 I think many people, including many psychologists, have been single-mindedly focused on happiness, on the maximization of pleasure. And they think that this is what people only think people want, they think everything reduces to pleasure, and they think that the best advice they could give anybody is to seek pleasure. I'm pretty sure all of these things are wrong. We want pleasure and happiness, but we also want to do good things for others. What's up, everybody? And welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And many of our guests have come on to talk about happiness and our pursuit of happiness and finding happiness, chasing happiness. It seems like it's the hot topic du jour. Unfortunately, what you just talked about doesn't really equate to happiness. War, marathon training. There are certainly moments in there where I found happiness, but it was very fleeting. So how is that balance of our pursuit of happiness and suffering allowing us to find that sweet spot? Like, how do we find that balance in life? And my follow-up is, do you think there's too much positivity, too much focus on happiness in this pursuit of meaning? I like the word balance, and I'll answer both your questions at once, which is, yeah, I think, I'm not anti-happiness. A lot of my book isn't, it's not necessarily telling you, this is how to live the good life. It's exploring what people want, how people get the most out of life. And I'd be lying to you if I denied that happiness would, everyone wants to be happy. Everybody wants pleasure. And I think living a life without pleasure would be, is a poor choice? Pleasure's fun, pleasure's great. But I think many people, including many psychologists, have been single-mindedly focused on happiness, on the maximization of pleasure. And they think that this is what people, only people think people want, they think everything reduces to pleasure, and they think that the best advice they can give anybody is to seek pleasure. I'm pretty sure all of these things are wrong. We want pleasure and happiness, but we also want to do good things for others. We want, and we also want purpose and meaning. If I offered you two guys a pill that would give you a certain form of Alzheimer's, total dementia, where you lose all your, you become just kind of in a vegetative state, but became deliriously happy, I can't imagine either one of you would take it. If I offered you a pill that would make you into psychopath, which took away all guilt and shame and regret, and you just really get more pleasure in a life now, because you could prey on people and won't bother you. I bet you wouldn't take that one either. You want, people want many things. Yeah, it's interesting in that we had a guest on a couple of years ago, David Goggins. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him and his story, but much of his adult life is choosing suffering, is choosing to be a pull-up champion, is choosing to be an ultra marathon runner, competing on broken feet. And in that episode, it's one of our more popular episodes to date. It seems like a lot of people aspire to and look up to a pain tolerance and ability to overcome suffering in their own lives, even if they wouldn't choose it every day. I think that that's right, yeah. You mentioned that there's a piece to suffering that leads to more happiness, that that pain actually allows us to find happiness and that counterpoint of suffering creates space for us to realize happiness in our lives. Am I on the right track there? You definitely are. And in two ways. One thing, and this is what I originally got started on, I was originally interested in it, is that pain can lead to pleasure. There's a lot of ways in which having a bit of pain, you know, the spicy food example, and all that can lead to pleasure. But then there's the deeper thing we're talking about now, which is, you know, struggling and suffering is part and parcel of meaningful experiences. And we find those satisfying. We look back on those and we say, that's part of a good life. I'm satisfied I did that. You know, so many of the things we do are kind of investments in a way. You know, where we're doing this ridiculous long hike and at every moment we're saying, man, I wish I was back home in a hot bath, you know, or lying on a sofa watching Netflix. That's what I want to be. I don't want to be, God, I have 10 miles to go. Are you kidding me? But then when we get back, well, A, the beer tastes a lot better. But B, for the rest of our lives, we look back and say, I'm the kind of person who did that and there's a satisfaction to it. You made a case of being able to escape from yourself in some of the earlier parts in the books, certainly when it was dealing with BDSM and SSI. And the other thing about that, for those momentary moments where you're separated, you're not there, you're somebody else, or you're transferred into another place. But through that, A.J. brings up David Goggins and a lot of his suffering is for the person that he becomes due to that suffering, the transformation that is there. And I don't know if you and your research had seen that for, I guess what I'm looking at is the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that self-actuation is at the top of that. So for those people who are comfortable and content with other areas in their life, here's the next part to strive for as if I don't need to find food every day to put on the table, I'm free to be my best self or to become my best self, to transform into my best self. And that transformation comes from the pressures that I'm going to put on myself to bring out the best qualities on myself. That's a nice way of putting it. I have a friend, a philosopher, Lori Paul, who talks about transformative experiences. And these are experiences or choices that not only change your life situation like going to war or becoming a religious convert or having children, but change the kind of person you are. And sometimes we sort of throw our hat over the fence. We present ourselves with forces, suffering, pain, with an idea of becoming a different person on the other side. Typically, if we choose to do it, we want to become a better person. And, you know, you're right at the first part of my book, I talk about suffering as an escape from myself. And I give an example of actually when I, the first time I ever rolled in BJJ against somebody much younger and much stronger to me, as was everyone else there. For like two minutes, I'm, you know, struggling not to have my head pulled from my body, but I realized during that time, I thought of nothing else but the activity. I didn't think about, oh, I have to do this, and I did this embarrassing thing in the past. There's total focus in struggle. But, and that's an escape from self, but then there's the added part that you're focusing on, which is a desire to transform yourself. And so many of the big choices we make that involve suffering, even I think I have my marathon, to some extent, have that sort of transformative appeal. And is there a physiological response in our body that leads to that pleasure after suffering? You know, I think of a hard workout. I think of a long run. I think of these stresses that we put on our body and you hear the runners high, right? Where you just feel escape from your body and the pain that you just put yourself through. There has to be some sort of, sort of neurophysiological story here involving endorphins and various neurotransmitters and so on. I think we know a lot more about what happens that for something like the runners high in very short term. I don't think we know anything about that when we talk about things like training for a half marathon. Not just, you're not just, you know, a one hour run, but training for it. Little alone, having kids or starting a business are going to war. Obviously the brain must change. This is, we're all talking about brain activity in some way. We know very little about what goes on. And I think in the conversation that you had with Sam Harris, what I found really interesting is when we introduce money into the equation. So there are a lot of misnomers around money and happiness and also some of the more meaningful jobs in society don't actually compensate you very much. There isn't financial payoff. So when we talk about balance, how do you view money and its influence on what are suffering and lack of financial means and then also in our happiness? It's a good question. Look, one of the big findings in happiness research is money makes you happier. If you want to make more money, well, you're kind of smart because money makes you happier. People making 70,000 are happier, making 40,000, better make 100,000. And it's not surprising. Money buys you all sorts of stuff. And particularly if you're poor, you're vulnerable to predation, you're vulnerable to sickness, you have no security. All stuff can make you miserable. Money does make people happy. But and in fact, there's some evidence suggesting this is true even at the high end. People who make $10 million have $10 million or could have been a little bit happier and people want $1 million. But your question is it raises an important point, which is there's other things to maximize than happiness. There's been a study of 2 million people where they said, what do you do? What's your job? And the people whose jobs had the most meaning included members of the clergy, soldiers, medical professionals, educators. And some of these jobs don't pay well and some of these jobs are actually of fairly low status, but they provide a lot of meaning. And so, you know, I wouldn't blame anybody for trying to maximize the amount of money they make because it's connected to happiness. But on the other hand, if you forget that there's other things in happiness, you could end up in a job and there are jobs like this, which really provide a lot of money and that has its benefits, but they're numbing, boring ways of spending your life. David Graber coined the term bullshit jobs, which are jobs that don't do anything. You just shuffle around stuff and the world is unaffected. And I think these numb the soul.