 your hunger for something presumes its existence. You know, I'm hungry for food. That sort of assumes food exists, right? You know, you want sex. That suggests that sex exists, right? As opposed to you have this meaningless craving for something amorphous. And if you have a craving for the divine, that suggests that there's something that is more transcendental than you that actually exists and is cognizant and has some sort of consciousness in some way, shape, or form. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Well, welcome to the show, Arthur. Happy to have you. Thank you. What a great to be here. I mean, thank you for, by the way, thank you for the show. Your show has been helpful to me, and that's not true for a lot of shows, but it's always practical, always useful, always upbeat, always positive, and you make me more productive and happier every time I listen. They are to charm. Well, thank you for that compliment. It means the world to me and Johnny, and it's certainly why we started the show in the first place. We've had a ton of guests on over the years talking about happiness, so we love asking those who study happiness and certainly the science behind living your best life, what is the ultimate secret to happiness? Yeah, you know, there are a million ways to answer that question, but there's only one really great way to answer that lesson, and I'm gonna answer the lesson based on not on theology, not on philosophy, but on data, because I'm a data scientist, I'm a social scientist. There's an 80-year launch into a little study that was run through Harvard University, where I teach, that looked at, started with men who were in their, they were 19 years old, they were sophomores at Harvard College in the late 30s and early 40s, including JFK who was in the sample, Ben Bradley, anyway. They didn't make it all the way to the end. And then they mixed it with some people who weren't, you know, all Harvard men, so it would be more demographically similar, followed them all the way through into their 80s, some of them into their 90s, and they came up with seven practices that predicted whether or not they were gonna be happy and well, healthy, or in some other quadrant. And so what you wanna be is happy and well, and of those seven, there was one that predicted more than anything else, whether or not you'd wind up happy in your 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that was love. And the guy who read the study, George Valiant, who was a psychiatrist at a Harvard Medical School professor for, you know, really, really long time, he was asked at the end of his career, how do you sum up the Harvard study of adult development? He said, happiness is love, full stop. My friends, that is the secret, love. And what I love about that study in looking across as long as it did, right, the entire lifetime, the idea that love and relationships and connectedness plays such a big role in our personal happiness because many of us think we have to take control, we are the root of it, it's our actions, but really it involves others. It involves being connected to others to reach that point of happiness. For sure. And, you know, in my own studies, you know, if you look at the people who are, who tend to be happiest, you find that they have a kind of a portfolio of habits. And so that, and the habits are not making a lot of money, having a really good education, you know, none of that stuff. So the money, power, pleasure, fame, that's not in the matrix. The four things that correlate that the happiness practices, the disciplines that happy people have that they do every day, is that they dedicate time to their faith or philosophical practice or meditation practice, something spiritual, something more transcendental than their own particular lives, their family life, their friendships, and making sure that their work serves other people. And all those things have to do with love. The common denominator across faith, family, friends, and work that serves is love. And I bet, you know, it gets you guys under sodium pentothal. Why are you doing the art of charm? It's because you have love for other people. You want to do something that lifts people up. You want to do something that brings people together. And, you know, it's not like I'm guessing. I listen to the show. And I can hear it in your voices, that this is a labor of love for you guys. Thank you. One of the points there that I would love to dive into is the faith aspect. I think for quite some time, we became more of a, seemingly to me, and I don't know the numbers on this, but a seemingly more of a secular nation as time has went on due to technology and science and research and everything. However, keep coming back to how religion, faith allows people to feel. There's a connectedness that is going on there as well. And you mentioned the transcendental aspect of it as well. Are you able to distill the few mechanisms that are important within faith and how we may go for somebody who is a bit more secular or science driven, how they might be able to incorporate those mechanisms in their lives? Yeah, so there's a lot of anthropological research that shows that you might say there's a God-shaped hole in people's hearts. And that doesn't mean that God exists, by the way. It just means that there's something about our nature where we want the transcendental, where we seek the divine naturally. And a lot of people actually believe that that is, again, this is not to say that God necessarily exists, although that's actually one of the classic theological arguments for the presence of God is that your hunger for something presumes its existence. I'm hungry for food. That sort of assumes food exists, right? You want sex. That suggests that sex exists, right? As opposed to you have this meaningless craving for something amorphous. And if you have a craving for the divine that suggests that there's something that is more transcendental than you that actually exists and is cognizant and has some sort of consciousness in some way, shape, or form, there are a lot of manifestations of that. This is the reason many people believe that most people throughout most of history have had some religious inclination. Now, again, there are a lot of people that go in a lot of different directions on this. So if we have a need for something like this, if we have an inclination for something like this, there's a lot of different ways to fill that need. And when we don't, as a society, we're going in the opposite direction and where more and more and more people say, I got nothing. I got nothing. That would predict that we're gonna see declines in happiness and in point of fact, we do. Now, David Foster Wallace, the great, the genius writer that we all know, he one time he said that people will worship something no matter what, right? And so if you take away God, they're gonna worship something else and it's gonna be tricky. So and the secret and this new book that I have, I try to sum it up at the end. You know, when I write a book and I write 65 or 75,000 words or something and it's like, no way, everybody's gonna remember this. I won't even remember this as the author. So in the end, what do you gotta remember? And it's basically the formula, if you really, really wanna be happy, is the world tells you to use people and love things and worship yourself, right? The right formula is to use things, love people and worship the divine. I'm not gonna tell you what the divine is. You gotta figure that one out yourself. But that's the right formula if you wanna be happy. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So something that strikes me as peculiar with the faith aspect is, and you mentioned this as well, that for all of us, we have a different idea of what that is. And I think this is what makes it so difficult over all this time in the religious argument of what exactly is it that we're arguing. There's even a famous Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson debate over that idea and then Jordan was like, well, could we at least define it first so we can have a discussion about what it is? And they couldn't even get off the ground on defining it to have the debate. And one of the aspects into what we do is there has been many people who have wrote to the show saying that the art of charm or that self development has been their faith, their religious experience of allowing themselves to work towards something to be the best of their ability. And that has become, we even see it in certain things such as veganism or the cult like behavior of CrossFit. People are like, oh, there are religious freaks over there at CrossFit. We see these things all the time. So are you able to speak to anything there? And maybe that is because we have this whole, we're gonna fill it with something. That's exactly David Foster Wallace's point. Now, here's basically how to think about it as far as I'm concerned. Here's how I think that each of us can get our minds around it. There's a search. The great adventure of life is that search is actually trying to figure that out. Now, you wish at some times in your life that somebody would give you the magic formula and say, okay, here is the way to get to heaven. Here is the ultimate truth. And when you're a kid, you think that grownups actually know it and then when you're a grownup, you find out that they don't. But if you see somebody who's wise enough and who's enlightened enough and who's, you know, if you can meet the Dalai Lama, then he must know, right? If you, you know, it's the Pope, he must know. And these people who have these special knowledge, the reason that you can get not the Dalai Lama and the Pope, but real sort of cult messianic figures is because people will assume that there is somebody who's finally found the truth behind this. The fun, the adventure is being in search of that truth because it is the search itself that is so unbelievably enlightening. Now, what is it that actually brings happiness about this? And I've studied all kinds of different religions and philosophical traditions and secular humanism and ethics, et cetera, et cetera. And there's no particular religion that brings you more happiness than another. If there were, I'd tell you. And if it were mine, that would be awesome, right? But which is right is a different question in which actually brings happiness. What you find is that they all can deliver. And the reason is because they distract you from the most boring thing in the world, which is your day-to-day life. You know, you are obsessed with an incredibly boring thing. My stuff, my car, my money, my job, my friends. It's like you're thinking during your work day about what you're gonna watch on TV tonight is so boring. And yet if we don't have something that's more transcendental, it can zoom us out to the majesty of the nature of our existence, whether it be stoic philosophy or the ecstasy that actually comes from, I don't know, crossfit to actually going to Catholic mass, we need that to distract us in a very, very big way. And so that's one of the things that I say. It's like, read in the wisdom tradition, start a faith or meditation practice. And I don't care if it's traditionally religious or not, but do it today and start now and you will reap the rewards, you'll be happier. I'm glad we started here because if we have this tendency or this whole that needs to be filled and then you have brought up this idea of the four false idols, right? Money, power, pleasure and fame. If those are the idols and we end up filling that hole chasing one of those, we're gonna find ourselves in a lot of trouble. Absolutely, and we're gonna get into the, who's actually behind you? Is that Mick behind you? No, it's Iggy. I can't quite tell it's blurry because anyway, but Mick Jagger was saying I can't get no satisfaction and then I try and I try and I try and the whole point is that you're looking for it with consumerism and sex and drugs and et cetera. And in other words, you can't get no satisfaction and so you try to get more money, power, pleasure, fame, more money, power, pleasure, fame and you're on this homeostatic treadmill, this hedonic treadmill and running and running and running and the truth is you do get satisfaction. You just can't keep it and that's the problem. You momentarily get it, but you actually can't keep no satisfaction. I talk about that a lot in this new book about the neuroscience of dissatisfaction. And the only way that you can get it is by looking for the transcendental. Why? Because the transcendental will allow you to actually chip away at the attachments, the cravings, the worldly desires in your life and substitute them with something that's actually more fulfilling, something that has a chance of giving you a little bit more lasting satisfaction. So won't be unto us if we listen to the world. And you know what are the great mistakes that people make is they think, you know, back in the 60s, they used to say, if it feels good, do it, right? And now millennials, a lot of millennials would be like, if it feels bad, treat it. It's the same mistake, which is to say it had not be fully alive to go only according to your desires, only according to your feelings. And if you go according to the, if it feels good, do it or if it feels bad, get rid of it, then you'll finally be happy. Well, guess what? News flash, mother nature does not care if you're happy. Mother nature just wants you to pass on your genes, man. And if you wanna be happy, that's up to you. That's not mother nature's problem. And so you have to be, that's the reason that the Buddhists talk about being at war with ourselves. They're not saying that nature's evil, they're just saying that we can be more complete if we are the master of ourselves.