18:32The Mindset Mentor Podcast · Talking Head
Act As If Everything Always Works Out
An 18-minute neuroscience case for why expecting the worst is a self-fulfilling prediction — and how to rewire your brain to see opportunity instead.
June 25thThe argument in one line.
Modern technology, social media, and hustle culture are left-brain simulations of right-brain experiences — and no amount of achievement, virtual connection, or optimized routine can substitute for the messy, unsolvable, meaning-generating realities they mimic.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You feel vaguely empty despite hitting the goals you set for yourself — more successful on paper than fulfilled in practice.
- You suspect your compulsive productivity or screen use is numbing something you can't name.
- You're in your twenties or thirties and your friend circle has migrated almost entirely online, and it doesn't quite feel real.
- You want a framework — grounded in neuroscience and behavioral science — for why life feels hollow and what to actually do about it.
- You're a high-achieving striver who was conditioned early to believe that love is earned, and you haven't examined that wiring.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for tactical productivity or career optimization advice — this conversation goes in the opposite direction.
- You're not open to the idea that some problems are unsolvable and should stay that way.
The full version, fast.
The core argument is that human brains have two hemispheres doing fundamentally different work: the left handles 'how' and 'what' — analysis, execution, apps; the right handles 'why' — mystery, meaning, love. Modern life has become an almost entirely left-brain simulation: online relationships, swipe-based dating, gaming as achievement, phone-first mornings. This locks people out of the right hemisphere experiences their brains actually need. The result is tripled depression and doubled anxiety since 2008, not because life got harder economically, but because it became more virtual. The fix is behavioral: break the doom loop of distraction, relearn boredom, pursue real-world relationships, allow romantic risk, find something to serve, and lean into rather than flee from suffering.
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00:00hostChris Williamson
00:30guestArthur Brooks
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 06:42
01 · Are We Living in a Simulation?
Brooks introduces the Matrix metaphor for algorithmic life and Ian McGilchrist's hemispheric lateralization — the left brain runs our simulations, the right brain is what actually needs feeding.
06:42 – 11:00
02 · Counterfeit Sources of Meaning
Achievement in gaming, virtual friends, and online relationships are identified as simulations that feel meaningful in the moment but leave people emptier over time.
11:00 – 15:00
03 · Why Meaning Can't Be Simulated
Meaning is fundamentally a right-hemisphere experience. No simulation can replicate it — and the brain knows the difference, which is why online connection produces loneliness rather than curing it.
15:00 – 19:30
04 · The Most Meaningless Day Imaginable
Brooks constructs a detailed blueprint for a meaning-free life: phone before bed, remote work, swipe dating, evening gaming, no exercise, no boredom. The key insight: no boredom moment to moment = a boring life overall.
19:30 – 24:10
05 · Are Ambitious People Especially Vulnerable?
Strivers use ambition as anesthesia. Busyness is a distraction from being uncomfortable in one's own head. Data shows above-average busy people have above-average alcohol abuse rates.
24:10 – 34:34
06 · Pursuing Goals vs. Pursuing Approval
The arrival fallacy is explored in depth — why it's antimemetic, why Mother Nature wires it in deliberately, and how it connects to a metaphysical argument for transcendence.
34:34 – 37:10
07 · The Three Components of Meaning
Michael Steger's framework: coherence (why things happen), purpose (why you're doing what you're doing), and significance (your life matters to someone). All three are absent from modern life for large numbers of people.
37:10 – 48:00
08 · Specialness vs. Happiness
The distinction between seeking specialness (fame, status, the unique achievement) and seeking happiness. Strivers who were only loved conditionally as children spend adult life earning love — and attracting partners who require it.
48:00 – 53:00
09 · What You're Praised For in Public, You Pay For in Private
Your boardroom strengths are your relationship weaknesses. The conversation explores how to be grateful for both sides of the same sword — and why taking the mask off in private is so hard for high achievers.
53:00 – 55:50
10 · The Parental Attribution Error
If you won't credit your parents for your strengths, you shouldn't blame them for your flaws. The hypervigilance that hurt you as a child is the same quality driving your success.
55:50 – 1:03:55
11 · Technology Is the Spear
Technology is a symptom of a deeper scientism — the conceit that every problem is complicated and therefore solvable. The most important problems are complex and must be lived with, not solved.
1:03:55 – 1:12:30
12 · How to Escape the Doom Loop
The doom loop: distraction → reduced boredom tolerance → less meaning → more distraction. Three behavioral steps to break any addiction: rebellion, algorithm for stopping, relearning to live with yourself. Specific phone protocols given.
1:12:30 – 1:16:59
13 · Can You Recover From Meaninglessness?
Yes — and it doesn't require giving up your phone, just putting it in proper boundaries. Phone-free times, zones, and 96-hour annual fasts are the minimum effective dose.
1:16:59 – 1:21:03
14 · How Important Is Romantic Love to Meaning?
Romantic love is the best way to activate the right hemisphere — it is categorically unsolvable, which is exactly the point. Go get your heart broken. That's when you find the meaning of your life.
1:21:03 – 1:24:25
15 · The Ladder of Love
Diotima's ladder from Plato's Symposium — each rung moves from romantic attraction toward something transcendent. Most religions treat marriage as a form of divine connection, not just a social contract.
1:24:25 – 1:31:30
16 · Transcendence and the Me Self vs. I Self
Transcendence requires moving from the 'me self' (navel-gazing, metrics, mentions) to the 'I self' (outward attention). Social media is a giant mirror that makes transcendence nearly impossible. The fitness influencer who deleted all his accounts and showered in the dark for a year as a case study.
1:31:30 – 1:38:00
17 · Finding Your Calling
Two wrong graduation speeches: 'do what you love' and 'save the world.' The calling is the thing you can't stop thinking about, where you earn real value and someone genuinely needs you. Status is a terrible barometer.
1:38:00 – 1:41:55
18 · Why Changing Direction Feels So Scary
Four career patterns (linear, transitory, expert, spiral). Spirals must rebuild every 7-12 years. Entrepreneurship in the business of your life means you cannot afford the sunk cost fallacy.
1:41:55 – 1:45:15
19 · The Role of Beauty in Meaning
Beauty is a right-hemisphere experience. A technocratic, left-hemisphere society produces less beautiful music, less moral beauty, and less access to natural beauty. If there's not enough beauty in your life, you're too far left.
1:45:15 – 1:48:20
20 · Suffering Is the Ultimate Meaning Maker
Suffering is not to be eliminated — it's to be leaned into. The most meaningful periods of life coincide with the highest negative emotion. Trying to engineer out pain is both impossible and actively destructive to meaning.
1:48:20 – 1:52:00
21 · The Modern Unhappiness Crisis
Happiness = enjoyment + satisfaction + meaning. For most people, enjoyment and satisfaction remain relatively intact; meaning has collapsed. Frankl's inverse law explored: strivers who can't feel pleasure distract with more meaning-seeking.
1:52:00 – 1:54:00
22 · How to Build a More Meaningful Life
Five-point protocol: get right with technology, learn to be bored again, pursue real-world relationships and romantic risk, entertain the metaphysical, lean into suffering with an attitude of nonresistance.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Depression has tripled and anxiety has doubled since 2008 — not because the economy got harder, but because life moved online and locked people out of the right hemisphere of their brain.
- The more pornography men consume, the lonelier they get — it's a simulation of the connection they actually need, and the gap widens with use.
- Conspiracy theories are a coherence problem, not an intelligence problem — people who fall into them are having a meaning crisis and crying out for a reason things happen the way they do.
- If you want a life with no meaning, make sure there's no boredom moment to moment — then your life will be grindingly boring day to day. The paradox is exact.
- The arrival fallacy is antimemetic: even people who deeply believe the view from the top isn't as good as expected still reject the lesson — because Mother Nature needs you in the hunt.
- Every Olympic gold medalist experiences depression after winning. It's called gold medalist syndrome — and the arrival fallacy is why.
- Above-average busy people are above-average risk for alcohol abuse. Workaholism and addiction run the same neurological loop; only one gets applauded.
- What you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private — your decisiveness in the boardroom is your emotional unavailability at the kitchen table.
- A striver who was only given love as a child when they achieved something will spend their entire adult life trying to earn love — and will unconsciously select partners who make them earn it.
- Real love is a free gift, freely given. Anyone who makes you earn their love doesn't love you.
- Meaning is made of three things: coherence (why do things happen this way?), purpose (why am I doing what I'm doing?), and significance (does my life matter to anyone?).
- The three macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. For most people today, it's meaning that has collapsed — the other two are relatively intact.
- Enjoyment is not pleasure. Enjoyment equals pleasure plus people plus memory — it requires consciousness and other humans; pleasure alone ends in detox.
- Dating apps are a left-brain solution to a right-brain problem. They're getting better only by adding human friction back in — letting your friends choose your matches.
- Beauty is a right-hemisphere experience — a society optimized for the left hemisphere will produce progressively less beautiful music, moral behavior, and architecture.
- Suffering is the ultimate meaning-making experience. The most meaningful periods of most people's lives were their periods of greatest negative emotion.
- Going online puts you in the 'me self' permanently — you're always looking at yourself, your metrics, your mentions. Transcendence requires the 'I self,' which looks outward.
- Four career patterns exist: linear, transitory, expert, and spiral. Spirals need to take their career down to the studs every seven to twelve years — and that's not failure, it's biology.
- Your calling is not the thing you love or the thing that saves the world. It's the thing you can't stop thinking about, where someone genuinely needs what you do.
- Three steps out of any addiction: get pissed (the spirit of rebellion), learn how to stop (the algorithm for your substance), and relearn how to be alone with yourself.
Meaning is a right-brain problem you can't solve your way out of.
WHAT TO LEARN
The collapse in happiness is not about money, success, or willpower — it's about spending life in the wrong hemisphere of the brain, running left-brain simulations of right-brain experiences.
01Are We Living in a Simulation?
- Your brain has two hemispheres doing different work: the left handles execution and analysis; the right handles meaning, love, and mystery. Modern life runs almost entirely in the left while the right starves.
- Depression has tripled and anxiety doubled since 2008 — correlating precisely with the shift to phone-first, online-first living, not with economic hardship.
02Counterfeit Sources of Meaning
- Virtual friends, gaming achievements, and pornography feel satisfying in the moment and leave you emptier over time because they are left-brain simulations of right-brain needs.
04The Most Meaningless Day Imaginable
- The meaning-free day blueprint: phone before getting out of bed, remote work from bedroom, swipe-based dating, evening gaming, no exercise, constant stimulation. No boredom moment to moment = a boring life overall.
05Are Ambitious People Especially Vulnerable?
- Ambitious people are especially at risk because busyness is a socially acceptable anesthetic. The same overriding need to be special that drives achievement also prevents the stillness that generates meaning.
06Pursuing Goals vs. Pursuing Approval
- The arrival fallacy is antimemetic by design — Mother Nature needs you in the hunt and has wired in the illusion that getting there will finally satisfy you. It won't. Every gold medalist learns this.
07The Three Components of Meaning
- Meaning has three components: coherence (why do things happen this way?), purpose (why am I doing this?), and significance (does my life matter to someone?). All three are collapsed for large numbers of people.
- Conspiracy theories are a coherence problem, not an intelligence problem. Counter them with empathy, not data — the person is having a meaning crisis.
08Specialness vs. Happiness
- Happiness has three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. For most people today, it is specifically meaning that has collapsed; the other two remain relatively intact.
- Enjoyment is not pleasure. Enjoyment = pleasure + people + memory. Pleasure alone ends in addiction; enjoyment requires conscious attention and other humans.
09What You're Praised For in Public, You Pay For in Private
- What you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private. Your boardroom strengths — decisiveness, emotional control, relentless drive — are your relationship weaknesses at the kitchen table.
10The Parental Attribution Error
- People who were given love only when they achieved something as children will spend their adult lives trying to earn love and will unconsciously choose partners who require them to earn it.
12How to Escape the Doom Loop
- Breaking the doom loop of technology addiction has three behavioral steps: get angry enough to rebel, learn the algorithm for stopping, and then do the hardest part — relearn how to be alone with yourself.
- Three phone protocols with the most evidence: first and last hour of the day without the device, no phone in the bedroom ever, and a 96-hour phone fast at least once a year.
14How Important Is Romantic Love to Meaning?
- Romantic love is one of the best ways to activate the right hemisphere — because it is categorically unsolvable. Going through heartbreak is not a detour from meaning; it is meaning.
16Transcendence and the Me Self vs. I Self
- Transcendence requires moving from the 'me self' (looking at yourself and your metrics) to the 'I self' (looking outward). Social media is a mirror that makes transcendence nearly impossible.
17Finding Your Calling
- Your calling is not the thing you love most or the thing that will save the world. It is the thing you cannot stop thinking about, where you create genuine value and someone genuinely needs you.
18Why Changing Direction Feels So Scary
- Spirals — one of four psychological career types — need to dismantle and rebuild their work life every seven to twelve years. The first transition is hardest; successive ones get easier.
19The Role of Beauty in Meaning
- Beauty is a right-hemisphere experience. If there is not enough beauty in your life, it is a reliable signal that you are spending too much time in the left hemisphere.
20Suffering Is the Ultimate Meaning Maker
- Suffering is not to be optimized away — it is the primary meaning-making engine. The most meaningful periods of most lives coincide with the highest negative emotion. Lean into it rather than flee it.
Terms worth knowing.
- Hemispheric lateralization
- The concept that the two halves of the brain have distinct core competencies. The right hemisphere handles complex, mysterious, meaning-laden questions (the 'why'); the left handles analytical, executable tasks (the 'how' and 'what'). Brought back into mainstream science by Ian McGilchrist.
- Arrival fallacy
- The psychological belief that reaching a goal — a certain income, title, relationship, or accolade — will finally produce the feeling of wholeness or worthiness you've been seeking. It never does, because the brain is wired to keep you in the hunt, not at the destination.
- Gold medalist syndrome
- The well-documented pattern of depression in Olympic gold medalists immediately after winning. The arrival fallacy delivers not fulfillment but emptiness, because the reward was the pursuit, not the prize.
- Coherence (as component of meaning)
- The sense that there is a reason things happen the way they do in your life — whether rooted in religion, science, philosophy, or narrative. Without it, life feels random and agency disappears.
- Significance (as component of meaning)
- The belief that your life matters to at least one other entity — a person, a pet, a community, or something transcendent. Distinct from fame or status; it can exist entirely in private relationships.
- Doom loop
- The self-reinforcing cycle in which distraction from boredom reduces tolerance for boredom, which increases the need for distraction, which further erodes meaning — mirroring the escalation pattern of substance addiction.
- Me self / I self
- William James's distinction between two modes of self-awareness: the 'me self' looks inward and evaluates oneself constantly (dominant in social media use); the 'I self' looks outward at the world. Transcendence requires moving from me to I.
- Atelic activity
- An activity done for its own sake, with no external goal or telos attached. Philosopher Josef Pieper's concept of true leisure — the kind that generates enjoyment and meaning — is atelic. A hobby you try to optimize becomes telic and loses its power.
- Spiral career pattern
- One of four psychological career types. Spirals need to rebuild their career from scratch every seven to twelve years, carrying lessons forward into a genuinely new venture. The first transition is hardest; subsequent ones get easier.
- Frankel's inverse law
- A counterpoint to Viktor Frankl's observation that people without meaning distract with pleasure. The inverse: people without easy access to pleasure distract themselves with meaning — perpetually chasing hard goals as a substitute for the joy they can't feel.
Things they pointed at.
00:30productThe Matrix (film)
01:00bookIan McGilchrist — hemispheric lateralization work
43:30channelDavid Brooks (author, NYT columnist)
44:00channelRyan Holiday
44:10channelMark Manson
34:34bookMichael Steger — meaning research (coherence, purpose, significance)
36:40bookSonya Lyubomirsky — goals and happiness research, UC Riverside
1:21:00bookDiotima / Plato's Symposium — ladder of love
1:39:00bookJosef Pieper — Leisure the Basis of Culture
1:47:30bookNorman Vincent Peale — The Power of Positive Thinking
Lines you could clip.
00:08
“We are subjugated, not by people necessarily, but by algorithms that fundamentally are creating a simulated version of a real life that's pleasant enough, keeps us from being bored, and feeds off our attention and energy and money. We're living in the matrix.”
12:30
“The reason I love my marriage is because it's unsolvable. The reason that people want to get a real cat and not a mechanical cat is because it's alive, and things that are alive are right-brain problems.”
24:50
“Striving and busyness is a way that people anesthetize themselves because they're very, very uncomfortable. Don't leave me alone in here, man. I don't wanna be alone in here.”
35:05
“The biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is: I don't know the meaning of my life, or my life feels meaningless. That's the number one predictor.”
42:10
“The arrival fallacy is antimemetic. People don't want to hear it and won't tell their friends about it. It's not just memetically neutral — it's actively antimemetic.”
1:11:30
“What you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private.”
1:38:30
“If you want to be an entrepreneur in the business of your life, you cannot afford the sunk cost fallacy with your own career, or your own relationships, or your own interests.”
2:13:50
“I'm really grateful for the beautiful things that are gonna happen this day. But something's gonna happen today that I'm not gonna like. Bring it on. I'm grateful for that too. Because when I lean into that, then I'm gonna be fully alive.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 15:00denseLeft-brain vs. right-brain simulation of life
06:42 – 19:30denseCounterfeit meaning — achievement, virtual friends, pornography
19:30 – 48:00denseStriver pathology — ambition as anesthesia, arrival fallacy
34:34 – 37:10denseThree components of meaning (coherence, purpose, significance)
37:10 – 48:00denseSpecialness vs. happiness, conditional love wiring
55:50 – 1:03:55steadyTechnology as symptom of scientism
1:03:55 – 1:16:59denseBreaking the doom loop — addiction framework and protocols
1:16:59 – 1:31:30denseLove, transcendence, and the ladder of love
1:31:30 – 1:54:00denseCalling, career patterns, beauty, suffering
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metaphoranalogystory
Why do so many people feel like modern life is simulated rather than real? Because it is. .
That movie, the matrix came out twenty seven years ago. I hate to shock and sadden you. It'll make anybody who was alive then feel old.
But the plot of that movie was that a great artificial intelligence was dominating the human race and kept the human race placid in a pleasant simulation so that it could feed off human kinetic energy. It kept them in pods and ran a simulation. And and the truth of the matter is that we are subjugated, not by people necessarily, but by algorithms that fundamentally are creating a simulated version of a real life that's pleasant enough, keeps us from being bored, and that feeds off our attention and energy and money.
We're living in the matrix. And that's why people say, I don't know. It doesn't feel like real dating.
Doesn't feel like real friends. Scroll. Scroll.
Scroll. It doesn't feel like real achievement. Game.
Game. Game. Because we're living in a simulation.
What's happening neurologically, though? So what's happening neurobiologically is that we're literally in the wrong half of our brains.
So this is the work of Ian McGilchrist, the great have you had him on the show? Friend of the show. He's fantastic.
He's an Oxford neuroscientist. He's a great genius.
He brought back the whole idea of hemispheric lateralization. That's the concept that the two halves of your brain do different things. I mean, they do a lot of things the same too, but the fact is that they have different core competencies.
Now when I was a kid in the seventies, this is long before you youngsters were born, there was this belief that there were right brained and left brained people. Right brained people were creative. Left brained people were analytical.
My mom who was an artist was a right brained person. My father who was a mathematician was a left brained person.
Growing up, I was a right brained person like my mom because I was a musician. I was a classical musician. I painted, and I wrote poetry.
Then I got my PhD, and I became apparently a left brain person because I became a scientist. Well, the truth is that that theory didn't work. What does work, however, is what Ian McGillchrist brought back to show that we ask and answer different questions with the different hemispheres of our brain.
The right hemisphere is the complex why, the mystery and meaning of life, the things that set us out in the hunt for the things that matter in life. The left brain is the how to and what.
It's how we execute. It's the linear side. It's the analysis.
It's the engineering. It's the apps of life or the left brain side.
And what's happening is when we're running a simulation of life, we're running a left brain simulation to meet our right brain questions of love and mystery and meaning, and you can't simulate the meaning of life.
Is it not a good thing for people to be more rational and analytical and objective? Is this not something that only a couple of decades ago we were trying to push more on people? Yeah.
I suppose, except that we need both. The truth is that we need both because life is full of both kinds of problems. Look, if you if you don't know the why of the things in your life, the how to and what mean nothing.
But if you only know the how to and what, then the why and the why is elusive. I mean, you get the point that I'm trying to make. I mean, you can either be incompetent in executing anything in your life or you'll have no purpose in the life that you lead.
You actually need both. I go to work every day. I'm traveling around doing my job.
It's great. I know how to do it. I'm competent at it because my left brain is working properly.
I know how to get where I'm trying to go and do what I'm trying to do. I can write my speeches and my columns and books, etcetera, but I got to know why, which is that I want to do something good for the world. I want to support the people that I love.
I want to glorify God. That's what I want. That's the why side, and that originates on the right side of our brains.
Furthermore, all the things we really care about are not the analytical things. The things that we care about are not the physical. They're the metaphysical.
That's what we really care about. So I'll give you an example. A big left brain question is how does my car work?
I actually don't know. I have the slightest idea. Right?
It's just I mean, it's a car. Right? But I could know because I could actually get a book or I could get a guy and come teach me, or I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos, And that's knowable because those are complicated left brain questions.
My marriage is a right brain problem. It's completely unsolvable.
I have to live with it. I can't figure it out. I will never figure out my marriage.
Dude, I've been married thirty five years before just an hour ago.
She texts me, I love you. Good luck on the podcast. I'm sure it's true she loves me.
Tonight, I could call, and she might be completely pissed off at me. I I don't know. Yeah.
But you did decide to date somebody with Latina blood. It's well, that that adds that adds a level of complexity, I grant you.
Correct. It's like a yeah. It's a multiplier.
She's a big pulsing right hemisphere. Right?
Sure enough. But this is the thing.
The reason I love my marriage is because it's unsolvable. Right? The reason that people want to get a real cat and not a mechanical cat is because it's alive, and things that are alive are right brain problems, and things that are mechanical are left brain problems.
And so what we've done is we've we've solved life. We've solved life. I mean, we have I mean, everything we're we're trying to the the engineering, the Silicon Valley set of solutions for everything that we're trying to do that actually pops through the screen at us, that dominates our culture, that increasingly can be simulated and understood through artificial intelligence.
All that's doing is it's a curve fit through the messy business of life using these left brain algorithms, and that's not going to get done what we need to get done.
It is going to leave us lonelier and more depressed and more anxious. Here's the thing, your brain knows.
So for example, this is one of the reasons that the more pornography people look at, largely young men, because more than 85% of pornography is being consumed by men. Now you're thinking I know what you're thinking, who are the 15%?
Old men? No. Is it you?
Thank you. Thank you very much.
The So more pornography that men look at, the lonelier they get. So in the moment, they feel less lonely and the more satisfied they feel, but the more unsatisfied and the lonelier they actually get because it's a simulation for the experience they're actually seeking, and it's unsatisfactory as a result of that.
Mhmm. You want actual human connection with another person. That's what you actually want, and you're settling for a a two dimensional simulacrum for it.
What are some of the other
counterfeit sources of meaning that
people mistake for the real thing? Achievement is a counterfeit source is something that you actually get that doesn't build anything real of any real consequence in life. So the idea of it's like, you just score in a game gives you a real short term sense of achievement, which is a source of purpose, which is a component of meaning, but it isn't real.
It's fake. It's counterfeit.
It's simulated. That's one of the reasons that you'll find that you got to do more and more and more and more and more to keep up with it.
They used to say if you really want to have lived a good life, you know what you need to do. You need to have a son, plant a tree, and write a book.
I don't know. I've done all those things. I don't know if I planted a tree.
That's what you're missing. I don't have a green thumb. It isn't my problem.
Need to plant more trees. But the whole point is that what those things have in common is that they're real. They're in real life.
They're real achievements in real life. They don't say plant a tree online. Pretend you're planting a tree.
Get really good at doing it. Have a son online. The whole idea of simulating these experiences is unsatisfactory.
What it does, simulates the experience in the moment. That's another example. Having friends is another way.
There's another way we think about it. Virtual friends, they simply don't meet your needs.
And one of the ways that we know this is that the more virtual friends that you have, the less that you're actually illuminating in the experience of interacting with them the right hemisphere of your brain. One of the reasons that you don't like to do your show virtually is because you don't have the same experience.
The reason is that you and I are connecting with our right brains right now. You and I are friends.
I mean, text and talk to each other even when we're not doing a show, which is great because we're friends. We have that texting relationship because we've actually looked at each other in the eyes and had real no fooling conversations with each other. And that's how you have to link with other human beings.
Otherwise, it's a simulated friendship. It's one of the biggest realizations
I had when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life toward the end of my twenties. And I had all of these friends because shock, horror in the nightlife industry in the Northeast Of The UK.
There weren't many people that were into the things I was getting into. Mhmm. There weren't many people that, you know, maybe they'd heard about Sam Harris, and they were thinking about doing meditation, or they'd read a bit of Robert Green and then got stuck after a couple of pages and then were struggling with that and then felt real bad because they couldn't sit still.
Like, all of these things that I was going through, it was I was finding it difficult on the front door of a nightclub to find people to resonate with. So I made friends online that were into the same sort of things that I was. And I found that these friends kind of
distilled out into two straddle of people. Even if all that I'd done was as I was going through a city on a train Mhmm. Stopped off for a thirty minute coffee with someone, That person immediately went into a different bracket of, I've actually met this person.
They're real. In three dimensions, they're real. Yeah.
And because your brain actually apprehended that person in a different way. Yeah. What you did was you had an imprint of that person in flesh and blood in real life, which is by the way how the brain was evolved.
We are our brains are more or less the same size and shape. There's slight physiological differences, but trivial for what we're talking about here as they were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago in the mid in the middle Pleistocene. And during that period, all human beings lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals who are kin based and hierarchically related.
And that meant that the relationship they had with each other was absolutely paramount, and our brains are wired for in person relationships. That's one of the reasons that you get oxytocin when you look at somebody in the eyes. You and I have a better conversation when we have this bonding hormone that's actually going through our brains when we're looking at each other in real life.
You don't get it through Zoom screens. There's lot of research on this at this point. You get a different kind of experience when you have the in real life experience.
And so one of the things that I do when I'm talking to couples, and my wife and I, we do we do work. We'll do these marriage retreats, for example. One of the things that we'll do with couples will say, okay, before you go to sleep, you need to stare into each other's eyes before you go to sleep, you're lying in the bed on your sides looking at each other, stare each other in the eyes for five minutes.
That's it. That's the prescription. Because you want to establish this thing that probably they haven't had for a really, really long time, and that your brain actually needs so that your brain registers, that's my person.
You can't get it any other way. Why is it that meaning can't be simulated?
Meaning can't be simulated because meaning is this fundamentally complex right hemispheric experience. And so when you're the simulation is always in the wrong side of the brain. And so it'll look like it's meaningful, but it isn't.
Mhmm. It's what it comes down to. It'll feel like in the moment like love, but it isn't.
It'll feel like friendship, but it isn't. So interesting with this conversation because
a lot of people when when I think about how this lands on the Internet, there is a kind of cohort of people that will say something like, this is good enough.
This is actually as good. There there's a a disbelief that you actually do need to go into three dimensions. There is a a I'm happy to wait for the sex robots to come.
I'm happy to have the AI partner. There's even a company that makes AI versions of your exes. So if you don't ever want to leave the relationship with them, you can just keep on texting.
And I think that that kind of when I read those comments, it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I think it sounds like somebody who's got hurt or is scared that the world isn't going to be able to give them something that they know that they can get compliantly online permissionlessly with lower risk of rejection or zero risk of rejection.
And it makes me it makes me sad. But, yeah, it's so much of what we're seeing in the modern world is people getting what they want but not what they need.
Right. And this is something that people need, but don't realize
that they want. Yeah. Well, they do know that they want it.
They just don't know how to get it. And it's ordinarily what's actually happening. I mean, I I rarely meet somebody who would say, I actually would prefer not to meet anybody in real life.
I mean, are people who are agoraphobic, for example. There are people that have particular pathologies along these lines, but the truth is it's they feel like it's the best that they can actually get under the circumstances. Look.
When when sixty two percent of couples are forming online, then it's very hard to form it's increasingly hard to form a couple offline.
Mhmm. And and if you're an exceptionally online person, or you're living in a remote location, or you you know, came of age during COVID, which means that you you don't have social skills that were wired into you at a tender age, then then you're gonna struggle is what it comes down to.
But here's the thing to keep in mind. The biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is is to say, I don't know the meaning of my life or my life feels meaningless. That's the number one predictor.
Why? It all gets down to the fact that these pathologies, they actually follow from this sense of emptiness.
People often say, so why has depression tripled? Why has anxiety doubled? Which they literally have clinically since about 2008.
Why? And they'll say, well, because generational difficulties.
Because boomers wrecked the economy and created income inequality and made houses expensive or something.
They have all of these exogenous economic explanations for this stuff. These are all wrong is what it comes down to.
Since 2008, when life has become increasingly online and we know, the average American is now checking her or his phone two zero five times a day. What you've done is you shoved yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain, and in so doing, you haven't been able to naturally experience this meaning.
And that's what leads empirically, that's what actually leads people to feel empty, to feel depressed, to feel anxious, to actually feel lonely.
That's the big predictor is what it comes down to. We have a meaning crisis. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit.
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Let's say that you're gonna design a life for someone to have as little meaning in it as possible. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. What would that consist of? It would start by
waking up when the sun is warm, you know, making sure you don't start your day like before dawn.
Make sure you start your day when kinda when you get up. Make sure that if you have an alarm clock, that is your phone. Look at your phone before you roll out of bed.
Right? Then make sure that the first thing that you do is eat a bunch of highly processed foods, high in sugar. Make sure you get your coffee in the first five minutes, so you get a big dose of caffeine.
And make sure that you're looking and scrolling on your phone while you're eating your first meal. That's a really important thing to do. Make sure that your whole first hour is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen.
Then make sure that you have a remote job. It's very important that you go to work back in your bedroom, and and you look at a screen, and you look at a screen all day long so that your colleagues are kind of squares on the Zoom screen.
And you see them sometimes in the clients and etcetera, etcetera. And and you don't actually know where anybody lives. You don't have a relationship with anybody.
Right? It's actually better if you don't see anybody the whole day, as a matter of fact. Now if you're gonna date, make sure that it's it's swipe right, swipe left, and so that you're only getting a two dimensional understanding of the person that you might wanna fall in love with as well.
Like no multidimensional, multi sensory understanding of who the person is.
Make sure you can't smell that person. Right? I mean, that's really important because, you know, the olfactory bulb does all kinds of meaning related things in the brain.
So make sure you rule that out. Right? And make sure that on your own dating profile, you're lying a lot.
That's important too. Right? Then let's make sure that that for fun that you're spending sort of the evening not doing anything of of real importance.
I mean, you're not working on a big project. You're not going out and seeing people, that you're kind of staying in and scrolling and watching YouTube shorts.
And if you're doing something that's kind of competitive and achievement oriented, make sure that it's gaming. Make sure that it's really oriented toward that.
So it's kind of . And then go to bed. Make sure you didn't do any exercise.
Important not to do any exercise at all. Right? And then repeat times or n equals any number that you can conceive of so that you're never bored.
You're never bored, but your life is grindingly boring. See, here's the key. If you want your life to have no meaning, make sure that there's no boredom moment to moment, but that day to day and week to week and month to month, life is boring.
That's what you're actually going for. As opposed, if you want your life to be really meaningful, make sure you got plenty of boredom moment to moment, and then then your life won't be boring at all.
Isn't that a strange paradox? It is. I mean, my my great grandfather, Lee Roy Brooks, he was born in Olathe, Kansas.
He married the sheriff's daughter. John Janes was the sheriff, was strung up by Quantrell's raiders during the civil war. Kid you not.
This is Americana in my family, Chris.
And he married Mary Ellen in Olathe, Kansas. And that's pretty much what I know about him, but I'm gonna make a prediction about good old Leroy.
He never came home to Mary Ellen and said, Honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today because his brain was working the way it was supposed to.
I promise you that his life behind the mule, looking at a mule's butt, was pretty boring moment to moment, but he was not bored. His life wasn't boring because he was living a real life.
But a lot of people today who have figured out a way by checking the screen and living online and living the hustle and grind culture that's been engineered out of Silicon Valley and various other places around the world, hide or abide and wherever you want, that not being bored from moment to moment gives them the most boring lives possible.
Is it the case that ambitious people are particularly susceptible, vulnerable to meaninglessness?
So asking for a friend. Right?
Of course. Of course. Me too.
I'm I'm like a senior version of you, man. Except you're not gonna be bald.
That's true. I'm gonna have to lose a of hair to take care you. To lose a lot of hair.
Know. If I had your hair, I'd be president of United States right now. I think you would.
Yes and no. So one of the the the the problems that really ambitious people have is that they they they don't know how to live with themselves.
So ambition, striving, busyness is is really a way that people anesthetize themselves because they're very, very uncomfortable.
So, you know, one I'll give you an example. One time I was talking to a great friend of mine who traveled constantly for work, constantly for work, and and his wife was just in his grill.
It's just like, he had kids, and and she says that I miss you, and and you always every year you tell me that this year's gonna be different. And and I realized getting to know this guy really, really well, the problem wasn't that his job made him travel too much.
The problem was he didn't wanna be home. He didn't wanna be home. He wanted to be distracted because his life stressed him out so much.
This is what it's like to be a striver, is is like having this unbelievably chaotic life. And and and you need to distract yourself all the time.
And so sometimes your ambition will be distracting you. Sometimes your success will be distracting you. Sometimes just your overriding need to be special or to be applauded by others is your way to distract yourself from all the things that are actually going on, all the storms and things inside your head.
Right? And when you have a down moment, then you panic and that's when the screen comes out. For that matter, that's when alcohol and drugs come out.
There's very interesting data from the OECD that show that above average, busier than average people are above average risk in alcohol abuse.
So you don't think you think of somebody who's an alcohol abuser or an alcoholic as somebody who's down and out. You know? You know?
A bum. Right? No.
It's more likely to be an investment banker. It's more likely to be a wealthy successful podcaster. And and the reason is because successful strivers anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol, with pornography, with screens, with anything that will actually make you feel like, don't leave me alone in here, man.
I don't wanna be alone in here. Mhmm. Which is why they're strivers in the first place.
How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they genuinely want them versus because they want approval?
So
everybody pursues goals because human beings, homo sapiens, only get satisfaction in their life when they're making progress. It's satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress toward an accomplishment with struggle.
That's what satisfaction is all about. That's why goals are incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important.
That's what it comes down to. These are the two things to teach your kids is have goals, accomplish stuff, and struggle, and don't be afraid of pain.
Those are the things that you teach your kids, and they'll get a lot of satisfaction. Satisfaction is one of the macronutrients of happiness to be sure. The trouble with that is that if it's somebody like you, highly intelligent, super hardworking, unbelievably energetic, then you can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it's actually not about making the progress and the struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself.
It's actually about if I finally get that thing, then it's gonna be okay. When I finally get that thing so, you know, I've I've I've worked with Olympic athletes. And and and it's funny because you'll often, they think they're alone in their struggles.
And you'll say, did you when you won that gold, were you depressed afterwards? They'd be like, how'd you know?
Like, because it's always true. Every other gold medalist. It's literally called gold medalist syndrome.
Yeah. It's called gold medalist. And and what it is, it's all in my field, in behavioral science, it's called the arrival fallacy.
And the arrival fallacy is just like, got to get there, and when I get there, I'm going to feel that thing. Now what was the thing I'm going to feel?
And this gets back to your question. I'm going to feel like I'm worthy. I'm gonna feel like I'm something.
I'm gonna feel like I'm special. I'm finally going to feel like I'm special, and you don't, and you don't. And that's the problem.
That's what a big part of the striver's curse. You know what's fascinating about the arrival fallacy?
No one's ever been able to make it popular. So The concept. Yes.
Yeah. Correct. Has tell me the most well known book on the arrival fallacy that points it out exactly.
Yeah. I know. Fucking so I was on my way out to Australia texting Mark Manson about this, and I was explaining one of the problems I was trying to navigate with the show, this live show that I was doing.
Was putting it together. And one of them is that a good bit of it is kind of about the the arrival fallacy. It's a PG version because I'm aware that it's chronically the most unsexy topic to ever talk about.
Yeah. And his response was, good luck. I've tried to talk about this publicly and every single time it's fallen flat.
I know. It's not just not memetic that people don't wanna Yeah.
Talk about it. It's not just memetic neutral that people will accept it and maybe bring it up or maybe not.
It's actively anti memetic. Yeah. People don't want to hear it and won't tell their friends about it.
No. It is No.
I know. I know. It feels saying to people that are still climbing, which everybody is, the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be, feels like you're sucking the gas out of their fuel tank Yeah.
Yeah. While they're still on the way up. It's like you as a fat person saying to someone who's starving, well, food's not that nice in any case.
Mhmm. And it's an unteachable lesson. And the only way that you can learn it is by getting there.
And because the the alternative to this with the arrival fallacy is that every successful person ever in history has been inducted into some kind of cult that pulls the ladder up after them, where everybody gets the same memo, which is so I know that you all of the problems that you had, all of the internal voids, your feeling of insufficiency, the chip on your shoulder from when you were a child, your desperate desire for validation from random humans on the Internet.
I know that all of that was fixed when you got the 30,000 square foot house, but we need to tell the pause that that's not the case. So you now are a part of this elite group of people that are trying to sigh up everybody else into not trying to strive for it.
Yes. That's the alternative. Right.
Which is or is it more likely that that's just the sense that the gold medalist's got? That's not to say that it's everyone, but it does seem to be a pretty big cohort.
Yeah. Way more than the people that are striving would think it is. Yeah.
Yeah. So there that there's a reason that it's antimemetic,
and that's because it goes against mother nature. Mother nature wants you to be fooled. The reason that that the that the ancient Williamson's, right, from some place, some Anglo Saxon tribe or something something.
Scotland. Right? Scotland and England.
Yeah. The reason they passed on their genes is because they were fooled by mother nature. That they were fooled.
That they actually that they they chased the arrival fallacy again and again and again and again and again. Now the reason that you're not gonna be satisfied, the reason that it can't be satisfied is because mother nature needs you in the hunt. But the only way you're gonna stay in the hunt is with the promise that you're finally gonna get there.
Now there's a side note to this. There's a metaphysical side note to this, by the way. This is a little bit of a side note that takes us in the transcendent dimension.
We'll come back to the right of fallacy in a second. But there is a philosophical set of arguments for the existence of something, which is that the the desire for something is actually proof of the existence of its object. So for example, proof that water exists is that I feel thirst.
Proof or or or evidence that food exists is that I feel hungry. Now, I want unremitting happiness. I want it, and I feel like I can actually get it somehow, but I can't.
I can't. But that philosophically is a proof that it does exist, not here.
That's actually proof of a divine afterlife, actually. It's evidence of a divine afterlife that you have this hunger for unremitting happiness, which suggests that it actually does exist, but you can't get it in this life.
Maybe you can get it someplace else is what it comes down to. This is one of the great proofs in most of the both Abrahamic and karmic religions for the existence of nirvana, heaven, whatever it happens to be.
Anyway, mother back to the question at hand. Why would mother nature play this trick on us?
Because we got to stay hungry. She wants us to stay hungry, so she's wired in a mistake.
She's wired in a mistake. She's wired in something that is such a deep mistake that we make again and again and again that even when people speak a manifest truth that people deeply believe, they still will reject it. I remember when David Brooks, you know the author David Brooks?
We and I have been are super old friends. We're not related. Sheriff's surname.
It's common surname. It's a common surname.
Right? And so my Brooks is, you know, snuck out of Lancashire in in 1630 to Massachusetts, one step ahead of the county sheriff, but and his came later.
Anyway, David Brooks, he said, I remember years and years and years ago, he said, you know, being number one in the New York Times bestseller list, it's really not that great. We're having lunch.
And I said, let me try. Let me see how it feels. Mhmm.
Right? That was exactly the point that you made. Now Ryan Holiday talks about that too.
The first time he had a book that was number one in the New York Times best soloist, he's like, This is great. And the next week, was some yo yo who had a stupid book as number one, and he realized how little it actually meant, but he wanted the next one to be number one too.
Actually, it's more tyrannical than that because if your next one doesn't make number one, now you used to be great, and there's almost nothing worse than that. Yeah. The only thing worse than never having made it is having fallen off.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I I almost I I wanted to do a show at one point where I talked to a producer about the idea of a TV show called I Used to Be Famous, where as a behavioral scientist, I'll go talk to people who are living relatively ordinary lives, and they used to be famous.
Some are happy, some are not. Some are addicts, some are crazy. Some are, like, normally married.
Fascinating show wildly unpopular.
You
know? Like, just it's just like you have it. Yeah.
But if you if you if you want to have that, it's the underdog story. Yeah. Right?
It's from zero to hero, not from hero to zero. Although it's pretty interesting when you when you hear about people who are living who are much much much happier than they were in the limelight. You know, when people are living ordinary lives, and and they're they used to be really famous and people go, oh, I remember.
He was so and so in the Partridge family or something. Now he's got a happy marriage and four kids and, you know, he you know, he works for a cardboard box company or something.
How can people work out the meaning that they've got in their life? What are the big questions they should ask? Yeah.
So
there are three big why questions that constitute meaning. And this actually comes from the work of Michael Steger, who's a a really good social psychologist at in Colorado.
And he he has the three parts, the three elements of meaning, which are called coherence, purpose, and significance.
And there are three why questions. Number one is you have to have an answer to the question. Why are things happening the way they are in my life?
Things are happening all around me all the time. Why? Part of meaning is having an answer to that.
Maybe that's your religious answer, because of the mind of God.
Maybe that's your scientific answer, because these are the laws of the universe. Maybe you're a conspiracy theorist and say because powerful people are doing these things. Conspiracy theories are nothing more than crying out for an answer to the coherence question, which is a meaning problem.
So if you have a relative who's going down the rabbit hole on the craziest conspiracy theories, don't throw data in their face and say, You moron. That's the wrong way to approach it.
They're having a meaning crisis. They're having a happiness crisis is the reason they're doing this in the first place. So coherence, number one, why things happen the way they do.
Second, why am I doing what I'm doing? That's purpose. Purpose and meaning are not the same.
Purpose is goals and direction so you can make progress. So why am I doing what I'm doing?
If the answer is I don't know, then you can't make progress. I mean, you're just going in circles. You're just a carnival cruise ship, just kind of randomly going around and around and around and around.
It's the reason I find cruises unbelievably depressing. They don't go someplace. Right?
I'm a teleological individual like you. I want a goal.
Right? And that's purpose. And and so in the in the in the research, you know, Sonya Luwomirsky's stuff.
Have you had her on the show? She's coming on next week or the week after? Super good.
Yeah. She's awesome. And she's at UC Riverside.
And she does these work on goals, and you'll give students these just random goals. Like, you're getting a b minus in physics. You know?
Let's get a b plus this semester. Just that goal. They get happier.
They get more directed. Life seems better because they have more meaning in life. That's what it comes down to.
Even arbitrary goals work. Better to have meaningful goals. Last but not least is significance, that's my life matters.
My life matters to someone, to my dog, to my wife, to God, to my kids. So that's the love question.
All these things are completely missing in modern culture for so many people. Why do things happen the way that they do? It's just random.
I don't know. Why am I doing what I'm doing? I have no idea.
I get up and I scroll. I get up and I surf. I get up and I go on a Zoom meeting for a company I don't really care about.
And and and, you know, what is the significance of my life? Why does my life matter? I don't think it does.
Mhmm. And that's those are the three things to actually keep in mind.
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When life feels random, then it feels like anything could happen at any time and there is no control. There are no levers that you can actually pull. So you you're not an active player in your own life when there is no coherence.
When you don't see a pattern, it's a big problem. You know, when you when you you remember when you learned to drive?
Mhmm. How old do have to be in in The UK?
17. Okay. And and when you first you know, you got a lot of confidence, but when you're looking at the traffic and all like and it's like it's like chaos.
Wildly intimidating. It's wildly I learned to drive in a mini, which is a very British way to do it, but it's fucking terrifying. You're like half the height of everybody else.
Yeah.
Any system that you're in that doesn't seem to make sense, that's It tends to feel really, really meaningless because you don't know what you can actually do to have some sense of agency.
There's no sense of agency when there is no coherence, is what it comes down to. So for example, if you believe that things happen the way they do because that's what God wills, then you're gonna try to work that lever.
You're gonna pray, for example. You're have a relationship with God. If you believe it's because of the laws of science, you're gonna learn more about science, and you're going to actually enter into that particular dimension.
So for example, I'm a behavioral scientist. I I really believe in science. I really believe that it's just like it gives you incredible amounts of power.
My job is to explain the science and explain how people can interact with the science. It's a pure coherence play is what it comes down to. And if it's all about conspiracy theories, then I'm gonna get online and, you know, share them with my friends.
Mhmm. So that that's why coherence really matters so that you can have agency over your life. And why are directionalist
people so psychologically fragile?
They're fragile because they don't know actually in which direction that they're going, which means they can't make progress. Now remember, this whole idea of happiness comes from making progress toward a goal, and there's tons of really interesting examples of this. The weight loss literature is super interesting in this.
So diets are all effective, and they're all catastrophic failures is what it comes down to.
Effective insofar as that almost any diet will make you lose weight, but they have between an eighty and ninety five percent failure rate after a year, meaning you gain all the weight back and then some. It's the weird industry.
It's like a $40,000,000,000 industry in The United States that fails With horoboros of nutritional advice.
It's craziness. Nine out of 10 times, they fail. Now, why are they successful?
Because economically, it's because temporarily, they make you make progress, but they ultimately fail because once you get to your goal, your goal weight, the reward is never getting to eat what you were like ever again for the rest of your life.
Congratulations. Then you get the arrival fallacy is what it comes down to.
So what you want in life is something where you can just make constant progress. I want to be a better dad.
I want to be a better person. I want to create more value with my work. There's no end to that.
I can't be like, hey, well, got to the best dad I can possibly be, so that's all good. No. Can always work to be a better husband.
I can always work to be a better friend. I can always work to be a better citizen. I can always work to love my country more.
I can always work to actually do something more important in my work and reach more people with the moral objectives that I have, And that's what I need.
I need goals I can't meet.
I don't I think that the confusing thing is it if significance is about being valuable to others and not famous, Why is it the case that modern people confuse the two?
Part of the reason is because what strivers they get into there's actually a pathology that that that is in the middle of this. So what you find is that certain people let me back up a little bit.
I work I'm sort of the striver whisperer. In my work, I specialize in people who do incredible things. Mhmm.
Right? And that's just because that's fun, although it is, but because that's the kind of books that I write. You know, people who do amazing things and still don't have perfect lives.
That's kind of my area of research, as a matter of fact.
They have a common childhood, and it kind of looks like this. You know, super strivers who are never satisfied and struggle, they, generally speaking, found that they only got attention and affection from their parents when they did something, when they got good grades, when they made pitcher on the baseball team, when they made first chair in the orchestra, when they right?
When they set up a lemonade stand and made more money than anybody thought possible, whatever it was. Right? Their parents, often their parents are immigrants or came from poverty, and they'll reward their kids when they do a thing thinking that they're actually wiring in success and happiness for their kids.
What they're telling their kids is that love is earned. They're teaching their kids that love is earned, and kids will learn that.
And when your brain is synaptically plastic, boy, will you ever learn that lesson. And then you will go through life trying to earn love over and over and over and over again.
If you're a man, you'll look for women who make you earn their love, right? And that you'll spend your marriage trying to bring in more and more and more and more money, for example.
Women will try to stay young forever by trying to earn their husband's love. You'll find that they will surround themselves with sycophants and yes men who are just like fake friends who make these people earn their love with gifts and favors and fanciness.
And and you'll surround yourself with people because you believe that love is actually earned. Well, the truth is that that's wrong. Real love isn't earned.
It's a free gift, freely given. It's a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you.
That's what it comes down to. But they don't learn that because that's actually what they've what they've what they've they've, um, uh, evolved over the course of their lives.
They're they're they're they become success addicts, winning addicts, looking for the specialness.
And and in the modern economy, when you can metastasize that from one to your family, to your community, to your church, to your city, to the whole world on the Internet, then you're going to be searching for the adoration of strangers because it's the best possible dopamine hit that you can get, and life is gonna feel gray if you don't get it.
So this is a pathology that actually people have, and the more talented you are, the more danger you're in. One of my favorite ideas of yours is this difference between specialness and happiness. Yeah.
It's so good. When you see it, it's something that you kind of can't unsee anymore. Yeah.
And and it's it's a lot of people who are you know, there are people watch and listen to Modern Wisdom because they want an edge. You know, it's good it's good entertainment. I'm I'm I'm fan.
Long before I met you. Yeah. But it's it's
actionable material for people who want an Well, I'm act I'm I'm actively making less actionable material Yeah. I know. Which is an interesting pivot at the moment, I think.
There's a a new term floating around, which you might not have seen yet. It's called grind slop. And grind slop is kind of this fuck your feelings, just work harder achievement and progress and optimization at any cost.
Yeah. And I think that people are feeling a lot of fatigue. I've felt that for a while.
And, you know, if I go back and look at what I was talking about two years ago, eighteen months ago, a lot of that was, I'm gonna try and feel my feelings a little bit more. I'm gonna try and see if there's something a little bit deeper.
I'm gonna have a little bit more fun. I'm not gonna optimize for outcomes at the expense of experience. And that has really come to a head.
I think for a lot of people, I think it's worsened by AI. I think that if you can have a oracle in your pocket, which you always had, but now an oracle that speaks to you personally and knows exactly everything that you need and kind of gives you this very curated, idiosyncratic, customized version of what it is that you want in a chat format.
It's almost as if you're speaking to your best friend that happens to be God. People have got information overload. And what I don't think that they necessarily need more of is just getting, like like, how made Yeah.
By just force feeding that high velocity, like, high density stuff.
Yeah. And I think that, at least for me, what I'm finding myself enjoying lots of is I took something away from that. Yeah.
And I had a good time. Yeah. Yeah.
As opposed to optimizing for you know, you think about short form or Blinkist or SparkNotes or, you know, what whatever your favorite summary service of choice was. Like, what is it that you're doing?
You're, like, trying to get to the outcome. Yeah. No.
You're you're trying to get points on the board. You're trying to get points on the board. Yeah.
It's fast to me. No. And and
I can't remember. Wait. That that was a digression from something from the original that that we Me saying if significance is about being valuable to others Yeah.
And not about being famous, how can people confuse those two? Oh, yeah. And so specialness and happiness.
Correct. Yeah. So specialness and happiness is really, really interesting because the idea of I mean, I will literally hear people say, look, any loser can have a family.
You know, any loser can have an ordinary job and provide for his wife and kids, but not everybody can start a company. Not everybody can be CEO.
Not everybody can have a famous podcast. Not everybody can do those things. In other words, they're saying, I know what would make me happy, and I'm going to forego that happiness for what I think is a happiness beyond it, which is specialness.
That will always lead to ruin. It always does.
I mean, again and again and again, I talk to people my age. I've been talking about people who are older than me. I mean, it's like this classic thing.
It's a friend who is twenty five years older than I am, An icon of finance.
An absolute icon of finance. And I said when I said, how old were you when you figured out you were gonna be rich? He said, 32.
He knew what it was. I was 32 years old. He said, it was like, you know, I actually left this bank, and I actually went and opened my own firm, and and it was starting to make money, and and we weren't rich yet, but I I realized I was gonna be rich.
I said, must have thought, what's it gonna be like to be rich? What's it gonna be like to be rich? What's gonna happen?
He said, yeah. He's not very materialistic guy. Doesn't have a boat.
He doesn't have 15 houses. He doesn't have any of this stuff. He's really, really wealthy guy.
He's not Scott Galloway.
My doppelganger. I should go I should I said to Scott the other day because we were doing a thing together, and I said, We should go on tour together with Stanley Tucci. I said, no.
And
put each of you under a big red cup. That's That's right. It's
like, you know, three card Monty or something like that. It's like, which one do you get? One get?
Three card Baldi.
So I and he said and he and I said, so what what did you think when you're when you got rich, how life was gonna be better? How did you really think life was gonna be better?
Because this is interesting for me as a behavioral scientist. I mean, is this is deep. And he he thought about for a while and he said, I thought that when I got rich that my wife would love me.
Really love me. And I said, so what happened? And he said, she didn't.
And he just stared at me. And it was this moment of pathos. Right?
It was this moment. It's like this What's pathos? This moment of deep understanding and feeling.
Right? That and it's almost as if when he he'd never said it before, when he articulated it, he understood it for the very first time. Do you think he'd selected a wife that
was the sort of person whose love needed to be won? Of course. Of course.
Because, you know, if you believe that love is earned, then you're gonna surround yourself with people who make you earn their love Yeah. Every single time. You've got you've got cause and effect going on here.
Of course. I've got this line from an essay I wrote recently. What you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private.
Nice. Give me an example. Your psychological resilience, you know, in the boardroom, people call it strength.
They call it decisiveness, assertiveness. They call it anti fragility.
Yeah. But around your kitchen table, it makes you put up with relationship that you should have left long long ago. It makes you impenetrable to the actual psychological and emotional needs that your spouse needs.
I had a a Navy SEAL sat here, Andy Stumpf, and he said, you know, I built myself up. Like, my entire career was made out of being a person who doesn't quit. Right.
And that caused me to stay in a marriage that was toxic for ten years longer than I should have done. Your strengths are your weaknesses, but
your weaknesses are your strengths.
What's that mean? You tell me. I've fucking Uno reverse carded me on a a limerick that I don't understand.
But I mean Riddler sat opposite me here. Yeah.
I'm a Batman villain. Correct. The the bald man.
The baldy. Yeah. Yep.
The what is your greatest weakness?
Uncertainty. Uh-huh. How did you how have you turned that into one of your greatest strengths in what you do?
Paying attention to every different permutation of how things could go to ensure that the plan is in place, hypervigilance,
galactically unreasonable attention to detail. Exactly right. What's your next biggest weakness?
In the similar sort of circuit, is that overthinking? Uh-huh. You fear failure.
Right? Fear
you fear shame? Fear shame more than failure. How does your fear of shame And, look, I'm not I'm not divulging anything to to our friends on No one's no one's fucking surprised.
Yeah. No one's surprised. No one's surprised here.
It's nothing that I haven't said on stage in front of thousands of people with tears in my eyes. It's okay. It's like the
shame faced boy part of the program. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. So so how does how does a fear of shame? Which, by the way, is very common for for successful people.
Working hard enough
so that you don't have to feel it. Yeah. You know, overachieving Yeah.
Outstripping what anybody thought Yeah. To this the point when nobody could ever think that it would be something shameful.
Right. But it does cause you again, what you what you appraise for in public, you pay for in private. It means that you have opening up about how you feel, especially about weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
That's hard. It's hard to do because you go, well, I'm supposed to have it all together. The reason that the world gave me the love that it gave me is because of, look at my competence, and here it is on display, and I'm and then you go, I need to I and there's a there's a hole in this armor, and I need to show it to somebody.
And I and the map that I have of reality from the real world gets ported across into the relational world.
Yeah. And that's very, very difficult to that's a a tough thing to it feels like being Batman and Robin for a lot of peep sorry. It feels like being Batman and Bruce Wayne for a lot of people.
You know? It feels like you have one life out there.
Right. And then when you come home, you can either choose to keep the mask on. Mhmm.
But taking it off means that you have to start living this double life, where you need to not feel the things that you do privately when you're in public, and not use the tactics that you have publicly when you're in private. Right. So Right.
And that actually is can be really disconcerting and it can be highly damaging for personal relationships.
This is one of the reasons that you find that when people start to get really famous, that they're much more at ease in front of a thousand people than they are in front of one person. Because they actually have to use a different set of social skills.
They've got the theater ability in front of a thousand people. But when they're actually talking to mom or an actual no fooling girlfriend, it gets real dicey real fast.
Right? It's what it comes down to. But what you put your finger on is that look, you will pay in private for what you're applauded for in public.
But you'll also what you're paying for in private is the source of your strength in public. And that what that means is that you shouldn't just try to you shouldn't just be thankful for what they're applauding you for in public on the contrary.
You should be down on your knees thankful for the weaknesses that you have as well. And that's that's the that's the pro move.
That's what it comes down to. And that's actually how we ultimately learn to manage ourselves. Is that we recognize that we have these frailties, that we have these weaknesses, that we have these feet of clay.
And and we say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that weakness.
Because and indeed, that is the source of my strength.
Yeah. Most of the things that you're most ashamed of are just the dark side of something light that you're really proud of. Yeah.
And, you know, if you've got a sword, most swords are double edged, and sometimes it nicks you on the backswing. Yeah. That doesn't mean that you throw the sword away.
Yeah. Just means that you learn how to hold it properly. Yeah.
And then the the ace move is being grateful for the wound.
For the wound itself. It's really interesting because actually what you find in a lot of Eastern philosophy is that we have a tendency to be very stoic about the way we talk about problems and suffering and weakness in our life. To say, I will bear up under it.
I will I do accept it. I do accept it, but it's not enough to accept it. You need to love it.
That's really That that that ultimately is the is what makes you fully human, is to actually love it and to accept it as the divine will.
This is the way it's going to be, and because it's happening, that's what I want. I my will, I want what I want is what is happening sort of axiomatically.
I realize it's sort of philosophical in its way, but ultimately, think this is what we need to get where we need to get in our lives is is recognizing that there's both strengths and weaknesses that we actually have, and we should be as grateful for our weaknesses as we are for our strengths.
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I had this idea, the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error that we are often prepared to especially in the modern world. Right?
Blaming our parents for stuff is basically a rite of passage Right. In modern psychology, in modern therapy culture. Yeah.
But if we're not prepared to lay our strengths at the feet of our parents, then maybe we shouldn't be so quick to call them the villains for what's wrong with us. So, you know, you say that your desire to work hard is because you were never freely given love at home, but isn't that also the same thing that's made you so driven and ambitious?
Right. You say that your hypervigilance was brought out because people didn't observe your needs ahead of their own.
Isn't that also the same reason that you're so concerned to ensure that everybody else's welfare is put before yours? Yeah. All of these things are they're not even two sides of the same coin.
It's just a single fucking piece of metal. Right. This thing exists.
It's woven throughout it all. Right. Right.
And
What you're what you're doing is right now you're being very subversive because what you're doing is subverting the culture of grievance. Mhmm. And which you've actually you're pretty good at that at this point.
I've noticed that. People got really angry when I when I talked about that. Yeah.
Maybe didn't like it. Well, the whole point is that, you know, the unhappiest people are people who are whose identity revolves around grievance and victimization.
And and that this is, by the way, one of the ways that people in positions of relative cultural authority and power keep you subjugated. The way that I then a baby boomer like me, technically in the last year of the baby boom, can conscript culture warriors who are Gen Z into my movement is by convincing them they're victims and they should be aggrieved about how the world treats them, about how older people treat them, about how the culture treats them.
Was easier before you, so there's no point in trying now. Yeah. Well or you should be really mad about it.
You should be angry about it. You should be, you know, carrying a a sign in the streets. Apply your efforts to complaining about the problem as opposed looking at yourself out.
Starbucks.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So it it seems like a lot of what you're laying at the feet here, the the issue is largely technology.
That that is one of the biggest movers. Is that a fair assessment? Of the spear.
It's actually what it is. It's technology is a manifestation of the way that the culture of engineering has given us this scientism.
This conceit that every problem is a complicated problem that can be solved. As opposed to the most important problems, which can't be solved.
They can only be lived with and understood. That a more human approach to what we're talking about is that there are plenty of complicated problems that we can solve, but the most important ones are the ones we can't solve. And that's what properly it's interesting because that's what most of the, you know, Buddhist teachers will say that the the wrong turn of the West was that was the scientism that said that everything is a solvable complicated problem.
Whereas you what we need is a balance between complex and complicated. The complex problems of the right hemisphere and the complicated problems of the left hemisphere, and they exist in a system. And there are many things that we shouldn't try to solve because we can't.
We should live with them. We should understand them. We should leave them as permanent mysteries that actually give our life flavor.
But the truth is that especially over the past twenty five years in the era of hyper development of technology, that is an expression of the idea that, no.
No. We're gonna hit the singularity, man. We're gonna live forever.
We're gonna be actually be able to figure out how to upload our brains. We're going to be able to solve any problem with whatever app or doodad or or or supplement or whatever it happens to be, that we will have the scientific acumen to solve everything that actually is a problem in our lives.
And that's just axiomatically wrong. And how do I know that?
Because we're solving more and more of these problems, and we're getting less and less and less happy. It's the same kind of thing to say, for example, if we had enough therapists, we wouldn't have any more depression.
Well, depression has tripled, and the number of therapists has tripled. So what's going on here? Obviously, there's a cause and effect problem and a glitch in our logic.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why people are feeling exhausted. They've got personal development fatigue.
Yeah. That permanently asking the why question, permanently trying to optimize everything becomes exhausting.
The kind of cost that you pay of trying to optimize everything is worse than being under optimized.
Yeah. The the process of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections would. And, yeah, all of this together is like, dude, I got enough on my plate.
Yeah. I got enough on my plate. Do I need more homework?
Yeah. Do I really need more homework Right. Right now?
As opposed to like, I'm
trying. I'm trying. I'm I'm trying and I'm trying hard and that's that's pretty good.
Yeah. And you know, there's nothing wrong with these big why questions. The problem is having these big why questions and believing that if you watch enough Internet videos and take enough supplements that you'll be able to answer these things.
And and this is one of the this is a big generational difference that we actually find. So there every philosophical school of note and of merit has something that the ancient Greeks called, which is to sit in a state of puzzlement over questions that can't be answered.
So Zen Buddhism is based on koans. Koans are riddles. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
And a strange unanswerable question. You're supposed to ponder that, and in the pondering, you gain a certain kind of complex knowledge, which we know is dominantly processed in the right hemisphere of the brain.
A big generational difference is that what's missing for a lot of people's lives today is that at night with their friends, they're not having these BS philosophical conversations about big questions that can't be answered.
That was what you did, right, at 11:30 after you came home from a party with your friends at college in 1985.
Is it like, I don't know, dude. Do you think God exists? Right?
It's like, Wow, dude. Now it's like, So we stopped doing that one thing.
There's nothing wrong with big why questions. The problem is that we only either ask questions that can be addressed by Google or ChatGPT, or we believe that if we have enough scientific knowledge that these questions can be answered.
Both of those are a big, big wrong turn. They're a big wrong turn philosophically, but they're also a wrong turn neurobiologically.
Weird, isn't it? Because the promise of modern technology, culture, science, being able to answer a lot of questions and fix a lot of the problems that previously were huge.
Infant mortality and fucking cuts on your you know how Ignace Sammelweis died? No.
Bro, this is fucking money. Tell me. So guy that discovered the germ theory of disease Yeah.
He's finds that childbed fever is being transmitted from corpses to, uh, newborn babies because the doctors weren't washing their hands in between. Begs his colleagues to adopt handwashing. He gets laughed out of every single institution he's trying to do it to.
Uh, he keeps on talking about it for so long that he drives himself insane. Everybody thinks that he's insane. Uh-huh.
And his wife helps to commit him to an asylum.
While he's being removed from his own home by the nurses that are taking him away to the asylum, he gets a cut on his leg. The cut on his leg is treated by a doctor who doesn't wash his hands after touching a corpse, he dies due to infection.
The most Yeah. Like, tragically ironic way Uh-huh. To die.
But, yeah, we we've got all of these promises that's been made by by by the modern world. And the problem is no one it's the first time that we've had the Oracle.
Right? It's the first time that humanity's gone through the, wow. Maybe we could answer everything.
Maybe all of the problems as opposed to
some of the problems. Yeah. Yeah.
And And the old idea is that if we we we dig a little deeper, we'll find it. We dig a little deeper, we'll find it.
But you're saying that there's a particular category of challenge,
which is simply unsolvable.
You're digging like, when you're in a hole what's the final digit pie or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Now this is important because this is, you know, a classic mistake that people make. This is a conceit that people have. I talked to a guy one time who was a big part of the war on poverty in America, which was this idea that we're gonna be able to wipe out poverty with social programs, with social welfare service.
And it did a lot. I mean, social welfare programs did a lot to lower caloric needs and and make sure there's more public access to education and all kinds of good stuff.
But the truth of the matter is that after a certain point, it starts to wire in pathologies. Actually, it makes it harder for people to actually become independent, etcetera. Because they become reliant on the money?
That's the idea. Yeah. That's the that's the whole idea of of this.
And certainly not true for everybody, but it's certainly true for other people. And and I and I asked him, who is one of the architects in this war on poverty, what would have made it that would truly have won?
You really wiped out poverty once and for all. And he said, just a little more money.
But that's what a lot of people in the valley think today, is that we're gonna get enough for that, that these are solvable world. We just need to go deeper.
We need to go deeper. I mean, you saw the the test
experiments with UBI from a couple of years ago.
They failed. Both of them failed. They failed.
Failed massively. Yeah. Yeah.
Why now tell me don't tell the sales. Let's say, why? What do they do?
You remember?
Not fully. I mean, I know that people they looked at the discretionary spend. They looked at where people were putting money away.
They looked at how much of it was being spent on things that people said they needed to prioritize, stuff like health care. Yeah. It wasn't going in health care.
What the quality of the food wasn't increasing.
It wasn't going to education. Yes. Mean, the whole point is that if it went toward human capital development, if it went toward what my parents would have put it into, right, it would have been great.
It would have been this fabulous thing. And the whole thing is just based on this idea that everybody has the same values, that everybody has the same priorities, which they don't. And it wasn't a question of money.
Furthermore, when you actually give people for nothing, you strip away their sense of earned success, and earned success is part of this idea of satisfaction. It gets into this idea of progress.
It gets into the wiring of That's homo what it comes down to. It denies the primacy and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love.
Mhmm. Right? Me too.
Right? Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have. And so every time that we try to reorder the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea that we've got this technology, we've got this economic policy, we've got I've got this new idea for how the genders are gonna behave toward each other.
Yeah. No. From now on, we're no longer gonna be like people were 50,000 ago.
It's gonna fail. It's gonna fail. And you to go with current.
You need to actually swim with the current or you're ultimately going to fail is what it turns out.
Getting back to the technology thing, how do you interrupt this doom loop that everyone's on? So the doom loop is that I'm I don't wanna be bored,
because I don't like boredom because it's boring. Right? And so I distract myself.
And when I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom. My life feels less meaningful because I'm actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that. And so I'm more at loose ends, and so I spend more time online, more time scrolling, more time doing what people do when they're they're really bored, and that makes the problem worse.
Much the same way with drugs and alcohol. That's how escalation and dependence actually works. The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom.
And so when I'm anxious and bored, I drink. Well, that makes boredom and anxiety worse the next day, and so I drink some more, and then down and down and down and down it goes. And so what you have to you're in a doom loop.
Any addictive process is a doom loop. The same thing is true with the way that we use technology. The same way is true of, you know, anything, any Which is totally hidden under the radar, by the way.
Completely. You know, when you most people,
despite the fact that alcohol is having a resurgence only after it was recently sort of stripped away, most people understand. I I I I'm I'm doing this, and I didn't used to do this.
And when I do this, I keep it seems to be ratcheting up. I'm drinking more than I used to. I'm I'm that's probably not good.
Well, it depends on how much you drink. It might be good. Well, I mean, if you're getting to five, six, seven drinks a night, I don't think That's a big problem.
Yeah. But it it but how many times does that entropy start to build?
Yeah. Because your tolerance you're chasing you're not chasing having the drink. You're chasing the sensation of the drink.
Yeah. And your tolerance I'd Yeah. Exactly.
I'll drink That's a doom loop. I'll drink ten, twenty times a year, maybe at most now, and that means half a corona in.
I'm like, it's nice. Yeah. Know.
It's like being 14 again. Yeah. You know?
That's cool. Yeah. But I can throw away a half rack at fourteen.
I don't know what's That's true. Yeah. Yeah.
The problem with using your phone in this way is it's a completely socially acceptable under the radar. Nobody is ever gonna say no one's ever gonna come over.
How many like, someone will make a joke about, dude, you're on your phone a lot tonight. Pretty different to, dude, you're pissed again, and it's five nights in a row. Yeah.
Yeah. Like, that's different. Yeah.
Right? It's much more obvious. Yeah.
The gambling thing, the porn thing, these kinds of compulsions, these kinds of habits are significantly more obviously destructive Right.
Than using your phone is. And then while I'm doing it, I can feel myself internally fucking rolling my own eyes.
Okay. Too much time on the phone is too much. I know.
You know what I mean? I know. And there are other by the way, there's a whole spectrum of these things and these dependencies that are all involving the the dopamine cycle in your brain, some of which are not just sort of neutral and hidden like the phone, some of which are applauded.
If you're a workaholic, nobody will say I mean, if you're a pathetic alcoholic, nobody will say, it's like, Chris, you were seven fifty milliliters of gin last night.
I saw you put that, congratulations. You're excellent. Correct.
They're going say, you got some problems. Mean, I think you got to get that looked at. Right?
But if you work sixteen hours a day and neglect your family, you're going get a promotion and a raise. You're gonna get rewarded for that. So there's some addictions that people actually love because it works in their favor.
It enriches them, and it actually leads to the world's rewards, which people admire. Yep. So the point is that we have a responsibility to look after ourselves, look after the pathologies that are actually inherent in our behavior, and to see is it actually making my life better or is it making my life worse, notwithstanding the reaction of the rest of the world?
What does fixing the doom loop look like? What is fixing it means clipping it. It means cutting it in a particular place.
So all addictions, getting out of addictions, they have sort of three steps in common.
It's it's really behaviorally, have three steps in common. Now I'm not talking medically. I'm not talking about the medical interventions because that's different for different things with gambling and drinking and methamphetamine and whatever.
But the three behavioral steps in getting out of an addiction are number one, you got to get pissed. You got to get pissed. It's like this is subjugating me.
This is like I'm in a cage, and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of actually being a wholly owned subsidiary of that company or this behavior or this culture. I'm tired of it.
I'm not gonna put up with it. You need to fight back by rebelling. That's number one.
You need the spirit of rebellion. If you're not ready to rebel, you're not gonna get out. Number two is you need to figure out how to stop.
You need to actually have an algorithm, and that's dependent on what the substance or behavior actually is. There are different ways to do it, but there's tons of science in every area.
If you can get addicted to it, there's science that tells you how to stop. And then the third is you have to learn how to live with yourself again because you've been distracting yourself from yourself.
If you're addicted to something, it means you didn't like being home in your head. That's what it comes down to. And if like I I haven't had a drink since I was 38 years old.
Right? And I remember in my thirties, I didn't like being home in my head.
Didn't like it. Didn't want to be there. Right?
And so I left. Right? I got a little relief.
I got a little vacation in the bottle. And it was going nowhere good, and it was really clear, and then my dad died. A couple of people I cared about said, That's your future.
You just saw your future. And so I stopped. But the hard part was step three.
The hard part was actually being alone with myself, being awake with myself, being alive with myself is what it comes down to. That's probably even more extreme for people who are very, very online because you're trying to break the doom loop of how technology is breaking your brain, not letting you find the meaning of your life, making you angry and depressed and anxious and lonely.
You're addicted, which is why you keep doing these self terrible, self destructive things to yourself. First, get pissed, and second, you got to quit. Look, I got the algorithms to help you do that, but then, man, you need new friends.
You need to live in a society. You need to live in people who are alive in real life, and you have to be able to sit behind the wheel of your car at a red light with nothing to do in your thoughts.
Right? And be in a supermarket checkout line without your phone, and and walk before dawn without a device, and hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet and say that's the sound of my feet on the path.
And that takes work.
How easy is it to recover from this? I think a lot of people feel like they're lost and totally unrecoverable.
It's absolutely possible. I've seen it again and again and again and again. I mean, look, this is this this is not heroin that we're talking about here.
I mean, the the the process of detox, for example, isn't you don't even have to give up your phone. You just have to put it in proper boundaries and have some rules in your life, right, and and actually have some proper habits. And, you know, we're our life is if you have a fairly functional life, you've got good habits already.
Right? I mean, you get up at a certain time, you work out every day, you eat something you don't eat like an 11 year old.
I mean, you have good habits. And then you just put protocols around it. It's like Huberman talks about protocols and which has kind of affected the culture.
It's a culture of protocols. And I'm an absolute believer in that when it comes to your phone. I mean, you wake up in the morning.
If you can, don't look at it at all for the first hour for neurocognitive programming. If you're a journalist or you have your job, you got to look at it and sure nothing's on fire to put it down. That's it for the hour.
Right? First hour of the day. While you eat, neurocognitive programming, while you eat is critically important.
It's best not to eat alone and never eat with your device. Why? Brain is is actually the the neuropeptides in your brain, most notably oxytocin, they flow very liberally when you're eating with somebody.
This is how, you know, homo sapiens would establish and and foster kin bonds, is by sitting around a campfire putting pieces of yak meat into their mouths, discussing their day, and looking into each other's eyes.
That's how we're wired. If you have a phone on the table while you eat, or God forbid if you're looking at it, there's no none of this neurochemistry happens.
What if you're on your own? Then you might read a book, you might listen to music, but don't look at your phone.
There's a meme online of
a guy starves to death even though he had food because he couldn't watch YouTube Yeah. Because his phone had run out Or of it's like or or died of sepsis because he didn't go to the bathroom.
Yeah. Yeah. He couldn't dig his phone in there.
So and last, but at least at the last hour of the day. Now that part of that is sleep architecture and blue light, etcetera, etcetera, the pineal gland, melatonin, yada yada. We all know the physiology of that.
But part of that is just the way that you actually understand yourself at the end of your day and get ready to rest. If you're living with your partner, that's critically important to your relationship, is not to be looking at your device in the last hour.
So you can be fully present as you drift off to sleep together. That's super, super important for your relationship. But just those three things.
Then there's phone free zones. You shouldn't have your phone in the bedroom ever, ever, ever, ever, because I mean, God forbid, you get up to pee at 03:00 in the morning and look at your phone. That's a big mistake.
Game over. Well, I mean, it's your pineal gland shuts off. Right?
No more melatonin for you. And so which is problematic on its face, but it's also you just you you spike your cortisol. I mean, this bad stuff happens to you.
So the phone should be in a different floor in a closet plugged in someplace from an hour before you go to bed until after an hour after you get up.
That's number one. It's a phone free zone. Second is that that I mean, this is just basic public policy.
There shouldn't be a phone in any classroom in any school in the world between kindergarten and PhD. It is complete insanity because it interrupts everything that we're actually trying to do, and it's child abuse.
There's phones in classrooms. You know, and and the most important hour they shouldn't have phones is during lunch, by the way. Because they need to That's even worse.
It's even worse. Shouldn't be in a classroom. It definitely shouldn't be in the cafeteria.
I mean, most of what's going on in the classroom is not interesting to begin with. I mean, I don't think I ever learned anything in public school. Think it was mostly babysitting, but Yeah.
But, you know, at least I had friends, and and and they don't have friends. And then and then people need phone fasts.
They need technology fasts. I recommend ninety six hours a year is kind of And there's a little bit of research on this that shows that this actually can break the relationship that you have, so you prove to yourself that you actually don't need it, and you're kind of in a state of bliss by the fourth day.
You know, it's really I mean, I go on a spiritual retreat every year for four days. No phone. Oh, it's great.
First day is like children screaming in my head. Yeah. Second day, I'm calming down.
Third day, I like it. The fourth day, I wish it were the whole year. That's what it comes down to.
But just those things, phone free times, phone free zones, phone fasts can rear can can can can do this part two.
This does not give you part one, which is rebellion, or part three, which is you gotta get comfortable back with yourself.
Different processes. How important is romantic love to meaning?
That's one of the best ways you can turn on the right hemisphere of your brain because that's something you will never solve. How do I know that? Because if we could have solved algorithmically romantic love, we wouldn't still have app developers that were trying to make the ultimate dating app.
The dating apps are fundamentally a left brain solution to a right brain problem. Right now, they're getting better, but the way that they're getting better is by figuring out ways to add more human friction into the algorithm as opposed to taking human friction out of the algorithm.
So for example, you're finding early experiments which suggest that a good way for you to find your matches on an app is to have your matches, some of your app matches go to your best friend and have your friend decide which ones you're gonna go out with.
Because you're adding a right brain into the mix. Yeah. You're adding your friend's right brain in the mix, for example, or having a whole bunch of potential people in a group that I will actually meet in a mixture.
That's a good way to do it Polytool. Yeah. Uh-huh.
And then pair up if it's meant to be or make friends if it's not. And so that those are ways that we actually do that, but the point the point of the matter is that the human brain is is highly attuned toward this incredibly complex indescribable experience of falling in love.
That's one of the reasons that all country and western songs are about romantic love. That's the reason that the greatest poetry is about romantic love, because it's not described scientifically, it's described artistically because it's a right hemispheric experience.
So you wanna you wanna turn on the meaning of your life, go get your heart broken. I mean, go take a risk.
I mean, that's that's when you find the meaning of your life. Right? I mean, when you've had your heart broken, that's horrible, and that's hard, but that's meaning rich.
That's when you ask all those big questions. You're definitely alive. You'll learn a lot about yourself.
You'll learn a lot about yourself, right, unless you stay drunk.
What's the ladder of love?
So was this prophetess that Socrates sought out.
So Socrates sought out the and she described to him that the way to find the meaning of life starts with this ladder.
And each rung of the ladder gets you closer to the meaning of life. And the first rung of the ladder is falling in love. The first rung of the ladder is actually attraction toward the beautiful other.
Romantic attraction, not just like, you know, Chris is awesome. He's so smart.
He's got such a great show. He's such a great conversation. He's such good friend.
Thank you. Thank you. Keep it.
But it's it's like that spark that you can't quite understand. No.
Actually, do understand neurochemically what's happening when you're falling in love. We know how the sex hormones start, and then we get the catecholamines actually involved along the way, and then we get a really dramatic drop in serotonin, and then we get the neuropeptides in the sequence.
We know when the sequence is off between two people is why they actually succeed in a relationship. There's all kinds of really fascinating neuroscience of falling in love, but it's still a mystery.
I tell you that the neuroscientists who are doing this cutting edge research, they can fall hard in love just like anybody else. Mhmm.
They can like, I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened. Yes, you do.
You wrote that paper. Right? But still, I mean, it's like I teach this stuff to my students at the Harvard Business School about the neuroscience of falling in love, but I don't understand this relationship with my wife.
I just love her. It's like, okay, yeah. A lot of oxytocin and vasopressin, and there's some amount of dopamine and norepinephrine involved, there are drops of serotonin when you're fighting.
That's not it. It's because it's this deep metaphysical experience. Most religions believe, as Montenev of Diotima, Socrates' prophetess suggested, that romantic love is the beginning of an antenna to the divine.
That And and most religions believe that if you're in a serious marriage and you deny your spouse love, you're denying your spouse God's love. That's how right brained and complex this actually is.
And just because you can
explain how gravity works doesn't mean that you're not going to hit the ground if you jump out of a a skyscraper. You can understand it plenty well. Yeah.
Yeah. It's still at the mercy of these things. There's that interview that Sam did with Daniel Kahneman, the famous of thinking fast and slow, Nobel Prize winner.
After many, many decades of studying the fallacies of the human mind and mental models and all of the different ways that our rationality goes awry, has it made you any more rational? Yeah.
Not really. Not really. I know.
I know. No. It's interesting too, you know, and and Sam and I, I've had one conversation,
more or less along these lines. He's the most soulful atheist I've ever met. Yeah.
He really is. Yeah. He's a soulful guy.
I really have. He'd be a great believer apart from the lack of belief. But that's the point, because his soulfulness would seem, might seem on the outside to contradict his his uber rationality as an atheist, but it doesn't because these things coexist.
These things can reside next to each other, and because Sam's brain has two hemispheres to it, so does mine, so does all of ours.
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No. I don't. And transcendence is important because it once again, it contradicts mother nature's tyranny.
So mother nature wants you in the psychodrama of your utter stultifying Christmas from moment to moment to moment.
My job, my flights are late. My podcast guest might be good.
I gotta prepare for that thing, and my stomach is rumbling. I forgot to eat lunch, and, yeah, the payment didn't come in for that thing.
It's so boring, but mother nature wants you to be the star of that psychodrama all day long in your head. That's what William James called the me self.
The me self. It's looking at yourself and thinking about yourself all day long. And you need that for self reference to make your way in the world.
If you don't understand what you're doing, you're gonna be a pretty bad driver. You're gonna be in a traffic accident pretty quickly. But there's also the I self, which is looking out at the world, which is transcending yourself by looking at out at the world in which you're one player, but you're only one player in it.
And and it's interesting because transcendent experiences are those where the me self disappears and the I self becomes dominant. There are times actually when when they they become confused, and that's kind of what a fugue state is psychologically, where the where you become disassociated with yourself in this weird way.
And and you all of us have experienced this. I remember one time, I had a lot of my mind and I was putting gas in my car and I was just really worried about something.
It's back when I was a CEO and my life was a living dystopian hellhole. Everything was a problem every single day. I was putting gas in my car and it was 08:00 at night and finished and I got back in my car and I was driving.
My daughter was with me in the car, and she was a little girl then. And there's this weird clanking sound behind me, like somebody had a muffler down right behind me.
They were following me. I said, Honey, what does that sound? She said, I don't know.
It's like clankety, clankety, clankety, clankety. He's like, Following me. What's going on?
Until people started pointing to me at my car, and I realized that I had driven away with the hose in my gas tank, I pulled it out of the gas pump and I was dragging it behind me, the whole mechanism behind me.
Clankity, clankity, clank. Right? And so I thought somebody else was doing a thing that I had actually confused the me self and the I self.
I was in this weird fugue state. It got real, real fast when I took it back to the gas station, and these four Iranian dudes were standing around the gas pump really mad, like who destroyed our pump.
I also found out how much it cost to fix a gas pump. It's expensive. But the whole point is that what we want is not to get into a fugue state.
We want to have these experiences where we can be in the I self, where we can stand in awe, where we can get outside ourselves, which is religious experiences, and that's spiritual experiences, and philosophical experiences, and experiences of service and love toward other people unbidden by any self interest.
And that's where life gets really interesting and beautiful. And when you do that, when you truly are in a transcendent state, that's when you're in the right hemisphere of your brain.
And you don't find meaning, meaning finds you. Which is why I'll often recommend to people, it's like, I don't know how do I find the meaning of your life. Go volunteer.
Go volunteer. Go pray. I'm not religious.
I don't care. It's not what I said. Go pray.
Why? Because when you do that, you'll induce a state in your brain and you'll wanna do it more.
What is it that people are missing? Why is transcendence so rare
without engineering it in that way, at least in the modern world? Yeah. It's it's especially true in the modern world that it's rare because the modern world is a big mirror.
It's a big me self. That's especially true in online. Uh, online, you're looking in the mirror constantly because you're looking not in the at the the dialogue you're having with other people, looking at them.
What you're doing is that you're think about it as the Zoom problem. The problem with Zoom when you're in a Zoom meeting is you're always looking at yourself in the Zoom meeting.
It's really hard. It's a really good idea to turn off your own camera or at least your own view of your own camera so you can focus on the other people.
But one of the ways that Zoom has has made communication a lot harder for people is because you're always in the me self even when you're trying to be in the I self. Mhmm. And and this is true certainly with social media as well.
You're looking at your likes and your mentions, and how do people interact with what I was doing? And it's this one big virtual mirror of everything that we're doing. It's become very it's induced narcissism where it wouldn't have existed otherwise, which is incredibly misery provoking because it it it kills meaning in the crib from the very beginning.
You can't get out of yourself. You can't get out of your head. And that is increasingly true.
Now, it's interesting because people who have experimented with trying to stay in the I self in in in literature, but also just in real life, had these incredible results. I had this PT.
This guy worked on my back. My back hurts. And so you get to my age, your back hurts.
Right? And and he always he worked on my back every week. Great guy.
Unbelievable. I mean, just like talented, full of love.
And I said, how did you get these skills? I mean, is this did you were you always a physical therapist, acupuncture?
He said, no. No. No.
I used to be a fitness influencer. I'm like, dude, tell me more.
I gotta know. Tell me more. Then, yeah, you know, basically took off my shirt on Instagram.
Was kind of sold supplements, and it was all about the abs. And and and I said, how was that? He said, was the worst.
It was the worst. I didn't eat what I wanted for ten years. I was so miserable.
I didn't have any normal relationships at all. I couldn't have any functional relationships with women because I'd be so jealous about the fact that I'm showing my body off for other people. I'd be looking at my I'd be I I gotta get a photographer because this guy doesn't understand the shadows, and he said it was horrible, and I was miserable, and I was sad, and I didn't know what to do.
And so he said, I finally I gave up. I deleted all my accounts. I enrolled in acupuncture school.
But here's the most important part, he said. I got rid of all of the mirrors in my apartment, every single one of them, and I showered in the dark for a year, so I couldn't see my abs. And then I finally was free.
And he's happy. Most people, I think, look to their work for something that's supposed to be transcendent.
Yeah. Calling. Yeah.
Like, what do you think people what do you think people think they're talking about
when they talk about finding your calling? Yeah. They think it's going to be the thing that they're Well, I mean, there's kind of two versions of it.
The the two graduation speeches. Graduation speech number one is go find a job that that you love and that's fun and you'll never work a day in your life.
Now that speech is being given by a cardboard box magnet who's so severely workaholic that he's had three heart attacks and two divorces by the age of 40, right?
So don't believe it, right? Or the second speech is go save the world.
No pressure. It's like, well, my generation wrecked the world. Go save the world.
That's the second speech. That's Both of those are wrong fundamentally.
Your calling, generally speaking, finds you as the thing that you can't stop thinking about. It's the most interesting thing.
Right? It's not the thing that you think I'm gonna be the savior. I'm gonna be the great Messiah.
And it's not the most fun thing necessarily. The thing that's most interesting to you is often not that fun. Actually, a lot of the time it's actually not that fun.
It's just something you can't get out of your head. It's something you feel you really need to do. Second, the goal is creating value with your life, earning your success, is being rewarded for something that you do well.
Where you create real value with your hard work and personal motivation, and more importantly, you're serving somebody where somebody needs you. That's what it comes down to.
Are you earning your success? Not only you really earning, are you recognized and acknowledged for real value that you're creating? Not kissing up to the boss, and not because somebody's trying to be nice to you.
No. No. No.
No. You're really creating value. And does somebody actually need you?
That's what it comes down to. That's your calling. How do you know or how does somebody know when they're chasing
status instead of their calling, instead Mostly of
people deep down know. Because what it comes down to is when you're creating true value and people need you, then you can I mean, you can sort of imperfectly measure that with respect to status, but you actually know when there's true value behind it?
Most people have an innate sense of that, a strong innate sense of that. And and I've interviewed a lot of people about this. You know, I talked to a guy who builds homes, homebuilder.
Right? He had a he got his master's degree in biochemistry from MIT, and he was going on to get his PhD.
And his parents really, really wanted him to be a scientist, is the whole thing. But he recognized that he he his he only felt truly alive.
He was only truly interested when he was building stuff.
That's what it came down to, and he became a home builder as a result of that. So it's really, really important to listen to what your heart is telling you about this. Status is a very, very bad barometer.
A lot of people are using status or using fame or power or money because they don't wanna look at the truth. They don't want it's like looking into the sun of something. And a lot of people make big mistakes for a long time as a result of that.
Like, they're they're doing something they don't that's not their calling, and it burns them out. I don't like it.
But they should like it. It's paying so much. They should like it.
They got so many followers for Pete's sake, but they're unhappy. That's what people need to be paying attention to. Look.
If you're doing something that's highly rewarding, but you're unhappy, it's not your calling.
I wonder how many people said in that bucket,
what proportion of you. I meet a lot. I meet a lot.
Look, I teach at a big business school. I meet a lot of people who honestly think that they go into business school thinking, will I will find my calling because it's gonna be something that's gonna pay me so well, which means I'm so good at this thing that it's gotta be my calling.
No. No. No.
No. No. No.
No. On the contrary. Look, I I I walked away from a career in classical music when I was 31 years old.
I could have done it the rest of my life. Right? It wasn't my calling.
I'd done it since I was eight. I'd been doing it since I was a little boy. Right?
But it wasn't my calling, and I made a living, and I made some records, and I was so unhappy.
It wasn't my calling. I'd spent many years on it. I'd spent decades on it, as a matter of fact, but there was no choice but to walk away because it wasn't my calling.
What about the fear that comes up when someone is faced with that realization?
They've got the inertia, the momentum, the sunk cost fallacy. Yeah. Yeah.
No. No. It's it's no joke.
It actually requires an unbelievable personal entrepreneurship. Look, entrepreneurship is not about building a business. It's about building your life.
Right? Great entrepreneurs, they change all the time.
They make all kinds of changes. You know what crummy entrepreneurs have in common? They have a bad business idea, and they chase it until they're broke.
That's what bad entrepreneurs have in common. Right? Good entrepreneurs, they try this, and it's not quite right, and they change, and they go from this thing to that thing, and they sell when it's time and start a new venture.
That's what great entrepreneurs have in common. If you want to be an entrepreneur in the business of your life, you cannot afford the sunk cost fallacy with your own career, or your own relationships, or your own interests.
Agile. You have to change is what it comes down to. Now, there's a very interesting theory about people who need to change the most, the people.
And and these are called spirals. This is the spiral career pattern. There's there's four career patterns psychologically.
There's linears who just kind of go up and up and up and up and up and up and up in their careers, and they only change when something is better. There are transitories who kind of just skip around all over the place. They don't live to work.
They work to live. Right? They they you know, I'm gonna be a barista, then I'm gonna run you know, drive a moving van, and I fell in love with a girl in San Diego, so you know.
Right? There are what's called expert, which is like slow and steady. Yeah.
It's lifestyle. My dad had the same job for forty two years, for example. And the reason is because it was secure and because it was low stress.
Right? And that's what he wanted. The post office is an expert career path.
But a lot of people, probably disproportionately a lot of people who are watching this show, are spirals. For every seven to twelve years, what they need is to take their career down to the studs and start again, and take everything they learned in the last one and fudge it into something that's meaningful in the next one, but have a new adventure.
The first turn is hardest. For me leaving the French horn and becoming a scientist, that was brutal. Going back and and getting a PhD when I didn't know what I was doing, it was really, really, really hard.
Right? Second turn, easier. Third turn, easier.
I'm on my fourth turn right now. Who knows? Maybe in ten years, I'll be a circus clown or firefighter You could see it or something.
I could see it. But the whole point is that that's what it means to live an entrepreneurial life where you're pursuing your calling because you have the agility and the courage to be an entrepreneur in the enterprise and the business of life. What about the role of beauty?
Physical beauty? Any kind of beauty. Beauty is a transcendent experience.
So one of the things that a lot of people have observed about the modern technocratic life is it's not beautiful. It's bereft of beauty.
Now, why is that? Because stuff that goes on in the left hemisphere of the brain never prioritizes beauty.
Beauty is a right hemispheric experience. It's when people see a beautiful sunset, sometimes they'll cry.
When people hear a work of music, people listen to a Bach B minor mass, and it's like they weep.
Why? And and they they can't as a matter of fact, anytime that you become emotional, um, and you can't quite explain it, it means you're having a right hemispheric experience.
Something that moves you weirdly. Right? When some people when they talk about religion, they get really choked up.
Some people when they listen to music, they get really choked up. It's really interesting how this works, but those are right hemispheric experiences. Disproportionately, that's when it comes to beauty.
So if we have a society that's entirely left hemispheric, that's technocratic, that's complicated and not complex, is not gonna be beautiful.
And it's exactly what we find. I mean, there's compelling evidence that music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past.
Newer music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. I can't really judge that, but this is what we pay musicologists to do or something.
That moral beauty is harder and harder to find. Moral beauty is just kindness toward others for no apparent reason.
You find very little of that on X. You find very little of that online. Mhmm.
Right? That natural beauty is harder to find when you're never in nature, which is sort of axiomatic.
But a lot of people will say, you know, it's like I got this incredible screensaver of El Capitan and Yosemite. It's like, there's the real thing. It's gonna blow your mind.
Right? And the reason is because it is an entirely different neurobiological experience for people when they're actually out in nature.
If you're behind the screen, you're not getting beauty is what it comes down to. And so artistic beauty is absent. Moral beauty is absent.
Natural beauty is absent. And the reason is because we're trying to filter everything through the left hemisphere. The simulation isn't beautiful.
If you want to know if you're too much in the left hemisphere of your brain, it's whether you ask yourself, is there enough beauty in my life? And if the answer is no, it probably means that you're too far left.
What about if there's not enough suffering?
Yeah. That's the hard one. I left actually, I read about that in this in this book, and and I left that to the last chapter because I was putting it off.
I was putting it off. Suffering is the ultimate meaning making experience, and we've talked about that.
We've talked about heartbreak. We've talked about loss. We've talked about grief.
There's a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that that is really, really active when you experience social exclusion, when you experience loss.
It's it was evolved so that you would be averse to sadness. Sadness is supposed to be really, really painful, and you don't want it.
So people actually they don't suffer so much from sadness. They suffer a lot from fear of sadness. You know, you're trying to avoid sadness, which is what motivates a lot of our behaviors.
Most of the things Most of the reasons we do what we do is because we're afraid of bad We're afraid of negative emotions. But at the same time, most people will talk about the most meaningful periods of their lives were times of the greatest negative emotion in their lives. Negative emotion brings meaning unless unless we try to eliminate it.
And this is another wrong turn that we've taken because once again, in our our left hemispheric conceit of the complicated world, the singularity is one in which we will have eliminated pain, eliminated sadness, eliminated negative emotionality, eliminated negative experiences. That's not only impossible, it's actually suboptimal.
It's death for what it means to be fully alive. We don't want to be we don't want to suffer, but we must suffer.
Strange the things that people want and what they need. Yeah. I know.
And the fact that those two don't cross over all that much. And and mother nature is a wicked tyrant.
She's kept us alive for generation after generation, but animal impulses are not the same thing as moral aspirations.
Seems like you're saying that enjoyment and satisfaction haven't collapsed
No. In the same way that meaning has. No.
That's right. That's right. It's really interesting.
I mean, I didn't know. You know, when I see a big happiness problem, when I when I look at the the depression explosion, the anxiety explosion, I know that one of the channels of happiness is blocked.
This is as a diagnostic matter. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We've talked about it on the show a couple of times as a matter of fact.
These are the three macronutrients of happiness. You wanna be a happy person, need to enjoy your life, which back to an early part of the conversation, by the way, one of the reasons that you're moving from a pure achievement orientation in the show toward having more fun is because you wanna increase enjoyment, which many strivers struggle with.
They don't enjoy their lives very much, and they want to enjoy their lives more, and they don't know how because they're always trying to put points on the board. So that's a different subject.
I'm gonna write a book about how to enjoy your life because I wanna figure it out because I need to figure it out before I die. So enjoyment, which is not pleasure, is pleasure plus people plus memory.
It's a conscious phenomenon, is actually pretty high for most young people.
Satisfaction, which is the achievement of worthwhile goals with struggle, that's pretty high, especially for strivers.
I mean, my MBA students at Harvard, they're real high in satisfaction because they're accomplishing a lot and they're struggling a lot. It's meaning that's collapsed, and that's the reason that we have this unbelievable happiness cry unhappiness crisis in our society today.
David told you my idea about Frankel's inverse law. Oh, no. Tell me, Victor Frankel.
Yeah. So there's that famous quote, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. Yeah.
Right? He's arguing lack of meaning causes Best to distract. Seek temporary relief and superficial pursuits rather than addressing some And this would be before scrolling you and existed.
Yeah. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem, Frankel's inverse law.
When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. Nice.
If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful.
The tldr is you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.
Yeah. Indeed. But, you know, it's absolutely the encapsulation of the striver's lament.
You know? It's like I can't I can't everybody else is having a great time, and I can't feel it.
I don't you they're out dancing and they're at a club. Mean, think about it. So you're a club promoter, and your heart I'm a French horn player in my heart.
You're a club promoter in your heart. Right? Mhmm.
Everybody's having a great old time. You're like, no. No.
This is my business. Go and enjoy yourself. I'm gonna suffer over here.
I think in a real way, and the meaning part is quite right, but I think ordinarily, strivers are addicts for satisfaction from achievement. And so they will put points on the board when they can't feel they can't feel enjoyment, and so they put points And on the and part of the reason is because they've actually never they've never learned how to do it appropriate.
They've actually never learned how to do that. So enjoyment once again is is it takes has the at its root things that actually make you feel good, but that's not the right you know, feeling good.
Just pleasure is a terrible goal. I mean, the the the end of the road for pleasure is not happiness. It's it's detox.
Right? Because you that's just addiction is what it comes down to. If it feels good, do it was the hippie motto, and it didn't end well.
Right? So so that's so that's important that that you add people and memory to it.
It's a conscious experience. It's in the prefrontal cortex, not just in the limbic system, but it's not apparent for everybody how to do that, especially if you're brought up in this way where I gotta do more.
I gotta do more. I gotta do more. Because what happens is that this idea that you're stopping and smelling the roses feels like a waste of time.
Maybe you have parents who say that. Are you practicing? I remember that.
They would yell through the door. Practice. I was practicing five hours a day when I was in fifth grade.
So then the whole idea of stopping and going and having fun feels like you feel kind of guilty about it. And so you're frankly just bad at it, and you don't like to do things you're bad at.
You don't learn how to And then my wife is really good at enjoyment. She just really enjoys life. She's Spanish.
I mean, that's like it's whole country, people who enjoy life. Right? In The States, we're a little bit less good at it, and I'm especially bad at it.
So part of that, actually one of the protocols for helping people like you and me is understanding leisure and actually having a structured disciplined approach to leisure.
It's actually take it If you don't know how to do it, take it seriously. Seriously. You need to work hard at not working so hard.
Yeah. It turns out there's a philosopher who specializes in understanding leisure, and that's Josef Pieper, who wrote Leisure the Basis of Culture.
Have you read it? Oh, it's great. It's a little thin book that he wrote.
He's one of the greatest twentieth century German philosophers, philosophers, untainted untainted by by Nazism, thank God. And he wrote the four cardinal virtues.
He wrote these really beautiful books, but probably his most influential book was Leisure, the basis of culture, where he defined culture as a serious business. It's not chilling on a beach, which is called acedia, also known as laziness or torpor.
It's like, I can do that for an hour, and then you don't wanna run away screaming.
It's the worst. He says that leisure is something that you're not being compensated for by the outside world, but that's creating value. That's leisure, and that's what will bring you enjoyment.
He talks about it in terms of deepening your spiritual or philosophical life, deepening your relationships, and learning things you don't need to learn. Just learning things you don't need to learn.
So when you think about what you're doing with podcast, right, you're deepening relationships. You're talking about things you don't need to talk about. Right?
You're doing people would say, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I would fit into this table, but that's leisure because you want enjoyment.
I have a friend who was given a a exercise by a coach.
He was told that he needed to start doing a hobby, but that he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it. Yeah.
And he decided to take up watercolor painting, I think, and did the first few classes or sessions or whatever and immediately found himself going to YouTube to find out what exactly the best kind of paintbrush was to do the thing, and I'm gonna find, actually, what's the best class in Austin that can do? Because I can get better if I can do this.
And what's the cadence? Do I need to be doing it three times a week in order to maximize my yeah. Well, I am.
It's gonna be struggle. It's gonna be difficult to put three times a week in because I got the knee. Mhmm.
And Turned into a job. Coach came in and said, no. You're not allowed to try and become better at this thing.
Yeah. Doing it, like, telically.
Yeah. Not
exotelically. It should be atelically. Atelically.
Atelically. So that that's you know, and and and it's interesting because Aristotle talks about that with people, that real friendship is based or is atelic.
Mhmm. You know, it's the same idea. Right?
So if you have your friends because it's a teleic relationship, it has a telos. It has if they're useful. It's not it's kind of deal friends.
But real friends are atelic. They're actually useless. It's the same thing with your activity, the relationship that you have with the activities in your life.
If it has a really, really strong telos, I'm gonna get better at it because I don't know. Yeah.
You know what? I bet I could sell that. Mhmm.
They'll strip that strip the love out of my my brother and I were both very talented classical musicians. He's three years older than me. He's a bass player.
String bass. Classical string bass. I was French horn.
I had that I was super telec. He was a telic. He's and he still plays.
He still plays in community orchestras. He's an extremely skilled amateur. He loves playing the bass.
He loves music. He loves it so much. He doesn't earn a dime from it.
That's why he loves it.
Let's say that someone feels completely empty right now. Yeah. Where should they start?
What are the most important habits in order to increase the meaning in your life? Yeah. So the things to be the things to be thinking about are along the lines, the sustaining
activities that will actually use your brain the way it's supposed to be used. So number one is understanding that your emptiness is not some sort of psychological weakness.
That notwithstanding what anybody's gonna tell you, there's something wrong with you. On the contrary, your brain is working the way your brain works. And you're living in the world, and it's the malfunctions are not your fault.
The malfunctions are you're going with kind of the slipstream of the culture. The culture is being driven by the technology. It's making you work in a way that's completely contrary to your ancestral habitat, and that's what's making you feel like garbage.
That's what it comes down to. It's kind of like you're eating meal after meal of Twinkies and wondering why your digestion is wonky and weird.
That's why is what it comes down to. What we need to understand then is you need to become aligned. You need to have a brain that's properly hemispheric, that's properly balanced between the hemispheres of what you're doing, which means you need to change your behavior.
So number one is getting right with technology. That's the number one thing that almost everybody today needs to do. Almost everybody's addicted.
Almost everybody has a dysfunctional relationship with it. Some more, some less. Me less because I'm older.
I remember the before times. Right? I mean, could throw Instagram up in front of me.
I'm like, okay. Good. Good.
This is really good for my business. This is good. Wildly interesting for sharing my ideas with other people.
Clips of you and me talking, people really like them. And that's great. Makes me feel great, but I'm going to scroll for an hour and like, uh-huh.
Right? But many and the younger you are, the more prone you are because you don't remember them before times. So actually, changing your behavior with respect to it, and there's ways to do it.
That's what I write about. Then you got to live in a new way.
You got to live in a new way. The first thing I recommend to almost everybody is go get bored. Go get bored.
Get good at it. Right? I don't mean like this whole thing where you stare at the front of the seat in front of you for a nine hour flight of the way to Greece.
Raw talking. Raw talking a flight? Yeah.
It's a great expression, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
It's disturbing. But the whole I mean, I'm I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actually living moment to moment.
You know, putting your hands in your lap when you're in the on the train looking out the window and saying, it's a tree. Being fully alive and saying, I'm fully alive right now. One of the ways to do that is to become more comfortable with repetitive prayer or meditative ideas that you would actually bring into your life, so you can be more mindful.
Just bring in some of those ideas, so you can become more comfortable with your brain working the way it's supposed to. Which by the way, ignites the default mode network in your brain, which you know about. The set of structures that allow you to mind wander.
Mind wandering leads to meaning. It's just as as predictably as as night turns to day.
That's the second thing. And then is actually having the experiences that that naturally open up the right hemisphere of your brain.
That means allowing yourself to actually fall in love and make friends and doing things in real life with other people in relation to other people and taking risks in your relationship.
It means actually entertaining the idea of something metaphysical beyond yourself. The left hemisphere is profoundly physical. The right hemisphere is metaphysical.
It says there is something more. Again, you don't have to do it my way. I'm a Catholic.
I got a Mass every day. You don't have to do it that way. You can do it like Sam Harris.
He's super right hemisphere guy. Right?
Because he has a sense of soulfulness. He has a sense of things beyond what we can actually see and touch.
He believes there are things that we can't see and touch that exist. He doesn't think it's God. So you you do transcendence your own way.
Looking for calling, how? By serving other people and being needed. By doing something.
By allowing yourself to be served and loved. This is actually how you can find these things. Looking for beauty, actually experiencing more beauty, real beauty, real beauty, not behind the screen.
It's not there. It ain't there, man. I don't care how long you look at it, it's not gonna be there.
That means going someplace in nature, listening to music that really sends you. I don't know. Read a poem.
Go to a museum. Right? Witness somebody helping other people just for no reason.
And last but not least is lean into your suffering. Bring it on. You know, it's like I have this I make my students say, my suffering is sacred.
Right? There's a do you remember Norman Vincent Peale?
Does that name ring a bell? Okay. He had a very famous self help book in the sixties called The Power of Positive Thinking.
That that sound that rings a bell. Right? He was a minister at a at a Protestant church in New York City, and he would say every single day when he started the day, the Psalm.
This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And he would have He was like the gratitude list originator and the whole thing.
All these good things, good things, good things. List all the good things that are happening in your life. List the bad things and say, I'm grateful for that too.
Bring it on. Right? Say as you wake up in the morning, it's like, I'm really grateful for the beautiful things that are gonna happen this day.
I woke up today, it's like, good to see Chris. It's gonna be great. I'm really grateful for that, but something's gonna happen today.
I'm gonna get a phone call or a text or an email that I'm not gonna like. Bring it on. I'm grateful for that too because when I lean into that, then I'm gonna be fully alive.
That's the moment I'm gonna be fully alive. And that attitude of nonresistance to pain will actually lower the suffering paradoxically as it raises the meaning in life.
Heck yeah. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen. Arthur, you're awesome.
I appreciate the heck out of you, man. Thank you. Bless your people go.
New book. What else is going on? Yeah.
So I'm all about, you know, looking for the sources of meaning in life. And so my my my website,
arthurbricks.com, actually has all kinds of ways people can interact. We have the meeting experience, which is a collaboration of people from all over the world on the Internet that meet once a month and and and talk about different ways to find the meaning in life.
And I give a like a an academic lecture, and then we have this great discussion. So we have all kinds of stuff and many ways to survey and measure where we are in our meeting journey, uh, many ways to interact with each other. It's all at all the website, arsenburgs.com.
Heck yeah. Alrighty. See you next time, everyone.
Dude. Thank you. Thank you.
You're great. I mean, you're you're the best. Thank you very
much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, another one that I know you'll love. It's just here.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Arthur Brooks opens with a blunt diagnosis: the feeling that modern life isn't quite real isn't a glitch in your perception — it's an accurate read of what's actually happening. The algorithms dominating daily life are left-brain simulations designed to capture attention and feed off energy, and the brain's right hemisphere — the seat of meaning, love, and mystery — is being systematically starved.
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