, you're gonna feel, on balance, pretty negative a lot.

    3. PAPeter Attia2:03:33

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ABArthur Brooks2:03:34

       So I always thought to myself, "Happiness is a really interesting thing, but it's not my lot. It isn't my lot." I went through years and years and years like that. And when I came back and started The New Happiness Projects, writing my column and the books that I've written in the past couple of years, I said, "All right, let's see if that's true. I can't move the stars as an astronomer, but maybe I can use the social science and the neuroscience in ways where I can, with the knowledge, change my habits and get happier." I kind of doubted it. I sort of thought I couldn't, and I did. I actually did. I changed my life. Um, I'm usually eight to nine weeks out on my column in The Atlantic because I'm trying the things that I'm suggesting. I'm a lab rat. I'm, I know you do this, too, because when you're, you're gonna, you're not gonna suggest something to your clients that you don't, that you don't feel comfortable with, even as a human being. This is what I'm doing, too. And my, I mean, I'm taking constant updates. I take the tests with my students on, on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction. My wellbeing has risen by 60% in the past four years. 60%. I mean, it was a pretty low base. [laughs]

    5. PAPeter Attia2:04:41

       [laughs]

    6. ABArthur Brooks2:04:42

       It was a bad denominator, but it's been dramatic. And I didn't actually, I didn't trust, I didn't actually believe, but it's actually true. And anybody can do this.

    7. PAPeter Attia2:04:53

       Yeah. It's actually, it's, it's a great message, Arthur, because you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy, 'cause if you did, you'd feel like a hypocrite all day long, right?

    8. ABArthur Brooks2:05:04

       Totally.

    9. PAPeter Attia2:05:04

       You'd feel like any moment you didn't have that warm, fuzzy, happy feeling, you'd be like, "Oh my God, how am I the guy that wrote the book on happiness?" And-

    10. ABArthur Brooks2:05:10

        Yeah, and furthermore, I'd be, I'd be faking it all the time. Be faking it, and my wife would be, "Aren't you supposed to be happy all the time?"

    11. PAPeter Attia2:05:19

        [laughs]

    12. ABArthur Brooks2:05:21

        [laughs] And somebody sees me kind of grouchy in the airport and be like, "Man, that's very disillusioning." [laughs]

    13. PAPeter Attia2:05:26

        Yeah. Yeah.

    14. ABArthur Brooks2:05:27

        Yeah.

    15. PAPeter Attia2:05:27

        Well, it's funny, when people see me eat a donut, they're like, "What?" And I go, "Hey, read the book, man."

    16. ABArthur Brooks2:05:32

        I know.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:05:32

        I didn't, I didn't say don't eat a donut.

    18. ABArthur Brooks2:05:34

        I just said don't eat 10 a day.

    19. PAPeter Attia2:05:35

        Yeah. [laughs]

    20. ABArthur Brooks2:05:37

        [laughs]

    21. PAPeter Attia2:05:37

        Well, Arthur, thanks so much for making time. I know, uh, I know your time's tight here in Austin.

    22. ABArthur Brooks2:05:41

        Yeah.

    23. PAPeter Attia2:05:41

        So I'm glad we had a chance to sit down today.

    24. ABArthur Brooks2:05:42

        Thank you, Peter. I have so much admiration for the work that you're doing. You're making my life better through the work that you do, and for a lot of other people, too, so thank you for that.

    25. PAPeter Attia2:05:49

        Well, you're making mine better, and likewise all the people that are listening and reading. Thank you.

    26. ABArthur Brooks2:05:53

        Right on. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:06:03