 is the key thing. If you want more of happiness or love, give more happiness and love. So, happiness is the thing. One of the reasons, why do I study happiness? Why do I teach happiness at Harvard? It's fun. Awesome. I mean, it's a cool gig. Why don't I write about it in the Atlantic? The best. The reason is because I want more happiness. How do I get more happiness? I teach it. That's how you do it. And it's actually, there's a whole brain process to this. This is really important. If you want to understand something in the big, meaty part of your brain that's the most human part called the prefrontal cortex, the big part of your brain behind your forehead, you actually have to think about what you're doing and explain it to other people. Then you will own it forever. I kept, you know, I kept, I'd read about happiness and I'm really interested in happiness, but I wasn't happy until I taught it. This is the secret. And that made the biggest difference. Big difference. Wow. That's it. All right. The giveaway today, again, it's map symmetry because we're in launch week, okay? It's a brand new maps program, a lot of demand, a lot of people excited, but you can win map symmetry for free. You just got to do this. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. If we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to map symmetry. Now everyone else, we're launching this brand new program. So it is on sale. Instead of being $177, it's only $97 plus we throw in two ebooks that I wrote. The first one is the muscle building secrets of isometrics. The second one is reverse dieting 101. So you get those ebooks for free, for getting map symmetry for the low price of $97. Of course, everything comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. One more thing, this launch ends the 17th. After that, everything goes up to retail price. So if you're interested, go to maps symmetry.com and then use the code S Y M 50 for the discount and the giveaways. All right, here comes the show. Arthur, always great to have you on. I'm in person. Welcome to our studio. Literally one of my favorite people in the world. Now I want you to real quick kind of explain what a social scientist is and what that's about because as we get into this, I want people to understand kind of your background a little bit and how you know the stuff you do. Social science, well, it's a broad category of everything from psychology to economics and what it studies as human behavior. The idea of what people do and trying to understand it using scientific, mostly statistical tools and experiments on human subjects. So it's more or less the same toolkit as if you were a natural scientist, but you're studying the humans, which is hard because the natural world is highly complicated. Humans are complex, meaning that you kind of know what they want, but you don't know what they're gonna do. So it's a tricky business for sure, but my laboratory is the airplane, it's conversations, it's human interactions. That's what I'm most interested in because love and happiness, that's what we all want. You're my favorite happiness expert for sure. When you study this, then can you somewhat accurately predict how humans are gonna feel or what makes them feel particular ways or are we so complex that it's almost impossible? Well, you have to have a lot of humility. And one of the things that we don't have very much in academia is humility, which is a big problem. And so you don't get beyond what your data will allow you to predict or even explain. But the truth is we know a lot more than we used to because there's been such an explosion in the intersection of neuroscience and statistical methods of studying social behavior that we know a lot more than we did in the past. So for example, even 50 years ago, people say you can't study happiness, it's a feeling. Well, it's not a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling anymore than your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey, which is just evidence that there's something good going on in the kitchen. The Thanksgiving dinner is actually protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Or if you're not, if you're a little bit more sentimental, it's the turkey and the stuffing and the vegetables that you're gonna eat with a bunch of people that you love. And so you can actually study happiness much more like we would study nutrition if we've been in the past, and you can take a scientific approach to it. But you don't want to get beyond the range of your headlights. You don't want to start saying things or absolutely settle as if it were the laws of gravity. So it's a lot we don't know. Why does academia lack humility? Academia lacks humility because we have a tendency to puff up our own egos and to say, since I know all this stuff, I must know everything. And I'm talking to people who know less and they're expecting me to know the answers. And nobody wants to go to a big expert in any field and have them go, I don't know. But the truth is that you guys do this too because your experts, I mean, this is the most popular podcast in fitness and culture and health in the world right now. And so anybody who is listening to this, they're going to be like, with these guys, they know everything about fitness. But there's lots of stuff you don't know about fitness. Saying you don't know is a hard thing for human beings to do. This is, you know, less than one of social science. People don't like to say, I don't know. Yeah, you know, it's interesting about that as trainers, it took me a couple of years to realize that if I said I don't know, I actually got more respect from my clients and they were more likely to take my advice when I did know. So, and that's the irony. At first, I was afraid of saying I don't know. And then afterwards I was like, I was happy to say it and people, it was easy for me. I really didn't know. So it's true. But the hell am I doing here? People don't want to display what looks like weakness. And this is a real problem that even as a human foible is that we don't want to display any sort of weakness. But it's absolutely true. You get more credibility when you explain, you don't know. So when I'm lecturing my students, I mean, I have this, you know, big sections of MBA students at the Harvard Business School taking this class on the science of happiness. And, you know, I've been studying this stuff for decades and they're taking it for the first time and they're super into it. I mean, they're just like, and they're great. They're smart. They're applied. They're interested. And they'll be firing these questions at me and I'll be talking at the posterior cingulate cortex. I'll be talking about different parts of the brain, all this technical stuff. I'll be talking about the neuromodulators of and how it deals with emotion, the limbic system, yada, yada, yada. And so they think I know absolutely everything. They'll ask me a question that's relatively basic, like, why do I love my dog so much? I'll be like, huh. I'll get back to you. But they actually have respect more when somebody who's mastered the field or at least arguably has more mastery over the field than they do says, I don't know, because we don't know everything because we can't know everything is the bottom line. So as somebody that studies human behavior, the last couple of years must have been very interesting for you because it's been somewhat unprecedented in my lifetime for sure. I've never experienced anything like that before. And just the pressures and the changes and the stresses, what are the big things that stood out to you? Or is there anything that you learned or saw that was surprising? Well, it was a happiness experiment. It was a massive happiness experiment. Now, it's interesting though that people are always caught off guard every 10 years there's a big thing like that that happens to society and it's uninvited so it's unwelcome, which is worth keeping in mind. I mean, you can have a change and if you invite it, even if it's really hard, like you quit your job and you go through a period of relative insecurity, if it's at your volition, then it's not terrible. But if it's imposed upon you, then you really hate it because we don't like to lose control. And this is what happens about every 10 years. And people forget that every 10 years is something as big as the coronavirus epidemic that happens to us as a systemically. So 10 years before this big crisis was the financial crisis when maybe the ATM machines were going to stop working. That's the level of dislocation that we had. People graduated from college and not getting any work for two years. Crazy. 10 years before that was 9-11. 10 years before that was the end of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War. Every 10 years, there's something huge that fundamentally changes the way that we live and the way that we see the world. 10 years from now, it's going to be something else. And we're going to be like, I was paying attention to the next virus and financial meltdown. And it was fill in the blank. The problem is we as a society need to be better at involuntary change than we actually are. However, every time this happens, it's a big experiment in the changes in human happiness. And you see how behavior changes and you see how mood changes and how people deal with it in different ways. So for me as a social scientist, it's been the most interesting thing. And by the way, I'm going through it like everybody else. And you and I, we text a lot, you know, and we talk to each other a lot about, you know, and I'm like, Oh, you know, you gave me advice. Quite frankly, I mean, you know, my home gym, for example, that was a huge, huge part of my, my own personal happiness. And so I wound up doing research on why it is that, for example, resistance training is critically important in times of relative inactivity for inducing the neuromodulators in the brain that will help you to deal with problems of loneliness and seclusion and isolation, for example. So even those types of things were a learning experience for me. Would you say that fear or control are the biggest deterrents towards your pursuit of happiness? So fear is a huge one. And the reason for this is that fear is the opposite of love. Love is the secret to happiness. As a matter of fact, there's a, at Harvard, we have a study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an 84 year longitudinal study of the same people starting in the late 1930s. It was Harvard graduates, among them JFK, Ben Bradley, the publisher of the Washington Post, he's pretty famous guys, and then mixed it with people who had not gone to Harvard because it's not exactly diverse, you know, all white upper class guys went to Harvard, but then people who didn't go to college and then their spouses and their descendants. So it's become demographically very diverse. And we looked at what they did over the course of their lives. And there's a bunch of things, you can find seven big patterns for things that they did voluntarily that led them to being happy and well when they got older, when they were old. But the number one by far, and they sum up the whole studies that happiness is love full stop. So therefore, you want to know not just to have more love in your life, but what is the greatest antagonistic force in the universe against love? And the answer is it's cognitive opposite, which is fear. People often think that hatred is the opposite of love. Hatred is downstream from fear. Anytime somebody's expressing hatred, it's because they're fearful, always. Fear is actually takes up more brain tissue to process than any other basic emotion. Interesting. I didn't know that. And the reason is because it keeps you alive. Yeah. Without fear, you're dead. You're dead hundreds of thousands of years ago. You're like, ah, it's a beautiful day. I found some berries on a bush. Life is really great. And there's the same or two tigers sneaking up behind you twig snaps. And you're like, it's just a twig. And you're his life. So how do we balance those two? Then if it obviously serves us for survival reasons, but then it also can cripple us because it's the opposite of love. How do you? Well, you need fear to be sure, but you need to actually have it not be maladapted, particularly to modern circumstances. The way that fear is supposed to be processed in the human brain is that it's episodic and intense. The problem that we have in modern societies is not episodic, it's chronic and mild. True. And the way this works when fear is activated, for example, you're walking across the word San Jose and you're walking across the street, minding you're a busy, beautiful day. It's always a beautiful day here. Somebody runs a red light and a car is coming straight toward you. That's processed by the visual cortex of your brain without you being conscious of it. It's imprinted into the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system of your brain. This is a million years old, this part of the brain, which sends a signal through your hypothalamus to your pituitary glands in your brain, sends a signal to your adrenal glands, which sit right above your kidneys. And they pop out cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. This happens in 74 milliseconds. It's like three seconds later that you've already jumped out of the way and your heart is pounding and you're sweating. You've already flipped off the driver before you know even what's going on. That's why fear is so important and you need that, but it has to be episodic and intense. The way that we use it now is you open up social media and your chest starts to tighten up and somebody's going to trash me and I'm going to get canceled or whatever it is that people are really freaked out about. That's just a little drip of stress hormones, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. And that's bad. So how do you deal with that? That's modern life. And the way that you deal with that is that you don't just, you can, you know, mindfulness meditation and everybody should listen to mind pump and learn again, getting really good shape. I mean, there's all kinds of things that we should do, but fundamentally the way for you to deal with your fear is more love. You go to the cognitive opposite. This is the key thing. Don't deal with it automatically. I mean, you should deal with it directly as well, but go to its opposite and surround the fear with love. You need more love in your life. You need more romantic love. You need more family love. You need more real friendships, deal friendships are not the same. And you need, so you need faith. You need love of the divine. You need love of your friends. You need love of your family and you need romantic love. So give me an actionable thing that I can do. So I open up my social media instantly at the, like you said, the closing of the chest and I'm getting frustrated and fearful because of everything that I'm seeing. What's an actionable thing I can do that obviously shut it off. That's the first thing, but then I want to pursue love. What does that look like? Text Katrina. I love you. Seriously. Yeah, you're right. Seriously. Cause that, what that will do is that will actually stimulate your brain. I mean, you're, you've got four negative basic emotions that are automatic. They're fear, disgust, anger and sadness and three automatic positive emotions that happen to you automatically, which are joy, interest and love. Those are the big three and you need to stimulate love in particular. The way that you do that is by expressing love, expressing true, authentic love. Talk about a challenge though for somebody, right? Who's like stuck in the fearful mindset and then to try and transition over to that, especially since I know that I get a follow-up question whenever I send that, she knows to ask me, yeah, why did I say that? What are you thinking about? Well, part of it is that you can have a, you can have a deal with her that when I'm, when I'm feeling stressed, when I'm feeling, when there's trouble, I'm going to reach out to you and just tell you what's really important to me, which is that you're written in my heart. My love, you're written on my heart. Love though. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I feel like sometimes I take for granted that you have to purposefully place yourself in love and seek it and not just seek it, but give it. Almost like, I just, I take for granted that it just happens. Like, oh yeah, love just happens. It's not something I have to actually work towards and seek out. But the way you talk about it is to make a conscious effort towards it. Give it. This is the key thing. If you want more of happiness or love, give more happiness and love. So happiness is the thing. One of the reasons, why do I study that? Why do I teach happiness at Harvard? It's fun. Awesome. It's, I mean, it's a cool gig. Why not write about it in the Atlantic? The best, the reason is because I want more happiness. How do I get more happiness? I teach it. That's how you do it. And it's actually, there's a whole brain process to this. This is really important. If you want to understand something in your, in your, in your, the, the big meaty part of your brain that's the most human part called the prefrontal cortex, the big part of your brain behind your forehead, you actually have to think about what you're doing and explain it to other people. Then you will own it forever. I kept, you know, I kept, I'd read about happiness and I'm really interested in happiness, but I wasn't happy until I taught it. This is the secret. And that made the biggest difference. Big difference. Wow. That's it. Why are we seeing, because we have, I mean, objectively speaking, life is better in terms of safety and dangers and food and material things and entertainment and all the stuff. But I keep reading statistics about people are more depressed and more anxious, especially kids, especially adolescents and teenagers. Do we, do we have any ideas as to why kids are experiencing this more? I mean, I have two teenage kids and I think about this a lot. Yeah. So Justin's question is fear. It's fear. Fear is the problem. We're in a fear-based polarity in our culture. And there's a lot of reasons for this. I mean, there's a lot of, part of it is that, you know, we tend to oscillate between fear and love as the, as the vehicular language of how we express ourselves. And we tend to be in a, you look at politics today and it's all, it's all fear. It's like vote for me, because the other guys are going to hurt you and come take your stuff and I'll protect you. And it doesn't matter if you're on the right or the left. This is, this is the, this is the language that we actually get from national leaders. But you'll also see it every place else, you know, women are afraid of men and men are afraid of women that we're afraid of actually expressing our politics in, like the, the freest, most upwardly mobile country in the history of the world. And we're actually afraid to express our politics. We're going to get canceled on Instagram. I mean, and this is a fear-based polarity that we have in our culture today, which is hugely problematic. We have as parents, we over protect our kids. On social media, we actually are exposed to the criticisms of complete strangers and mass numbers. And the result of this is this intense social fear that's filtered itself down to the way that we conduct ourselves. So you find that the people are about 30% less likely to say they're in love than they did in the 1980s when they were in their 20s. Yeah, yeah. So kids in their 20s to the kids, young people in their 20s today are 30 percentage point percentage points less likely to say they're in love than I was when I was in my 20s. That's massive 1980s. It's unbelievable. You never see data like this. This is catastrophic. This is a cataclysm in human happiness. And so all of this, what we're talking about the, the depression. I mean, and again, you can look for more proximate technical causes like the uptake in social media, which is the junk food of social life, you know, in the same way that yeah, totally. I mean, it's like eating McDonald's every day is, and part of it is because there's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that functions as a hormone. And it's, you get it from eye contact and touch, you don't get it from social media. So you binge on it in the same way that you'll binge on burgers and fries when you're hungry, get too many calories, but you're hungry again an hour later because you have met your nutrient needs. Same thing is true for, for social media. And all of this leads to loneliness leads to depression. And it's all in this brew of fear that we see as a society. Yeah. When it, with social media, I mean, from a fitness perspective, the thing that I noticed a lot with, with body image issues is they got worse because, and I'd love your input on this, that you see all these perfect bodies and your brain just unconsciously compares you to these people. And you have this bias like, Oh, everybody looks like that. Well, guys like me are comparing ourselves to you. It's a problem. Oh, come on. Don't say that. I know how ripped you are, but, but, but it makes you cut you without being conscious about you end up comparing yourself and you end up thinking, my God, everybody looks like this. And I look, you know, normal or whatever. Right. And I feel like it does that with news with, you know, scary things that you read on social media. And that's what obviously gets popular. So as a kid, you're like, Oh my God, everything sucks. There's all the scary stuff. I can't do anything about it. Am I going, am I kind of heading down the right path? That's right. Is that the comparison sets are too big for sure. And this is one of the problems in social media. Now it's the, the, the lack of approval from other people, the criticism from complete strangers for sure. But then there's the social comparison issue, which is a completely different issue, but it's a really deleterious one. Nonetheless, social comparison that, you know, the Teddy Roosevelt, the president of the United States, called social comparison, the thief of joy. He was kind of a good social scientist. He understood humans pretty well. He's one of my favorite presidents. Yeah. Yeah. And he's a really interesting guy. He's a really, and highly entertaining too. But he, he called, and it really is the thief of joy. You know, when you compare yourself to other people, there's nothing good can come of that. I mean, we do that, the only way to do that is to surround yourself with people that you know in person and whom you admire. Then it's a really good thing to do because then you want to become more virtuous. You want to become more admirable. You want to actually take on people's good qualities. So one of the things that I've done actually pursuant to this research is I surround myself with people I admire like you. It's like, I, I, I want to surround myself with people who have virtue, not, you know, somebody who's got just like better abs. That's, that's not virtue per se. It's, it's good. It's fine. You know, it's just like having, having better abs, like having more money. Although as you all point out, there's more people with a million dollars than haven't had visible abs in America today, which is a pretty interesting statistic I have to say, because it wasn't that long ago when it was the reverse because we didn't, we had no money and no food. Everybody had abs. That's right. They got abs. It's like talking, that's called being malnourished. So, but, but that's the key thing is you surround yourself with people with whom you want to have your own comparisons because you want to elevate yourself morally in terms of virtue, but everything else is bad. Everything else is bad for your happiness is bad for your health. It's bad for your social life. It creates fear. And at least in the cycle of problems that we're talking about. You spoke about over-protecting our kids and that resonates with me because I have that tendency. I have that tendency to want to just, you know, cover them up and make sure nothing ever happens. And I want to ask you a personal question. I know one of your sons is a Marine and he's out there. I mean, in the front, in danger, how did you handle that personally with that? Because I'm sure part of you wanted to be like, no, don't put yourself in danger. Like, how did that work out? Part of it is just knowing yourself and so confronting this quite consciously. The problem with fear is when you don't know you're being motivated by fear, then you'll act according to it. When you make something conscious, you can manage it. So here's the deal. When something is limbic, that part of your brain that acts automatically with your basic emotions, we talked about that a minute ago, it will manage you. If you actually become conscious of it, you can manage it because you're literally processing it in a different part of your brain. That's called metacognition. When you're afraid, you have to sit down and say to yourself, Sal is feeling fear. Why is Sal feeling fear right now? Oh, that. That's interesting. Sal always feels fear into those circumstances and you become the boss. You become the boss of your fear. So this is the same thing with almost anything. If you basically have this visceral, kind of primeval caveman fear because something might conceivably hurt your child, then you'll do often the wrong thing. The truth is, you shouldn't overprotect your kids. It's bad for them. My parents didn't overprotect me. On the contrary, I had this paper route when I was 11 years old in this working-class neighborhood in Seattle, where I grew up in this lower middle-class neighborhood in Seattle. It was the same neighborhood that Ted Bundy had been marauding. Oh, wow. A few years earlier, for sure. But there was this craze in the 1970s about serial killers. Serial killers. My mom was like, it was 4.30 in the morning. I had this paper out. My mom says, do you think we should let Arthur be walking around at 4.30 in the morning in the neighborhood with vicious dogs and serial killers about delivering papers? My dad, he wanted to protect my interest because I always had like $20 bills hanging out of my pockets. It was a pretty entrepreneurial kid. My dad, he had a Ph.D. in biostatistics. He tried the scientific approach on my mom. He says, well, I've been studying the data. I don't think Arthur fits the core demographic profile of a serial killer. They don't want to kill him. He's fine. They won't be going after him. And she says, what? She doesn't understand the thing he's saying. Finally, he resorts to pure emotion. He says, well, even the perverts have to sleep sometime. It was very different even when we were kids. I would go, I tell my mom, I'm going to go hang out with my friends and go, what time are you going to be back? And then that was it. I was gone. I was disappeared into the ether. Totally. And yet we are different with our kids. Totally. I wouldn't let my daughter, my baby, my perfect princess at 11, go walking around, go to the mall by yourself. Even though crime is lower, the world is safer, but we have to be very careful about those impulses because there, our limbic system is playing us like a violin and we're managing, it's managing us and we're managing our parenthood wrong under those circumstances and it's bad for our kids. What are the consequences of that as parents? They get more fear. They get more, our kids become fearful because the parents say, you're exactly right. You're, you're motivating them to behave in a way that's not consistent with the love that you want to motivate them as people so that they can be happy and they can lift other people up. And the reason is because they take their cues from you. It's like the world's scary place because my dad's scared. I mean, my dad's scared. Did you tell me one time that you're like, when you were a kid, you thought that your dad could lift the house? Yes. Yes. You told me that one time, right? And that your dad is the, this is one of the really interesting things. The reason that, that the biggest predictor of going to church is seeing your dad on his knees because the strongest person in your life is on his knees for no man but in front of God. That's the reason people are like, yeah, that's why I'm going to church because even my dad was on his knees for that, right? But if you're, but then now think of the dark side of that. That's true. If the only time you see your dad afraid is because you might walk to the mall, then the walking to the mall is a scary, dangerous thing. Wow, that makes a lot of sense. You're speaking to my dad, you know, your book resonated with me because I, my dad retired a bit early because he's arthritis up and down his spine. I mean, he's been working hard labor since he was nine years old and he went through like a two year like depression period. Like I remember he, he, he stopped working and that's all he did for most of his life. And after that, he was like, and I remember my mom telling me, she's like, you got to get your dad out of the house because he's mop the floor five times and he's, he's already rebuilt the backyard and he's the whole backyard. He's driving it crazy. Yeah. Cause he did like a million, he didn't know what to do. And for like a couple years, it was really tough for him. So I, I'd like to, to go into your book a little bit, strength to strengthen. I'd like to start with the impetus. What motivated you to write this book? Cause you have, there's this great story of, of kind of what got you to go down this path. Yeah. So when I was about 50 years old, I realized that I needed to make some changes. I mean, my life was good. I'm, I'm a, I'm a very lucky guy. I was the CEO of a think tank in Washington, DC. So for, you know, people who listen to mind pump who have a, a life and don't know what a think tank is, uh, which is a normal thing to not know. Think tank is a research institution, like a university without students. And so I, it's a big research nonprofit in, in, in Washington, DC, dedicated to helping politicians and policymakers make better decisions. And in our case, it was about how they could use the free enterprise system to lift people out of poverty, how to get a better national security system would protect American America's interests, et cetera. And I had like 300 and some employees and I was raising $50 million a year. I was giving 175 speeches. I was traveling around all the time. I was the king of the mumbo, but I knew I couldn't keep it up and I wasn't happy. I wasn't happy. I mean, I had looked back, I'd found this bucket list that this is the stupidest idea to bucket list. So dumb. And when I was, because all it does is it lowers your satisfaction because every year you look at the things you haven't done, you feel like a loser. And it's like, that can motivate me. I don't know. Anyway, so I'm 50. I'm looking at my bucket list when I was 40. I'd done everything on the bucket list. And I wasn't happy. Oh no. I'm like, huh, something. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And one night I'm sitting on an airplane from, from here, from California to DC. And it was like 11 o'clock at night. And I hear this couple talking behind me on the airplane. And, and I can tell they're old, but it's out of their voices. Tell it's a man and a woman. I'm assuming they're married. And the guy is confessing the man is confessing to the woman that he might as well be dead. And she's trying to console him. Oh, it's not true that nobody remembers you. And it's like, Oh, I'm a has been, I'm washed up. No, we didn't take my calls anymore. And I'm thinking it's like, it's like that Nicholson movie about Schmidt, you know, where he's, he gets retired, it gets a watch and they're throwing all his files away. And it's in this old joke, you know, that you go from who's who to who's he in like a month. And, and I'm thinking it's probably somebody who's kind of disappointed. And you kind of wanted to do a lot, but never lived up to his own standards or capabilities or promise or whatever. And, and at the end of the flight, the flight, the lights go on and everybody stands up and I turn around as one of the most famous men in the world. This is one of the most famous, successful men in the world who for decades ago had these big achievements, like not controversial. He's a hero. And, you know, as we were leaving the plane, the pilot said, you know, recognizes him because everybody would said, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And at that point he's beaming with pride. But I heard him. I heard his, I heard what was the dialogue going inside his head. Nobody hears this. Cause inside I'm thought, what am I going to do? I mean, I'm like, I'm not going to be that guy. I'm not a hero. I'm not famous. I mean, it's, but, but, but what am I going to be saying to my long suffering wife Esther at 85? I'm going to be like, I might as well be dead. Nobody remembers me. Nothing's good anymore. Or can I make some changes? What can I do for my happiness 401k plan? What can I do? What are the investments that I can make? Because I'm on the wrong track. I was lonely. I was working really super hard. I was not becoming more effective in my life. I was not cultivating the relationships that I need. I was not a very good husband because I was on the road all the time. I'm thinking, you know, what, I mean, what's the deal? Who are the happy? What are the secrets of the happy people? And it turns out half the people get happier after 70 all the way to the end and half the people get unhappier after 70 all the way to the end. And people get unhappier after 70 are the strivers. So the successful, the ones that success early in life. They're the ones who tend to be unhappier because they're disappointed with the contrast. See, look, if you don't do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. It's the same. If you do a lot, what goes up must come down. And so what do you do so that you can be you guys 40 years old, killing it and at 70 still be happy? What can you do? And that's what this book is. It's your happiness 401k plan. It's my happiness. It's my happiness 401k plan. It's me search, not research. So what are some of the things that you found in common with those two groups that obviously at that point, a fork in the road, they go opposite directions. Obviously, it was not directly connected to how much money or success they had. There's other things. What are the common things between those two groups? It's not money and success at all, it turns out. So and we all want money and success, but the question is, what do you do with the money and success? And if the money and success are an opportunity for you to invest in the things that really matter, your faith, your family life, your friendship, work that truly serves other people, then those things like money and power and pleasure and fame, then they're fine, but only as instrumental things to get to the stuff that really, really matters. And that's what happy people have in common. The second big point about the happiest people as they get older is that they recognize that their strengths change. And that's what the guy in the plane didn't figure out. He had this incredible life early on. He was the king and he wanted to keep that forever. This is the thing. You want to stay with us. There's this Hindu theory of life, the balance of life. And when you're in your zone for work and success, it's called Grihasta. It's a working Sanskrit for the house, the manager, the dad. You've got all this worldly success, but around age 50, according to this Hindu philosophy, you've got to move to a period called Vanaprastha, which means technically to retire into the forest, not literally. But what it means is basically to start stepping back from these things, to start taking stock, to start investing in your relationships, to start teaching other people. This is entirely consistent with all of the best neuroscience research that shows that you get this curve of intelligence early on, and that's called fluid intelligence, which you get better and better and better at focusing, at being an innovator, at being an entrepreneur, but working indefatigably for these goals. And you're really good at that through your 20s and 30s. And the more you do, the better you get. But it peaks and you start to decline in that, in that energy and that focus in your 40s. And it's just falling like a rock in your 50s. But you get another curve behind it called your crystallized intelligence curve. That's increasing through your 40s and 50s and 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s. That's your wisdom curve. That's your ability to teach. That's your ability to share knowledge, to build up other people, to create teams. And if you actually move from your high horsepower curve to your wisdom curve, then the world is yours. But if you're trying to stay on that superstar curve, the first one through, it'll be like chaining yourself to a roller coaster that's going down and down and down and down and down and down and doesn't come back up again. And that's what's going on. Explain wisdom then. So obviously knowledge is a part of it, knowing information. But what makes someone, what's the difference between someone who knows stuff and someone who's wise? Wisdom is knowing how to use what you know. So knowledge is being able to answer questions. Wisdom is knowing which questions are worth asking and answering. It's judgment is what it comes down to. It also has a whole lot of generosity in it. Wisdom to be wise, to have this crystallized intelligence, to say, here's the knowledge that's important. Here's how to use it. And here's how I can serve other people with it is the key thing. And you become other focused in a way that's deeply satisfying. That second intelligence curve, that crystallized intelligence curve, you can write it all of it in your life and get happier and happier and happier. And that's what the happiest people have. When do you know you achieved this crystallized intelligence? Is this all part of that whole 10,000 kind of a journey where you're getting an accumulation of hours and you've been able to now see and predict patterns as they come? Yeah. What you find is that it gets a little bit harder to focus single-mindedly on a particular task in your 40s, but it gets easier for you to do the pattern recognition. And it gets easier. Yeah, it gets easier and easier. What you guys are going to find is this decade progresses because I'm 15 years older than you guys. And as this decade progresses, what you're going to see naturally because of the structure of your brain is that it's going to get easier and easier for you to explain highly complex concepts in this show or whatever the show becomes because it's a morphing thing. This is a communication vehicle. It's not a podcast. It's not a YouTube show. It's the way that you're going to find that you're more and more and more professors, that you guys are teachers, more and more. The whole thing is going to go from how you saw at the very beginning to build a company to actually sharing knowledge. And you'll get better and better at it. It's the bottom line. Now, there's a problem that we have in our culture which valorizes youth. Yes. Right? And especially, we're sitting here in Silicon Valley. And the problem is that this is the tech industry, for example, has revolutionized our country, revolutionized our world. And yet it's not very trusted or respected. And the reason is because it's all fluid intelligence, no crystallizing. You need more 70-year-olds in tech companies, is the bottom line. They've made every mistake in the book. They're going to say, you guys, we're making a product that hurts people. You guys, these are anti-competitive practices. You get knuckleheads. Don't do bro culture. It's exploitative and it's undignified. And it's going to get us into a whole lot of trouble. I mean, older people know these things so they have this wisdom that they have. But when it's all kids, you got a problem. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, talking about fluid and going to Chris Link. Justin was a very competitive football player in high school, college, talks about it. I hear him talking. Very happy when he talks about it, brings him a lot of joy. Just started coaching high school football team. Obviously, very busy guy. And all of us have recognized the spark and the happiness that it's coming. And it's exactly what you're talking about. He's teaching what he used to do. And it's really cool to see. From player to coach. From player to coach. It's a total evolution, right? You sort of see that next chapter of how you can apply that knowledge and then see it foster right in front of you. And 10 years ago, you wouldn't have been as good. And the reason is not because you didn't have the experience. You knew just as much about football 10 years ago as you know it today. But for some reason, it's easier to explain now. And the reason is because you've got crystallized intelligence because of the changing structure you're right. Wow. And now you said something that's very interesting about us valuing you so much and maybe not so much wisdom as people get older. But other cultures seem to, a lot of older cultures seem to value wisdom and the elderly, for example. And you're very well traveled. What lessons can we learn from some of these other cultures in terms of how we value wisdom? We see this, particularly in India and China, for example. There's a lot more respect that's given to older people and a lot more deference. And it's not just because it's the right thing to do. It's because it's smart. And so the way that we could adopt this is that you should have a 70-year-old in every C-suite. Even if they don't quite understand and don't have the hustle culture and the acumen for the tech, you need more old people. You need more old people around as the bottom line. And because the thing is, 70 is the new 50. It's amazing that I feel like I'm 27. And part of the reason is because you train me. The success of Mind Pump is because of Doug, for that exact reason right there. He's our old guy that we keep around just for that. But he's still younger than me. Yeah, maybe a year. And it's really important. I mean, it's really important that we actually learn that that's the sort of the technical lesson of these Eastern cultures, but there's a moral lesson to it too. Look, life is not that interesting when you don't have any diversity. You know, when everybody's the same, when we're all like clones, it's so boring, right? And we know that enough to know that it's important for men and women to work together for people with different races and different backgrounds, different cultures. That's all interesting. It just makes life better, right? Because different perspectives creates more quality. But the single most undervalued part of diversity is age diversity. You know, it's crazy. And we set up our culture so you're all five-year-olds in kindergarten and the cohort didn't chunk going forward. Oh, we thought this is so weird because we know this and yet we still, our school structure is still cool. Yeah. And now we, instead of having our elderly parents with us, we put them in a home, which is a huge mistake because you can get, I mean, I understand it's a hassle having your grumpy dad living downstairs or whatever. But there's so much to that. There's so much intergenerational wisdom and interest that we can actually get from that if we were to value it differently and understand that that could enrich us in big ways. You know what? You just literally put, you just literally explain what I miss most about personal training. I stopped training about a year into mine pump. Obviously, this was taken off and, you know, we had to put our time and energy into it. And I missed a lot about training people, but you, what I miss the most, and I'm really realizing this now, when you train people, you, I train people who are 40s, 60s, I had clients in their 70s. I had clients that were in tech, others that were entrepreneur, just a wide variety of people, wide variety of ages. And you meet these people twice a week for years, you know, so you develop a relationship with them. And it was so profound, the amount of growth and stuff I learned. And now I'm starting to realize what it was. It was just, I was surrounded by lots of very different people in different ages. Right. And you were getting a big mix of different kinds of intelligence. Yes. That was, and it went early on when I started training, when I started lifting in most of my late 30s. And I, you know, I wasn't going to personal trainers. I was just trying to get in shape. And I, what I figured out was I put together a little strategy where I thought to myself, well, let's see, what do I want to do with this? I'm not going to, I'm not going to be in a bodybuilding contest. I don't know the genes or the, the, the, the possibility of doing anything like that. I don't have the, I don't know the, I don't have the goods. What do I want to do? I want to be healthy. I want to feel good. And I want to be able to do, I want to be doing this when I'm 80. So I started going to these old rusty iron gyms where the old guys, right? The guys who are lifting, they're 75 years old and they're lifting, right? They're doing like dead lifts at 75. I mean, they're not afraid of that because they have, they have good form. They know what they're doing. And I would go up to the old guys and the old guys will always give you advice. You know, the old guys and say, how old are you? Like 76. I said, dang, I mean, you're dead lifting twice your weight. And, you know, and can you, can you give me a couple of pointers? And of course they'll give you a couple of pointers. So almost everything I learned in my late 30s, I learned from people in their 60s and 70s, which was pure crystallized intelligence. Because when I was in my late, when I'm in my late 70s, I want to, I want to be going to the gym every day still. Speaking of wisdom, how important is it for your high achievers out there to consider having and applying a spiritual practice? It's hugely important to walk a transcendental path. And so it's about half of your happiness is genetic. It comes, it's, I mean, your baseline happiness levels and your baseline mood levels actually comes from your genetics. If you have gloomy parents, you'll have a gloomy baseline as the bottom line or vice versa. So your mother literally did make you unhappy. And we say in my business, your results may vary. About a quarter of your happiness is circumstantial. You know, things, good things going on, bad things going on in your life that are bringing you up and down. But those things never last. Everybody thinks that circumstances are everything. The thing that really matters is the last quarter, which is your habits and the four big happiness habits. There's a lot of little things. You know, it's like, what makes me happier? Resistance training or cardio? Those are little things and they're not completely trivial, but the biggies are faith, family, friendship, and work. Faith, family, friends, and work. And work has two characteristics. It has to be where you earn your success, which is why the free enterprise system is so incredibly valuable as an engine for letting us live up to our potential and serving other people, people who really, really need you. But the first one, faith doesn't necessarily mean my Catholic faith. Although I recommend it to everybody, I love it. But what you find in the data is walking a transcendental path, whether it's traditionally religious or spiritual or just philosophical, you need something that gives you a better metaphysical perspective on your life. And the reason for this is if you don't, it's just tedious and boring. You know, it's like, left to your own devices, you will compulsively think my job, my money, my car, my vacation, my money, me, me, my house, my friends, me, me, me. And it's just tedious. It's like watching the same episode of the same sitcom every single day over and over and over again. And you know, whether you're reading the Stoics or whether you're going to Roman Catholic mass or whether you're doing a Eastern meditation practice, something has got to daily give you relief from you is the bottom line. And so I, one of the things that I recommend to everybody is to start walking a spiritual path as soon as they possibly can. Is that more challenging now? I mean, you've been teaching for a long time, do you see that become more challenging or younger people? Easier as you get older, right? It's harder when you're younger. For sure. Yeah. It's one of the things in the book that I write about is that people tend to after 40, that's when their interest in this starts to rise. And part of the reason is because, frankly, their fluid intelligence is in decline. So their focus on their, on the here and now, the focus on the tedious is in decline. What fluid intelligence will make you do is it'll allow you to focus intensely on something boring like being a lawyer, right? And it's like, it's like, and again, you know, I got, I got no, not to cast dispersions on lawyers. I'm glad that they're really, really good lawyers. But I mean, it's like, when you're 60, you're just not going to focus on the, on the minutiae of a legal brief in the same way that you will and can when you're 30, your brain is built for that. And so what happens after 40 people are like, man, I need some relief. I need something. I need to zoom out. I need perspective on this. This is one of the reasons they start getting much, much more interested in this. However, I find that my students every year are more interested in the metaphysical. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think, is that, is that, do you think there's a correlation between that and like their, their own, the youth being more anxious? Yes. Oh, yes. It has, it goes, it once again ties right back to what we were talking about 15 minutes ago, which is fear is there. And the fear, which is antagonistic to love. Remember that there are 30 percentage points less likely to be in love. They're less likely to be married, less likely to cohabitate. They're having less sex. People in their 20s are having fundamentally less sex worth than you were when you were in your 20s. Yeah. And, and, and, and again, you know, all of your, your morals around these things notwithstanding, people just don't love each other as much. They have more fear. They have less love and they're looking for some relief in their life. And so that's one of the reasons that they're, they're asking spiritual questions. You know, talking about fear again, I want to circle back because we kind of just briefly went through the whole COVID thing. And I just think that's still so top of mind for so many people. And I also think that we haven't seen all the, the consequences of what we all just write through. What are some of the things, one that you learned, just kind of watching everything? And what are some things that maybe you predict is going to happen? And maybe that gives us some insight on how we can maybe combat it. Yeah, for sure. Well, it's interesting. Early on in the coronavirus epidemic, when people were locked down, they were intensely uncomfortable. People would even say, I can't sleep, you know, I'm irritable. I'm restless all the time. A lot of that has to do with this, this hormone that we talked about a minute ago called oxytocin, which is produced by the human brain. It's the, it's the hormone of human bonding. This is what you get when you, when you, when you, I mean, we all have kids. And, and when you lay eyes, eye contact with your baby for the first time, it's like fourth of July in your head. And, you know, neurobiologists, evolutionary biologists say, that's so you don't leave the baby on the bus or something. But the truth is, I think it's a gift from God. I think that it is like, this is your baby. And this is, you know, for me as a Christian, this is like, this is the first time I truly understood my relationship with God was when I laid eyes on my first son. I said, Oh, that's how God loves me. Unconditionally, for no reason, no merit of my own. And it really put my life into perspective. Now neurobiologically, that's oxytocin. And when you don't have it, you're not going to be able to sleep right. You're going to feel really uncomfortable. You're, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to crave highly glycemic carbohydrate, all the stuff that everybody was doing. So 85% of people when they had all the time in the world to exercise got out of shape. Fast to the fastest rise in obesity. It's unbelievable. Everybody got fat. Everybody was sitting around. If people were eating hog and docile, watching Netflix and cocooning on the couch by themselves, feeling lonely and gross. Yeah. Tiger King. Everybody was like, Oh, I don't care if it's that popular. It's a train wreck. That's a neurological problem that people watch Tiger King. So the people liked that, as a matter of fact. So, so what we find is that, that people were, were getting into these really, really bad patterns of loneliness, of fear, of isolation. And a lot of it had a, had a neuroscientific basis to it, to be sure. But people were feeling this and happiness was just tanking all over the place. Now, the, the interesting part about that is that people didn't, people don't always take care of themselves. What happens is when you're lonely and you're fearful, that impairs your executive function. Your executive function is not your animal part of your brain. It's the human part of your brain. It's the front lobes of your brain that make you make good decisions, not withstanding your instincts. That's when you manage yourself as opposed to being managed by your feelings. That's impaired when you're lonely. That's impaired when you're fearful. So what happens with the really problem, the big problem with the coronavirus epidemic is that people were involuntarily demobilized and, and they became fearful about getting sick or losing their jobs or having the economy meltdown. And they were intensely lonely because of these crazy lockdowns and social distancing, which was just unbelievably deleterious for mental health. And the result of that was they became incapable of doing what they need to do. So you'll still see people who are really not in danger of getting sick, who are still walking around with masks because they're authentically fearful. The worst thing that we can possibly do who are not afraid is to make fun of them because they're actually afraid and their executive function is being impaired by the fear and the loneliness they felt all the way through this virus. And that's what we actually see. So people are making a big set of bad decisions about their own lives at this point, ordinarily under normal circumstances before the virus, about 9.5% of the population exhibits symptoms of clinical depression at any time, the American population, which is higher than most countries right now is 28%. Yeah. And that's still, even though we're technically past anything like full lockdown, I mean, where I'm, my life is completely normal, except that I fly every single week, except that I have a mask on the plane. That's the only meaningful difference in my life, even here in California, which was lockdown central. And so, but, but you find that people are, are reacting very, very poorly to this. There's a huge rise in mental illness. So what we need to do, we need to help each other. We need to love each other more. We need to show each other as much understanding and patience as we possibly can. And the worst thing that we can do is to attack each other. Those of us that are very skeptical of a lot of, you know, the continuing, the most intrusive parts of these lockdown procedures that attacking people who disagree with us, we should not make this political, we should love each other more. Wow. Yeah, I feel like you just targeted me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking to me. I'm talking to me because it's very easy for me to like, come on, come on, get with it. Don't, don't keep telling me to lock down. It's not right, but the whole thing is these people are afraid and they, they need my love. Meanwhile, I feel like we're the most politically divided I've ever, at least in my lifetime, in my short 40 years, I have never felt like we were so divided as a country as we are. That's factually true. Yeah. I've never seen extremism so popular. In just how polarized we are. Like it just, that sounds like amazing, but I just, I wonder how we can actually start implementing that on a grander scale and get leaders out there to actually like promote that instead of, you know, just feeding to their base. I would question is extreme, is it really that popular or is it that's what we're being fed through social media? I think that that's, so we think it is, you know, absolutely. Yeah, these are, yeah, these are, it's something like 93% of Americans hate how divided we become. That means 7% don't hate it. And when you hate somebody's profiting, this is the key thing. There's politicians, there's media, it's the click machines, the people who are getting their jollies or their followers that actually come from this stuff. I mean, hate is extremely profitable. And by the way, it has huge neurobiological implications to it. You know, it's like, you don't get it, you don't stimulate dopamine and somebody's brain by going, you know, we should all just love each other. You know, it's no, somebody, you should be afraid. You know, somebody's got your stuff. I'm going to get it back. You know, these wily foreigners are going to come steal your stuff, whatever it happens to be, or whoever the targeted population happens to be, that, that stimulates the brain chemistry of people and it can lead to tons and tons of profits. So we need like a 70s all over again. It's funny, you know, it's funny because the, yeah, right. The 70s when the serial killers were running rampant. And the, but also it's, the 70s were, were tricky. I mean, they follow the 70s followed on a period of unbelievable political polarization in Ken Burns told me in 1968, 1969, there was something like 700 domestic political bombings. You know, we don't have anything like that today. Right. And so it for, for sure in our adult lifetime, this is the worst it's been, but arguably it was more violent back then. And that was followed on by a period in the 70s that was different in the 80s was a lot more positive. I mean, like her hate Reagan, my family thought he was terrible. I was the odd man out because I thought he was kind of awesome, you know, because he loved me. I felt that he loved me is that it kind of shifted the polarity in America from fear to love. And that's ultimately what we have to do. And each one of us, look, you guys are leaders, you have millions of followers, but you're also leaders in your family and your leaders among your neighbors. And all of us have to be leaders with love all the time and never falling prey to the culture of fear. It sounds like fear and even loneliness, the combination is a, it becomes a positive feedback. Yeah. So it's like, you know, I'm lonely, I'm scared. That makes me less likely to want to be around people. So I get even lonelier and more scared. Right. Okay. That's exactly right. And it's all it is is a, all it is is a self-fulfilling prophecy of fear leads to fear. And then you get more evidence of why that's the case. And then you got to break out of it. You got to clip the cycle someplace and each one of us can clip the cycle in our own way. Everybody listening to us as a leader, they have that, you know, they, if you're, anybody who's listening to mind pump, it's because you want to be better. You want to be a better person. You want to be more excellent. And anybody who wants to be more excellent as a leader in some part of their life. So show that leadership by showing more love is the bottom line. And you will be part of the solution to the problem. Excellent. Arthur, you by chance read, read Dalio's latest book. Yeah. I really would love to hear your take on like what your thoughts are, where are we at in the cycle right now and stuff. I know that I know you like economics too. So I'm just curious to what you think. It's hard. It's, you know, the, the predictions on that are notoriously impossible. Right. And that's the reason for that is that we're, we're, it's a random walk. You know, or as we say in the economics business, I'm actually an economist. It's a stochastic process. You know, and if you were able to predict it, it would be, it would be neutralized before it actually even happened. As you get some people with, Ray Dalio's got a ton of alpha and that just means, you know, beta is the normal two and fro of these markets and up and down in the random stuff. Alpha is your sensibility, your ability to predict a little bit better than anybody else. And then you can actually calculate an alpha rating for hedge fund managers like Ray Dalio. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And so there are alpha ratings for these different hedge fund managers. His is sky high because he's got this acute tiny little bit and all it takes is just a millimeter more alpha for you to be a billionaire, you know, in these particular markets, right? Cause you don't have to be right a tiny bit more than the other guys. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And that's pure profit that accrues to you as the financial entrepreneur to be sure. So, you know, what Ray Dalio says, you'd be foolish to actually think that that's not the case. I think more about sort of the political economy of what's going on in our society today. And I think that there's good times coming. I actually, I'm not optimistic on this hopeful. I think there's a lot that we can actually do. And what typically happens in American life with periods of polarization and the polarization is manifest in our economics, you know, people when we're against each other, we're against each other, you know, we're not working together. It's going to, it's going to, you're going to see it. And I actually think that people are sick of it. And they're going to, there's going to be a time where politicians who are notorious followers, leaders are actually followers. Like, what do people want? Oh yeah, that people want fear. Okay, I'll do fear when they, when they actually figure out, when some politicians actually figure out that there's, that people want more love, that people want more positivity, we're going to actually start seeing it for national leaders. I've heard you say that people often realize they're lonelier than they thought they were. And there's an epidemic of loneliness. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit. So that's the key thing about when your executive function is impaired. So you think, for example, I feel crummy today. I think what I'll do is I'm just going to, I'm going to do self-care. Or as like we say in the university, they call it radical self-care. I was like, what the radical self-care? It's like, it sounds like indecent. I don't know. And it sounds like I shouldn't do that. You'll, you know, you'll go to hell. Anyway, the self-care is, or they'll think about it as just kind of babying myself. And what do you do when you baby yourself? You stay home. You, you know, you get a cuddly blanket. You lie down on the couch. You eat the stuff that you want. You maybe have a bottle of wine. You binge something on Netflix. Exactly the wrong thing to do. Exactly. And so what I teach my students is called the opposite signal strategy. O-S-S. The opposite signal strategy is when you are feeling lonely, do the opposite of what you want to do. Wow. Is the key. And that means get out, get fresh air, do some exercise, call a friend, see people. These are the things that you should be doing when you actually feel like cocooning. Almost always the case. So this makes perfect sense. Why I love is the opposite of fear because you have to be vulnerable to do that. Like if I feel shitty, the last thing I want to do is call a friend and tell them, Hey, what's up, man? I'm feeling like shit right now. Really? I thought everything was going great. So you have to be very vulnerable in order to do that. For sure. You basically, you know, when you're, when you're feeling fearful, you bring fear to others. That's the wrong thing to do. When you're feeling fearful, you need more love for you to get more love. You need to give more love. That's an opposite signal strategy. When you're feeling crummy and afraid and lonely and sad and you don't quite know why. Sweetheart, I just want you to know, I just love you so much. Yeah, I thought, yeah. That's great. You shared a thought experiment that I don't want to mess up. So please take it from me as soon as I trigger it for you. And you know what I'm talking about? Where I think you said, you know, imagine five years from now and you were the happiest you could possibly be, you know, what are like your five things that you value and where they are. And then, and then you ask, I guess, like, you know, how does that align with you now? Or what are you doing right now about to explain that? Yeah. So there's a bunch of experiments. This is on, it sounds technical, but it's actually really simple on what they call extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards. The extrinsic rewards are money, power, pleasure and fame. Those are the things that you get from the outside world. And that's what your brain, your animal brain says, that's what you want. It'll make you permanently happy. You get like a boat and I'll finally be happy. Like, you won't. You won't. Like at the data, you won't. And the same thing with, with, and especially fame. Terrible person to go shopping with. I know, I know. Dude, I want this. Dude, you don't want that. It's just going to be, it's going to be a hassle. But and fame is the only one of those things that you can only have ever be happy in spite of, which is really interesting. So yeah, yeah, yeah, your brain says, and you get all these, this rush of brain chemistry saying, if you actually get more followers, you get more clicks, it's going to give you actual happiness and it won't. What is going to complicate your life? Yes. And, and so happy and fame is a ton of research on this is the only thing you will be happy in spite of it. If you have good perspective and you can use it for virtue and good, like you guys are doing, but as you'll never be happy, like I'm actually happy because we've got a quarter million YouTube subscribers right now. And because of the fame per se, I mean, you actually have more reach, which is really important. Okay. So what you find is that, that, those are extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are relationship focused. Intrinsic rewards come from, yeah, faith, family, friends and work, research, love, love, love and more love is the bottom line. And when you take the population, so you take college people graduating from college and you say five years from now, what do you want that would actually make you happy? Half of them will say extrinsic stuff and half of them will say intrinsic stuff. And then if you go and look at them, you'll find that the ones who are intrinsically motivated, I want to be married, for example, I want to have a good relationship with my friends. I want to have a good relationship with my family, et cetera. These are the ones who are way happier. I mean way happier and they have fewer physical maladies and they're less stressed out. They have fewer cases of anxiety, less clinical depression, on and on and on, less stomach aches, less anger, everything. Okay. So now I go to my students and I say, imagine yourself in five years, because based on this research, you're happy. You know what that feels like. Happiness is not the feeling, but you know what it feels like. You know what the turkey smells like, right? Okay. Anybody who's like, what's that reference? Go back to the beginning of the episode. A little callback. So imagine yourself five years are happy. Why are you happy? They'll have done the research my students will, but we all kind of know in our heart of hearts. Put them in order the five reasons that you're happy in order, in order of importance. Okay. Now you've got them in order, you're looking at them now. Say, come back to the present. Which one of those things are you most actively managing? It's always four and five. It's always four and five. I love that because it even shook me up a little bit because I felt like I had a good grasp. Oh, these are my five. But then when I ordered them and I went, oh, wow, you know, am I really spending the most time though, working towards one and two? If I say that's one and two, I'm probably spending more time on four and five. Yeah. It's going to be your family. It's going to be your friendship. It's going to be your faith, for example, which is a classic and goals around these things. And then, and then four and five is like my career and my money. And, and those are the easiest things for you to manage because the world says manage those things and tells you how to do it. And you know, if you go to the Harvard Business School, that's what they're teaching you to manage is your money and your career. They're not saying and, and except for my class, which is leadership and happiness, which is how to manage your love life, how to manage your relationships in the same way that you would think about it in the same organized way that you would think about it in the case of your career and your money. So start getting your priorities in order is the basic is what is your, it doesn't mean you don't manage your career and your money. It's great that you're, you're, you're working hard. It's fantastic. But pay as much attention to the management of your marriage and the management of your friendships and the management of your spiritual walk as you are to, you know, mine pump in the bank account. And that's what it comes down to. It doesn't look, that's super hard for me. Yeah. Again, it brings me back and I think how we take that for granted because we think, oh, for working money, I have to work every day. I have to work towards it and focus on it. Oh, love family stuff that just happens. Totally. But you got to put effort and work into it just the same way, right? Yeah. And there's this thing that we often do, especially men. And they'll be like, yeah, the reason I'm working so hard, honey, I'm sorry, I know you're lonely. The reason I'm working so hard is because I'm doing it for you because I love you so much. Yeah. I'm such a martyr. Stop calling yourself right now, Arthur. It's absolutely classic. And I interviewed a guy for the book and he's like, yeah, my wife, you know, She doesn't get it. She doesn't get it. I mean, she's always complaining about the fact that I'm never home, but she wants the nice things that the money will buy. It's like she wants those things because she's lonely. She's lonely. She wants you as the bottom line. But what you want, you don't understand yourself. You only understand a facsimile of yourself. You're self-objectifying. You're homo economicus. You're the good one. You're the hard worker. You're the successful one. You're a success addict. So many people are success addicts. And this is the, they get into this cycle of managing four and five and they get completely incompetent in one, two and three. How do we balance that? Because obviously there's some value in being focused in that direction, but not so focused that we... And you've said you were a success or you identified that yourself. It's my natural tendency. Yeah. My natural tendency. And part of the reason is that I distract myself from, I mean, I'm addictive. You know, I'm a success addict because I'm an addictive personality. And I, you know, and anybody who's an addict to anything, by the way, is self-medicating. This is what you find. You know, people who get addicted to cigarettes when they're 13, 14 years old, the other kids are like, Oh, I got a carton of cigarettes. Let's smoke these cigarettes. Like gross. And the one kid's like actually kind of awesome and becomes a smoker early on. Aren't we all in a sense though? I mean, isn't everybody... Well, it depends on what your deficit is. So the thing about the smoking case is illustrative. So the kid who has insufficient dopamine to the prefrontal cortex has a hard time focusing and only feels focused and really effective when something artificially stimulates that and niconoids are the best way to do that. And so they smoke a cigarette for the first time, like, Oh, wow, I feel a lot better. I don't know why. And I can't even articulate it. And they're like, I want another one. And another one, they get addicted by 14. Well, the same thing is true of success addicts. There's a deficit in your understanding of yourself. You know, you don't feel like a full person. You don't feel like the person that you want to be, you can't endogenously produce your happiness in the right way. And so the result is you're looking for outside validation. You're looking for extrinsic validation of you. It's like the outside version of Sal. And what you need to work on is the interior version of Sal. That's the way the combatter is number one is knowledge. Right. And when I say Sal, I mean Arthur, by the way. It's like, who's Arthur? He's that guy that people talk about. You know, he's that guy who's got that job. He's that guy that somebody wrote that thing about. Whatever happens to be. No, no, no, no, that's not the way to do it. The way to do it is to understand the problem and to do the work to actually build the person that you are. And that has to be built on love and relationships. Wow. Yeah, you're speaking to. Totally. Totally. I mean, you guys are successful and ambitious. And there's every, the tons and tons of people watching this who want to be you. But we're, look, we all have the same problems. Because we're all just walking this path in the same way. Oh boy, that's challenging. That's why I feel like that's what I meant by that. Like, isn't everybody someone that I feel like everybody has something that it just manifests itself different in everybody's life? Yeah, for sure. We all have different needs. We all have different. And some people are naturally better at this than others. I mean, I know some guys who are just like, they get it. And they get it, right? But our culture valorizes the most incomplete people. Because you, when you meet really famous people, they're often extremely screwed up. I always say this. When it took them to be so spectacular in this thing, it means they're most likely out of balance. They got famous for a reason. They did what it took to get famous. It's incredibly hard work. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of famous people for my research and they'll say staying famous is unbelievably hard work and extremely boring and is stressful. You know, it's like to be a famous actor is 99% boredom and 1% terror. You know, it's like it's a great combination of stuff that you've got to do, right? And but there's a problem that you're addressing it. Now, can you be happy and well in spite of being successful? Absolutely. That's what this book is for. Because everybody who's reading the book or who's watching this podcast or watching this podcast, who's watching this, what are we? A show. Watching our show. Watching our show. They want to be successful because people are driven this way, which is a beautiful thing about people, but don't let it ruin your happiness. Because it doesn't have to. How important is the partner that we choose to do life with in this equation? It's critical. It's really critical. You know, people, especially the most unfortunate of the people who forgo love for worldly success. That is insanity. That is just stepping over $100 bills to get to Nichols. Yeah. That is just nutty. And people do it all the time. It's like, I talk to students, you know, business school students, like, I don't have time for love. It's like, you don't have time for it. I mean, you can't forgo this. That's like saying, I don't have time to breathe. Yeah. Ultimately. Or you don't want to be happy. Yeah. Or they get, part of it is they get the formula all wrong. Yeah. They actually think that they will find lasting satisfaction in the rewards of the world. And that will substitute for what they really want. In other words, four and five will suddenly grow and important because I'll even do the exercise. I'll say, yeah, one, two, three, all right. But I'm still going to focus on four and five. Yeah. Because four and five are going to become one and two. It's just so counter-cultural, though. Like we're just so inundated with what success is. It means how hard you work. And it means like achieving this monetary goal and status and fame and, you know, to everything you're saying is so, it's so different than that. So how do people get into that mindset? I mean, obviously your book's an amazing, you know, piece to that puzzle, but I just feel like there's just not enough of that type of language out there. Yeah. Now, most people have a, I mean, a lot of people have a really good sense of this and do pretty well. So I'm talking to strivers and you have a disproportionate striver audience. Again, people who want to be excellent will judge their own excellence based on the standards of the outside world. This is the key. Guys, how do I know I'm excellent? I don't know. I'm going to look on Instagram. I want to have Sal's apps. Right. That's excellent. Right. And they'll look at these standards of excellence. And nobody's like, you know how to be excellent? I want to have as much love as Sal has in his marriage. Right. Because that's not Instagram worthy, right? It's the trivial stuff by sort of cosmic terms that we put up and so people interpret that as the most important thing in their life. Go for it. Do the good things. Be excellent. Absolutely. You know, have success, but don't leave the most important things behind is the bottom line because what you're doing is you're not nourishing yourself in a way where anything can even give you satisfaction in the long term. You talk a lot about friendships and how challenging it is as you get older to make friends, especially for men. And I've heard you talk about this and I'm like, oh yeah. So true. Oh, so true. I go to work and I go home and I would, you know, it would be cool if I had some friends, but like I do nothing to seek it out. If you did, you'd be cheating your family. If you're like going away. I mean, I know you guys got this like, you guys goof off of in Tahoe. Yeah. Because you guys have authentic friendship, clearly about anything friendship. But a lot of guys, if you were working in an investment bank, for example, likely it's not you would not have close friendship with the people that are in the offices around you because it would be a slightly different culture. And you wouldn't cultivate, especially if you were management, you wouldn't cultivate the outside friendships because you'd be cheating your wife and kids. Because it's like, honey, yeah, I'm going to go away with the boys. Like, no, you're not. Yeah. No, you're not. It's like, I'm going to golf for five hours on Saturday, even though I already worked 75 hours over the week. Because I'm starved for friendship. Well, it's like, so work class. I mean, something's got to give. And what always winds up giving is love. You know, you take the 14th hour of work over the first hour with your friends or the first hour even with your kids sometimes. And that's the big mistake that people make. They make bad trade-offs. Part of it is interesting. You know, I was interviewing this lady for the book who's just like icon on Wall Street. I mean, she's just huge, really, really well known, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. She's a company founder. She's my age. And she's bummed out. I mean, she's burned out and she doesn't have a good relationship. She feels like roommates with her husband and she has kind of a cordial relationship with her adult kids and she's drinking too much and she's out of shape and she's starting to get bad blood work back from the doctor and all this stuff that happens when you're in your late 50s and you're not taking care of yourself. I said, she said, what should I do? It's like, you don't need a guy with a PhD to tell you this. Yeah. You know, you just told me, you should probably get into AA. You should probably, you should, you start walking a spiritual path. You should start going away with your husband. You should take a souvenir in your company and step back from the top management of the company. You told me what to do. Why don't you do that? She's like, thinks about it. She says, I guess I prefer to be special than happy. Oh, wow. Interesting. You know, and how many times have I talked to? I mean, I've done a lot of research on an addiction and I talked to people, they all know, look, if you have somebody who's addicted to drugs and alcohol, they know that they're not happy because of their addiction, but they prefer to be high than happy. They're making that decision. And the same thing is true for success. Addicts is the bottom line. So you've got to know yourself and you have to take this problem on its face. You don't have to be not successful. What is neurologically happening there where they have obvious awareness? Yeah, but they're not choosing it. But they still choose not to. What, where's the disconnect or what's going on in the brain? So what's going on in the brain is this neuromodulator dopamine that everybody knows about now. 30 years ago, you just said dopamine, nobody would know what you're talking about. But dopamine is actually not... People think about it as this neurochemical of pleasure. It's not. It's anticipation of reward. It basically is like, you're going to get the cookie. You're going to get the cookie. You want the cookie. Right. And what happens is your brain gets better and better and better at pumping out this dopamine, which will make you into a fiend for something that gives you the reward. Now, what's the reward? The reward is your, your crack, whatever it happens to be. And everybody's got their reward. You know, some people it's gambling and some people it's sex and some people it's alcohol and some people it's success. That's the cookie. And part of it, usually these tracks are laid down neurologically when we're kids. And so if your parents are like, you're so smart, you're such a hard worker, you're so good, you're smarter than the other kids, you're always going to succeed. And the kid's like, oh, that's where I get my rewards pat on the head, hit the lever, get the success, get the promotion, get the grades, get, and they turn into these success machines where they get their dopamine. And our brains are incredibly good at becoming attuned to producing this dopamine on cue for our particular reward. Success addicts are really dopamine addicts. And that's how they get their dopamine is the bottom line. And you couldn't even get away with, get away from it. This is one of the reasons that, that if you're, if you're an alcohol abuser, you could, you should probably never drink alcohol again for the rest of your life because it's like carving your initials into a tree. The tree will keep growing. It's like, Sal loves so and so. You know, when you come back 30 years later, mortified by what you carved in the tree. This is kind of how the brain, you know, lays down these dopamine tracks, your ability to process dopamine. So you got to be careful with the rest of your life. And by the way, people who are drug and alcohol addicts have to be careful about success addiction because that's the addiction that we'll put right into this place. Trade one for the other. So what's the remedy look like? Is it a rip the Band-Aid off type of deal? Or slowly building habits and things into your life? What does that look like? It starts with knowledge. It starts with knowing yourself. Yeah. Awareness is really, really critical. People under emphasize this is to, is self analysis. And sometimes it's actually important, as they say, talk to somebody about this because the key thing about good therapy for people who have used therapy properly is that it's a way for you to understand yourself. It's basically going to school in where the subject is you. If all you're getting is just like, you know, medication and 15 minutes or something like that, I mean, if you need the medication, you need the medication. But the key thing for a professional, whether it's a religious professional or a counselor or a psychotherapist, whatever it is to be, is understanding yourself better. And by the way, most of us can do that without professional intervention, but we have to do the work in understanding ourselves. Second thing is saying, I want to be happier. And most people don't do that. They don't actually say, I want to be happier. I understand what's going on and I want to be happier. You know why? Because it's admitting you're not right now. It's also admitting that you're willing to be less special. Because I'm willing to be less special to be happy. It's like, I'm not ready for that trade yet. It's a lot of people, when you talk to people who drink way, way, way too much, they'll be like, I'm not happy and I'm drinking too much and screwing up my relationships and it might ruin my marriage and all that. But I'm not ready to stop drinking yet. And when you talk to people that they'll make a date to go into rehab, like two months later, and they'll drink more and more and more all the way up to that date, preparing to go into rehab. That's what a lot of people are doing with their any addiction, actually. Well, when we talk about self-awareness, we're talking about emotional intelligence, right? And is this more genetic or learned behavior? What would you say? It's, well, it's a combination of both. We don't understand the genetics very well in this yet. Oh, okay. The genetics. Because I feel like some people are just kind of naturally have this ability to do it and then others really have to actively work at this. Yeah. And part of it is kind of the way you're brought up, too. So some people are just not very, brought up to be very introspective. Men tend to be worse at this than women. Men are pretty bad. Men are not introspective creatures. It's like, I feel crummy. I don't know. I thought I was going to go deadlift. Nor that feeling. Pick up heavy things. Cover it with heavy metal. Yeah, kinda. Yeah, for sure. And by the way, there's a lot of people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol and then they'll become orthorexic and have very improper behavior in the gym. Totally. And they'll just be like working out three hours a day or something. I had a client who did that. She quit smoking and became addicted to exercise. And I had to talk to her through the whole process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get all these weird behavior. It's like, so why are you trying to dump body fat? Why are you actually, why are you doing these things? Like, I don't know. I want to feel special. I just want to feel special. Wow. Can you tell us about some practices that you and Esther have and your family has that helps with the kind of stuff? Because, I mean, from the outside, you travel a lot. You're very successful. Lots of, you meet with very important people. They ask you your advice. I mean, for all intents and purposes, that's an environment where a lot of the stuff you're talking about, the success addict, the, you know, not spending time with your family. What kind of practices do you guys have? Well, part of it is that we're, yeah, I'm not always practicing what I preach. I mean, I'm booked to her right now. Six days a week or something. And my wife reminded me of that yesterday. She's like, you know, if you read your book, subtle jab, it's like, it's really good. You should try reading it. It's actually a pretty effective book. I mean, I think it's helping a lot of people. You might, you might consider it. You know, it's like, you know, I get it. I get it. Yeah. It's a, it's so, so that's a problem. Because, you know, again, I wrote the book for me. And I didn't even know if I was going to publish it, but Esther found my notes. So I think maybe you should write. I mean, it was, it was, it was a project for me to become happier. I was unhappy. And, and, and I said, I don't know if he's really interested in, you know, getting happier as you get older. And I don't want to write an old man book and all things. Is that really how this played out? Was it was like notes for you? And then it, oh, wow. It was my strategic plan for my life. Oh, I did. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really cool. And I didn't know if it'd be popular. So I wrote it up as an article, as a feature article in the Atlantic, which is where I'm a columnist. It was a long, or a 7,000-word article. And, and it became one of the 50 most red essays in the world for that year. I didn't know they kept data like this. I don't know. And it's like, I guess there's a market for this. And so then I wrote it up as a book and, and, and, you know, people want to read the book because we're all going through the same stuff in our lives. So how do we practice it? Well, in the same way that I talk about in this book, we're, we're deeply involved in our Christian faith and as Catholics. So I go to Mass every day, which is with my wife, which is really important. And the Mass is important for me, but it's also that with my wife part is really important for this because we're worshiping together. We pray together every day, which really locks us into our relationship in a big way. Because look, this is a non-negotiable thing. We're, she's the person I'll look at as I take my dying breath. And, and this is, this is the, this is the relationship that actually completes me as a person critically. So I take that really super seriously and much more seriously than I did 10 years ago. And that requires practice. That requires protocols. That requires daily activities. And it doesn't happen on its own. And that's the key point that I'm making. I'm, I'm, I'm cultivating one, two, and three. My relationship with my kids is super different than my relationship with my parents. I mean, I had a pretty distant relationship with my parents and, and you know, I moved to Europe when I was in my mid twenties to marry my wife, you know, and I was playing in an orchestra in Barcelona and, you know, doing my thing as a classical musician for a long time. And I thought, I gotta get to know my parents better. I mean, my dad was a, my dad was a scientist. My mom was a, was an artist and she was creative and they were interesting people. And yeah, I really got to get to know them. And then they died. You know, they died young. My dad died, youngish. My dad died at 66. My mom was, was already cognitively impaired by my age. And so she was kind of gone. And, um, and I thought to myself, it was a real source of regret for me for a long time. And I thought, okay, okay, regret's fine. What am I going to learn from it? Dan Pink has a new book about regret. It's a really good book. It's worth reading about how you can learn from it and how you can make it into a source of transcendence. How your regret is good for you. You should not tattoo no regrets on your body. So many people cringe your own. Especially spelled wrong. If you're going to do it, at least spell it wrong because that's funnier. So, and, uh, and, and so I, I turned it into a lesson. That's actually a protocol. My kids are hither and yon. I mean, actually my oldest son who's 23 is engaged. He's living with us right now in our guest room. So I see him all the time. His brother's in the Marines at Camp Pendleton. I talk to him every day. I FaceTime with him. I try to FaceTime with him every day. Even when he doesn't want to talk to me, he's going to hear from his dad. And my little girl, she's in college in Spain. When I go back and forth, I live in Spain a lot because my wife is Spanish. And, but she's in college in Spain, but we talk all the time. We've already, we've, we've texted 15 times today already. And it's not even lunchtime yet. And it's nine hours later there. Yeah. And, and that's because I have learned from my regret to enter into a positive schematic protocol that cultivates love. I'm, I'm managing love in my life in the same way that I manage my money. Anything you're learning about yourself having a grown child now man living back with you. Yeah. Big messy chick back in the nest. That boy is messy. He does not know how to put his shoes away. He knows how to work hard. And he's a, he's a great kid. He's, he's fantastic. He's mirrors back me to me. And it's funny because you're, each one of you, how many kids do you have? I only have one. You have one. Yeah. And you've got three and a half. Yeah. And you have two, right? And they're a combination of you in a weird way, right? And, and they, they just heard of the good and the bad. And they helped me understand myself a little bit better. I see the young version of me, but what I'd learned is that I wish that I'd had more open conversations about these things with my kids. And so I guess it's probably weird to be the child of a social scientist, because, you know, it's like, my little girl, I think they're analyzing their behavior. Yeah. If I'm bothering my little girl, it's just like, daddy, daddy, you're not oxygenating my ventral striatum. Your heart has to melt a little bit. That's like, oh, she stands me. That just means that I'm not giving her good feelings. But, you know, the key is actually with them is seeing yourself in them and then being very, very clear about what the best life is. It's to say, you know, what's, what do I want for you? And not, my middle son, the Marine, he had a tough time in school. He wasn't a motivated student. And I was spending all of my time haranguing him about that. And the reason is because I wanted him to have a good life, right? But then I realized that he could interpret that as what I care about the most. Like, that's a mistake. So I started saying, you know what I want for you? I want you to be honest and I want you to be compassionate and I want you to be faithful. That's what I want. Those are the three things. Everything else is gravy. I don't care if you live in my basement. I mean, I do. That wouldn't be optimal. But that's the key thing that I've actually learned from that. And I've learned as much from my kids as I've learned from any book that I've ever read. What about if I were to ask you if you were to look at each child, because I'm sure each one was a different experience. What do you think that you did best with raising each individual one? That's a good question. Or I don't want it at worst, which is the opposite side of the same coin, right? Right, right. I was trying to stay positive. Yeah, no, no. But it's actually because you can take positive lessons from even negative. Yeah, I just, I love talking to somebody with your experience, your wisdom, further ahead than I am as far as fatherhood. So I can be thinking about these things as I'm raising my son and potentially another one in the future. Yeah, you know what I did is I cultivated a lot of the most, what I think are the most, what I think are really healthy interests in my first son who has a lot of the same, who loves a lot of the same things that I do, a lot of the same books, a lot of the same music that I do. No, I mean, he's super nerd. He goes to opera. And since he was 12 years old, he's been really into opera, Italian opera, right? Because I'm into opera. I think opera is great. I mean, it's beautiful. And we would go to concerts in New York City and he cultivated those particular interests, which has really, really made him a much happier person as a result of this. My second son is funny because he's, he has a lot of the same appetites that I do, but not the same interests. I mean, his main interests are blowing stuff up. He's in the Marines. You know, he's a combat Marine. He's a, you know, a sniper and a mortar man in the Marine Corps. He's six foot five too, by the way. You've seen, you've seen a picture of him. He's a, and he's super. And he's Jack. He's super Jack. He's 200 pounds and 4.3% body fat. Whoa. Yeah. A machine. He's a machine. He's a machine. He's not going to be able to maintain that. That's all I can say because let me tell you, when it's 57, it's hard. This is not easy to stay in shape for sure. But you know, actually figuring out what is best for him, given the fact that he's got very strong appetites and impulses. And those are the things that I share with him. And just being, just completely upfront with him, completely upfront with him. Carlos, you're going to want to do this. Don't do that. Don't do that. And, and, and, and if he does not freaking out, you know, here's the key thing I learned actually from my son who has my appetites. Don't freak out. That's probably the best piece of advice for fatherhood. Don't freak out because there's nothing worth freaking out. You know, only things will only get worse. And out literally everything has a solution. What's done is done. And it has a solution. Every problem actually has, if they rob a bank, there's a solution to that. It's not good. You don't want that for sure. But it's never worth freaking out. And my little girl, it's just pure love. It's just pure love. I mean, I, she understands me and she just loves me and I just love her and I'm telling her I love her all the time. And it's just this abundance of, she's, she's adopted by the way. So she's, I, as soon as I got her, I thought, man, we should have gone out and said the gene pool earlier. That's awesome. She's just, she's just perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, you're, what you're saying is this, I mean, this is how you are in real life. I know you personally and your wife, and you have been so gracious to talk with Jessica and I, and you know, I really look up to you and how you guys handle things. So just want the audience to know this is very authentic. This is not just a dude selling a book. Yeah. Well, and I've been a pump head before, before any of this, before you guys knew me. That's why I was listening to the podcast and getting all kinds of knowledge about how to get happier and healthier from you guys. I mean, you guys, it's very easy to think, you know, my pump is a fitness podcast, not as a happiness podcast. And, and it's really the reason that, I bet you that people are more interested in the first 45 minutes than the quads. That's, that's actually true. I bet it's true. Especially after they become, yeah. And the reason is because you're, you're modeling authentic friendship for each other. You're talking about things that have, they're fun, but they also have substance. And they're a model of the kind of discourse that we can and should be having more of in our society and our desiccated society where we don't have that very much of it. And that's really brings a lot of happiness. And even before I knew you guys, I kind of knew you guys. And that's a beautiful thing. You're doing a good thing and I appreciate it a lot. You know, I want to, I know we're going a little long, but I have to ask you this because I've never met anybody as effective in this particular realm as you. You are so good at talking to people who don't think the same things you do, who don't, don't have the same politics, but they all like you and you do a good job of communicating with them. Like, what's the secret to that? And I think we need to learn a little bit of this right now because it's not happening. Everybody's so... How do you bridge that distance? Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you. That's really kind of you. And not everybody likes me. You know, it's... I don't know anybody. Well, don't they say it. If that's, if everyone did like you, you're not doing, you're not doing the right thing. Yeah, yeah. And there's some people who are just so bound up in ideology that it becomes a religion and everything's a holy war. And so, you know, I get protested sometimes. You know, I go on to, I've been on college. Really? Yeah, I get to talk. You get protested. Well, part of it is just because it's such a highly charged ideological environment that, you know, I'll get the chalk, the sidewalk. What do they have? That's a scary sign of the time. Yeah, somebody is leaving with blood. Now, it's like, what do they say? Down with the love and happiness guy. That's what I said. It's a good, it's a bad look for protesters, you know. It's like, for that, for sure. But the whole point is that in an outraged culture, people are going to be outraged as the bottom line. And the key thing is, is that, look, we're all, we're all sisters and brothers, just no exceptions. And if that's the case, treat people as such, you know, that you will never, never persuade anybody to be better by using your values as a weapon. You can only use your values as a gift. Nobody has ever been insulted into agreement. And furthermore, it's not fun to do that. What's really fun is to bring love, even when love is not, you're not getting love. You know, this one was what warms your heart. I've had these experiences where I inadvertently answer hatred with love. And I feel it changes my heart. And some of these changes their heart too, under the circumstances. But I've just gotten better at it. You know, I've had missionaries on both sides of my family. And, you know, missionaries are constantly getting rejected. Yeah. They're kind of, it's like, nobody's ever said, hey, great news, there's missionaries on the porch. There's guys on bikes. Come on in. It's like, oh no. It's like, pretend we're not home. But they're full of happiness. And the reason is because they're sharing something with love that they think is critically important, even if some people are not going to take it. And that's what we can have. You guys are missionaries. You're missionaries for something that's good and healthy and happy and nutritious for everybody. I mean, morally nutritious for everybody. And taking that out with the spirit of the missionary so that nobody has ever turned off to it. You know, nobody's ever, where you as the vehicle for it are not alienating to people who are listening. That's such a beautiful opportunity is the key thing. And the more I do it, the more you do that, the more you want it is the bottom line. So the secret is simple. Love everybody and treat everybody like your sister or brother. And then go from there. And sometimes it doesn't turn out so great, but ordinarily it does. Well, you're a passionate person. It's not like you're just naturally like, I mean, you're a pat, you have opinions, you're very passionate, but you have to practice this. I say, that's what I fall prey to. I'm a very passionate person. I get very excited. And then afterwards I go, oh man. We have the best feet on Instagram. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I used to, they booted me, right? I know, I know, I do. Of course I know that. I know instead of the first day of texting, just like, Sal, are you not on Instagram? Or are you? Because you're the reason I opened up that app. Because it was, I would openly laugh. The more childish your jokes, the more I laugh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone didn't like it. They kicked me off. So I'm on Twitter now, but I'm a little bit more aggressive there. I need to, after talking to you though, I really. Always, always such a pleasure having you. Oh, I love your show. I love what you guys are doing. What a privilege for me to be part of this in some small way. And I gotta say, if you got time, find Arthur Brooks on YouTube, read his books. Like they're very effective and positive, and they make you feel good. And so if you want to be a better person, like I can't recommend, I can't recommend all your stuff enough. Like all of it makes you feel good, and it's all very actionable. You're very good at communicating. Here's the steps that you can take. So I appreciate that. And I hope all our listeners take my advice there. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Love being with you. Thanks again.