Arthur Brooks — Finding The Meaning of Your Life

1. 0:00 – 0:34

   Preview.

   1. ABArthur Brooks0:00

      What they train Marines to do in leadership is to get to 80% knowledge and then choose and stop looking.

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:06

      Mm-hmm.

   3. ABArthur Brooks0:07

      Now, that's really, really important because you're gonna be paralyzed if you're trying to get to 100% knowledge.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:10

      You're never going to have complete information.

   5. ABArthur Brooks0:11

      Which is what this, the pure seeker mentality does. If you want to seek and get higher presence, you need to go to 80%.

   6. TFTim Ferriss0:18

      Mm-hmm.

   7. ABArthur Brooks0:19

      And now, how do you get to 80%? You get to 80% by saying, "I'm pretty sure this is right."

   8. TFTim Ferriss0:23

      Mm-hmm.

   9. ABArthur Brooks0:23

      "And this is right enough that I'm gonna turn my attention to another dimension-

   10. TFTim Ferriss0:28

       Mm-hmm

   11. ABArthur Brooks0:28

       ... on this." And that means if you're in love, you should get married.

   12. TFTim Ferriss0:32

       [laughs] Wow.

2. 0:34 – 1:45

   The vascular Arthur Brooks returns.

   1. ABArthur Brooks0:34

      [laughs]

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:34

      Arthur Brooks, we meet again.

   3. ABArthur Brooks0:35

      Nice to see you, Tim.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:36

      [laughs] Nice to see you.

   5. ABArthur Brooks0:37

      [laughs]

   6. TFTim Ferriss0:38

      You know, glad to see your, the vascularity in your arms is still visible even through the long sleeve shirt.

   7. ABArthur Brooks0:43

      Yeah. [laughs]

   8. TFTim Ferriss0:46

      [laughs] Because every woman wants a vascular man. [laughs]

   9. ABArthur Brooks0:49

      You know, I, I, I only take my cues from the internet. Um-

   10. TFTim Ferriss0:53

       Exactly.

   11. ABArthur Brooks0:53

       [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss0:53

       My wife every day, she says, "I love you. You're so vascular."

   13. ABArthur Brooks0:57

       [laughs]

   14. TFTim Ferriss0:59

       Could really take this a lot of directions-

   15. ABArthur Brooks1:01

       [laughs]

   16. TFTim Ferriss1:02

       ... but I'm gonna take a hard left from vascularity, and I'm gonna try to pronounce Brahmamuhurta?

   17. ABArthur Brooks1:10

       Brahmamuhurta.

   18. TFTim Ferriss1:11

       Okay. Brahmamuhurta.

   19. ABArthur Brooks1:12

       Yeah.

   20. TFTim Ferriss1:12

       And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to offer some candy, much like maybe in E.T. putting the Reese's Pieces on the floor-

   21. ABArthur Brooks1:23

       Nice

   22. TFTim Ferriss1:23

       ... to lure E.T. out. I want to bring my listeners and diehards into the conversation with [laughs] a morning routine.

   23. ABArthur Brooks1:33

       Yeah. [laughs]

   24. TFTim Ferriss1:34

       And we'll, we'll talk about evening routines at the end as bookmarks, and then we're gonna dive into all sorts of stuff. But what is Brahmamuhurta, and

3. 1:45 – 3:53

   Brahmamuhurta and why Arthur studies happiness.

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:45

      could you describe your personal morning routine?

   2. ABArthur Brooks1:50

      I do have a very strong and very disciplined morning routine. And I studied love and happiness, so it's not as if I'm, you know, doing, going deep into the physiology of actually how I can have the best amount of muscle mass and minimum amount of body fat.

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:02

      Mm-hmm.

   4. ABArthur Brooks2:03

      I wanna have more love and happiness in my life, and it's not easy.

   5. TFTim Ferriss2:06

      Mm-hmm.

   6. ABArthur Brooks2:06

      So I'm a specialist in human happiness because it's hard for me. That's the first thing to-

   7. TFTim Ferriss2:11

      Yeah

   8. ABArthur Brooks2:11

      ... I know everybody who does research on happiness in the psychology behavioral science world, they're doing it for a reason.

   9. TFTim Ferriss2:17

      Yeah.

   10. ABArthur Brooks2:17

       It's sort of me search more than research.

   11. TFTim Ferriss2:19

       Mm-hmm.

   12. ABArthur Brooks2:20

       But one of the things that I've found is that discipline and an understanding of your own human physiology, the biology and neuroscience, is critical for actually becoming a happier person. So I have a morning routine that I dedicate to being both more productive and having higher wellbeing.

   13. TFTim Ferriss2:37

       Mm-hmm.

   14. ABArthur Brooks2:37

       So I'm managing mood because high negative affect is a characteristic of my personality. A- and I also need to be really productive because the morning hours are when you're most productive, especially in creative stuff. Almost everybody experiences this. And that starts with what you just mentioned, which is called the Brahmamuhurta, and I've studied a lot in India. I go to India every year. I have spiritual teachers, but also I'm very interested in behavioral science in the Vedic tradition. They came to a lot of truths way before Western social science actually came upon this. And one, and one of the ideas was Brahmamuhurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. Now, a muhurta is, is 48 minutes long. So two muhurtas, the Brahmamuhurta, is an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. And the whole idea, going back thousands of years, is you get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn, and you'll be more creative, more in touch with the divine, more productive, and happier.

   15. TFTim Ferriss3:30

       Mm-hmm.

   16. ABArthur Brooks3:30

       This was always the contention. So of course, it's been put to the test in modern behavioral science research. And sure enough, we don't know if it's two muhurtas is the right number of muhurtas, but the whole point is getting up before dawn has incredible impacts on productivity, focus, concentration, and happiness. If you're getting up when the sun is warm, you've lost the first battle.

   17. TFTim Ferriss3:49

       [laughs]

   18. ABArthur Brooks3:50

       For mood management and productivity is what it comes down to.

4. 3:53 – 8:10

   Arthur’s morning workout protocol.

   1. ABArthur Brooks3:53

      So my days always start before dawn. Now, I usually set the clock for 4:30 in the morning, which is a lot before dawn in-

   2. TFTim Ferriss4:00

      Who knew that Jocko Willink was such a fan of Vedic traditions?

   3. ABArthur Brooks4:03

      [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss4:03

      He also wakes up at 4:30.

   5. ABArthur Brooks4:04

      Yeah.

   6. TFTim Ferriss4:04

      And I completely understand.

   7. ABArthur Brooks4:05

      4:30 is a good time for a lot of different reasons. You try to retrofit your schedule to what you need to do, for sure. And that's a long time before dawn in the winter and not that long before dawn in the summer, and our, our listeners in Helsinki are like, "What do I do in July?" I mean, okay. You know, you have to tailor the routines to what you're doing, but it's very clear that this is good for productivity and very good for happiness. And then the most important thing is what do you do right after that?

   8. TFTim Ferriss4:28

      Yeah. What do you do?

   9. ABArthur Brooks4:29

      I pick up heavy things and run around.

   10. TFTim Ferriss4:31

       Okay.

   11. ABArthur Brooks4:31

       So the most im-

   12. TFTim Ferriss4:32

       What does it look like?

   13. ABArthur Brooks4:32

       Well, the most important room in my house is the gym.

   14. TFTim Ferriss4:35

       Mm-hmm.

   15. ABArthur Brooks4:35

       And I've always had a good gym in my house, down in the basement of my house. Now, down in the basement of my house is also living one of my kids and his wife and their two sons-

   16. TFTim Ferriss4:43

       [laughs]

   17. ABArthur Brooks4:43

       ... so I have to be real quiet. [laughs]

   18. TFTim Ferriss4:45

       You have to lift heavy things very quietly.

   19. ABArthur Brooks4:46

       I can't be clanking around down there because-

   20. TFTim Ferriss4:48

       [laughs]

   21. ABArthur Brooks4:48

       ... sort of like I don't wanna wake up my grandchildren. But, you know, I do, generally speaking, two-thirds resistance, one-third zone two.

   22. TFTim Ferriss4:55

       Mm-hmm.

   23. ABArthur Brooks4:55

       But I tailor that to what my day is gonna look like. So if I have a sedentary day, I'll do more zone two to start the day. And if I know I'm walking around a lot, I'm walking around campus or whatever I have to do, I know I'm gonna be walking seven or 10 miles that day, I'll do all resistance.

   24. TFTim Ferriss5:09

       Mm-hmm.

   25. ABArthur Brooks5:09

       And so that really depends. Or if I'm going on a hike with my wife on Saturday or something. But that's seven days a week. I do an hour in the gym seven days a week.

   26. TFTim Ferriss5:16

       What would the, let's just say, prototypical two-thirds resistance, one-third zone two or whatever the, the, the ratio might look like as a template, what would that look like? Like, what are the, what type of exercises? Free weights, equipment, kettlebells?

   27. ABArthur Brooks5:32

       Yeah. Yeah.

   28. TFTim Ferriss5:32

       What type of zone two do you like?

   29. ABArthur Brooks5:34

       Um-

   30. TFTim Ferriss5:34

       Because for instance, like with zone two, it's like I travel a lot. Stationary bikes can be a real hassle because-
5. 8:10 – 8:51

   Why Arthur does Zone 2 cardio without headphones.

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:10

      Mm-hmm.

   2. ABArthur Brooks8:10

      And these are these basic ideas. So it's push-pull legs, and then I'm doing usually somewhere between 20 minutes and 40 minutes of Zone 2 cardio, which I have an elliptical machine because it's super easy on the joints.

   3. TFTim Ferriss8:22

      Yeah.

   4. ABArthur Brooks8:22

      And every place, every hotel's got an elliptical machine. I've got a nice elliptical machine at home, and that's what I'm doing. And this is an hour. A lot of the time I'm doing it without headphones.

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:30

      Mm-hmm.

   6. ABArthur Brooks8:31

      It's important because you need to concentrate for... To begin with, that's your most creative time. That's like taking an hour-long shower. You get your best ideas if you work out without headphones. There's a lot of good neuroscience on that as well, and that's 4:45 to 5:45 in the morning every single day. That's the one thing I can really count on that's always gonna be good. Always gonna be good.

6. 8:51 – 15:04

   Quantifying progress as the secret to happiness.

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:51

      Do you record your workouts?

   2. ABArthur Brooks8:53

      Videotape my workouts?

   3. TFTim Ferriss8:54

      No, in any type of-

   4. ABArthur Brooks8:55

      Oh

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:56

      ... like workout journal-

   6. ABArthur Brooks8:57

      Yeah

   7. TFTim Ferriss8:57

      ... or is it so intuitive at this point that you're like, "I really know since I'm using dumbbells, and dumbbells should be consistent from place to place"? [laughs]

   8. ABArthur Brooks9:04

      I can tell you what I did on this day in 2001.

   9. TFTim Ferriss9:07

      Meaning you remember it?

   10. ABArthur Brooks9:09

       No.

   11. TFTim Ferriss9:09

       Or... Okay.

   12. ABArthur Brooks9:09

       Meaning it's written down.

   13. TFTim Ferriss9:10

       Okay. [laughs]

   14. ABArthur Brooks9:10

       Meaning it's written down.

   15. TFTim Ferriss9:10

       I was like, "Wait a second."

   16. ABArthur Brooks9:11

       Yeah. No, no, no, I'm not-

   17. TFTim Ferriss9:12

       There are some people who are like that

   18. ABArthur Brooks9:13

       ... sort of a Rain Man deal? Yeah.

   19. TFTim Ferriss9:15

       Well, for instance, people you wouldn't expect, Arnold Schwarzenegger loves chess, and when I first interviewed him, I was talking to his right-hand man, and he said, "Oh, he plays chess daily with X number of people over the course of a week or two, and he keeps track of every game-

   20. ABArthur Brooks9:30

       Yeah

   21. TFTim Ferriss9:30

       ... and every score in his head."

   22. ABArthur Brooks9:32

       That's amazing. So no, I'm not doing that.

   23. TFTim Ferriss9:34

       Yeah.

   24. ABArthur Brooks9:34

       But I can tell you, I mean, I've got... I have journals that go back, um, you know, I write it down.

   25. TFTim Ferriss9:38

       Yeah, okay.

   26. ABArthur Brooks9:38

       And so I know, you know, what's on what day and, you know, what I did. There's a whole lot of things that I keep records of, for sure.

   27. TFTim Ferriss9:44

       Mm-hmm.

   28. ABArthur Brooks9:44

       Just so I understand my own progress in life, making sure I'm not making regress in life. And for some reason, I got into the, I got into the pattern of writing down every single workout going back, you know, until back to my 30s.

   29. TFTim Ferriss9:57

       Yeah, I'm the same.

   30. ABArthur Brooks9:58

       And now I'm 61 years old, so that's a lot of datebooks. [laughs]
7. 15:04 – 17:47

   Post-workout holy half-hour.

   1. TFTim Ferriss15:04

      be. All right. You have your workout.

   2. ABArthur Brooks15:05

      Right.

   3. TFTim Ferriss15:05

      After the workout, what is your morning routine?

   4. ABArthur Brooks15:07

      I get cleaned up, then I go to mass.

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:10

      Then you go to mass.

   6. ABArthur Brooks15:10

      I'm a Catholic. I go to mass every day.

   7. TFTim Ferriss15:12

      Mm-hmm.

   8. ABArthur Brooks15:13

      And that's the experience of transcendence, which my, my path is not the only path. You know, I'm gonna say, "Everybody's gotta go to mass," and that's, that's not gonna be effective because that's not for everybody.

   9. TFTim Ferriss15:23

      Mm-hmm.

   10. ABArthur Brooks15:24

       But there is a period of reflection and transcendence that's very, very important for not just mood management, for productivity that's, that's going to follow. And there's a lot of neuroscience behind why that is effective. But for me, it's also an o- opportunity because that's, my wife gets up at 6:00.

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:39

       Mm-hmm.

   12. ABArthur Brooks15:39

       And when I'm home, I'm home about half the time. I'm on tour about half the time. I'm home, but I'm home every week.

   13. TFTim Ferriss15:44

       Mm-hmm.

   14. ABArthur Brooks15:44

       So I don't go on tour for months at a time. I go on tour for days at a time, which means that I've always got, you know, a flight home, and that's inconvenient, but that's actually a part of my life protocols, is making sure I spend every single weekend at home.

   15. TFTim Ferriss15:57

       Mm-hmm.

   16. ABArthur Brooks15:57

       I'm out maybe four weekends a year, and so that means I have lots of days at home. I have at least three or four mornings at home, and we start the day at, uh, at 6:30 mass. The two of us do that. It's very important for-

   17. TFTim Ferriss16:07

       How long is mass?

   18. ABArthur Brooks16:08

       Half an hour. Daily mass-

   19. TFTim Ferriss16:10

       Oh, all right

   20. ABArthur Brooks16:10

       ... is half an hour. You know, Sunday mass is an hour.

   21. TFTim Ferriss16:12

       Yeah.

   22. ABArthur Brooks16:12

       But, you know, daily mass is half an... You know, during the week, after 30 minutes, no souls are saved.

   23. TFTim Ferriss16:17

       [laughs]

   24. ABArthur Brooks16:20

       According to science, no.

   25. TFTim Ferriss16:22

       Yeah.

   26. ABArthur Brooks16:22

       So we do that, and that's a, that's a, that's a period of prayer and reflection. Some people prefer Vipassana meditation.

   27. TFTim Ferriss16:29

       Mm-hmm.

   28. ABArthur Brooks16:29

       Our friend Brian Holiday does a lot-

   29. TFTim Ferriss16:31

       Mm

   30. ABArthur Brooks16:31

       ... with actually studying the stoic philosophers, but you need what the ancients would call the holy hour.
8. 17:47 – 25:26

   Creatine, caffeine strategy, and 60-70 grams of protein for breakfast.

   1. TFTim Ferriss17:47

      So after the holy half hour, what happens?

   2. ABArthur Brooks17:49

      After the holy half hour, now I've taken no nutrition except for, you know, salty water with some, you know, a high dose. I take high-dose creatine monohydrate with my workout drink.

   3. TFTim Ferriss18:00

      What's high dose?

   4. ABArthur Brooks18:01

      High dose for me is 15 to 20 grams a day.

   5. TFTim Ferriss18:03

      That is a lot.

   6. ABArthur Brooks18:03

      Yeah.

   7. TFTim Ferriss18:03

      Okay, in a single dose.

   8. ABArthur Brooks18:04

      Yeah, so five, the first five is for, you know, muscle protein synthesis or-

   9. TFTim Ferriss18:08

      Mm

   10. ABArthur Brooks18:08

       ... volumization of muscles, which is really good for your workout. The other is for this just exploding area of research on the, on the biological benefits of it-

   11. TFTim Ferriss18:16

       Yeah

   12. ABArthur Brooks18:16

       ... the neurobiological benefits of it. And for me, that's really, really important because, you know, I'm a crummy sleeper. And, and, you know, Rhonda Patrick has done a lot of stuff on how, how creatine is really good when you don't sleep.

   13. TFTim Ferriss18:27

       Yeah.

   14. ABArthur Brooks18:28

       It's also really good because I'm trying to bank neurologically four hours of concentration and, and it's mostly creativity.

   15. TFTim Ferriss18:37

       Mm-hmm.

   16. ABArthur Brooks18:37

       So I have to, I have to set myself up for optimal creativity, and that's one of the best ways to do it. That's the best supplement that I've been able to find that affects my creativity later on in the morning.

   17. TFTim Ferriss18:47

       Mm.

   18. ABArthur Brooks18:47

       So-

   19. TFTim Ferriss18:48

       All right

   20. ABArthur Brooks18:48

       ... I'm adding that to my pre-workout drink. I'm not k- taking no caffeine.

   21. TFTim Ferriss18:52

       Yeah.

   22. ABArthur Brooks18:53

       This is important. I don't take any caffeine to wake up. Huberman's right on this.

   23. TFTim Ferriss18:56

       Mm-hmm.

   24. ABArthur Brooks18:56

       And so this is all... This is very contested in the literature about A2A adenosine and how caffeine blocks adenosine receptors.

   25. TFTim Ferriss19:04

       Mm-hmm.

   26. ABArthur Brooks19:04

       But I really believe, and, and Huberman believes this, but I find, I, I find this the most compelling explanation, and it absolutely works for me. I don't use caffeine to wake up. I use caffeine to focus.

   27. TFTim Ferriss19:14

       Mm-hmm.

   28. ABArthur Brooks19:15

       Because what I want is I actually want circulating adenosine to metabolize and to clear endogenously.

   29. TFTim Ferriss19:21

       Mm-hmm.

   30. ABArthur Brooks19:21

       And I want lots and lots of clarity, plenty of open parking spots for the adenosine receptors that I can then fill two to three hours after I wake up with caffeine.
9. 25:26 – 27:48

   Four hours of distraction-free deep work and Hemingway’s protocol.

   1. ABArthur Brooks25:26

      [laughs]

   2. TFTim Ferriss25:26

      [laughs] You have your 60 to 70 grams of protein as described, and then you are sitting down to write? What are you doing?

   3. ABArthur Brooks25:33

      Yeah, then I sit down to write. If I'm at home, then, then I sit down to write, and there's no distractions.

   4. TFTim Ferriss25:38

      Mm-hmm.

   5. ABArthur Brooks25:38

      I mean, there's no meetings, there's no Zoom. I mean, if the president of the United States or the Pope calls, there'll be a morning meeting, but that's kind of it.

   6. TFTim Ferriss25:45

      [laughs]

   7. ABArthur Brooks25:45

      You know? And I've got a very quiet place. I'm not looking at email. I'm not, you know, answering text messages. I'm not looking for, I'm not reading the Wall Street Journal. To do this with, when I set myself up this way, I get four hours of, of productivity, and that's very unusual. If you're doing things the old-fashioned way, you know, you're getting up when the sun is warm, and you're having the nice big, you know, three espressos to try to wake up and, and you're not optimizing your brain chemistry appropriately, you'll get two hours of creativity max.

   8. TFTim Ferriss26:12

      Oh, max.

   9. ABArthur Brooks26:13

      That's why, you know, Hemingway used to write for two hours a day.

   10. TFTim Ferriss26:15

       I was just gonna bring up Hemingway also because he would leave things unfinished. He would basically end mid-paragraph so that he had momentum in starting the following day. And I suppose my question is, in a world of ubiquitous interruption and notification where you have iMessage on your computer-

   11. ABArthur Brooks26:32

       Yeah

   12. TFTim Ferriss26:33

       ... you have ChatGPT, you have research that you might do concurrently with your writing, there are different ways to approach writing. How do you set yourself up, say, the day before such that you can sit down without interruption or self-interruption-

   13. ABArthur Brooks26:50

       Yeah

   14. TFTim Ferriss26:50

       ... for four hours and write?

   15. ABArthur Brooks26:52

       To begin with, you need to know what you're gonna do the next day, the day before.

   16. TFTim Ferriss26:55

       Mm-hmm.

   17. ABArthur Brooks26:55

       You need to make a list of the things you're gonna do in priority order, and the priority order is not what you like the most, but what actually requires the most concentration and cre- and creativity.

   18. TFTim Ferriss27:03

       Mm-hmm.

   19. ABArthur Brooks27:04

       So the thing that you need to hit immediately, which will be the last 10% of that page you were writing.

   20. TFTim Ferriss27:09

       Mm-hmm.

   21. ABArthur Brooks27:09

       That's a really good protocol to procrastinate that last 10%, because your most creative, most productive, your best quality stuff is first.

   22. TFTim Ferriss27:17

       Mm-hmm.

   23. ABArthur Brooks27:18

       And so you want to leave the last to be the first the next day.

   24. TFTim Ferriss27:21

       Mm.

   25. ABArthur Brooks27:21

       And that way you've got consistent creativity. If I'm writing a column, for example, and I'm on deadline every single week for a column, and it's 1,200 words a week of science about human happiness.

   26. TFTim Ferriss27:32

       Sounds stressful. Sounds like a way to make yourself unhappy. [laughs]

   27. ABArthur Brooks27:34

       Yeah, I know. So I'm, I'm, I'm hunted.

   28. TFTim Ferriss27:36

       [laughs]

   29. ABArthur Brooks27:37

       But doing that, if I sit down to write it, the, the kicker's always gonna be worse than the lead.

   30. TFTim Ferriss27:42

       Yeah, right.
10. 27:48 – 29:59

    Alcohol kills sleep to borrow happiness from tomorrow.

    1. ABArthur Brooks27:48

       or better, because I'm leaving it so that my brain chemistry is optimized to the product that I'm trying to create. That was a very good protocol from, from Hemingway. His problem was he was a drunk.

    2. TFTim Ferriss27:58

       Yeah.

    3. ABArthur Brooks27:58

       And when you're a drunk, what you're doing is you're borrowing tomorrow's dopamine tonight.

    4. TFTim Ferriss28:02

       You're borrowing, as a friend of mine put it also, you're borrowing happiness from tomorrow.

    5. ABArthur Brooks28:06

       Yeah. And the reason is because your dopamine is gonna be below the baseline, and you're gonna have anhedonia in the morning. Anhedonia is the characteristic of a clinical depression, which is a deficit of dopamine, meaning you, an inability to feel pleasure, and is below the baseline when you're hungover, below the baseline when you've, when you've popped it really hard and you're getting the trough-

    6. TFTim Ferriss28:23

       Mm-hmm

    7. ABArthur Brooks28:23

       ... the next day. If you drink at night, and if you want to be productive the next morning, this morning starts last night, and it starts by going to bed at a reasonable time sober, which we'll probably get to at the end of this conversation.

    8. TFTim Ferriss28:35

       [laughs]

    9. ABArthur Brooks28:36

       So that's why he had two hours of productivity.

    10. TFTim Ferriss28:38

        Yeah, it's um, go to bed sober. [laughs] Well, also because if you need any, and this is my kind of repeated realization that should be top of mind all the time, which is if you wear an Oura Ring, a WHOOP band, the one conclusion that you [laughs] will come to over and over again is if you drink before bed, [laughs] even a few hours before bed, your sleep is garbage.

    11. ABArthur Brooks29:01

        Your sleep, the architecture is so messy.

    12. TFTim Ferriss29:03

        And for me now, for whatever reason, at this age, I'm 48, I had one martini with my brother.

    13. ABArthur Brooks29:08

        Mm.

    14. TFTim Ferriss29:08

        I don't see him that much. We went out to a nice speakeasy, had a drink, and just shattered my sleep.

    15. ABArthur Brooks29:16

        [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss29:16

        It was shocking to me, kind of embarrassing, honestly.

    17. ABArthur Brooks29:18

        The older you get... And you know, the truth is that young people are figuring out what people my age didn't when I was... I mean, I drank very heavily in my 20s and 30s. It's what we did.

    18. TFTim Ferriss29:29

        Yeah.

    19. ABArthur Brooks29:29

        I was a musician. It's what we did. We knew it wasn't good for us, but the truth of the matter is that if it's euphoric, if it gets you buzzed, it's neurotoxic, and you have to be careful applying neurotoxic substances to yourself 'cause you're gonna pay a price for that. Now, there's a cost-benefit analysis to anything. I don't drive the safest car. I don't drive a car that, that if it crashes, I will be completely safe no matter what. I drive something I like. I'm making a cost-benefit analysis. But the truth is that many people, they think it's costless to get buzzed.

    20. TFTim Ferriss29:57

        Mm-hmm.

    21. ABArthur Brooks29:58

        It's not.

11. 29:59 – 34:50

    My ketosis, intermittent fasting, and morning protocol.

    1. ABArthur Brooks29:59

       Just isn't.

    2. TFTim Ferriss29:59

       Your routine, I'll just pause us there, is very, very similar to mine.

    3. ABArthur Brooks30:06

       Tell me more.

    4. TFTim Ferriss30:07

       Well, right now I'm day three of segueing into ketosis, and we're always producing ketones, but I'm probably, just because I've done this a lot, I'm probably at right now, like 1.2 millimolars in terms of blood concentration of like beta-hydroxybutyrate after doing-

    5. ABArthur Brooks30:27

       You like ketosis. You like how it feels.

    6. TFTim Ferriss30:29

       I, I love how it feels in terms of mental acuity. I also, because I have neurodegenerative diseases in my family-

    7. ABArthur Brooks30:36

       Mm-hmm

    8. TFTim Ferriss30:36

       ... and metabolic dysfunction, see doing, let's just call it four To six weeks of nutritional ketosis once or twice a year to appear to be very cheap insurance.

    9. ABArthur Brooks30:51

       What's your APOE profile?

    10. TFTim Ferriss30:52

        APOE 3/4.

    11. ABArthur Brooks30:53

        You're 3/4?

    12. TFTim Ferriss30:54

        Yeah, 3/4. There are other risk factors. I also have relatives who are 3/3, but nonetheless developed early Alzheimer's.

    13. ABArthur Brooks30:59

        Yeah.

    14. TFTim Ferriss31:00

        So I'm like, "Eh, you know what? I, I like how I feel. I need less sleep when I'm in ketosis. I naturally wake up very, very alert-

    15. ABArthur Brooks31:08

        Mm-hmm

    16. TFTim Ferriss31:08

        ... which is unusual for me." I wanted to mention that first just to set the stage in a way. So I, for decades, did minimum 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. I still think that is a great option. For me now, for a host of reasons that I could get into, but I'll keep it simple, I almost always do intermittent fasting, where I am fasting until 2:00 or 3:00 PM in the afternoon, but when I wake up, like this morning I woke up at 7:30, and I was preparing for this conversation, so I wanted to block out a few hours to do that, but woke up, had... Now, this is mildly stimulating, but I wanted to have a little bit because I'm also jet-lagged and arrived at around midnight last night. Had some cacao with a little bit of cacao butter mixed in.

    17. ABArthur Brooks32:00

        Nice.

    18. TFTim Ferriss32:00

        Just enough, under three grams of net carbs. [laughs]

    19. ABArthur Brooks32:04

        Mm-hmm. 'Cause you're keeping your net carbs to 30 a day, probably, right?

    20. TFTim Ferriss32:07

        I'm keeping my net grams to, for me personally right now, under 10 grams.

    21. ABArthur Brooks32:12

        Under 10? That'll get you into ketosis fast.

    22. TFTim Ferriss32:14

        Under 10, yeah, especially if I am already adapted to intermittent fasting so that I'm doing 16 to 18 hours of fasting with a short six to eight hour window of eating. Once you get to 16 to 18 hours, especially if you're doing some exercise, let's just say, in the morning or any-

    23. ABArthur Brooks32:31

        Mm-hmm

    24. TFTim Ferriss32:31

        ... other point, you're depleting your liver glycogen and you're going to get into the habit, your metabolic machinery will develop the habit and the capability of producing ketones even when you are eating carbohydrates in that limited window of eating.

    25. ABArthur Brooks32:46

        And you don't take exogenous ketones?

    26. TFTim Ferriss32:48

        I will occasionally on a day like today because I know that I'm on effectively, let's call it day two and a half of segueing into ketosis. I think my natural production is roughly where I mentioned. My natural production right now is probably around .9.

    27. ABArthur Brooks33:06

        Mm-hmm.

    28. TFTim Ferriss33:06

        Let me just back up. So I wake up at 7:30. I have the, the cacao plus some cacao butter, then I sit in, in a... I have a hot tub. This is, like, one of my indulgences. It's not actually that expensive, but I sit in a hot tub and I meditated for 10 minutes with an app, the WAYH app. Henry Shukman is my spirit animal. Amazing mindfulness/Zen-focused practice. Did that, 10 minutes, that's it. Got out. It is pretty chilly right now in Austin. Gets down to, I think, last night was 37 low. Got into my pool for a few minutes and got out, cold shower, came back in, and then sat down and this was my kinda deep work prep, right?

    29. ABArthur Brooks33:52

        Mm-hmm.

    30. TFTim Ferriss33:52

        No interruptions.
12. 34:50 – 39:07

    Experimentation is king.

    1. ABArthur Brooks34:50

       great for you. And here's a big takeaway, I think. You got to that through experimentation.

    2. TFTim Ferriss34:54

       Yep.

    3. ABArthur Brooks34:54

       You didn't get that by getting it off the internet.

    4. TFTim Ferriss34:56

       Yeah.

    5. ABArthur Brooks34:56

       You learned a lot about these different variety of protocols.

    6. TFTim Ferriss35:00

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks35:01

       And you tailored it and tried it, and over a number of years came upon what worked best for you, and that's exactly what I've done, too.

    8. TFTim Ferriss35:08

       Mm-hmm.

    9. ABArthur Brooks35:08

       And everybody watching needs to treat their life like a lab.

    10. TFTim Ferriss35:12

        Yeah.

    11. ABArthur Brooks35:13

        Experimentation is king. The precursor to good experimentation is information, is scientific information, and then it's getting experience through the experimentation and figuring out what your own protocol actually is.

    12. TFTim Ferriss35:25

        Mm-hmm.

    13. ABArthur Brooks35:25

        Because as they say in the ads, your results may differ.

    14. TFTim Ferriss35:28

        [laughs] Yeah, right, exactly. And so for me, if I'm weight training, I will typically weight train late afternoon. That's just always been-

    15. ABArthur Brooks35:34

        Mm.

    16. TFTim Ferriss35:34

        ... my preference. But if we had not had this podcast today, I would've done zone 2 training.

    17. ABArthur Brooks35:41

        Mm-hmm. In the morning?

    18. TFTim Ferriss35:42

        Right, exactly. After the meditation.

    19. ABArthur Brooks35:44

        Before you eat.

    20. TFTim Ferriss35:45

        Before I eat.

    21. ABArthur Brooks35:46

        You like fasted cardio?

    22. TFTim Ferriss35:47

        I do like fasted cardio.

    23. ABArthur Brooks35:48

        Yeah, yeah. I do, too.

    24. TFTim Ferriss35:49

        Especially when I'm trying to get into ketosis or intermittent fasting because it'll help me deplete the stored glycogen at a faster rate. If it is too high, just for people who may be interested in intermittent fasting or ketosis, if the exertion level is too high or if it is resistance training, sometimes it will spike glucose in such a way that makes it a little counterproductive if you're trying to get into ketosis. So the zone 2 is, zone 2 is perfect.

    25. ABArthur Brooks36:14

        Because your, your stress hormones are...

    26. TFTim Ferriss36:16

        Yeah.

    27. ABArthur Brooks36:16

        Yeah.

    28. TFTim Ferriss36:16

        Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're already gonna have increased cortisol in the morning. You need that to wake up. [laughs]

    29. ABArthur Brooks36:22

        Mm-hmm.

    30. TFTim Ferriss36:23

        And also with caffeine, oftentimes you'll see a pretty noticeable spike in glucose.
13. 39:07 – 40:50

    David Baszucki, metabolic psychiatry, and ketosis: the poet’s protocol.

    1. ABArthur Brooks39:07

       disciplines.

    2. TFTim Ferriss39:07

       And also, I'll just say to your point, right, uh, managing the physiology, had a great conversation with Dave Baszucki recently, who's the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, and he and his wife are the largest... Well, their foundation is the largest funder of metabolic psychiatry research, including ketogenic therapy-

    3. ABArthur Brooks39:25

       Right

    4. TFTim Ferriss39:26

       ... which includes Chris Palmer at Harvard.

    5. ABArthur Brooks39:27

       That stuff's super interesting.

    6. TFTim Ferriss39:28

       Ketosis for me, it is like taking modafinil and all of the kind of short-term powerful but long-term penalty drugs that I've tested over time.

    7. ABArthur Brooks39:38

       Have you ever tried, have you ever taken a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, an SSRI?

    8. TFTim Ferriss39:42

       I have never taken one for antidepression. I have taken what is similar, it's not exactly an SSRI, but I have used trazodone for sleep.

    9. ABArthur Brooks39:53

       Well, trazodone is a monocyclic, right? It's a really early, early generation antidepressant.

    10. TFTim Ferriss39:58

        It is effectively a failed antidepressant because it put people to sleep that was repurposed as a sleep drug-

    11. ABArthur Brooks40:04

        Mm

    12. TFTim Ferriss40:04

        ... is my understanding.

    13. ABArthur Brooks40:05

        Like Unisom was supposed to make you not sneeze, and it's, uh-

    14. TFTim Ferriss40:08

        There's so many examples

    15. ABArthur Brooks40:09

        ... doxylamine succinate actually was supposed to make you... was an antihistamine that was repurposed as a sleeping pill.

    16. TFTim Ferriss40:14

        Yeah, [laughs] there you go. That is it. But why do you ask about SSRIs?

    17. ABArthur Brooks40:16

        The reason I ask that is because a lot of people will say that they find that a proper keto diet is better than an SSRI too-

    18. TFTim Ferriss40:22

        Hmm

    19. ABArthur Brooks40:22

        ... for the serotonin effects.

    20. TFTim Ferriss40:24

        Oh, yeah. People should look up Chris Palmer. I had a conversation with him as well. But for mood stabilization, mood elevation, but not in a peak and trough-

    21. ABArthur Brooks40:36

        Right

    22. TFTim Ferriss40:36

        ... type of way, I have found nothing better than the ketogenic diet.

    23. ABArthur Brooks40:41

        That's interesting. So for mood management, this is fundamental for you.

    24. TFTim Ferriss40:44

        It is, without exception, the number one with no close second.

    25. ABArthur Brooks40:49

        So poets take

14. 40:50 – 46:36

    Four affect profiles: mad scientists, cheerleaders, judges, and poets.

    1. ABArthur Brooks40:50

       note.

    2. TFTim Ferriss40:50

       Yeah. Poets take note. And maybe you should just... [laughs] We have to revisit this. People are like, "What is this mad scientist poet stuff?"

    3. ABArthur Brooks40:57

       Yeah. Yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss40:57

       You want to just explain what we're talking about?

    5. ABArthur Brooks40:58

       Yeah, yeah, quickly. So there are four affect profiles, and affect profiles mean the intensity of your negative and positive emotion. You're born with this, so there are times in your life when you have more positive emotionality or more intense negative emotionality, depending on circumstances, but this is your baseline state. You can be above average positive and above average intensity negative emotion. Those are the mad scientists. That's me.

    6. TFTim Ferriss41:19

       You have high highs and low lows.

    7. ABArthur Brooks41:21

       I'm all about it's great or it sucks.

    8. TFTim Ferriss41:24

       [laughs]

    9. ABArthur Brooks41:24

       You know? And it's impossible to be married to a mad scientist. My wife reminded me of that this morning. [laughs] You can be above average positive and below average intensity negative. These are cheerleaders. These are the happiest people. They have some weaknesses. They, they tend to be bad bosses because they won't accept bad news and they can't give criticism.

    10. TFTim Ferriss41:42

        Hmm.

    11. ABArthur Brooks41:42

        Like, "No bad vibes, man."

    12. TFTim Ferriss41:44

        Yeah.

    13. ABArthur Brooks41:44

        There are some people who are low low. They're just low affect people. These are the judges. They make really good surgeons. You know, you don't want somebody to cut you open and go, "Oh, my God!"

    14. TFTim Ferriss41:53

        Yeah.

    15. ABArthur Brooks41:53

        That's not what you want. You want somebody who's gonna be like, "Eh. I can take that out." Or, you know, nuclear power reactor operators or something who are really calm.

    16. TFTim Ferriss42:00

        Low low means low positive, low negative.

    17. ABArthur Brooks42:02

        Low positive, low negative.

    18. TFTim Ferriss42:04

        Got it.

    19. ABArthur Brooks42:04

        They're, they're s-

    20. TFTim Ferriss42:04

        Their sine wave is flatter.

    21. ABArthur Brooks42:06

        They're steady, man.

    22. TFTim Ferriss42:07

        Yeah.

    23. ABArthur Brooks42:07

        I mean, they're not freaking out about anything. And then there are those who are low intensity positive emotion, but high intensity negative emotion.

    24. TFTim Ferriss42:14

        Yeah.

    25. ABArthur Brooks42:14

        And these are the poets. And the poets are the most interesting, and the reason is because they tend to be the most creative and most romantic.

    26. TFTim Ferriss42:20

        Hmm.

    27. ABArthur Brooks42:21

        And part of that is because there's this research, all neuroscience research is contested, I should preface this.

    28. TFTim Ferriss42:26

        [laughs]

    29. ABArthur Brooks42:26

        But there's a part of the limbic system called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that-

    30. TFTim Ferriss42:29

        Uh-huh
15. 46:36 – 48:15

    Why Arthur was moved to write The Meaning of Your Life.

    1. ABArthur Brooks46:36

       five years

    2. TFTim Ferriss46:36

       ... I want to know why, after your many books, author of 15 books, right? You have Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, From Strength to Strength, which was my first introduction to your books, which is an exceptional book, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, and now The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Why write this book?

    3. ABArthur Brooks47:00

       When I came back to academia, I was gone for a long time. I'm a sort of a lifelong... I'm a third-generation academic, actually. My dad was a professor. His father was a professor. This is the vortex of life. I tried to escape it by, by being in music all the way through my 20s, but it sucked me in, right?

    4. TFTim Ferriss47:14

       [laughs]

    5. ABArthur Brooks47:14

       This was my natural habitat, but I left for almost 11 years 'cause I was, uh, the CEO of a big think tank in Washington, D.C. called the American Enterprise Institute, and when I was gone, I wasn't paying attention to academia. I left at the end of 2008. I came back in 2019. My memory of my academic experience, going back, you know, intergenerationally, it's the happiest place in the world. Everybody has the best time at college. They make all their friends. They get a bunch of adventures. They get exposed to weird new ways of thinking. People love college, and most people say, "I was happier in college than when I left college." I come back in 2019, and it's like the plague had gone through my village.

    6. TFTim Ferriss47:52

       Hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks47:52

       It was com- completely different, and in point of fact, clinical depression among adults under 30, especially highly educated adults under 30, college graduates, especially the elite colleges, had tripled.

    8. TFTim Ferriss48:04

       Mm-hmm.

    9. ABArthur Brooks48:04

       Clinical depression up by 3X, anxiety, generalized anxiety 2X. And it's not because of a lack of therapy.

    10. TFTim Ferriss48:12

        Yeah.

    11. ABArthur Brooks48:12

        On the contrary, the number of therapists has gone up by about

16. 48:15 – 51:55

    Psychogenic epidemic: technology isn’t the problem, it’s what we’re not getting.

    1. ABArthur Brooks48:15

       4X.

    2. TFTim Ferriss48:15

       Yeah.

    3. ABArthur Brooks48:16

       And so something's not working. This is what we call, in my business, a psychogenic epidemic-

    4. TFTim Ferriss48:21

       Mm-hmm

    5. ABArthur Brooks48:21

       ... which is a simple idea with fancy words 'cause that's how we get tenure, Tim.

    6. TFTim Ferriss48:24

       [laughs]

    7. ABArthur Brooks48:25

       And what it means is there's something that's contagious-

    8. TFTim Ferriss48:28

       Mm-hmm

    9. ABArthur Brooks48:28

       ... and creates suffering and has no biological origin.

    10. TFTim Ferriss48:33

        Mm-hmm.

    11. ABArthur Brooks48:33

        No known biological origin. That's a psychogenic epidemic. So eating disorders and cutting and many things, they'll spread around, create tons of misery, but they're not biological in origin, and so those are harder nuts to crack. The depression, anxiety epidemics that we see today are s- are psychogenic-

    12. TFTim Ferriss48:49

        Mm-hmm

    13. ABArthur Brooks48:49

        ... and so we need to understand what's behind them. So when I see the data, and I set about my research agenda saying, "Okay, I'm-" What's going on? And that's a kind of a Sherlock Holmes, kind of a, a forensic behavioral science experiment, and that's kind of how I do my work. That's the most interesting things to do, is to figure out this mystery using the tools-

    14. TFTim Ferriss49:08

        Mm-hmm

    15. ABArthur Brooks49:08

        ... that are my stock and trade. You know, that I suffered through to get my PhD. You know, it's applying them a little bit. And one of the things that I do is I just start talking to people and doing a content analysis of what they tell me, and see the words that start to pop up.

    16. TFTim Ferriss49:21

        Mm.

    17. ABArthur Brooks49:22

        Those are the clues.

    18. TFTim Ferriss49:22

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks49:23

        Right? Because the words will start popping up. And when you do that, the word that kept popping up again and again and again was, "I don't know what I'm meant to do. My life feels meaningless." And sure enough, when you do the survey work and ask people if their life feels meaningless, that's the predictor of depression and anxiety.

    20. TFTim Ferriss49:39

        Mm-hmm.

    21. ABArthur Brooks49:40

        And so we have lots and lots of data out there. We have lots of pop arguments about why, you know, so many young people are depressed today. And it, you know, people my age are like, "Because they're entitled babies. They're not tough enough."

    22. TFTim Ferriss49:49

        [laughs]

    23. ABArthur Brooks49:49

        And people who are my kids' age, who are in their 20s-

    24. TFTim Ferriss49:52

        Yeah

    25. ABArthur Brooks49:52

        ... they'll say, "It's because boomers wrecked everything and made houses too expensive and spoiled the environment or something."

    26. TFTim Ferriss49:56

        Mm-hmm.

    27. ABArthur Brooks49:57

        But people have been saying that stuff forever.

    28. TFTim Ferriss49:59

        Mm-hmm.

    29. ABArthur Brooks49:59

        There's nothing new about that. These psychological effects that we're seeing are new. They're really, really a new thing. So that's not it. Or there's a lot of people, and you've talked a lot on your show about technology, and a lot of people say that technology is screwing us up, and technology really has a big role in what I found. But the problem is not the technology per se, but what we're not getting because of the technology is what we're actually missing.

    30. TFTim Ferriss50:23

        What it's displacing.
17. 51:55 – 1:00:01

    Macronutrients of meaning: coherence, purpose, significance.

    1. ABArthur Brooks51:55

       book is.

    2. TFTim Ferriss51:55

       Well, let's start with definitions.

    3. ABArthur Brooks51:56

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss51:57

       That's how I like to roll.

    5. ABArthur Brooks51:58

       Yeah, I know.

    6. TFTim Ferriss51:58

       So.

    7. ABArthur Brooks51:58

       And that's the most important thing that scientists almost never do.

    8. TFTim Ferriss52:01

       Yeah.

    9. ABArthur Brooks52:01

       You know, throw out a term and then not define it. So the meaning of life has been, you know, discussed forever, but the best philosophical and psychological definitions, they disassemble it into-

    10. TFTim Ferriss52:11

        Mm-hmm

    11. ABArthur Brooks52:11

        ... its component parts.

    12. TFTim Ferriss52:12

        Yeah.

    13. ABArthur Brooks52:12

        So the way that you and I have talked about happiness in the past is that happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

    14. TFTim Ferriss52:18

        Mm-hmm.

    15. ABArthur Brooks52:19

        So meaning is a macronutrient of happiness.

    16. TFTim Ferriss52:21

        Mm-hmm.

    17. ABArthur Brooks52:22

        And when that's missing, that's why you have a happiness problem.

    18. TFTim Ferriss52:24

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks52:25

        So that's the beginning of this whole thing. Meaning, in turn, has macronutrients. It has component parts to it as well. Psychologists will refer to them as coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is why things happen the way they do. You have to have a theory of why things happen the way they do, or you won't know the meaning of your life.

    20. TFTim Ferriss52:41

        Meaning how life or why life unfurls for you the way it unfurls.

    21. ABArthur Brooks52:45

        Things are happening all the time. Yeah, things are happening. Like, why?

    22. TFTim Ferriss52:47

        So is that picking... I don't wanna dislocate the sharing of the three, but-

    23. ABArthur Brooks52:53

        No, no. It's important

    24. TFTim Ferriss52:54

        ... just, just, just to, maybe we'll come back to it. Is that coming up with or adopting a story that is enabling?

    25. ABArthur Brooks53:00

        Yeah. It's adopting a story that actually explains things so that life is not inherently random.

    26. TFTim Ferriss53:06

        Okay. But it doesn't need to be objectively accurate in explaining.

    27. ABArthur Brooks53:09

        No, no. It's your way of seeing things.

    28. TFTim Ferriss53:11

        Yeah.

    29. ABArthur Brooks53:11

        It's your, your understanding of the world. It's putting things in context, and so things kind of make sense.

    30. TFTim Ferriss53:15

        Mm-hmm.
18. 1:00:01 – 1:03:53

    Search vs. presence and the trap for seekers.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:00:01

       They're just not gonna take yes for an answer.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:00:03

       Right. So I'm wondering how you learned to take yes as an answer.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:00:08

       It's not easy because when you're a chronic seeker-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:00:10

       Yeah

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:00:10

       ... there's always something more.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:00:11

       Right.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:00:12

       There's always something new.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:00:13

       Yeah.

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:00:13

       And you can't be there yet. The answer to this actually comes... Two of my kids are Marines.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:00:17

        Mm-hmm.

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:00:18

        And so I have one enlisted Marine, I have one officer in the Marine Corps, and my daughter's a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and she's, right now she's at Quantico, and she's going through the Basic School, you know, getting ready to do her, her MOS. She wants to be a signals intelligence officer. My son was enlisted. He was a scout sniper. He was in a scout sniper platoon out of Camp Pendleton, and that's a super interesting and dangerous job. As a non-commissioned officer, he led a lot of guys. What they train Marines to do in leadership is to get to 80% knowledge and then choose and stop looking.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:00:48

        Mm-hmm.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:00:49

        Now, that's really, really important because you're gonna be paralyzed if you're trying to get to 100% knowledge.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:00:52

        You're never going to have complete information.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:00:53

        Which is what this, the pure seeker mentality does. If you want to seek and get higher presence, you need to go to 80%.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:01:00

        Mm-hmm.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:01:00

        And now, how do you get to 80%? You get to 80% by saying, "I'm pretty sure this is right."

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:01:05

        Mm-hmm

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:01:06

        And this is right enough that I'm gonna turn my attention to another dimension-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:01:09

        Mm-hmm

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:01:10

        ... on this, and that means, friends, [laughs] if you're in love, you should get married. That's what that means.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:01:16

        [laughs] Wow.

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:01:18

        That means if you're in love and you know each other-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:01:20

        Mm-hmm

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:01:20

        ... and you think that within three to five years you really could be best friends-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:01:24

        Yeah

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:01:24

        ... and you have a certain stability of values, stop looking.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:01:30

        Yeah.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:01:30

        Get married. Why? Because the longer you don't get married, the longer you're in search for your soulmate, the more you're putting off the best thing in your life. You're postponing the best thing in your life. Marriage is the best thing in life for most people.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:01:43

        Mm-hmm.
19. 1:03:53 – 1:09:05

    Marine rule: get to 80 percent and choose.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:03:53

       right? Nuclear Armageddon, that is actually, on the list of existential threats, one of the scary ones in my opinion.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:03:59

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:04:00

       Therefore, I don't know how to conclude that my life matters. How did you personally arrive at an answer to this question, or how do you suggest people explore-

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:04:10

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:04:10

       ... unpacking that? I have some thoughts. I'll just, rather than burying the lead, I'll just throw it out there, which is take the time to not, take the time to not just study people who do huge things in short periods of time, but also study people who commit to things that take longer than their lifetimes, like scientists, like-

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:04:31

       Clergy

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:04:32

       ... clergy. By simply extending the time horizon-

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:04:35

       Mm-hmm

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:04:35

       ... the spectrum of options opens up quite a bit. But I would love to hear you expand.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:04:40

        Yeah. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. But there's a compatible point with that which is stop looking for your significance at the macro level. Start looking at the micro level, which is your love relationships around you. This is where people feel significance.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:04:54

        Mm-hmm.

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:04:54

        People feel significance by having children. People feel significance by getting married.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:04:59

        Or adopting children.

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:05:00

        Or adopting children, as I did. I did both. You know, we did it by markets and by biology. [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:05:05

        [laughs]

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:05:07

        And people feel significance by working through their religious tendencies-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:05:13

        Mm-hmm

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:05:13

        ... to try to understand their relationship with the divine. This is how most people find significance. You don't find significance by getting a million Instagram followers. You will never find significance-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:05:22

        No

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:05:22

        ... by doing that, but that's indeed what we're encouraged to do. You won't find significance, an adequate kind of stable significance, by being the world's greatest angry activist.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:05:31

        [laughs]

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:05:31

        And that's the, the cult that's actually going on on college campuses all the time.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:05:35

        Yeah.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:05:35

        The cult of activism, which is kind of a substitute religion.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:05:38

        Yeah.

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:05:39

        Significance comes from love. Love is the essence of significance, and it's whom I love and who loves me. That's what it comes down to. And, you know, if the answer is my spouse, my children, my parents, my friends, my creator-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:05:53

        Mm

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:05:53

        ... those are the big answers that people actually get. But you gotta do the work. [laughs] You gotta make the commitments and do the work. And a lot of people today, one of the things that I actually find in this book, is that a lot of young people today don't have those micro commitments-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:06:06

        Mm-hmm

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:06:06

        ... and they're trying to establish macro significance-
20. 1:09:05 – 1:11:15

    Significance at micro, not macro level; cult of activism as substitute religion.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:09:05

       yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:09:05

       Whatever it might be.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:09:06

       Yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:09:07

       Trying to put that on one's radar, I think is helpful, but then the question is, okay, if this is hardwired, if this might actually be a constitutional psychological requirement-

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:09:18

       Mm-hmm

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:09:18

       ... how do you satisfy that requirement if you are not going to adopt an organized religion?

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:09:25

       Yeah. I've looked a lot.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:09:25

       This is a quest for me, right?

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:09:26

       No, no, I hear you.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:09:27

        This is, this is very pleasant for me.

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:09:28

        I completely hear you.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:09:28

        I feel like I've made a lot of progress-

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:09:30

        Yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:09:31

        ... for myself, but I'd love to hear you talk that down.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:09:34

        So this is a question not of religion, but of transcendence.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:09:37

        Exactly. Exactly.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:09:38

        Transcendence is the phenomenon in which we move from the me self to the I self, in the words of William James, the father of psychology.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:09:46

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:09:46

        The I self is looking out and including looking up and standing in awe. The me self is looking in the mirror and thinking about yourself.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:09:54

        Mm-hmm.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:09:54

        What we need to actually find meaning, to find significance, paradoxically, is to look less at ourselves.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:10:01

        Yeah.

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:10:02

        Significance, the sense of significance comes from being... This is really paradoxical, and yet everybody will understand it when I say it. To feel significance, you need to be less significant.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:10:11

        Mm-hmm.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:10:11

        You need to make your less... self less significant. Now, I had this experience where at my university, the most popular class, arguably, is Astronomy 1. And they're not astronomers.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:10:20

        Mm-hmm.

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:10:20

        I mean, they're, like, English majors and business majors, et cetera. They love the astronomy class. They flock to it. There's lines for the astronomy class. And so I finally ask a student, it's like, "Why do you love that Astronomy 1 class so much?" He's like, "I don't know, but, like, I go in in the morning, Thursday morning at 9:00, and, and it's a 90-minute class, and I'm bummed out because I just had an argument with my mom, and I think I'm breaking up with my boyfriend, and I got a B on a test," which at Harvard is like the end of the world, right?

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:10:46

        [laughs] You're excommunicated from the Church of Harvard.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:10:49

        [laughs] I go in at 9:00, and at 10:30, I come out and I say, "I'm a speck on a speck on a speck, and I'm at peace." That's transcendence. That's what it is. It's to stand in awe. You've had Dacher Keltner on your show before?

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:11:03

        No.
21. 1:11:15 – 1:13:32

    Transcendence: from me self to I self; Harvard’s Astronomy 101.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:11:15

       reading that book just a few months ago.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:11:16

       That's transcendence.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:11:17

       Yeah.

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:11:17

       It's to stand in awe, in the I self, looking out-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:11:21

       Mm-hmm

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:11:21

       ... in awe of the universe, things bigger than you. And there's two dimensions of transcendence. The first is to transcend upward, and the other is to transcend outward, which is why worship of the divine, spiritual and religious experiences do this, and also service to others.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:11:36

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:11:36

       That's why they both have this kind of transcendent metaphysical experience that people actually get. And that's why when you see moral beauty-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:11:46

       Mm-hmm

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:11:46

        ... somebody serving somebody else, it gives you that... [inhales] Rhett Diesner, the psychologist, who, who by the way is Rainn Wilson's uncle.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:11:53

        [laughs] Yeah.

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:11:55

        The world's leading expert in moral elevation and the-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:11:57

        Wow

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:11:57

        ... physiological impact of moral elevation.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:11:59

        Rainn is very philosophical also.

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:12:01

        He's great. He's a great friend. We're great friends. We're bu- we grew up five miles apart from each other in Seattle.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:12:05

        Wow.

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:12:05

        We're the same age. Yeah. We didn't know each other as kids, but we bonded over, you know-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:12:09

        Small world

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:12:09

        ... watching Gilligan's Island on Channel 11-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:12:11

        Yeah

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:12:11

        ... when we were in fifth grade or something. And it's really important to keep in mind that there are ways to transcend.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:12:16

        Mm-hmm.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:12:16

        And there are some really well-established ones to do it. I go to mass every day. It's a venerable way to experience transcendence.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:12:23

        Mm-hmm.

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:12:23

        And there are other ways to experience transcendence. Now, I'm not gonna speak to the metaphysics of who's cosmically right. That's a completely different conversation. I don't know.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:12:32

        Mm-hmm.

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:12:32

        Right? But I do know when it comes to transcendence, 'cause that's research that I've done.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:12:36

        Mm.

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:12:36

        And Lisa Miller has done that. She teaches at Columbia. She does neuroscience and social psychology at Columbia.
22. 1:13:32 – 1:20:19

    Two dimensions of transcendence: upward (worship) and outward (service).

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:13:32

       And for, for people who are interested in digging into this, and I suggest that almost everyone should be very deeply interested, you mentioned the book Awe.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:13:39

       Yeah.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:13:39

       There's also some fantastic writing and articles out of Johns Hopkins-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:13:44

       Mm-hmm

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:13:44

       ... related to awe. And if awe seems too abstract, I mean, you could think of it as wonder. You could think of it also as self-transcendence.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:13:51

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:13:52

       And I'm gonna be shooting myself in the foot a little bit because I just wrote 10 pages on this that I need to refine before putting on my blog, but-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:13:59

       [laughs]

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:13:59

       ... people think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, and at the top you have self-actualization. In fact, the pyramid and that strict hierarchy were created by consultants and other people who commercialized the writings of Maslow, who later revised that to have self-transcendence-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:14:19

        At the top

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:14:19

        ... at the top.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:14:20

        At the top.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:14:21

        He talked about it much later in his career too.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:14:23

        Much later.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:14:23

        Because he got more religious as he got older.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:14:25

        Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:14:26

        People get more religious as they get older.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:14:28

        Mm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:14:28

        They believe less in Santa Claus and more in God-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:14:29

        [laughs]

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:14:30

        ... as they get older.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:14:31

        They believe more in death too. [laughs]

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:14:32

        Yeah, yeah. And life is messy, and they, they come to terms with that. And Scott Barry Kaufman talks a lot about this.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:14:38

        Mm-hmm.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:14:38

        You know, the guy who is sort of the master of the dark triad and a lot of pathologies, but he's also really good on how-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:14:44

        I'm gonna have to ask you about the dark triad.

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:14:46

        Oh, yeah.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:14:46

        Oh, boy.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:14:46

        And, and I've written a lot about the dark triad.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:14:48

        Sounds like a great fantasy novel.
23. 1:20:19 – 1:23:38

    Maslow revised: training awareness so the mundane becomes miraculous.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:20:19

       talking about. One of the great things about, you know, transcendence is, so Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the great book Flow-

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:20:25

       Oh, that's how you pronounce his damn name.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:20:26

       Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah, that's right.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:20:28

       A lot of consonants.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:20:28

       It's tough, man. That's a tough name. He talked about the fact that you have a transcendent experience when you're in a state that is the state of self-forgetting.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:20:37

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:20:37

       That's what flow is. It's intensely pleasurable for any of us at any particular time. And so we established the first way is, you know, worship or meditation.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:20:45

       Mm-hmm.

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:20:45

       The second is service to others, but the third is really total absorption.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:20:49

        Mm-hmm.

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:20:50

        Just total absorption in the kind of thing that you do, which by the way, is one of the reasons not to wear headphones when you're working out.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:20:55

        Yeah.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:20:55

        One of the reasons to be fully there when you're working out, to establish a mind-muscle connection when you're working out. It might sound trite, but it really is because you should be able to as- attain something of a flow state when you're working out, otherwise it's an hour of misery that you're gonna want to distract yourself from. So what, so you've got, like, better calves?

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:21:14

        [laughs]

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:21:14

        It's just so dumb, which is the ultimate me self kind of experience. So that's really the third way to do it.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:21:19

        Mm-hmm.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:21:19

        Is find your thing, is what it comes down to.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:21:22

        Yeah.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:21:22

        And by the way, my protocols lead up to four hours of writing. That four hours goes by in minutes-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:21:27

        Mm

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:21:27

        ... because it's a flow state.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:21:28

        Mm-hmm.

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:21:29

        And I'm having a transcendent experience. I'm in an I self transcendent experience.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:21:33

        Mm-hmm.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:21:34

        It's not me. It's like some other guy's writing this thing. I don't know what's going on. Clickety, clickety, clickety-click.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:21:38

        Mm-hmm.

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:21:38

        And before I know it, my wife says, "You want lunch?"

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:21:41

        [laughs] Nature seems like another option.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:21:45

        Yeah.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:21:45

        It's so simple. Just walk barefoot [laughs] -
24. 1:23:38 – 1:26:06

    Flow state as self-forgetting; beauty as transcendence.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:23:38

       So the transcendent experience is the one thing, the one place that they don't happen is in a simulated experience of human life. Fundamentally, transcendent experiences require being fully alive. There's a, you know, the great fourth century sage and saint, Saint Irenaeus, who's one of these guys where, I mean, today it's, like, pretty costless to be religious like me.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:23:57

       Mm-hmm.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:23:57

       In those days, uh, you might get your head cut off.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:24:00

       Right. [laughs]

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:24:00

       And he was doing a lot of deep thinking, and he said, "The glory of God is a man fully alive."

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:24:05

       Hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:24:06

       It wasn't a gendered comment. A person fully alive is the glory of God. So then the real question is what does it mean for me to be fully alive? And I ask my students, are you fully alive when you get up and the first thing you do is you pick up your phone, which is by the side of your bed, and check in with a universe that's being mediated through the small screen, and then you do your work on the Zoom, and then your friends are on social media, and your dating is on the app, and your progress is made through your score on your gaming, and your relationships are stripped of their humanity because you're looking at pornography? Are you or are you not fully alive?

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:24:44

       Hmm.

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:24:44

       And if the answer is you're not fully alive, the reason for that is because you're living a simulated life.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:24:48

        Hmm.

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:24:49

        And a simulated life just, Tim, isn't beautiful.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:24:52

        And a simulated life means you're cosplaying life. [laughs]

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:24:56

        That's right, and this is one of the things that I found in my interviews for this book as well.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:25:00

        Mm-hmm.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:25:00

        I kept hearing meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning. But you're talking to a lot of 27 and 28-year-olds, and their affect is very flat because they're telling you the same story over and over again, and this is where the penny dropped. This guy says, 27-year-old guy, he said, "I really do feel like I'm not living a real life. I really feel like I'm living in a simulation every day, and I don't know how to break out." Because my job is fully remote, because I can't meet women on the corner and say, like Bill Ackman said on social media the other day, he said, "Women should come up to women and say, 'I would like to meet you.'" What does that mean? [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:25:33

        [laughs]

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:25:34

        And watch him run in terror, right? You know, 'cause my friends really are virtual friends.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:25:39

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:25:40

        Because my sense of achievement really is what I can actually do with this gaming experience or whatever it happens to be that I've gotten really good at. How am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to break out of this, but I know it's not right. I know something's not right. It's like, here's the funny thing, your brain, you can kind of be fooled. The Turing test can be passed with respect to the kind of experience you think you're having, but then there's a deep knowing.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:26:05

        Mm-hmm.

25. 1:26:06 – 1:29:10

    Living in the simulation: complicated vs. complex problems.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:26:06

       You can't simulate the meaning of your life. You can only live the meaning of your life.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:26:10

       Mm-hmm.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:26:11

       A simulation is a complicated simulacrum for the complex experiences of human life, and that's a non-trivial use of language.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:26:19

       This is pops over dinner, right?

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:26:20

       Exactly. A complicated problem is that which is very, very hard to solve, but once you solve it, it's static and you can do it again and again and again.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:26:27

       Engineering problem.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:26:28

       It's an engineering problem. It's a how and what problem. Complex problems are super easy to understand and impossible to solve, and I'll give you an example. Making a jet engine is a complicated problem. We didn't do it for a long time. Making a toaster is a complicated problem. I mean, I defy you to build your own toaster with tool- the stuff in your-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:26:44

       [laughs]

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:26:44

       You'll burn your house down if you try to make your own toaster. It's a complicated problem, right? My marriage is a complex problem. I understand what it means to love and be loved. I can't put it into words. I'm not Pablo Neruda.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:26:56

        [laughs]

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:26:57

        But I understand what it means to love and be loved, right? But I will never solve my marriage.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:27:02

        Mm-hmm.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:27:03

        Tim, this morning before we started, Esther texted me, "I love you," and she does, and when we finish, I'm gonna turn my phone back on again and she might be pissed off at me. I don't know.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:27:13

        Mm-hmm.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:27:14

        I don't know. And part of it's 'cause she's Spanish, and, you know, that adds a layer of complexity in and of itself.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:27:18

        [laughs]

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:27:19

        But that's the point of my marriage.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:27:20

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:27:21

        The things I care about in life are complex. They're not solvable. They're only livable.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:27:25

        Mm-hmm.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:27:25

        And so if I take a complicated simulacrum of anything, I'm doing it wrong because I'm not gonna be satisfied and my brain's gonna know.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:27:34

        How much of the malaise associated with the feeling of being in a simulacrum is resolved just by having more in-person human interactions? Because the older I get, and maybe this is just the path of people as they age, I don't know, but I have one foot in the cutting edge, bleeding edge technology.

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:27:57

        Uh-huh.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:27:58

        I'm fascinated by the latest advancements in you name it, doesn't matter.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:28:03

        AI, neuroscience.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:28:04

        I'm very involved.

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:28:05

        Biologics.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:28:06

        Right.

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:28:06

        All of it.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:28:07

        The last twenty-four hours, I've had conversations with three or four scientists, all at the cutting edge of different fields. I love it.
26. 1:29:10 – 1:33:28

    Left hemisphere vs. right hemisphere.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:29:10

       We know why. We know why the need exists. We know exactly. Neuroscientists know exactly what you're talking about, and this is the theory of hemispheric lateralization. Again, very simple idea with complicated words for tenure.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:29:23

       [laughs]

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:29:25

       This is the theory that's being most popularized right now, but probably the most visionary cutting-edge neuroscientist living today, who is Iain McGilchrist at Oxford.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:29:34

       Yeah, smart.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:29:34

       He wrote The Master and His Emissary back in twenty ten, and The Master and His Emissary talks about the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain do many things the same, but fundamentally they get at your two needs, which is to figure stuff out, to dominate world's problems, to make progress, and to feel fully alive by being a beloved person. Why? We have two hemispheres of the brain that do those complicated things, that's the left hemisphere, how and what, and the complex things, which is the why questions, that's the right hemisphere of the brain. All of the mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness, that's processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, and how you go out and do stuff is in the left hemisphere. The problem is modern life, this gets into the meaning crisis, has pushed us all into the left hemisphere of our brain and slammed shut the door to the right. Everything that we're doing, from workaholism to hustle culture to making sure that people don't study humanities, they only study STEM-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:30:35

       Mm-hmm

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:30:35

       ... and most especially to the simulacrum, the technologized simulacrum for ordinary life, that's all left hemisphere, and if you're on the left hemisphere, you're gonna know how and what and how and what and how and what, and you're gonna be bereft of why-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:30:48

       Hmm

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:30:48

       ... including the big why questions which make up the meaning of your life. And so the solution, where is meaning to be found? It's the right hemisphere of your brain. How do you open it up? That's the meaning protocols, and it really comes down to these very simple ideas that we've already been exploring and, and it comes down to this. There's something that I promise you that Great-Grandfather Ferris never said-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:31:11

        [laughs]

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:31:12

        ... to your great-grandmother, which was, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today," and the reason is 'cause it wasn't a thing, and the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. His life was pretty boring, and it was boring from day to day, objectively boring, but he never said, "My childhood was boring."

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:31:29

        No.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:31:30

        His right hemisphere was exercised as well as his left hemisphere, and the result is he didn't have flooding of the HPA axis. He wasn't morbidly depressed for no apparent reason. He didn't live in a, in a, in a world of affluence and yet feel like he was experiencing nothing. And the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. This was not a policy problem. This was a neurophysiological problem that he didn't have and that we have actually today. And so the result is we have to live in an extraordinary way that was ordinary 100 years ago. The simulation we really need is the old-fashioned life, is what comes about. Because almost all of the things that I talk about in my research that people can experience if they actually put some work into it, is to open up the right hemisphere of the brain and do what was absolutely ordinary not that long ago, three generations ago, as a matter of fact.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:32:22

        Complicated versus complex, I like the distinction. And also, having just come back, just brief aside, every year I do this past year review. I'm gonna be doing that in the next few weeks.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:32:31

        Me too.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:32:32

        Look at my top relationships, top defined as dear close relationships that are reliably nourishing for everybody involved, and energizing. And then I book time in the next year, more time with all those people.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:32:49

        Mm-hmm.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:32:50

        I establish these relationships, and then I book more time with them in the subsequent year.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:32:54

        Yeah.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:32:55

        And often with extended trips. I just came back from a trip with a number of my very close friends, and I look at some of the basics, and I think it's replicable, where three days into it, granted, these are my close friends, but I challenge anyone, if you put in 20,000 steps a day [laughs] and you compliment, let's just say, two of your close friends and three strangers, and tell me by the end of the week that you don't feel better.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:33:20

        Mm.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:33:20

        Right? Just like [laughs] ...

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:33:22

        Mm-hmm. And check your phone only 10 times.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:33:23

        Right.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:33:24

        Yeah.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:33:24

        Yeah, exactly. There's simplicity right on the other side,

27. 1:33:28 – 1:37:36

    Your suffering is sacred: pain times resistance.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:33:28

       and if you do those things, by the way, you'll probably be checking your phone a lot less, hopefully. I want to touch on something because I know we, as expected, are gonna run out of time before we run out of topics to talk about, but I'll let you pick where you want to go first. So there's, there's a line here that I have, or it's more, more phrasing that I want to hear you expand on, "Your suffering is sacred." And then there is a line here which is, "Treat your life like a pilgrimage that opens your mind and heart so life's meaning can find you."

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:34:01

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:34:01

       So those are both interesting to me, right? Your suffering is sacred, and so that life's meaning can find you-

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:34:06

       Right

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:34:06

       ... because most people think of themselves as going out to find meaning-

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:34:11

       Right

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:34:11

       ... if they think about it at all.

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:34:12

       Right.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:34:13

       So dealer's choice.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:34:14

        Yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:34:14

        Which one would you like to start with?

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:34:15

        Well, start with suffering, 'cause suffering is the most misunderstood thing in, in most of modern life. We have an eliminationist strategy toward especially mental suffering. We see big increases in depression, anxiety, and if you go to campus counseling at any university, and you're gonna say, "I feel sad and anxious," they go, "We gotta fix that."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:34:31

        Mm-hmm.

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:34:32

        You know, you'd have some therapy. There might be some psychiatric medications involved, and I have nothing against therapy or psychiatric medications. It saved the lives of people in my family.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:34:40

        Mm-hmm.

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:34:40

        But the truth of the matter is that suffering per se is life itself.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:34:45

        Right.

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:34:45

        I mean, that's the first noble truth of Buddhism.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:34:47

        Mm-hmm.

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:34:47

        Dukkha. But it also suggests that you have a working limbic system, which is your alarm system for threats in the environment.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:34:54

        Mm-hmm.

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:34:54

        Negative emotion is, exists as a threat system, as a threat alarm system, and negative experiences is the only way that you learn. There's a reason that great philosophers always say that suffering is your teacher.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:35:04

        Mm-hmm.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:35:04

        Because suffering is the ultimate complex right hemisphere experience that teaches you about the meaning of your life, and if you try to eliminate your suffering, you will inadvertently eliminate meaning.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:35:15

        Mm-hmm.

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:35:16

        That's what will happen. The worst mistake that people can make is trying not to suffer. I self-tell my students, these are MBA students at Harvard.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:35:23

        Mm-hmm.

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:35:23

        I say, "You're studying at Harvard University, getting your MBAs. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy."

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:35:30

        [laughs]

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:35:31

        Something's wrong with you if you're actually not suffering. So the real question is: How can you learn and grow from it? The math that Buddhists have about suffering is as following: Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance.
28. 1:37:36 – 1:46:32

    Pilgrimage as metaphor.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:37:36

       talking about. Then the second point that you made, the second question you asked is when you're in search to get presence, you're in search, search, search, search. There's a mistake that people commonly make, which is thinking, "If I search enough, I'm gonna find." Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. But the process is a little bit counterintuitive and different. Every religious tradition has a protocol for finding truth, and that is to make a pilgrimage, in which point it is revealed that your truth finds you. Now, there's a lot of ways that that's described in the Bhagavad Gita, where going to the birthplace of the Lord Krishna in Mathura, in the Hindi heartland, in Christianity for the Camino de Santiago, which I've walked twice, across the ancient route of 1,100 years old, doing the Hajj if you're a Muslim. What you find is that when you, when you make a pilgrimage, that's a metaphor for your life.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:38:27

       Mm-hmm.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:38:27

       And the end of the pilgrimage is the metaphor of the ultimate goal of life, which in, you know, Abrahamic religions is heaven.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:38:35

       Mm-hmm.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:38:35

       Right? And it's, it's the end of samsara in the karmic religions or whatever it happens to be. It's the reuniting with a godhead in the Hindu body of religions.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:38:43

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:38:44

       But the bottom line is that what's most important is, is actually what's happening to you in the process of this pilgrimage. And what actually happens to you neurobiologically is that you beat yourself to the point that you have an open aperture-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:38:59

       Mm-hmm

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:38:59

       ... so that you're no longer in a defensive crouch, such that you're weak. You weaken yourself on purpose. This is why you walk 25 kilometers a day and you're walking on blisters and you're actually inducing this amount of pain. And I remember this the first time I walked my Camino. I was in a, a liminal space in my career. I just stepped down as the CEO of this big think tank, and I, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I mean, I was 55 years old, and I was spent, dude. I was-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:39:25

        [laughs]

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:39:25

        ... out of gas. I was burnt out. I'd been working 80 hours a week. I missed a lot of my kids growing up. I'd made mistakes, right?

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:39:32

        Mm-hmm.

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:39:32

        They stuck with me by the grace of God. And I was walking the Camino day after day after day. I was praying, and I was, I was tired, and I was in pain. And when I entered into Santiago de Compostela, this medieval city in northern Spain, and I saw the cathedral, I realized that my mission was to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas to be a scientist in the public interest, but for love and happiness. And I didn't find that.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:40:02

        Mm-hmm.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:40:03

        It found me.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:40:04

        Question. How did that appear? Was it drop by drop? Was it a Japanese breakfast on a silver platter in your mind? I mean, did it, did it all come at once or was it bits and pieces that you slowly were able to weave together?

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:40:20

        It was bit by bit because it's not this epiphany.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:40:23

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:40:23

        It's not like falling off my horse on the road to Damascus in a, you know, temporary blindness, which is probably, you know, temporal epilepsy-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:40:30

        [laughs]

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:40:30

        ... in the case of St. Paul. But-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:40:31

        Yeah

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:40:31

        ... it was a realization. It was a realization. It was something that had already existed out there. It felt like it came to me little by little, particularly over the last couple of days, the last couple of days of the pilgrimage. It was, "What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to return to my roots as a scientist and to use that as missionary work for, you know, greater love and happiness, to get into the mission field as a behavioral scientist, going back to the roots of what I've actually learned. Why? What do I want for me and for everybody? I want more love. I want more happiness. I want more meaning. That's what I want for me and for everybody because that's the sustenance of actually what we need."

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:41:05

        Did that want come into high resolution in part because of the nature of that particular pilgrimage-

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:41:15

        Mm-hmm

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:41:15

        ... the religious connotations and the prayer along the way, or do you think that that was already a little beneath the surface and waiting to come out and it would have come out in a different environment with a different context?

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:41:26

        That's a good question. It's an empirical question, but I will say that all of the components of the pilgrimage, not to be metaphysical about it, not to be mystical about it at all, all the components of a pilgrimage, which is the physical difficulty, the strain that actually comes from it, the intense effort that you're making while away from these technological distractions, the work that I'm doing on my relationship with God and my wife, with whom I'm holding her hand and praying the rosary.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:41:51

        You did the pilgrimage with your wife?

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:41:52

        Yeah, yeah. And I would've done 33 days, except she's like, "No."

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:41:55

        Yeah [laughs] .
29. 1:46:32 – 1:48:22

    AI as left-brain adjunct.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:46:32

       people ask me all the time. How is AI gonna interact with happiness?

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:46:35

       Mm.

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:46:35

       The answer is that AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:46:39

       Mm.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:46:39

       The way that it can bring you happiness is that if you do left brain things with it, thus freeing up a whole bunch of time that you then use to deepen your relationships in real life with real people. That's an algorithm right there, man.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:46:51

       Yeah.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:46:52

       The way that you won't get it is if you try to use it as an adjunct to the right hemisphere of your brain by making it your lover, friend, or therapist.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:46:58

       Or if you use it to do certain things more quickly so that you can simply consume the, quote-unquote, "free time" you've created with more left dominant-

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:47:11

       By frittering away your time on Instagram

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:47:13

        ... activity, which is what I predict most people will do.

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:47:15

        Yeah. Exactly right.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:47:15

        So, so the idea of this thing-

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:47:16

        So the, my morning pro-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:47:18

        ... the era of leisure time [laughs]

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:47:20

        I know. I know

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:47:20

        ... is on its face pretty ridiculous because that's been predicted with every advance in technology, but-

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:47:25

        Exactly. When we started off by talking about the technology that I use, which is my morning protocol, the morning protocol per se is not the secret to happiness.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:47:33

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:47:34

        It instantiates, it enables.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:47:37

        It's a scaffolding.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:47:38

        It's, what it is, is an architecture-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:47:40

        Yeah

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:47:40

        ... such that I can actually have the freedom to live in the right hemisphere of my brain and find the meaning of my life. That's what all these protocols are. That's why, you know, blood flow restriction is a, is a left brain protocol, but the reason that you do anything like that is because ultimately, what you want is more freedom, in a way, more freedom to spend it in what really matters most in your life, which is more love.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:48:03

        Mm.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:48:03

        It's more love. It's more meaning. It's more significance. It's more coherence. It's more purpose.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:48:09

        I want to end where I promised we would end, and The Meaning of Your Life, this is the new book, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I love your writing. I love your thinking. People should absolutely check out the book.

30. 1:48:22 – 1:51:05

    Arthur’s evening protocol: Psalms and Neruda.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:48:23

       I need to ask you briefly about a specific element of your evening routine and wind down, and that is personal evening reading.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:48:33

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:48:34

       What do you read before you go to bed?

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:48:37

       Before I go to bed, I read something that's not trying to educate me better-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:48:40

       Mm-hmm

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:48:41

       ... but trying to be generative to me. I wanna use, and again, this is very left brain thinking, I want my sleep to be concentrated in the hemisphere of my brain that'll bring me the most meaning, and what you read before you sleep will actually stimulate the part of your brain that you're gonna use most while you sleep. It's one of the reasons that if you wanna remember something-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:49:02

       Mm-hmm

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:49:02

       ... read about it right before you go to sleep.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:49:04

       Yeah.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:49:04

        And you'll actually remember it, but you won't learn something you don't know, but you will remember something better.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:49:08

        Mm.

    12. ABArthur Brooks1:49:09

        That's the reason that I read the Psalms. Actually, I like to have the Psalms read to me in a feminine Spanish accent.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:49:16

        [laughs] Sounds great. Sign me up.

    14. ABArthur Brooks1:49:18

        [laughs] I read love poetry.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:49:21

        So do you have any favorite Psalms? And then love poetry, what are we talking?

    16. ABArthur Brooks1:49:25

        Well, actually, we are talking about Neruda.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:49:27

        Yeah.

    18. ABArthur Brooks1:49:27

        The greatest love poet ever.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:49:28

        Mm-hmm.

    20. ABArthur Brooks1:49:28

        The Chilean love poet in Spanish, which pronounced in Spanish from your beloved is like a narcotic.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:49:34

        Yeah. [laughs]

    22. ABArthur Brooks1:49:35

        And yet won't ruin your life. The Psalms, Psalm 121. Any of the Psalms, actually, because they, they have the, a different flavor as you work your way through them.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:49:44

        Mm-hmm.

    24. ABArthur Brooks1:49:44

        The first Psalm is like, "A tree planted by streams of water who prospers in all that he does." The idea of God's promise and love for you, Tim, and that promise and absorbing that promise of the intense love for you, which is the essence of significance at the metaphysical level-

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:50:00

        Mm

    26. ABArthur Brooks1:50:00

        ... and absorbing that and having it read to you or reading it or having it read to you is so significant. That's a beautiful thing to do, and that's a great part of the evening protocol. The evening protocol is, you know, happiness and better sleep.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:50:12

        Mm-hmm.

    28. ABArthur Brooks1:50:12

        Deeper love, generativity in the nighttime hours, which by the way, for me, are a torment. I'm a terrible sleeper.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:50:18

        Yeah, me too.

    30. ABArthur Brooks1:50:19

        I'm terrible. And you can't get the machine off, right?
31. 1:51:05 – 1:55:25

    The oxytocin protocol for marriage, break glass plan.

    1. ABArthur Brooks1:51:05

       But there is actually part of the protocol, this is really important for everybody watching us who doesn't sleep alone-

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:51:09

       Mm

    3. ABArthur Brooks1:51:09

       ... is actually the oxytocin protocol, which is, as we all know, the love molecule, the bonding neuropeptide.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:51:15

       Mm-hmm.

    5. ABArthur Brooks1:51:15

       It functions as a hormone of the brain. Women have three times as much as men.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:51:19

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ABArthur Brooks1:51:19

       Side note, here's how you fix every marriage. You do four things. Number one, you have more fun together as opposed to rehearsing grievance. More fun, less grievance.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:51:28

       Mm-hmm.

    9. ABArthur Brooks1:51:28

       Therapy is like grievance, grievance, grievance. N- have-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:51:31

        Yeah

    11. ABArthur Brooks1:51:31

        ... more fun together. Number two-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:51:33

        And how long have you been married?

    13. ABArthur Brooks1:51:34

        34 years.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:51:35

        Mm-hmm. Okay.

    15. ABArthur Brooks1:51:36

        Second is pray together.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:51:38

        Mm-hmm.

    17. ABArthur Brooks1:51:38

        Because you're the fusion, one flesh. This is the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brains.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:51:43

        Mm-hmm.

    19. ABArthur Brooks1:51:43

        This is the goal. If you get married, Tim, the goal is to fuse your right hemispheres. The best way to do that is by meditating together, is by praying together, is by doing right hemisphere activity together.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:51:55

        Mm-hmm.

    21. ABArthur Brooks1:51:55

        The third protocol is to make eye contact whenever you talk.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:51:59

        Mm-hmm.

    23. ABArthur Brooks1:52:00

        Never be talking without making eye contact. Way more important for your wife than it is for you.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:52:04

        Mm-hmm.

    25. ABArthur Brooks1:52:05

        Way more important because she gets three times as much oxytocin, which means she's better at bonding, but it also means that she's better at starving-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:52:12

        Mm

    27. ABArthur Brooks1:52:12

        ... when she's not getting enough oxytocin. And eye contact from the beloved, which is, you know, when you have eye contact with a newborn baby, oxytocin is like the Fourth of July inside your head-

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:52:21

        [laughs]

    29. ABArthur Brooks1:52:21

        ... which is why you wouldn't leave the baby on the bus-

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:52:23

        Right
32. 1:55:25 – 1:56:37

    Happiness is love and other parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:55:25

       Arthur, always so much fun to spend time together. Thank you for taking the time.

    2. ABArthur Brooks1:55:30

       Thank you, Tim. Thank you for what you're bringing into the world. Even when I'm not in person, I'm with you virtually, and you enrich my life.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:55:35

       Oh, thanks, man. This is... Boy, talk about lucky timing. All the serendipity required to end up with this as a job. Remarkable.

    4. ABArthur Brooks1:55:45

       Right on, man.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:55:46

       And I get, get to spend time with people like yourself. The Meaning of Your Life, folks. Check it out. You can get it everywhere books are sold. And people can find you at arthurbrooks.com on all the socials.

    6. ABArthur Brooks1:55:57

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:55:58

       Presumably. Is there anything else you would like to share? Anything else you'd like to say or request to my audience? Anything at all before we wind to a close?

    8. ABArthur Brooks1:56:06

       If you don't know what to do today and meaning feels out of reach, turn off your device and go love somebody. And it doesn't really matter how you feel because love is an act. It's a commitment. It's a decision. And you'll lift up yourself and that person and a little bit of the whole world. Happiness is love.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:56:24

       Boom. I think that is a perfect place to end. And folks, we'll link to everything as usual, tim.blog/podcast. Go love somebody, including yourself.

    10. ABArthur Brooks1:56:34

        Right on.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:56:35

        [laughs] See you next time. Thanks for tuning in

Episode duration: 1:56:48