 All right. Hello, Paul. Thanks so much for joining me. How you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me here. Absolutely glad we were able to set this up and we're talking about your brand new book, The Sweet Spot. So, you know, I'm sure some of my audience is familiar with your work. I talk about your books all the time, but this brand new book, I read it months ago, but for those who have yet to read it, what's this one all about? What kind of inspired it to? What inspired it was, I've always been interested in some odd puzzles of human nature. So, you know, it's not, you know, we want food, we want sex, we want love, it makes perfect Darwinian sense, but why do we like spicy foods and hot bass? Why do we like horror movies that scared the crap out of us? Why do we like, why do some people like BDSM, people from people trained from Arathons? So, I was really interested in how we could use controlled suffering control pain to give us pleasure. I started to write the book, I was going to call it The Pleasures of Suffering. And then as I began to think about this and work on it, I kind of realized there was a lot of suffering that wasn't in the service of pleasure, that was in the service of morality or meaning or purpose, and so the book expanded somewhat. Now I'm sort of looking at the role of suffering in a good life. Yeah, so I'm curious to how you would kind of frame it, because this book is absolutely different. I think one of the first books I read of yours was How Pleasure Works. I loved it. I was actually talking with David Livingston Smith about essentialism and how I learned a lot from it, from your book. How would you say like the conversation around pleasure in this book is different from what you wrote about in that book? That's a great question. That book I'm happy with. It talked all about the role of essentialism and pleasures was that why we like original art more than forgeries, why food tastes different depending on what you think it is and all that stuff. But I wrestled a bit with the idea of suffering and control suffering and control pain in that book, and I was never happy with the job I did. So this is coming back and building on it. And this book in some sense, How Pleasure Works is a lot of fun. It was all about pleasure. It didn't try to say anything else. Here I try, I struggle to talk about meaning and purpose in a life well lived through the lens of chosen suffering and pain. So in some way this newest book is a little bit more ambitious, I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think one of the reasons I loved it, we'll talk about it a little bit, like I'm a recovering drug addict, right? Like I know you talked with Dax Shepard instantly and every day, but I found a lot of meaning and purpose through my suffering and everything. I think that's where I connected a lot with it. But before we jump into that, since we touched on the topic of essentialism, you're the perfect guy to ask this. There has been so much debate and weirdness around NFTs, all right? And I like wrote a piece the other day, and I think I cited your book, right? Because I'm trying to explain essentialism, like art, like I don't care about art at all, right? But some people do, and they care about the person who touched that art. We believe in the essence of it. So since I have the master here, can you give me what your thoughts are on NFTs, right? Like they're like, do you think in a digital space that essentialism carries over? Because here's my thought process. A famous digital artist, whoever it is, they put in that work, right? They physically made that digital artwork. The way NFTs work is that it tracks that. They could say, hey, this is the original, if you know how to check for it. So as somebody who's a collector or a fan of art, isn't that kind of similar? Or do you think it's different from digital to physical art? I'd love your thoughts on that. I think it's a great question. I'm having a dinner tonight with a friend of mine, George Newman, and we've published together on the sort of art people like and these factors, we're going to talk about NFTs. So your timing is perfect. I know very little about them, besides what I read about in articles like yours. But I don't think there's anything so different about them. They capture a fundamental thing that we like, which is we like things to be special. We like things to be one of a kind. And my example of this was I was in a city in Mexico, and I went into a shop and I saw this most beautiful artwork, because a little bit, but I'm going to go back and get it later on. But then I go into a next shop, and they had them lined up against the wall in a next shop. And suddenly I didn't want it anymore. And it still looks the same. It'll be the same in my house. But now it's a mass produced thing. It's not an original artwork. You think of it differently. And what NFTs are, is a new fangled way of creating originals that can't be that you know are special. And, you know, it's no different in kind from any other artwork where this phenomena shows up. Now, why this matters is we're kind of a cool question, sort of a cold-blooded view, which is entirely financial. If there's just one of something, it's going to be a more valued and after it's 10 and that's going to be a more valued is 100. You know, I have some prints, they have little things saying seven out of 80 or something. Wow, there's only 80 of them. This is great. So just financial. But I don't think that's all. I think it's also it just, there's a feeling of specialness, a feeling that that that of things that that were the singular intent of some creator or a singular artifact of some historical value that just thrills us. My bet would be, you know, five year olds don't know anything about NFTs. But, but if you if you showed them something, this is one of a kind versus this is something which there's as many of them as you want, they prefer to one of a kind. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's been fascinating to me. The whole reason I wrote about it is because I actually saw a philosopher during the standard NFT joke, like, oh, like, you could just take a picture of this. But like you just shared about your experience in Mexico, this piece of art was special until you saw saw them lined up, right? And they're still going to be the original. Like I could find postcards with the Mona Lisa. I could find postcards with Van Gogh and everything. But it was really, I think what really made me interested that a philosopher was saying this and making this joke. I'm like, there seems this disconnect. And I'm just curious from your perspective, like, do you do you think like the mind has a difficult time making this transition from physical to digital? You know what I mean? Like it seems weird because for me, I'm like, you could just carry over the same essentialist idea or that scarcity mindset of it. But some people, it feels like they're not able to make that connection. I wonder if you think there's some kind of block there. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think you're asking the question not about the phenomena itself, but why do we struggle with the phenomena? I think I think there's no basic difference. I think people get get all caught up in bells and whistles and blockchains and in this and that, which, you know, it's technical and so on. But it's just the same. You know, somebody who mocked NFTs, suppose they hear that there was a huge fire and a Mona Lisa burned to dust. And I said, well, don't worry about it. I'm sure there's plenty of perfect duplicates out there. You think I'm a Philistine? You think I'm a moron? But if you get upset at some rare art or something special that you own being destroyed, and in a sense it's irreplaceable, you got NFTs. You know the spirit behind it. And so I'm not as prone to mock it. I think these things could always be taken to extremes. But the idea, you're right, the idea is the same in the digital world as in the real world. And there's almost a puzzle why people don't appreciate that. Yeah. Hey, maybe that's a topic for your next book. It's trying to figure out how it's difficult for us to make that transition. But yeah, now to the depressing topic of suffering. Not depressing at all. Well, here's something, another reason I was sucked into the book is because, you know, it feels like a lot of people are suffering, right? Like I am, you know, I'm that type of like Bernie Sanders supporting like give everybody Medicare and let's get like a social safety net and all this because I see suffering and it's because of my addiction background. I worked in addiction treatment. I've worked with so many people and you know, relapse rates are high because things are rough, right? But you discuss like Steven Pinker's kind of controversial views and things have never been better than ever. So why do you think it is that so many of us are struggling like do you think it's us not being able to relate it to the past and how much better things are now or has our suffering kind of transformed like hedonic adaptation like now that the bars out here were suffering a lot easier or what do you think that is? Yeah. So two things just good. This is a great issue. So one thing is just to be clear, we're going to sort of bookmark and move it to the side. My book is making case for chosen suffering. I'm sure you choose as good. There's a whole other conversation we're having now about bad stuff that happens to you that you didn't choose. You know, your child dies, you get assaulted, your house burnt down, you lose your job. That's very different. I'm not saying, you know, sometimes I'm known for making unintuitive claims. My feeling on chosen on bad stuff that happens to you is totally conventional. Bad stuff is bad on the whole. Try not to let it happen to you. Try to get over it and so on. But putting that aside, again, I am kind of sold by the view that Steve Pinker has, as well as others like Robert Wright or Peter Singer that in many ways the world has been getting better. And I don't think we need to talk about hunter-gatherer tribes to make this point. In so many ways the world has gotten better over the last several decades. It's gotten better both in terms of, in the United States, in terms of violent crime, for instance, in terms of all sorts of moral attitudes towards people. I'm old enough to remember that 10 years ago, a liberal talk show host like John Stewart, could make part of his shtick making fun of trans people. And the audience would scream off the light. Things have changed for the better very quickly. And Steve points out in a recent discussion that in all, there's a lot of places where you ask people how happy they are. And then two years later, five years later, you ask them again. The dominant trend has arised even in this hedonically adapted time. Then we get to COVID. And COVID sucks. And COVID is on all of our markers a dip. COVID has led to depression and anxiety and everything. And in many ways the world has gotten demonstratively worse. And COVID will go away and I'll get back to an upward trend, I hope. Yeah. And going back to that kind of chosen suffering, I have multiple questions about that. And maybe it's because my background in mental health, not just other drug addicts and alcoholics and things like that, but also depression and those things. And for example, even though the health care system sucks, there's a lot of different ways to get help. Like for example, I got sober, I was broke, no health care, I got to rent 12 step fees free. There are self-help books written by just some of the best psychologists out there, talking about cognitive behavioral therapy and all these things. But when it comes to choosing suffering, is there anything I can't remember if you discussed this in your book, but have you found anything where people, they choose to be miserable? Because I've worked with a lot of people and some people, even though the options are available, and I know depression has symptoms of lack of motivation and things like that. But eventually, and I've even struggled with that with my own mental health issues, where there's like comfort in that suffering. Is there a way that we can explain that? Yeah, it's a good point. I mostly think about ways in which we choose to suffer, which are good for us, which enhance our pleasure or part of a meaningful activity, like running a marathon or raising children, starting a business, writing a book, whatever. There are maladaptive ways you could choose suffering. And there's a psychologist, I think his name is Paul Gilbert, who talks about depressed people who just don't want to be happy. They don't want to be happy. Maybe they think if they're happy, they'll pay for it, and some later waiters are balanced, too much happiness will lead to sadness later. Maybe they think they don't deserve it. Maybe in some way they're sort of, in some odd way they're sort of comfortable in their misery. So yeah, you can choose suffering. You would choose have your life worse for certain somewhat mysterious reasons that are not on the whole good for you. Yeah, that's definitely something. Yeah, I personally remember when I first got sober back in 2012, I had like an anxiety attack, like probably six months into it, because nothing was wrong, right? Like I grew up with an alcoholic mom, and I had a very chaotic childhood and everything. And it almost felt like my mind wasn't used to things getting better, because there are some people, and you know, I used to be one of these people, where it seems like they caused their own chaos, because that seems to be the norm. So is there anything that you think, like somebody's listening to this right now, do you think there's anything in the book where we talk about this kind of like chosen suffering and finding that balance? Because like you mentioned, like there's maladaptive suffering, right? Is there anything that someone can learn from that to hopefully get out of that spiral, because they're causing more suffering than they've gone past that sweet spot, if you will. Yeah, I don't have, my book is not filled with concrete advice, it's filled with a lot of examples of how people change their lives, and a lot of different theories of what's going on. I guess to some extent, the person I'm trying to persuade in this book isn't somebody who suffers too much, I can't say that point, it's not going to be too much, I'm not going to tell you to suffer more. I mean, you know, you've got to work to get your act together and work to find improvements through whatever therapy or medication, and sometimes you're right, sometimes being healthy and happy and living a good life isn't some way a burden. All of a sudden you have to take responsibility for all this stuff, you have nothing to fall back on, you have, you're in the position that, I mean, sometimes if you're really low, there's a reassuring feeling, nothing bad's going to happen because you're there already. Yeah. Well, if things, if you're riding high and taking all sorts of chances, you're at risk, but to some extent, if there's something I'm trying to talk to in my book, it's actually the person, what I want to do is pleasure and happiness. Yeah. I'm going to get a buzz, and my book pushes against that. I put myself in a tribe of motivational pluralists to say there's a lot of things we want, and I think there's good reason to believe that a rich life does involve some degree of chosen suffering and struggle. And we're not talking about pleasure anymore, but we're talking, you know, if, if you say, oh, I have this greatest job, it's no work at all. I just, the days breeze by, I don't do anything. You probably could do better at your job and find a better job. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like that, that seems, you know, that seems like hell, I forgot there was like, there was some story or parable about that. Some, some guy, he, he's like a bank robber and he goes somewhere and he gets everything. It's a Twilight Zone episode. Oh, that's what it was. This guy, he, he thinks he, he's a horrible guy in the end. He dies and he finds that he has everything he wants. He has an angelic guide, and everything he wants, just comes to him and he gets kind of ridiculous. And he says, like, like, I can't bear this. I want to go to the other place. And the guy says, you are in another place. Yeah. You know, how much joy would you get out of playing a game if you always won? Yeah. Of trying a project. If you knew you'd always succeed. We don't, we don't look for failure. You know, if you and I were to play chess or poker, I'm not trying to lose. I want to win. But if there wasn't a chance of loss, the chance of failure, it would be incredibly boring. Yeah. And, you know, I'm curious with thoughts around this, because when I, when I look around, obviously, there's so many conversations around like, you know, outrage culture and, you know, trigger warnings and safe spaces. And, you know, I've had plenty of guests on here. But something that I think about quite a bit is it seems like it seems like there are many people who, who have this kind of idea that life is supposed to be just no discomfort at all. And that's what I think that your book really shines a light. Like, yeah, you need discomfort. But, you know, when we're talking about, you know, like we mentioned, like, you know, trans jokes, and there's the Dave Chappelle thing that's going on and everything. But when I look at it, like I understand, obviously, like people are getting offended and people, you know, you know, just saying hateful things and all that. But it seems like to an extent, even with the self-help movement, right, where it seems like we're pushing this idea like, hey, life should just be a breeze and you should never have suffering. Like, do you think this has gotten worse? Like I've read some books on like the happiness industry and how it kind of like started going like up towards the 80s, 90s and all these other things. Like, do you think that's gotten worse over time and we're like conditioning people to think that life should just not have any form of discomfort in it? I don't know. I don't know what the data is on this. You know, I started off, I was originally very skeptical about positive psychology, which, which concludes the happiness movement you're talking about. And you're totally right. Originally, a lot of the stuff just equated happiness with pleasure and relief from pain and had nothing more to it was, you know, it was the most rudimentary and kind of, I think dumb of philosophical views was guiding it, though they didn't know they were being guided by this, but it's gotten better. And so, so now a lot of people who think seriously about happiness, a lot of positive ecologists like Marty Seligman, who's like the father of the movement. People like, like John Hyde or Lori Santos are pretty sophisticated. And I think they recognize that a good life is more than a happy life. So, you know, connecting, connecting what you're saying, a very nice paper came out like a month ago, too late to get my book by Oishi and Westgate on the need for psychological diversity. And they argued that a lot of what we want and part of a good life isn't happiness, it's doing a lot of different things, some which will cause you trouble. Now, this is, I feel like I'm sort of ducking where you're at with this, which is, you know, should we develop a thicker skin about the world in some way, a thicker skin never hurts. On the other hand, if you treat me poorly, you know, I should be able to respond. Yeah. And I think to some, so to some extent, or even outside of psychological issues, there was moral issues, which is maybe I'm tough enough, but still, I should have a right to respond and react if people treat me poorly. And they should be tough enough to take my response. Yeah, it's this weird balance, you know, because I, you know, I try to be optimistic, I try to be realistic. I love just, you know, more psychology and more philosophy and all that too, like, would I like everybody to treat me well, would I like if nobody, you know, these are, you know, ideals, but I got to a point, you know, especially when I just got sober and had to start dealing with the world, because a large part of my drug use and alcoholism was, I just really didn't like anybody, right? I thought everybody treated me poorly. I felt the world was against me. So part of my effort to stay sober was saying, Hey, people will suck, right? Not everybody's going to do what I think they should do. And I have to learn to deal with it. So I don't know if I was put in a unique position to have to deal a little bit more, you know what I mean? Like, but like you said, we do need to like fight back and say, Hey, I don't like how you're treating me. I don't like how you said this. So have, have, have there been any research on like finding finding that balance? Is it like situational? Because for some of us, when we fight too much, it's stressful because my concern, I guess, is reaching that, that idea that eventually nobody's going to ever upset us again, and everybody's going to be kind and generous and all these things, you know? This is an interesting question. In some way, it's not entirely a psychological question. I don't know. Suppose I'm Jewish. Suppose somebody starts throwing antisemitic comments at me. So there's one question, which is how prepared am I to deal with this? And I think you should be prepared to deal with it. It's a tough world that there's a lot of bad stuff is going to come your way, the tougher, the better. But then there's the moral question, which is how should I respond? And that's kind of different. Even, even if I have the skin of Superman, I could still respond and say there's a terrible thing you're doing. You better stop it. And so it's not, I guess what I'm trying to do is disentangle moral outrage from fragility. It is possible to be incredibly tough and still say, certain, I'm not going to allow that, but to leave your rise into the defense of other people. Yeah. Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense. And speaking of which, I've been really fascinated with the topic ever since I learned the term is post traumatic growth, right? Like, something, you know, I often just look at, you know, just my life and everything. And, you know, I originally started with a YouTube channel, Mental Health, sharing a lot of my experience, because I'm like, I was able to do something, right? And, you know, there's, I'm not the only one millions of people out there have gotten sober, but I'm like, how do you, how do you turn this into a formula that I learned about post traumatic growth, right? Where, you know, not to get all like 12 step, but there's a line in the big book that says, like, you know, we'll look, you know, we'll look back on our past and like, see how we've grown from it, right? And that's something that's set in my head. So I realized looking back like, hey, everything I've gone through has made me stronger, right? 2019, I had hundreds of thousands of strangers on the internet coming after me, whatever. I stayed sober. I stayed sane. I got through it. I feel I'm stronger now, right? But with post traumatic growth, I've seen a lot of conflicting research around this. Right? And I haven't found out, like, is it a genetic thing? Is it like conditioning your mind thing? But how do we take these traumatic pasts or traumatic events? Because not every single soldier who comes back from war has the same problems, right? Like, how are we getting any closer to figuring out how to harness this thing? I think that was a great question. I mean, as you know, I'm kind of a post traumatic growth skeptic. I think there's some real good news. And the good news is, and there's a book by George Bonanno, Bonanno, who taught, which talks about it, is that resilience seems to be the rule. And not the exception. Post traumatic stress disorder happens. Trauma happens is sorry, trauma happens a result of bad experience. But it's by no means inevitable. And in fact, it's fairly rare. You look at all the people that had something bad happen they were assaulted, somebody loved died suddenly. And of those, only a small minority end up scarred by it. We're much tougher than we think we are. But then there's the post traumatic growth claim. And there's a weak version of claim, which is true. Some people, bad stuff happens and it better at the other end. World's a complicated place. Something bad could happen, you get your act together and it becomes better. Is this the stronger view is, oh, this is a powerful psychological process. Here to evidence is just pretty weak. So for instance, if you ask people about whether they grew as a result of experience, they'll often say, oh, I sure did. Then when you look to see if their lives are any better, you find that they aren't. You also find that people often say their lives got better after traumatic experience. But then people did the studies with control groups. People also say their lives got better after a positive experience. Post ecstatic growth, they call that in the business. And they also say that their lives got better after nothing happened, a control group. So you go up to 100 people who suffered from addiction and terrible things that how are you not say, I'm stronger, I'm more spiritual and better than that. But once you go to 100 people who nothing happened, they said, how do you compare stronger and more spiritual and so on. So getting rid of all these things that we're reporting bias and that sort of desire that they have a positive view in the world. Is there an effect where bad stuff happens and makes you better? I don't know. It could happen to some people. As a psychological law, I'm very skeptical. So let's unpack that for a second because now I'm thinking about so do you think it's more just outside of the resilience aspect and the growth aspect? It's more like situation like for me, for example, right, like the drugs and alcohol, those being removed from the equation, things are naturally going to get better, right. And we talked to 100 people, whether addicts, non addicts, whatever, their life is going to get better just because they get older, they get wiser, the prefrontal cortex develops a little bit more and things like that. So that's naturally going to happen. You age out of certain bad things actually. Yeah, yeah, that too. And so now I'm curious because I can tell you of just countless people I've met who got sober too and their lives suck, right? Just not, but these could be external factors like they're struggling to find work, they're struggling to keep work, they still have toxic relationships just on every kind of measurement of what makes just not a great life but a half decent life, they're still really far down there. So is this external to what's happening to us psychologically? Does that kind of make sense? It does. I mean, the way some people involve in post-traumatic growth, say, look, there's a phenomena, post-traumatic stress disorder, something terrible happens to you, you ruminate over it and it really causes damage and it's a variant of an anxiety disorder. You get flashbacks, you get a certain emotional numbness, you get a whole host of problems. And the post-traumatic growth movement says, out of the same process, it can go to positive way. So they're very careful. We're not talking about resilience, they will tell you. They say, we're not going to transformation, instead of transformation bad is a transformation good. And it's a pretty picture. Does it happen? I'm not so sure. I think what happens is more, you call it an environmentalism or mundane, which is bad things happen. Most of us learn to cope with it. Some of us find ourselves in a life where we can benefit and change, a lot of support. Others find ourselves not really prepared to get out of it or the problems never fully go away. And you don't need the psychologist to tell you this. But for others, it's just life. And there's no part of the brain, there's no cluster of neurons, there's no genetic encoding that says this stuff's going to hit me and I'm going to emerge stronger. This is on people. Yeah, I guess what I wonder is, do people just have different tools? And then there's the question of effort. And something I was going to ask you about, because, for example, you talk about the idea of fact, we get more pleasure from building something. For example, my son and I, during the pandemic, he's 12, well, he was 11 when it started, but we got into cooking. It's great to cook. We put in that effort, we screwed up recipes and we're like, you know what, screw that, we're going to go back and retry that recipe. We'll try it three days in a row until we get it. And there's this kind of reward from going through that struggle like we were talking about. And I look at myself, because again, I'm always trying to decode myself so I can help others. And I have this kind of insane persistence. When I get knocked down, I get back up and I just keep trying, but there are many people who do give up. And sometimes it is good to give up. I had Randy Nessie on here a while back, we were talking about depression and everything. But yeah, I get back up and I'm always trying to figure out how do we provide people with those tools so they can get through those difficult struggles and not give up. Say for example, someone's looking for a job, they get shut down 10 times. How do we provide them with coping skills? Are there answers within that suffering and outlook that we can pull from to help more people kind of figure out how to do this? You know, the only insight I have here is just to point out that question you're asking, which is a great and very important question, is very different from an example you gave of cooking with your son. Think about cooking with your son, think what that involved. It was a choice you made and it's an autonomous being. It involved mastery. You got better and better. It brought you closer to your son. He felt your love in getting him in with this. He got, you know, there's a whole lot and maybe it was difficult, you failed a lot of times. But it was your choice. You could make it just so. And a lot of the unchosen suffering life has a very different flavor. C.S. Lewis, the theologian, has a great example and talks about fasting. And he says, you know, people fast for religious reasons and it's often imbued with pride. Being C.S. Lewis, he was a bit negative about this, but nonetheless, it's imbued with pride. Look at what I'm doing. It's a full day. It's a ritual. I'm not eating a thing. Check me out. You know, and I'll tell other people, look how pious I am. Control, feeling proud of yourself. Now imagine you're not eating because someone stole your food. Are you locked in yourself? No food. That's that's different. You can't control it. You can't titrate it. It's humiliating. And real life suffering is of the second sort. So it poses a much harder challenge. Now, religions and other 12 step programs, other things kind of try to reverse engineering. They try to say that, well, you're suffering. Why don't we treat it as if this was a challenge? Treat it as if this is something for you to redefine yourself, get mastery over and so on. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a worthwhile endeavor to try. I think that's one of the draws of religion saying that no suffering is without meaning. No, it's sort of a purpose, but it's hard to make the case. Yeah, no, that's definitely making sense. Just, you know, I think a great example, some unchosen suffering in September, I got laid off just out of nowhere, thought my company like made it through the pandemic and everything. And, you know, but I've been fine. I've found like, you know, obviously I have my podcast. I have a lot of other endeavors, but I've also been doing some freelance writing. And a lot of it's like involving like pitching out to editors and everything, but I'm reframing it as this kind of challenge and trying to break it down and see what I can do better with it. And this is one of my arguments for gamers, right? Like my son's a gamer. I've been gaming since I was a kid, but looking at having that challenge mindset of like, ooh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure this thing out and kind of gamifying different challenges within life. But, you know, with one of the things I was just going back through like the the intro of your book and you you have like these three main arguments, right? And one of them is like a wife, a life well lived is more or better than a life of pleasure, right? And I think some summer, then I have a problem differentiating those two. So how do I separate or we separate that life well lived from pleasure? Like what's the what's the difference between those two? Well, one way to illustrate it is through this nice thought experiment by the philosopher Robert Nozick, who calls it the experience machine. As he makes you this offer, an offer is you plug you into a machine, you know, if you see in the matrix, you get the idea. And for the rest of your life, you're lying on the table, you live your natural life until you would have died anyway. And and you will have experiences of a rich, full life with intimate relationships and love and success and accomplishment, pleasure, struggle, whatever you want, the best life possible. But of course, it's just all agreements entirely in your head. And then you die. And the question is, would you want to get plugged into this machine? Now, to be honest, some people say, Yeah, I do. That sounds that sounds terrific. And if I was in prison or something, I can imagine all sort of like I'd say, Yeah, plug me in now. But, but is that the best life? I think most people say no, they say, Look, man, I want to climb Mount Everest. I don't want to think I climb Mount Everest. I want to raise children. I don't want to think I raise children. I want to try. I want to make a difference in the world. I want to help people. Sometimes they ask, What happens to my family and friends, the people who love me, once you plug me in a machine, or you'll never see him again? Will they miss me? Of course, don't miss you. But I didn't know this is but of course, you won't know it, you'll be perfectly happy. If you if you're like best life involves around you'll be seeing them and everything. And people say, Yeah, but I don't just want to be. I don't want to sort of think my son's okay and having wonderful times with me. I want to not mess up his life in reality. And examples like that show we really care about doing things, we care about helping people. And and and that's the sort of thing that pulls them apart. And there are other things, you know, you ask for sort of more concrete stuff. There's been a lot of studies showing that people who want to be happy and try to be happy the extent to what you want that is correlated with bad outcomes. Depression, anxiety, sadness, that sort of thing. There's something about hedonism, which is of itself defeating. Yeah. And that the best the best way to live a good life is not try so damn hard to be happy. Yeah, yeah, hey, you know, speaking about he did it. So you know, I know a lot about that time with most of my life and I was I was absolutely miserable. And you know, as you were talking about that too, and this, you know, this thought experiment, I was reminded of one of your other books, which I love just babies, right, talking about just kind of like morality and everything. I love that. And when I look around the world, right, because you're kind of talking about like, part of it is we care about other people. You know, right now I'm reading Roy Balmeister's book on evil, loving it, right? That kind of myth of pure evil. And you know, people care like they're serial killers who love their dogs or love their family members, whatever it is. So but there's obviously this, you know, big question, are people naturally good or bad? But I look around. I look around and it feels like there's a lot of selfishness, right? Like there's a lot of people where it seems like we start really small, we want to take care of our kids, we care the most about our kids, spouse, immediate family. Then after that, it's a it's a role of advice, right? And you know, from what I've learned from, you know, just work of like Jonathan Hyde and some others is, you know, more liberal people, they kind of widen that circle a little bit, they seem, they seem to care about more people like on a global issue. But but with this kind of moral aspect, because it seems like with what you're saying about like a life well lived, part of the life well lived is helping others. So how, how do we explain why there's, you know, in this capitalist world that we live in and there's so much like wealth hoarding and everything, you know, like, that's where I get confused. Because it seems like, you know, we evolved from babies to want to be helpful to want to help others and, you know, reciprocity and all that stuff. But some people are just like, taking over the, you know, that tragedy of the commons, if you will. Well, you know, life, let's assume because I do think it's true that to some extent, some degree of goodness, some degree of caring for others, desire for fairness and justice, imagine that just wired up within us. I think that is true actually, I think there's there's evidence supporting that. I think a lot of bad stuff is also wired within us, but there's definitely this good stuff. And you're asking, why doesn't it manifest itself more? And I think the answer is, is one answer is that there are other things that get in the way. You know, yeah, you want to you want to you have a good instinct, but you also care about your own reputation and care about your, your security and how much money you have and how, you know, and whether people disrespect you and these push you in other ways. Another answer is sometimes our moral motivation actually, and this is Baumeister's line, is actually the cause of some terrible things. Many people who do terrible things, don't think, oh, I'm the psychopathic monster. Do you think, hey, I'm the good guy here? Yeah, good guy here. But another thing, and I like this because I like the story of a very moving story of you and your son, which is there's complicated tradeoffs here. You spent all this time with your son. And you said before, you described not going elsewhere as selfish, but I don't think the time you spent with your son is selfish. I think it expresses a tradeoff. You cared for him more than you care about distance strangers, more of your time, more of your energy than distance strangers. I think some of that is right. I think any normative theory that denies that, that family and friends have priority is missing out on, is so distant from human concerns, it wouldn't count as an ethics for humans. Could we care less for those we love and more for distance strangers? Absolutely. But there's always this tradeoff. And sometimes behaviors that might look bad for you and me are when we see people not making a tradeoff that we would make ourselves. And I've seen it the other way around. I've seen people who put a lot of energy into life projects and don't seem to care that much about their kids. And I think that that's kind of bad too. But of course, they could say, man, you're doing it wrong. Those are hard problems. Yeah. No, that's so interesting too. My mom's also in recovery, but she's a psychologist and she's a clinical director at a rehab center. But not her, but I've seen people she's worked with or whatever who just fully dedicate themselves to their job at a treatment center. Hell, I've worked with people at a treatment center. But then there's that tradeoff, the working and helping others at the treatment center and neglecting the kids at home or the wife or whatever. And that's really interesting. I'm gonna have this. So the tradeoff is a difficult problem. Yeah. I'm curious because a little bit earlier, you mentioned Peter Singer. And I really got into effective altruism and all that. And I recently read a book that was making me question some of the aspects, but I like it because it seems like the best ways we can give and now I feel guilty if I'm sitting on too much money and not doing something for someone else, whatever. But with this life well lived, helping others, finding that balance and these tradeoffs, I'm curious your thoughts on effective altruism and is there an optimal way to live a good, meaningful life through helping others? I have a really easy route through 12-step programs like, hey, you want to stay sober? Help other people. I'm like, nice, right? But being sober almost 10 years now, I'm always looking for other ways to help and everything. But then there's a question of, I gotta provide for my son, I gotta provide for this. And for people who want to give, is there a way to better assess it? How do you kind of view the effective altruism movement at all, if anything? It's a great issue. I think like a lot of things, there's an easy answer to effective altruism in its favor, which is when we choose to make the world a better place, should we attend to the effects of our giving? And to me, the answer is obviously yes. If you do it differently, you're just doing it wrong. If I give to charities to give me a warm glow and have pretty pictures and everything, and I don't care about where my money goes, it's ridiculous. I think we genuinely care about people. And sometimes we're distracted from it, and we forget about it. But the idea of giving effectively is, to me, it sounds like people talk about evidence-based medicine, and I say, is there another kind of medicine you really want to rely on? And then effective altruism is a no-brainer. Then you get to the heavy duty stuff. And the heavy duty stuff is a version of utilitarianism, where basically the way to live is to focus all your energies on doing the most good. And I think there's an obvious, profound truth to that. But if you live that way, you wouldn't care for your children as much. You wouldn't pursue other things like being good at art, or going to the movies, or athletic pursuits, or musical pursuits, or literary pursuits. You turn yourself into a machine, helping those who need the world the most. And there's a sense, and maybe this sense is morally dubious, there's a sense that that's not a full life. You know, Susan Wolfe has a wonderful article called, the philosopher Susan Wolfe, called Moral Saints. And she asked you to imagine somebody who's purely good. And such a person would be weird to interact with. You say, hey, did you catch the newest episode of Secession? They say, I don't watch TV. I'm busy doing good. That doesn't do any good. And you want to gossip about somebody saying, I don't gossip, that's not good. I mean, I'm doing good business. And such a person would be difficult to get along with. And at some level, you think they aren't living the fullest life. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely remember, I remember just first getting sober, and because some people, when they get sober, they hit what we call a pink cloud, and they'll just like, hear about being of service and helping others. And they'll just like give away stuff, and like harms their family or, you know, whatever it is, because they're just giving and giving, oh, don't wait from the house to a little shack and, you know, and all these other things. So it goes back to kind of what you were talking about with that trade off. But with a little bit more of your time that I have, you know, speaking of money and giving, something I think about regularly, because money played such a big role in my life, like growing up broke, money started being my like primary objective. But, you know, when I share my story of addiction and recovery, I talk about how in my active addiction, I was making more money than I've ever made in my life, right? But I was absolutely miserable. I've never been so low like talking like aside from my addiction, but just suicidal and everything just, but I had the nice car, the nice house on paper and looked like I had everything. But that, that clicked for me, where I was like, Oh, money doesn't make you happy. So without giving too much away from the book, what does the research say about money and happiness? Because I just wish I could help more people understand like, you know, you're working yourself to the bone, you're trying to get these things and so much of that is fleeting. And it's that pleasure, right? That we're talking about. So the research suggests would be it would be good to make it as much money as you were making and add all that nice stuff and not have that addiction. It's, you know, so of course, you're totally right. Money is not the cure for everything. There are people who make a lot of money, who live terrible lives. On the other hand, one of the big findings from happiness research, and it's going to be of no surprise to anybody, I don't think you're disagreeing with this, is more money you make the happier you are. Because, and how could it be otherwise, money buys, it buys security, it buys travel, it buys time to friends, it buys the ability to free yourself from abuse of relationships. In many countries, it buys you health care. It buys you good schools for your kids, it buys you health care for your kids and that. And it and so to be poor life is harder. You're more vulnerable. So so the correlation of money and happiness is within every country. And also across countries, rich countries are happier and poor countries. It's not the only factor, not by far, there's other factors to happiness. But, and you know, so, so part of the advice that psychologists interested in this will give you is the trick to money is using it right. Yeah. You know, there's, there's a book out, I think by a list on a Michael Norton called Smart Money. And, and it's about, you know, you, if you could use the money to buy you experiences, which matter a lot, probably more than things. Why you freedom? Yeah. And, and, you know, I just wrote a little article based on my book on children. Yeah, it turns out that, that, that whether or not having children makes you happy relates a lot to what country you're in. And then turn it relates to child care practices. So, so I have friends of mine in Quebec and they have kids in daycare and for them it costs like six dollars a day, daycare, it's heavily subsidized. When I had my kids in, in school, in New Haven, Connecticut, you know, it was about the equivalent of a college tuition. And I could afford it. If I couldn't afford it, life would have been harder. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's where I get curious because I, as I was reading the book, like I saw like the counter, you know, argue that's like, yes, like, hey, research shows money makes you happy, but here's, here's where I get kind of messed up and maybe it's just the, the crazy progressive in me, right? Because it seems like the reason, the reason money makes people happy, happier is because of a sense of security, right? And if we're looking at like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and everything like that, like we need to feel safe, we need to feel secure healthcare, right, providing for our kids shelter and all that stuff. So do you think, do you think money would make people as happy as the current research shows in a system like, I don't know, well, in Scandinavian countries, for example, where these things are provider, you mentioned like Quebec and child care is like cheaper, they have healthcare and everything. So does that change? Like do we have less, because it seems like money is just the thing to meet our other needs. So is there something that you think, especially here in the United States that we could be doing better, where money isn't as important, where people are working 10, you know, a job in 10 side hustles, you know what I mean? To reach that happiness or security. I'm living in Toronto now. I'm from Canada originally. And so plainly, healthcare, Canadian healthcare, enables you to lose your job, to quit your job, to be destitute. And you still get fine healthcare. And it won't, you won't go bankrupt. Maybe the healthcare is better in some other countries. But, but there's that degree of safety net. Accordingly, and I think you're right, money matters less. There's some, there's some places where being poor is dreadful. Other places being poor, and it sucks, but it's not as bad. And it's exactly the reasons that you're talking about the idea of safety nets. But let me just push back a little bit. So I think that that point is exactly money. When it comes to needs, if your needs are taken care of money becomes less important, another one or wants, you know, maybe you want it, maybe. And some of the wants may be frivolous, maybe not. Is it, you know, what about travel? Travel seems fun. You know, there's not going to be a world of the future where everybody where all the flights are free. I don't think so. What about the ability to, to quit your job or take time off your job and live well? So there's a balance between individual wealth and the state, but it's hard to imagine a world, even the sweetest world of all. So long as it had money, where more money wasn't better and less. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Because I, you know, I was just talking about that. Like I, for example, I play video games, right? So if we just eliminated money, like that doesn't mean I'd have like the ability to play games with my son and, you know, whatever, whatever that is. So yeah, it, it makes sense. So like, yeah, I, I, I, I'm curious how many people kind of, you know, kind of think about this on a regular basis and look at these other places, you know, because obviously here in the States, there's so many debates around the healthcare and everything. Even when Andrew Yang pops on anywhere, we're talking about universal basic income, like you guys understand that you'll be less stressed, you'll have a little bit more time to sort of your families and all that. But Paul, with, with time for one more question, something I've always been interested in is, is the chosen suffering around you talk about like BDSM and everything like that in there, which is always interesting to me because I think maybe it's because I live in Las Vegas, which is a city of insane here, right? But I find more interesting, like the topic of self harm, right? And you talk about that a little bit in there. And I've, I've read so many books on mental health, self harm, all these other things. And you touched on a few things that I haven't seen other people talk about. But this, you know, a lot of people have loved ones, right? And you talk about self harm is this kind of like signaling, right? And you break that down because there's this misconception that self harm automatically equals suicidal and all these other things. Can you kind of just break that down a little bit when you found for your research on that? So I want to be conscious because this is an area I've studied myself, but I've, I've drawn upon the work of some really smart people, including Matt Nock, who's a psychologist and excellent work on this. And there's no single story for why kids cut white, often adolescents will cut themselves or harm themselves. And, and these are cases where they're even described as non suicidal self harm. You know, they're not trying to kill themselves, it's not failed suicide attempt. Which is why are they doing it? I don't think there's a single answer. So one answer is what you just said, which is it's a cry for help. And the cry for help will happen under this theory, in cases where the environment's not very good, because if it was really good, you just say to people who have control of your life, I'm in trouble. Can you help me? Another end if it was terrible, you wouldn't bother, because no one will listen anyway. So it's a way of saying I'm expressing the importance of things to others. It can be a form of self punishment. Sometimes people harm themselves in a way too, because they, you know, we're moral beings, we want to punish bad people. If you think you're a bad person, you might want to punish yourself. And also, I think to some extent self harm is reported to have a sort of analgesic effect, some sort of numbing effect. You know, a sudden sharp droll to pain takes you out of yourself. You know, rigorous exercises too. Or even something as simple as snapping a rubber band on yourself. During that instant, your mind just has to pain in it. And that sounds like it should suck. But actually, it keeps you away from all the distractions and all of the sort of ruminations we have. You know, the mind is a messy place. And sometimes pain just has a tremendous distracting force. And this is a way in which self harm, which is pretty not only a negative thing, connects with more, more positive or neutral things like, you know, voluntary activities. I remember I talked in my book about the first time in Brazilian jiu-jitsu I ever rolled ever sparred with somebody, you know, I was the oldest person in the gym, and least in shape. And so for like two minutes, three minutes, you know, it's somebody trying to pull my neck off my head off my neck, mostly successfully. And I realized afterwards that during those minutes, I didn't think of anything else. Yeah, I didn't think about my book. I didn't think of my career. I didn't think about my problems with this person. I didn't worry about my self image. Just total and that's glorious. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think that's that's one of the keys. And I hope people gather from, you know, finding that that sweet spot, right? Because mine used to be like, I think I relate to people who self harm, even though that was never my thing, the drinking and the using of, you know, there was self punishment. But I heard somewhere was, you know, we drink it used to get a feeling, get rid of the feeling or have an escape, right? But now I found those other things like you were mentioning with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right? Where even hitting that state of flow, right? So you get out of yourself and flow, they talk about having a certain amount of struggle, pursuing something challenging to get in that state. And yeah, so I, I hope, you know, more people pick up your book and find that balance where that sweet spot is with that suffering. So perfect timing. So can you let everybody know where this awesome book's available? I see on your bookshelf if you have two different copies. So is it available already in the UK and in the States? It's available in the UK in the States. If you go to my website, paulbloom.net, there's there's links to links and blurbs and all that good stuff or just go to Amazon or book, friendly bookstore near you. Beautiful. And I follow you on Twitter is at the best place to keep up with you and stuff you're working on. That is and also get dad jokes and relentless self promotion and hopefully promotion of my friends too. Beautiful. And last question because I always have to ask when's the next book coming out? I would say in a bit over two years, I'm almost finished it, but it takes a little while. Really? Really? So it's already in the works. I'm excited. It's a book about, it's, it's tentative title is psych and it's a book that tells the complete story of psychology. Not a textbook, a book for somebody to just pick up and learn all about psychology. Beautiful. I love it. We'll all be staying tuned and I'll reach out so I can get a review copy and check it out. But paul, I know you're a busy guy. Thanks so much for your time and yeah, we'll do this again when when sight comes out. Great. Thank you.