 Starts with the definition of happiness. So most people, when you say what's happiness, they talk about, the feeling I get when I'm with the people I love, or when I'm doing the things that I enjoy, it's not a feeling. The feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness. Loving people is different than using them. And there's a tendency to look at other people instrumentally, and that's a huge mistake. And the mistake that people make when you're meeting somebody that you admire is to objectify them in a particular way. And that makes intimacy impossible. That makes actual friendship impossible. Don't objectify them. Love them as an actual person. Treat them as an actual human being with actual human feelings, not just as a bundle of things that you really like and want to be around. Do you want to lift up another person? You got to make them needed because that's the essence of dignity, is to be needed, to be needed by other people. You're going to find a homeless man within a block of here. What do you need from him? It's human connection. We have a society that's becoming bereft of love and that's the problem. This is easily one of my favorite episodes. I had my friend mentor and one of the smartest, best people I've ever met in my entire life on this episode, Arthur C. Brooks. He's a social scientist. He's an expert on what makes humans happy. He's a Harvard professor, a genuinely amazing good person. He speaks all around the world talking about the things that actually have been shown in science, scientifically studied to make us happier, to make us better people, to make us better parents. In fact, that's what we talk about in today's episode. This is probably going to be one that you're going to want to listen to at least two or three times. No joke. Again, he's one of my favorite people, one of my favorite episodes, Arthur Brooks. By the way, you can find Arthur on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks. All right, today's program giveaway is the Super Bundle. I think there's like four or five programs in this bundle and you can win it. Here's how. Leave a comment below this video. Do it in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications and if you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. Also, there's only 48 hours left for our June special. Okay, so MAPS cardio is half off, the shredded summer bundle is half off and the bikini bundle is half off. So all of those 50% off, all of them will go back to regular price in two days. So if you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. Always awesome having you on. You know, when people ask us who some of our favorite guests are or favorite people, your name always comes up. And I've told you this before, I don't know if I've said this on air, you're a mentor to me without knowing it. So I literally try to emulate all the things you do. And we haven't talked about fatherhood with you on the show. And you and I talk a lot about this. We do, we talk offline about the importance of this. We do. And I think you're an exceptional father, the way you talk about your kids. And now a grandfather. Now a grandfather, right? Just recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's difference between being a dad and a grandfather. Yeah, well, part of it is I'm not responsible. It kind of sounds like the best part of fatherhood without the responsibility for it. My grandson is a little bit three weeks old. So, you know, it's too early to tell, you know, what the results are. But my 25 year old son is a father. He's phenomenal. He's great. He's affectionate and engaged and loving it and having a great time. I have to, I think he, so far, he seems like a better father than I was. Really? Yeah. I don't know. He's just so into it. And I remember when we first had our first child, he was my first child, actually, he's my oldest son. We were living in Santa Monica in those days and I was working on my PhD and I was just so stressed out. And three weeks into my son being born, I'm just, I'm going back to work. I got to go back to work. Got to go back to work. I was a complete workaholic. My son has a much better balance. He has a much better sense of what his true holy vocation is, which is fatherhood first, then I'm a husband, and I do a thing for work. Well, then I make some money. I like it. I like what I'm seeing. A lot of men fall into that that I did with my, because I have, well, I have four, my two, I have two older ones and then two younger ones in this big gap. And I was like that with my first two. And I thought that's what I, that was my value was work. And I buried myself. Perfide. Yeah. Why do we fall into that? What's the dangers or the negatives, I guess, of that? Well, we fall into that because it, I mean, there's nature and there's the nurture debate about all that. It's absolutely the case that men in general, they see themselves as providers and hunters. What does it mean to be a good father when you, you're a provider, as it turns out? Well, you got to be more than that. But the younger you are, the less likely you are to be sophisticated about those things. And it's nice to see my son acting like an older dad, even though he's actually a pretty young dad, 25. That's old school. Do you think that's what it is then is if we have, if we were to have kids younger, that the typical thing is that you just default to provide. That's what I'm supposed to, the bare minimum I'm supposed to do that. So even though there's a whole other things I should probably do as a father, I'm going to at least execute that. Yeah. Well, you're providing for the material needs of your family and you need to provide for more than that than the material needs of your family. Now, remember that most men when they're 25 years old are not making bank. You know, and my son's a math teacher in a Catholic school, he's certainly not making bank, but he has a good healthy rounded out sense of what being a provider really means. I didn't. I frankly didn't because I was just in this panic. I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to provide for my family. I was afraid that it was, I was just going to screw up somehow. And so it was just work, work, work, more, more, more. Also, I was just ambitious. So I don't want to make it look like I was some sort of a martyr. The truth is I was kind of selfish too. A lot of what we learn is from our own fathers about how to be dads and our dads were like that. That's kind of how I, you know, I thought, okay, what I do is I work and then I hug and kiss my kids and play with them on the weekend. That's what I thought it was all, what it was about. Yeah. Yeah, that certainly was the case for my dad, just like that, except for the hugging and kissing at the weekend. I didn't get that. No, just the work part. Well, my dad was a professor like me and he didn't work super long hours. But, you know, so I'm a generation or half a generation above you guys. And so my dad was a generation and a half older than you guys are and certainly other than your dads. And he, or I asked him one time, I said, dad, you know, why'd you have kids? And he said, we all felt like we had to. Thanks dad. I was like, oh yeah. If I don't want the answers, I shouldn't ask the questions. I feel like a bundle of joy. It's like, hooray. And I asked my mom, she said, oh yeah, I wanted to have more. And I'll let your dad's like, no. So just me and my brother. And now you have, how many kids you have? I have three. So we have two biological kids and we have one adopted daughter. So my oldest is 25. My middle son, who is also married is 23, just turned 23 last week. And their sister is 20. So she's halfway through college, not married yet. So Jessica and I have talked about, and sometimes I'm like, why are we doing this? We're crazy, but we've talked about, what if we had another one, right? And it always goes to adoption. We would sell the business. Adam and Jessica like, no, please. They see my hair falling out every single day. I'm good to me, man. I've talked about your hair, I can be president of the United States. Listen, that's because I had a lot to start with, trust me. Give you another week. But we talk about adopting and its value and all that. And if you don't mind me asking, what made you adopt rather than having? Yeah, so it's interesting. So I was studying at the time, I was doing research as a social scientist on the effects of serving others. So that was a key area I was doing research on when I was teaching at Syracuse. What happens to you neurophysiologically when you're behaving charitably? And I asked this question in my research, what's the difference between doing a little for a lot of people like writing a check to a charity or doing everything for one person? Oh, right, what's the difference? Yeah, and it's, I was looking at the data. The data are like, you do everything for one person, you get much happier, much happier. You're gonna get way happier. You get richer, happier, healthier, the whole deal. If you turn the whole dial in a person's eye, go home and I tell my wife. I was writing it up for a book. And she says, interesting, she's interesting. She says, why don't we do more of that? I said, what do you mean? She says, why don't we adopt a baby? And I'm like, it's only a book. What door have I opened yet? I was like, oh man. And she turns out had been having this dream. It's a weird dream. She's having a dream about a little girl that had been abandoned in a park, this dream. She kept having this dream again and again. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And she starts praying about it. And she starts the process, we start the process because she had me dead to rights. We had to do this when she brings up, I'm gonna be like, no. And so we start the process of a foreign adoption with this Chinese children adoption agency. And the Chinese government matches us up with an infant at this point, not an infant anymore, 15 months at this point. And they give us the background and she'd been abandoned in a park. What? You're kidding, I had 12 hours old and was found on a park bench at 1 a.m. in a little Chinese city. This is after all of you guys have already. After the dream. Wow, totally. Months later, months, months, months. Oh, so you're like, we have to. Well, I mean, it was, yeah. And so I went by myself. She was not, my wife's not a citizen at the time. And so I went by myself, the first time they ever had a dad that had gone and independently done the adoption because my wife was taking care of her boys. And so she couldn't go by herself because she couldn't execute the adoption as a foreign national. And they're like, is your wife dead? I mean, where's your wife? And so for weeks, I was there by myself in China and I picked up my daughter Marina and she was 16 months old at the time, very disoriented, very malnourished in the whole deal. And we still have this weird mystical bond as if I had gone through labor. Oh, wow. What do you mean? Because I was there by myself. Wow. I picked her up by myself. And I was the first person she ever met. I mean, really met. She doesn't remember because she was only 16 months old, but she has this, we have this bond. It's as if we've been together for all eternity. Yeah, you're just as intense today. Yeah, oh yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I was just there, I was on tour, I was speaking to her in Spain last week. I saw the picture you posted with her, right? Yeah, yeah, that's my baby. That's my baby, she's 20. Yeah, she's studying in Spain at the University of Navarro in Pamplona. Yeah. So that's, I did not know that story. Yeah, yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, it's super heavy but it's just the most amazing thing. Anybody who thinks, you know, people will often ask, you know, do you get the same neurophysiological connection to your child if your child was adopted? And what that is, is really asking about a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in the brain called oxytocin. And oxytocin is the love molecule. What it does is it bonds you through eye contact and touch to your friends, to your family members, and especially to your children. So the three of you guys you've had kids and when you first lay eyes on your newborn infant, it's like the fourth of July inside your head. You would die for the squalling disoriented infant and you're like, what's going on? It's true. I mean, evolutionary biologists say that so you don't leave your baby on the bus, but it's deeper, man. I mean, it's like, it's, and so the question was for the longest time, you get the same oxytocin levels with an adopted child. And I remember when I walked into, you know, when they're matching up these orphans with their adopted parents, you walk into this room and they call out your name and they put this baby in your arms, who doesn't know you. And she grabs onto my shirt and just looks up at me in my eyes and her little, you know, eyes into mine. And it was like, this exact same sensation is when I helped deliver my own sons, my own biological sons. And every time I see her, it's just- Gives me the chills. So I experienced something with each kid that was a little different. I love your, just from a neuro, I guess biological standpoint. I noticed like with my oldest, when my, at the time my ex-wife was pregnant, it was like this concept, cause I'm not connected to the baby. I know there's a baby in there. I watch it grow. And then when he comes out, it like hits me, right? With each successive child, the connection happens faster and faster to the point where my fourth one, the minute my wife said I'm pregnant, immediately I felt this connection to this baby. Is it because I've done it before and I know what to expect? Like what's happening with that? It's hard to say actually, but probably you were at a point in your life really on where you were less connected because of what was actually what was going on in your life. You're now really keyed in. You're busy. I mean, you guys are successful and busy. I mean, I know because I'm a fan. So this is my favorite podcast. And so I, but at the same time, you're older and you're more dialed in to what the experience can actually be. So this is one of the things that people actually tell me. I'm Catholic. So I know a lot of these big Catholic families, six, seven, 10, 11 kids. And what they'll all say is, man, I wish I were the father with my first child that I was with my 10th. They always say that. I feel guilt over them. You get better at it. You get better at fatherhood. That's what it comes down to. It's true and actually feel a little guilt. Like the way I'm with my youngest kids and my older ones, man, I was not as great. Well, it's gotta be a combination of both maturity and practice. You're older obviously on the later ones. So you're wiser, more life experience. And then you've done this before. And so you're also more of a child when you're younger. I mean, you're a younger man, which means that hormonally, you're attuned to different things in your own life as well. You want to hunt more. You want to, you know, you're out walking the Savannah with a club more than when you're older. You're, you have more of this fluid intelligence to go solve particular problems. There's a, the difference between different sorts of intelligence is really interesting. So you're now what, you're 43. 40, yeah, 44. 44 now. And what happens is that your fluid intelligence is the intelligence that everybody has men and women that gives you the capacity to work hard to focus and endophaticably, to work alone, to solve problems. It's your startup entrepreneur intelligence. That peaks in your late thirties and starts to decline. And, and that's the reason that people burn out in their mid forties. If they're, you know, real entrepreneurs and, you know, hot shot lawyers and dentists and electricians, everybody, they tend to burn out in their forties. And the reason is because they're not making progress anymore about what they were really good at, which was intense focus on my work. Sure. That's the bad news. The good news is there's a crystallized intelligence curve behind it. It's a different kind of intelligence. It's increasing through your forties and fifties and sixties and stays very high in your seventies and eighties till you die. That's your wisdom curve, your ability to, to connect the dots, to identify patterns, pattern recognition, the ability to explain stuff. You guys are going to notice cause you're all in your forties now, right? I mean, and that you're getting better and better and better at explaining complicated ideas. And look, I've been listening to you guys for years and even I hear it, you're clearer and better at why because you're crystallized intelligence. It's not just because you have more experiences because you have the teacher brain. Now, dad with the hunt on the Savannah brain versus dad as the teacher, these are different kinds of fatherhood. Totally, right? Now what you might call the first one, the father brain, the second one, the grandfather brain, I'll let you know, right? But that's the reason that you have the different kind of experience with your grandfather. Your grandfather came from Sicily, right? Yeah. And he, you had a different kind of experience with your grandfather, right? He was a different one. I would hear stories from, from my mom about how he was as a dad as a kid. I didn't believe it. Yeah, cause he was a maniac as a father and he was super mellow as a grandfather. And my dad even, my kids will go over there and they'll throw like, I remember my, my, my two year old like hit my dad in the face and my dad laughed. I'm like, well, this is not the same man as well. That's cause he had crystallized intelligence and that's you with your second batch of kids. That's actually kind of what's happening. It's much more on the crystallized intelligence curve. It's not that you're calming down. On the contrary, you're, you've got plenty of energy. You mean you guys are killing it in your business. The point is that you look at the world differently. You're not the soul. You're not the ninja. You're not the assassin anymore. You're the eminence. You're the explainer is the way that this works out. Interesting. And it's a, it's a different style. It's a different style. And you said in, in one of your past books that this is the key to finding happiness as you get older and retire is to understand that and then shift gears into that. That's right. If you keep trying to do what you were good at at 25 you're going to be really frustrated. And you see a lot of people who athletes who this happens to, of course, and it makes perfect sense. They think that it's a physiological phenomenon. Like, you know, of course I don't have the strength or the balance. I don't have the agility. I don't have any of that. Well, it's also, you don't have the brain, your 25 year old brain when you're 40. You see guys who kind of bend the curve a little bit like Tom Brady, but nobody escapes this. Nobody escapes these patterns. And the good news is that if you can actually get on this crystallized intelligence curve and do what, you know, where you're building teams, you're mentoring others, you're explaining, you're recognizing patterns, you can make way more money and you can be way happier. That's how if you can transform your business model from the first to the second, you can do, I mean, it's sky's the limit actually. Awesome. You bring up Tom Brady, it can't help but think that I wonder if that's what makes him wrestle with retiring or not retiring. It's like my physical body, I could still get out there and play good enough with these young guys, but then maybe mentally he's going through this transition in his life. And so he's, he can't quite. He never saw himself as a coach really, you know, this is like a pure athlete. When the coach is a true teaching role, but there's another problem that actually comes from performing in that kind of high level for a lot of these guys. So, and that's a different set of neurotransmitters. So we all know what dopamine is at this point. Nobody knew what it was 15 years ago, only neuroscientists did, but everybody knows that dopamine lies behind all addiction. And the reason is because it's the, it's the neural modulator of anticipation of reward. Oh, so it's not even the reward, it's anticipating. Yeah, exactly. So you think about something that you're really into. It's like, I want a roast beef sandwich, something like that, cause you're hungry. That spikes your dopamine, then it goes way back down. So you go in search cause your dopamine is low and you want it back. And you're only going to get it again when you get the roast beef sandwich. Interesting. Now what exceptional achievers, you guys, I mean, you're hunters, what exceptional achievers do, they rewired their brains. So their dopamine is almost exclusively relegated to the experience of exceptionally high achievement. This is the reason that child stars are screwed up through their whole lives. Oh, they can never get that again. Yeah, they wired their brains. It's like, it's like getting addicted to methamphetamine at age 13. You're never going to have a normal life because your brain is wired to get the satisfaction and the anticipation of the reward only when you do this really bad thing. I talk to athletes and actors all the time because of my work. And I got a really interesting email from an athlete, very famous professional athlete, not long ago. It was like, yeah, I retired and the last 10 years have been great. I've been making a ton of money. My business is going really well, but I don't feel it, man. I don't feel it. What you don't feel is the dopamine that you only get when you do the hardest thing in the world, which you can't do anymore. And the whole arena is watching you. Yeah, wow. Which you can't do anymore. Now does the brain, because I know that there's plasticity, that I know that there's certain things that, especially at certain ages that, you know, it'll be plastic and then it kind of shapes and forms itself relatively permanently. Is this something then you just have to struggle with because you were young and you felt this. We rewire it. Yeah, you got to think to yourself like, okay, it's just going to feel different and you got to manage that. Okay. Well, sort of. So the brain is a lot more plastic when you're an adolescent for sure. That's the reason that with, when you're raising kids, back to the subject of fatherhood, the most important, you're not going to get your kids to never smoke weed or never smoke cigarettes or never drink beer. The key is do it as late as possible. Delay, delay, delay. The right strategy is not never. The right strategy is not now. Because the longer they wait, the less plastic their brain is, which means they're less, they're going to carve their initials into the tree of this is how I get my pleasure. They're not going to be cocaine monkey. And so for example, if you start smoking cigarettes after 25, you'll never be addicted probably. If you start smoking cigarettes before 15, one month, you'll be addicted. This is a really interesting conversation for me because I've never been able to articulate what the relationship that I've had with recreational drugs. I didn't do anything like that until after 25. So I was like a goody-goody kid my whole life. And then I got to a point in my life for, oh, I started hearing some positive benefits of psychedelics and things like that. And marijuana has some benefits. And so as I got older, I allowed myself to, and I've always had this relationship with like, I don't need it. I don't. Take it or leave it. Yeah. Take it or leave it, enjoy it. Right? So that explains a lot of it. Totally, totally. And in the way he grew up, he follows that like, literally, like this is the person that should be addicted. Right, right. And he doesn't because he waited. So that makes a lot of sense. That's really the key. So if you can get your kids, I mean the drinking age should be probably 25. It won't be. And the truth is that's not a political point. I mean that it would, for political reasons, I would just as soon have it be 18 unless you have an arrest or irresponsible behavior and then you can't buy alcohol. But as long as you're responsible, you should be able to use it. But I understand that neurophysiologically, it's a different phenomenon. So that's the key that you waited. I didn't, you know, I was doing all that stuff when I was 13 years old. That's why I don't touch anything now because I can't, can't do it. Interesting. I can't touch anything. So it's harder to break that relationship. I've always said that we've talked to actually off air about this where I can, I can allow something and I have, and everything even down to the simple things like caffeine, like caffeine or anything that, anything that we consider a classic drug, I can allow it to come into my life. And then I was, oh, I don't, I don't need it and I could take it out. And then I don't miss. It's not a big deal. It's adult brain. And your adult brain is that particular way. And so you're going to get your, your anticipation of reward other ways for sure. And no doubt there are other things you got to be careful with. Other behaviors, other ways of thinking you got to be careful with. And everybody's got this. So one of the biggest dangers for young men today, and this is another fatherhood issue, there's way too much exposure to pornography. And pornography is a total dopamine enhancer. You will, so the internet pornography is like fentanyl. It's taking a dangerous but natural opiate and then super charging it in the lab. That's what's going on. So what will happen with internet pornography is you have access to it and you can accelerate the experience to keep up with your dopamine. Your dopamine anticipation of the reward and then I want that feeling back so I want more. And so you go into stuff that's harder core and harder core and harder core. When kids have access to pornography when they're 11 and 12 and 13 years old, there's a good chance they're not gonna have a normal sexual relationship or get the satisfaction that they're supposed to for the rest of the lot. So as a father today, do you, would you say this is maybe one of the biggest things that we have to be aware of today that maybe 20 years ago wasn't as okay. People are paying attention to weed. They should be paying attention to porn. Porn is dangerous. It's like, it's dangerous for every single person watching and listening to us. It's dangerous for guys our age. But if you're 11, 12, it's, could be lethal. The way I heard it explained from someone and this really hit home for me was that the type of novelty and the amount of images you could see, not even the wealthiest kings hundreds of years ago had access to that much. 100 concubines. That's like half an hour. For somebody surfing the web. So our brains are just, they're not designed for this and it causes some serious problems. It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem for your sons. It's a lot less for women for all sorts of reasons. But maybe that's, maybe that supposition is an acronistic at this point. Maybe the females in their brains will catch up to this at some particular point. It's usually been concentrated on young men because young men are more curious about it. Traditionally have been. And so also the same philosophy as the drugs because we're, is delay as long as you can. Delay, delay, delay, delay. You're not going to say never you can't. You're going to see it. Yeah, right. I mean, this is just, you live in the world. You're not going to go live in a cave or a commune or a compound, a cult compound or something unless that floats your boat. That's not my thing. So the key thing is just delay, delay, delay, delay, delay. And then what, if people see pornography for the first time at 25, they're more likely to be like, I like my wife. Yeah, cause I know that like back in the day it was like you get imprinted, right? Whatever that is in terms of like a, you know, an opportunity and you have some relationship with somebody and you're exposed to something like that sexually and that stays with you so much more with your formative brain in those years. And so it just makes perfect sense of your, now you're just inundating your mind with all of these different, you know, novelty acts and things like so early, like what's that going to cause? It's a huge problem. It also shears it off from another human being. I mean, the whole idea of sex is that sex, it links people up together in very, very profound ways. That that's pair bond mating. And this whole idea that men can't pair bond mate is complete nonsense. It's complete utter rubbish. The problem is that when they're used to shearing off the sexual experience from the connection to another human being, then it becomes harder and harder and harder to do. They can't maintain a relationship with another person. They have no concept of what an actual human partner would even find satisfying and intimate because all they have is actors. Yeah. I've read some statistics that on the surface you're like, well, that sounds like a good thing. But then you think about why and you think maybe that's not as good. I think for the first time in a long time, and you might be familiar with this, that kids, and I talk about teenagers and are having less sex and dating less than ever before. Now a surface you're like, well, that's a good thing. They shouldn't be having as much sex. But really it's really a reflection of something much deeper, a little worse. It's a whole bunch of things that are interlocking. It's absolutely the case. So you find that they're having about a third less sex in their 20s than they were in the 1980s when I was in my 20s. A third? A third. Yeah, they're about a third less likely to say they're in love as back then. They're half as likely to get married and half as likely to cohabitate. So it's not like this is just the end of the traditional institutions. This is not, people are less in love than they used to be. They're having less sex than they used to with actual human beings. Meanwhile, pornography is exploding. It's not rocket science. You don't have to have a PhD to figure out this statistical connection between the two. At the same time, of course, the way that our culture is trying to treat the idea of actual relationships is, the polarization in the culture war are setting people against each other and making people afraid of each other. Making people afraid to have relationships with each other. And I get it. I get the liability and I get the fact that there was a lot of abuse in the past, but the truth is that happiness is love. Full stop. I mean, my whole career is the science of happiness and it comes down to happiness is love. Three words is what it comes down to. And the most intense, profound experience of love that any of us is gonna have is romantic love. That's just it. Pair bonded serious romantic love is the most important happiness experience people are gonna have in their lives. That's why a long happy marriage is so critical to being happy, especially for men, by the way. Men get more out of it than women do, as it turns out. We actually live longer with marriage and kids. Yeah, and happier. Way happier. And they had died earlier, I think it was. But yes, I saw that. So I wanna ask you about marriage and kids because it's funny when I think about it, right? I have four kids, for sure I'm more stressed, definitely spending more money, definitely have less time for myself, definitely have less time to do hobbies. And yet, if you ask me whatever, trade it and go back, no way, there's no way. It doesn't make sense on the surface. What's going on here? Why am I so much happier, even though I'm more stressed, more sleep deprived, spending more money, less likely to do or less able to do things for myself? Yeah, so there's a straightforward answer to that. But it starts with the definition of happiness. So most people, when you say what's happiness, they talk about it. The feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love or when I'm doing the things that I enjoy, is not a feeling. The feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness. It's not happiness itself. It's like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner is not the Thanksgiving dinner. It's evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner. Your feelings are evidence. So it's the smell of the turkey. The actual Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of three things. And everybody who's a mind pump fan, all of us pump heads, know that all food is protein, carbohydrates, and fat. It's just three macronutrients. And you need a macronutrient profile that's balanced and abundant. It's healthy. You're not overloading on highly-glycemic carbohydrates. All the stuff that everybody who listens to the show knows. Happiness is the same. There's three macronutrients to happiness that you need in balance and abundance. They're enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things you need in life. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And all three of these things are very deep and very complicated and there's a whole scientific literature behind each one of them. It's not like straightforward, ah, pleasure and fun and no, no, no, no. I mean, enjoyment is not pleasure. You should never stop at pleasure. It's pleasure plus the love of other people plus making memories. So it takes work. Enjoyment takes actual work. Satisfaction is the joy that you get after struggle. That's what satisfaction is, right? And there's a whole science of that. And meaning is a combination of coherence, why things happen, purpose, direction, and life in significance. There's a reason for things. I mean, and so those three things together are your macronutrient profile and you need to be doing that. Now what's going on when you have kids? It's a perfect, you just nailed what being a father is is the perfect balanced meal. Yeah, and what happens is, but it's a different meal than what you had earlier in life. When you were 20, you had higher enjoyment and less meaning. And now you're 44 and you have less enjoyment and more meaning. And you've changed your macronutrient profile to be more appropriate to this point in your life. Having kids, it's a pain and you're tired and you're stressed and your enjoyment's lower, unambiguously, but your meaning is higher. That's what you wanted because now that's your, on more of a carnivore diet, more of a carnivore diet of happiness. That's so awesome. We were talking about earlier about the neurochemicals and neurotransmitters and how younger brains are different than older brains. I can't help but think about how modern life, when you become an adult or when you do adult things now is later in life. Adolescence has been stretched out more and more in order to earn a good living. You gotta get more education. You need to spend more time learning things. Is there a consequence of starting life later now because obviously we evolved to start earlier or is it better, what are the differences? Part of it is that we actually don't need to start later but we elect to start later because our culture treats and fantasizes us till we're a lot older than we've been in the past. There's a cultural problem with treating 26-year-olds as if they were 18-year-olds. 26-year-olds are old enough to be parents, old enough to go to war, hold elective office, certain elective offices. I mean, 26-year-olds are grown-ups and the fact that we don't treat them as grown-ups is a huge cultural problem. The fact that we would have sort of these men-child children that are acting, it's unbelievable. And part of the reason for that is that we have this cult of youth but part of it is that just we're so rich that we can continue to infantilize our own kids and take care of them, helicopter, parent them and not let them actually grow up. And that's a big problem for happiness. It's a huge problem. I mean, we actually need to let our kids grow up and we need to treat them as grown-ups. We should treat our kids as grown-ups by the time they go off to college, making their own decisions, making a lot of their own mistakes, but it's hard. It's really hard to do because you don't want your kids to screw up and you wanna save them when they're actually making mistakes. And I've been looking at these data for years and years and years but the problem is I gotta do it. I'm a scholar of this junk but I'm also a dad. And so it's interesting. I remember when I was, I got three very, very different kids and what I would ask them to do is to make a business plan for their lives when they're in high school because their entrepreneurs in their lives, I'm VC. So, I get a business plan but it had to be creative. It had to be individual. And my little son, Carlos. Carlos is, he's a character. He was a handful. He was a pain, man. It's like I had a frequent flyer program into the principal's office when he was in high school. Is he the one that's jacked? You told me. Yeah, he's seen pictures of Carlos and Carlos says he's six foot five. He's 203 pounds and he's 4% body fat. The beast. I don't know, he's that tall monster. He's in the, he's a scout sniper in Marine Corps. He's down at Camp Pendleton. He's living his best life. He's married now. He's living his best life for sure. But Carlos in high school, he comes to me when he's graduating and he's gonna graduate maybe. And I said, what's your plan? Now, what's your plan? And he says, I'm not going to college. No, I'm a college professor. My father was a college professor. His father was a college professor. This is the family business. It's like, I'm not going to college. And he said, and he had me dead to rights because I said, you know, really? Do you think you're gonna have the best life? And he said, what were you doing at this age? And I said, well, I was getting tossed out of college. I didn't finish college until I was 30, right? And so he says, I need to figure this out. So when he worked as a farmer for two seasons, dry land weed farmer up in Idaho, picking rocks out of the soil, building fences, and they joined the Marines. And now you can ask him, these are these two questions I ask young people, by the way, about meaning in life. I can tell if you have a meaning crisis in your life, by asking you two questions, diagnostic questions. Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die? Oh, wow. Those are the two questions. And I'm gonna tell you what the answers are, but you gotta have answers. And if you don't have answers, you got a problem. Wow. And he didn't have answers. How did you, as a dad, that must have been, I mean, like you said, you're a professor. You come from a lineage of professors. How did you deal with that back then? Cause I, you know, I ran into situations with my kids where I'm like, I just want to make them do what they need to do. How did you deal with that? Did you make mistakes? Totally, totally. I was, you know, I didn't do it right. Lot had lost my temper. I, you know, my patience was no good. And looking back on it, I can look like this, you know, wise guy, because now I'm at grandfather and it looked all grandfatherly about it. But the truth is you do the best you can and then keep loving each other and then ask for forgiveness a lot. Make sure that you're working as a team with your wife. Cause, you know, they will divide and conquer you 10 times out of 10, if they can. You have to be an impenetrable force with your wife. You guys know what this is like. I mean, you're, you're four year olds already doing this, right? It's a formal wedge between you. They're smart. Speaking of your wife is a wonderful woman. They've had the opportunity to talk to her and she's been so helpful to Jessica. And you guys have been married for a long time. 32 years. What are some of the secrets of doing that? Cause obviously you went through challenges and strong, everybody does. Like what are the secrets of, cause you guys are such great couple, such wonderful people. I know you guys off, you know, off air. What are some of the, the secrets of that? Yeah, it's, it's, I've written about this a lot. I've written about what are the successes, not just of marriage, but of having a happy and harmonious romantic life when they come down to. And that the bottom line is making sure that you're growing together as people, as opposed to growing apart as people. And that sounds sort of simple, but it's, it isn't because you're going to go through all kinds of changes in life. And you're going to find that one of you is going to get more religious than the other. This is, this happens almost inevitably happens in almost every couple that one person starts to feel more religious, especially after age 40, that one person has a different concept of what they want to do professionally than what the other person does. One person goes through a period of depression, very, very common. And the other person's got a band. You get, it's two rivers that are going parallel to each other. And if they break apart and start going in other directions, you're in trouble. But if basically when, when your partner is changing, that's when you decide to change. That's what it comes down to. And sometimes it's you, and sometimes it's her. Yeah. And 30 years is a long time. So it's like, if you're going through it and it's been a year, you got 29 more. Yeah, yeah. You'll find that couples that are, that are more or less happy because there's no such thing as a happy couple. There is just couples that are mostly happy, right? Look, living with another person, right? That's what it comes down to. They'll look back. You'll talk to these couples that have been married for 50 years and they'll look back and say, oh, that five year period was brutal. Like five years. Because, you know, that's, that five years is how long most marriages last, right? Because especially, you know, marriages melt down. It's about a third of marriages break up in the United States at this point. People always say half, not half. But still it's a lot. And so if you basically are willing to say five hard years for 45 good ones, yeah, I'll take that, I'll take that. So that's the key is being, is this commitment to the love, commitment to the love and everything is subservient to the love. It's like my career is subservient to the love. It is. I mean, I'm not gonna sacrifice the love of my marriage for a gig or for money. Who am I? And when you think about it like that, you're like, yeah, yeah, theoretically, yeah. But then the problem is moment to moment to moment. You gotta make these decisions. So today I gotta make a decision about that. I'm willing to sacrifice my wife being mad because I'm gonna do this thing. But all those little decisions add up to having made the wrong meta decision. Do you see the point that I'm trying to make along these lines? If you can, and you know, my wife and I, we teach marriage prep to couples that are engaged. And it's really interesting. And we talk about, it's a class that we call called his needs, her needs. And she jokes that it should be, her needs and his need. What? Done. So it's like, we're kind of simple. Yeah. That's hilarious. Do you find, hold on, hold on. Before you keep moving him, he's got like, there's so many things I wanna go deeper. I'm gonna back you up on some stuff because there's, I feel like there's so much there. First of all, I wanna go back to the metaphor of the happiness formula, the macronutrients. Cause I just, one, I just, that blew my mind. I love that. And so I wanna ask you deeper questions around that. So if break down the, first of all, the three macros, so I don't forget again of what- Enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. Okay. So if you were talking to somebody who wants to improve happiness and you looked at their breakdown of their macronutrients and one was way off. So take me through each one. What would be some tactical things you would tell them to go do to improve that balance? So the big one for young people. So this is, I mean, a lot of young men are listening to us, watching us. And the reason is cause they want the product, which is that they wanna be healthier and better and they wanna improve their lives. Now, young men are really attuned to that first one, that enjoyment one, but they're having trouble because they're getting stuck on pleasure and they're not making it all the way from pleasure to enjoyment. And I see this a lot with young men. So let's start with that one. Number one is that pleasure is something that you can get a lot of immediate satisfaction from alone. Enjoyment never happens alone. This is important. This is just a rule of thumb. This is a practical rule of thumb. So I think pornography, video games, television. If you're doing stuff alone, you're stopping with pleasure and that will not lead to happiness. Even food, eating food by myself, pleasure, eating it with someone else. It's always moving. It's always social. Pleasure plus communion with others, plus consciousness means you're conscious of what you're doing. That's how you get to enjoyment. If you're doing stuff without thinking and you're doing it alone, you're doing it wrong. That's the rule of thumb. Again, I can come up with exceptions and the whole thing, but that's the rule of thumb because you asked about very practically how to do that. That's number one. And that's the biggest one that I see for one of the biggest constituencies for, now that isn't the only constituency for mind pump. I'm 58 years old and I'm a fan. So there are some aging pump heads out there. On the Harvard faculty. The second one is satisfaction. Satisfaction is a really, really tough one because mother nature lies to us about it. Satisfaction is the joy that you get when you achieve something. And if you don't work for anything, you won't get satisfaction. And almost everybody knows that. If you cheat to get an A, you don't get satisfaction from the A. If you work hard and do an all nighter and you get the A, then you get a lot of satisfaction from it. If you work hard all week, you're gonna enjoy your Saturday more. And if you don't work hard all week, if Thursday and Friday look just like Saturday, Saturday is a lot less fun. It's what it turns out to be. If you are working out every day, you're gonna get a lot more satisfaction from the gains that you actually get as opposed to what you talk about. You know, if it's pure PEDs, it's not the same level of satisfaction. You don't get the same psychic return on what you get otherwise. The problem is this. We get fooled into thinking that we will get that satisfaction at last. And that's not how we're wired. Mother nature wants us to strive, but their mother nature wants us to think that we'll get happiness from that forever and get fooled by that again and again and again. That makes us run on what's called the hedonic treadmill. Run, run, run, run, more, more, more, more, more. Because, you know, it wears off immediately and you want the next thing. You know, I'm, oh man, when I get that car, I'm gonna love that car. It's gonna be so great. And a month later, it's just your car. And so you're running for the next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing. Here's the way to break that cycle. Everybody should be ambitious. However, if your formula for satisfaction is more, you're gonna fail. You're gonna be really, really frustrated. The right formula for satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. So it's halves divided by wants. You need a strategy for having more for sure, but you also need a strategy for wanting less. And if you have both strategies, then greater satisfaction at last will be yours. That's the second very practical strategy. So let me like unpack that a little bit. So that, no matter where you're at in your financial state, you can still find this happiness because you can either, one, find ways to set goals, achieve them and have more, or go the other direction and learn to want less. And you should do both. Or if you're a monk, then just the want less strategy, fine. Right, sure. But if you're the rest of us, then you need both. I want to, look, I'm a business. I wanna grow my business. I wanna sell books. I wanna do my thing. I wanna spread the gospel of the science of happiness to as many millions of people as I possibly can, more, more, more. But what do I want less of? I need to want less of the personal glory. I need to want less of the admiration of strangers. I need to want less of the power that I think that this can actually bring me. Because those things are, those are idols, man. Those are idols. And so I have games that I play with my MBA students at Harvard. I have a game called What's My Idol? There's four idols in life, by the way. Money, power, pleasure and fame. And fame means prestige or admiration. It means a lot of different things to different people. Money, power, pleasure and fame. And the way that we play is we say, okay, what's your idol? You don't actually know until you eliminate the ones that aren't your idol, right? So for me, I don't want power. I mean, I was a CEO for a long time. I hated being called boss because I don't like people having power from me. I don't like having power over the people. Okay, kick that one away. Okay, what's next? I've got money and pleasure and honor, admiration of other people left. I could, you know, money's not that important to me. There's not that much stuff I really want to buy. I mean, I have a car I like and I have a house and I don't want another house because, you know, it's another house. So don't worry about it, right? Okay, pleasure or fame. I can, I'm pretty, you know, I'm pretty spartan. You know, I miss one day a month in the gym, right? I mean, I'm willing to suffer. So I can kick away pleasure, okay? But you know what that leaves me? My idol, the admiration of people. I want the applause. And here's the thing, once you know your idol, you will have recognized the thing that always leads you astray. Every time you do something you're not proud of, about yourself, it's always because of that thing. It's always because of that thing. It's like, you know, I'm ashamed of myself. I did that because seeking out that little pleasure because pleasure is your idol. But once you know it, then you can manage it. Knowledge is power of you. So get on that thing, recognize that thing, offer that thing up, ask your partner, your wife to help you with that thing and you do much, much better. So that's on the satisfaction side, how you understand that equation. Haves divided by wants. And that's how you manage the wants. I love that. Yeah. I love that. It's very practical. And these are tools that work. And the last but not least is the meaning part. And the meaning part, the purpose part is you got to ask those two questions. The two questions are, why am I alive? And for what would I be willing to die? And go in search of the answers. My son found it in the Marine Corps. Now he's got a dangerous job. And I ask him, why are you alive? Because God made me. For what would you be willing to die? For my faith, for my family, for the United States of America. Boom. I mean, that's not everybody's answers, but those damn, those are solid answers. And I'm proud of them. But he's, the point is he's happy. Cause he's got the answers. Again, it's all three of those. You can just think about raising kids. Like every single one of those, I'm like, oh, having kids does that formally. It's hard to get those without having children. Like let's say somebody listening is like, I don't want kids. I keep hearing about how it brings all this joy and meaning and whatever. Where do I go searching for those things? And what do people typically find? People who find those things, who don't have children, where do they typically find them? You can find them in work. You can find them in service. You can find them in community. You find them in loving other people is what it comes down to. The way to think about kids is not, it gives me all this joy. It gives me all this fulfillment. What it does is it completes you as a person. And the way that it completes you as a person is through struggle. It's a struggle. Having children, having a family is a struggle. And that's actually what rounds you out as a man. That's the reason that men really become men when they're fathers a lot for the very first time in their lives. And that's the reason that, you know, not everybody. I mean, different people are different. But when you meet a lot of guys who never get married and have kids, never settle down and have kids, they're always kind of childlike. Yeah, that's true. Not all of them. I mean, I don't want anybody to unsubscribe to Mind Pump because of what I just said. But that's a pattern. You know, the people will say that these guys, they seem kind of hard to domesticate. It's also the fact that after 30, if you've never been in a permanent domestic partnership by age 30, you have a one in three chance of a substance abuse disorder for men. Say that again. What age? 30. 30. If you've not been in a permanent domestic or a semi-permanent, what feels like a permanent domestic partnership, married or probably living together, by age 30, the data say that you have a one in three chance as a man of suffering from a substance use disorder. Is that because you're searching for something in the wrong place now? Two things. Number one is if you're addicted, you're less likely to be in a partnership. But also, if you're not being domesticated by a permanent loving relationship, you're more likely to get to fall in love with a substance. You know, you said love other people. You're one of my favorite examples of this. I, you know, you feel it when you meet you the first time. I've seen you with other people and it looks like you're doing that with other people. And you meet with such different people that you wouldn't think, you know, that would be all be your friends because they come from different walks of life, whether it be politics or religion or celebrities, but you genuinely are able to do that. How do you do that? Because it can be hard for people to do that to other people. We say love people and you're like, I don't like that person because of this or I don't like that person because of that. How do you do that? Well, loving people is different than using them. And there's a tendency to look at other people instrumentally and that's a huge mistake. When you meet, and you guys meet people who are very well-known. I mean, you have guests on the show who are really, really well-known. When you meet somebody who's authentically famous, President of the United States, whatever, they know when you're objectifying them, just like an incredibly beautiful woman knows when you're objectifying her. And some people, they kind of like to be objectified. Everybody likes to be admired for some characteristic that we have, whether it's our success or a money or a looks or sense of humor or intelligence, whatever it happens to be. But the truth is that nobody's gonna relax with you when you're objectifying them. Objectifying people is sinful. It's the wrong thing to do. Our fathers taught us not to objectify women. We don't look at a woman and reduce her to her physical characteristics is a bad thing to do. We learn that. It's like, what are you staring at, boy? I mean, remember that and I appreciate that, right? But we do that to people constantly. And the mistake that people make when you're meeting somebody that you admire is to objectify them in a particular way. And that makes intimacy impossible. That makes actual friendship impossible. Don't objectify them. Love them as an actual person. Treat them as an actual human being with actual human feelings. Not just as a bundle of things that you really like and want to be around. Plus that makes it more, saying that it makes me think like sometimes you have a celebrity or someone you follow and you tend to idolize them. And then it's like they're either perfect or if they're not, oh my gosh, this crush is all mine. But what you're saying is like they're a human and they're flawed just like I am. And so if I don't like this particular thing or agree with this particular opinion, that's okay. What about the opposite though with someone maybe you do not like hold up or put up on a pedestal. This is, we actually talk about the software. Sometimes I get frustrated when we are quick to judge somebody because there's things that we don't like about how they do versus, I've always chosen to look at somebody and you can do so many things that I don't like but I'm gonna find the thing that I do like and focus on that. Like what is the advice to interacting with people that their values don't align necessarily with you or you don't like maybe some of the things you do and how do you still come off as that person because I feel like that's part of what Sal's asking too. Yeah, I mean, another form of objectification is to reduce somebody to their opinions, to their political opinions for example. That's just another form of objectification. So it's like, you know, you guys are like into capitalism. Well, I know everything I need to know about you. That's like saying you got big muscles. That's all I need to know about you. Are you kidding me? That's one part of who I am is one outward characteristic of who I am as a person. And so it's making a commitment to yourself to not do that because once again, the objectification problem, it leads to less happiness and less prospect for a productive and fun friendship is the way that it comes down. So it's just like anything else. It's like I don't like you because of that one thing is like I wanna be around you because of that one thing. It's interesting. So I bet you guys are starting to experience this more. So you're on the road more than used to be because you're doing events now and you're getting recognized, right? You're getting recognized in airports, especially when the three of you are together that then it's like obviously it's the mind pump guys and it's people treat you weird, right? They know us. They know you, well, and they know more about you than you know about them because that's what being a little bit famous is all about. They know they can tell you the name of your wife. For example, it's like that's creepy except that it's not because you mentioned it and they listened to the show but they treat you in a way that's slightly awkward and uncomfortable, right? And that's what's going on with people of this world, historical significance, they're getting all their money and that can warp the character. And the key thing is for you guys is making sure that doesn't start messing you guys up, right? Because that's what will happen to people who experience a whole lot of fame and get addicted to it on the dopamine cycle. Then pretty soon they don't wanna be anything except objectified because that's what gives them their shot of the neuromodulator. You know what's interesting about that, Arthur, is that we started this so late, like we weren't kids, right? We started this after we had businesses, we were all in our mid-30s. By the time we got traction, we're late 30s. And none of us, that's the thing that we like least about this business is the getting known or fame type of deal. And I think it's because maybe we started later because had we done this in our, we talk about this all the time. Had we done this in our 20s? You would have wired your brains to it. Oh, it would have been a hot flame that burns out. Well, you would have been influencers. Yeah. You wouldn't have been, you guys are educators. You're actually educators. Thank you. Oh, that's so much better than that. It's true. You're in the information business. And the reason I started listening to this show years ago before I met you, I was, you didn't know when you met me for the first time that I was, you came to an event that I was doing. You didn't know that I was a fan of yours, right? Why? Because you wanted my good and you wanted me to learn things. Every time I turn it on, it's like, huh, yeah. You authentically were trying to teach me things as opposed to convince me of things or trying to influence me to do things. I never felt manipulated by you guys because you're educators. Awesome. Wow, thank you. We're good salespeople. Yeah. Just kidding. What's the upsell now? Something I've been wanting to tell you, and I want to say this on air is you played a huge role in my spiritual progression. Okay, so, and the audience knows where I started and how I moved along. And one of the reasons why you were so influential, Arthur, is sometimes you meet people that are spiritual and religious and they just come across as like preachy or righteous or you're not like that at all. Like you just, I want to know more because you just seem to be living it and you're just wonderful person. Like what's like, how do we do that? How do we go from like, oh, now I'm spiritual and I know these things to like you. Like I said, you influenced me and I don't think you were trying to, you were just yourself. Well, I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy. And one of the things that you find is that people who are happiest have a transcendental path in their life. Now I'm a Catholic. It's literally the most important thing in my life. But I'm also a social scientist. I'm going to tell you that that's not the only path to the happiness, everybody's got to decide what the right path is, you know, cosmically and, you know, eternally or whatever. But for living a happy life, having something bigger than you, something spiritual, something philosophical that's bigger than you is incredibly important. And it's something that you need to be thinking about. Otherwise, look, I mean, life is so tedious. My job, my money, my lunch, my commute. It's just, it's like watching the same episode of Better Call Saul every single day for the rest of your life. It's terrible. And so, but if you can zoom out on it, you can get peace and perspective on your life. For me, that's the faith of my youth. For other people, it's reading the Stoic philosophers or walking in nature or studying the Mohan Sebastian Bach's fugues or starting a meditation practice. But the truth is we need a transcendental practice. Now, what draws people to that? If you want people to be happy and you know that's the case, you're not going to get that. I'm not going to get that by kicking down Sal's door and shoving a crucifix in his face. That's not going to happen. The way that it's going to be winning is excellence. Is have people say, I mean, excellence in life. The way that people are going to want to, I mean, just even things that are less, they're more ephemeral, less cosmic than what we're talking about here. If people want to get in better physical shape, what's going to attract them to it? The answer is excellence is going to attract them to it. And that means whole life excellence. Why are we having a conversation about the science of happiness on mind pump? Because of the mind part, not the pump part. I'm also interested in the pump part. You come to me for the mind, I go to you for the pump. But also go to you for the fact that you're integrating the two for the whole person excellence, which is incredibly winsome. And people want to know what the power behind that is. For me, part of the power behind that is my relationship with God. And if somebody says, hmm, tell me more, all the better because I want, they're good. I want, I will the good or the other. Because I love you, that's why. I love how you portray your faith. And this is something that I grew up in the church and it's been a real struggle with the culture of that and just how to present that to people. And like, I just have always wondered why, you know, Matthew seven was just like, just went right over everybody's head. Can you describe like, why, why do we focus so much on the negative? And why do we focus so much on other people's inadequacies versus just loving them and. So you're talking about love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. You have been told you should love your neighbor, you should love your neighbors and hate your enemies. I tell, I give you a new teaching, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you because it's hard, you know? And because we're going according to the, you know, it's interesting life as a human, one of the beautiful things about it is that you don't just have this animal nature. You've got a divine nature and we get to choose but left up to mother nature. We're going to go low. We're always going to go low. You're going to go for pleasure over enjoyment. You're going to be on the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more, more, more. You're not going to understand what the formula for actual meaning is because you're going to overlook that entirely. The divine nature that each one of us has called to do is to do these hard things. And again, fitness is a metaphor for this of doing a hard thing that doesn't feel that it's like, it's much easier to sit on the couch and play video games and watch TV and eat hog and doze. I mean, it's much easier to do that, but you elect the hard thing because you choose the divine path. That's what it comes down to. Love your enemies is the divine path precisely because it's the hard thing. And look, we don't have, we're not throwing a dart into the general population for the people who are watching and listening to us now. You watch and listen to Mind Pump because you want to choose the better path, which is the harder path. So then the question is, what is the better path in every part of your life? What is the Mind Pump for every part of your life? That means, okay, yeah, you're gonna get into the gym. Yep, you're gonna clean up your diet. Yep, you're gonna treat your wife right. Yep, you're going to develop yourself spiritually. Yep, you're gonna love your enemies. Look, it gets complicated real fast, but the divine path is a divine path. And the good news is that you can find it and work on it for the rest of your life and make progress for the rest of your life. That's awesome. How long have you been teaching college students? So I started, I got my PhD when I was 34 and I went immediately to Georgia State University in Atlanta for three years, then went to Syracuse for seven. Then I stopped and I ran a think tank in Washington, D.C. for 11 years. I was president of a think tank in D.C. And then I came back and I took a professorship at Harvard in 2019. So off and on for decades. Lots of differences with these new generation versus the older, what are the similar challenges or different challenges? People are people. People are people are people. What happens is the culture changes a little bit and the polarization in political life has filtered itself into academia. And so the biggest problem that I see, the worst thing that we've done to students in the current generation is that we've told them that you should hate your enemies and that you need to fight instead of love and that the right way to make the world better is by being more pugilistic, to be an activist instead of a volunteer. That's the biggest problem. We have a huge activism problem in this country. If you wanna make something better, you gotta scream and yell and hate other, hate the right people and curious sign and cancel. And that's nonsense for happiness, but it's also nonsense for progress. You need to love more, love more, love more, love more. That's what it comes to. You wanna better world? Love more. You wrote it down. I also think too that what you brought up earlier about like just focusing on one person or just like your immediate community, you're gonna have way more effective impact in that direction versus trying to solve the world's problems through all these. Holy, there's this ancient scripture in the Jewish Talmudic book of the Sanhedrin which is that a man saves the world who saves a single man. Oh, wow. Look, the whole world is a person. I mean, a person is the whole world. I mean, each one of us is the whole world. That's what it comes down to. And the idea of I'm gonna sprinkle droplets of water in the ocean. No, man, no. It's interesting because we don't see people very much. You know, we don't look at people. There's so many people that we overlook constantly. I mean, we look at, we're in California right now which is the best place and the worst place in a lot of ways because it's become so utterly unlivable because we've stopped seeing our brothers and sisters as people but rather as kind of wards of the state and basic outcasts. And so, you know, the way that we've neglected entirely marginalized populations at the government level. I mean, you see the evidence of failure when you go into San Francisco, it's like Blade Runner. Oh, so true. Holy, you can't believe it but that's really a lack of love is what it comes down to. It's a lack of love on our own part and it's not even a political statement that I'm making. And so, what we all can do to redress that. I mean, you don't have to find a homeless person and take them home but you do need to look them in the eye and treat them like an actual human being. It's funny because I was given this lecture to a bunch of college students, you know, Christian college students and I said, look, do you wanna lift up another person? You gotta make them needed because that's the essence of dignity is to be needed. Not to be managed by the state and by welfare but to be needed by other people. And I said, I'll give you an example. We were in New York City and I said, you're gonna find a homeless man within a block of here. What do you need from him? And these students are like baffled. They were completely confused by the whole question. And I said, you know what he needs from you who's a sandwich perhaps. You need his prayers. If you're a Christian, you believe that God hears the cries of the poor. You need his prayers. So next time you're gonna give that guy a sandwich, look him in the eye and say, by the way, would you please pray for me and my family? Cause you need those prayers. You said that at your talk that when we first saw you you told that story and it got me emotional and I've actually done that since and it was so profound and the profound part of it was every time I've done that, I've done at least three times is the look in the face of the person What what? You're asking me for what? And then absolutely, absolutely brother. And it's like unbelievable. It's human connection. And look, there's more that we can do. We need programs and we need policies and I got it. But what we need in this, we have a society that's becoming bereft of love. And that's the problem. And if we actually got back to the basics of love and human connection, then we could figure out the policies. You know, a guy like you, I can't imagine you cause you're so connected with politicians as well. And you worked in Washington and politics is like, you ask the average person, what do you think about politicians? They hate them, they hate them. Terrible. And you talk about polarization. And I mean, as we're talking, the two least popular people in the world are probably gonna end up what it looks like running against each other. How the hell does this even happen? How do we change, how do we change this? How do we change this? How do you walk among these politicians and work with them and they love you and you love them? And I see you talking with them and there's on both sides of the aisle and like, how do we do this? So we're in a, we economists, we call it a suboptimal equilibrium. There's a sort of the game theory around this. It's very easy to get into a situation where the worst people are encouraged to do the worst things. What's happening right now is that we're in a fear polarity. Any family or company or community or country is either in a love polarity or fear polarity. And a fear polarity is one in which the vehicular language of what we're doing is fear. And we're mostly afraid of the other side. So even though we don't like our own bully, we're afraid of the other bully more. Oh, I see. So that's how the polarity of national politics is working in the United States. And what you need to do is to flip the polarity to a love polarity. And that will happen from time. It doesn't mean everybody loves each other all the time. It's not like this is Berkeley 68 or something, right? Because that's nonsense, right? But the truth is that that's where there's a lot more trust and we find that at different periods in American politics. We find that with Democrats and Republicans. We find that my parents thought that Reagan was terrible, but they trusted Reagan. And I knew a lot of people who couldn't stand Bill Clinton, but they more or less, they trusted Bill Clinton to be competent as a president and to work with the other party when it was actually possible. It's because the polarity was basically shifted. The good news is in politics, there's a lot of good going on at the local level, not here in California. It's catastrophic. I'm sorry, I don't count around. I feel bad to keep the guys here. You see it in a lot of places where there's, you don't quite know if it's a Democrat or Republican. You don't quite know. Because you have these people that are dedicated to doing a lot of good and you don't agree with everybody, but they want to hear particular voices. They want to make progress. They don't want to, in a fear polarity, the way that it works is, if I don't get 100% of what I want, I've lost. Oh, okay. Now, you guys don't do that. I mean, you guys have, this is a multifaceted business and you're buying and selling property and doing all kinds of stuff that's beyond the scope of the podcast. When you're doing that, you actually want the other party to win. You want that, why? Because you might want to do business with that other person again. And you think about it in a different way. I love polarity as one that's win-win oriented. And that's what's going on in state and local politics in certain areas. That's what's going on in a lot of Americans' lives. And that's what we got to bring back. And so that's what I'm talking about. What are you actually doing so that you can make that cool? And sometimes it is. And of course, it will be again. It's just that this is a very tough time. And so that's the reason that we have these two characters that are gonna be like, it's like set as nice as possible. Double phase 330 million Americans. That's the best we can do. Before we got on air, you mentioned that your teachings have now the amount of neuroscience has increased dramatically. I'd love to hear maybe some things that either one, you're currently learning or currently speaking and teaching about right now. Yeah, so I'm, I'm, I've just finished up a book that's coming out in September with Oprah Winfrey. Which by the way, congratulations. Thank you. It's phenomenal. She's a fantastic co-author. How did you meet her by the way? Did she contact you? Yeah, she's a reader of my column in Atlantic. And she enjoyed my last book called From Strength to Strength. So I went on her podcast and we started, we just, you know, we hit it off like a house on fire because she's super into ideas. And, and so we wound up meeting and, and, and she said, you know, we, why don't we write a book? I'm like, huh. Is this an Oprah? Sure. It's like, let me think, yes. And, and it was phenomenal and really, really rewarding experience. So that's coming out in September. That's done. That book is done. And a lot of it is, interestingly, it's parallel to what I'm, I wind up teaching in my class at Harvard, which is more and more about this, about the mechanism of action when we're talking about happiness. So the most interesting questions in happiness, they, they don't come from social science. They come from philosophy. They come from theology. They come from art and music and poetry. And that's where the interesting questions come about. They're talking about love and they're talking about the meaning of life and all that stuff. Then you have to answer, why do things happen the way that they do in my, in my head? And, and modern neuroscience over the past 30 years has exploded in the way that we understand these things. And so the two, sort of there's two branches that are going on simultaneously. One is about neurochemistry and one is about the basic mechanics. So it's just the anatomy of what's happening. And so it's quite interesting. I'm doing both at the same time. We've talked about dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin. You know, we've talked about these things in this conversation so far. The anatomy turns out to be really interesting and very complicated. And so I'm studying this all the time because I wasn't trained as a neuroscientist. I was trained as a social scientist. And so I've got the statistical and mathematical methods and experimental methods, but understanding the mechanisms and the anatomy is really, really hard. I mean, the brain is a very complicated thing, but it's super interesting because I'm learning about things that always I knew, but now they're making sense in a different way. And I'll give you an example. The, when you feel pain, like when you go to, when, when a bad thing happens to you when you're squatting. Now, maybe that hasn't happened to you guys yet, but by the time you're 58 like me, it's almost inevitable. It happened last week. So trust me. I know. And by the way, if all of your aches and pains are gym related, good on you, right? As opposed to I got up off the couch wrong. You know, that's not what you want. But something happens and it hurts. There's this, there's two components to the pain. There's the sensory component, which is it hurts in that place. And there's the affective component, which means I don't like it now want it to stop. Those are two different sensations and they're happening in two different parts of the brain. The affective component, I don't like the pain, is using the same part of the brain when you have psychological pain or emotional pains, the same part of the brain. Wow. So when you're rejected by somebody or your wife yells at you, that affects, it's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. It's a very ancient part of the brain is dedicated entirely to physiological and psychological pain. So that's the key thing to keep in mind. So when you're in the gym and you're doing the right thing, so you're like doing occlusion reps on your biceps and you feel like you're going to die. What's happening is you have lots of sensory pain, but no affective pain because you want the pain. And so it's not actually, you're not like, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It's like, oh, it hurts so much and I love it. Now, can we shift the pains? Okay. That's the key. Once you know this, this is the reason that the neuro mechanics or the neuro physiology is so important because once you understand this, you understand the difference between you're forming a little off on your dead and then getting hurt and actually wrapping up your arms and wanting to feeling like your biceps are going to pop and it hurts. I mean, that's pain. I mean, that's really, really painful, but it's so good because you're doing it on purpose and you're doing it your own way. Then you can start thinking about hard things in your life in a different way. Because once you do that, you can start thinking, look, I can manage the affective component of my pain and the biggest problem I have in life is the affective component. I'm being inhibited from doing things because I'm like, I don't like it. I don't like it. I'm going to decide to like it. I'm going to decide to like it. You can start taking the pain and sacrifice and challenge in your life and turn it into opportunities just like building your muscles. That's what it turns into. And so I'll give you an example. You have conflict at home because we're married men. There's going to be conflict today. Don't put that on me, man. This morning, author, this morning. I'm not even home, but there's conflict this morning, right? And okay, so is it going to be more like you did something wrong on your deadlift or is it going to be more like I'm subjecting my biceps to intense pain? And it's your choice. It's your choice. You know, when you have a conflict and you have a disagreement, you can turn it into trying to actually get hypertrophy in your relationship. Opportunity for growth. Absolutely. By turning it into that and the way that you do that is like, okay. The bad form is I did this and you did this and I and you and me and you. And starting to talk about us and we, that's when you start to get hypertrophy. And guess what? The affective component of the pain from this conflict is going to be dramatically decreased. How do I understand that? I mean, this is a life lesson, but I got that from the neuroanatomy. That's interesting. You know what's funny? I talk on the show all the time about the physiological response to pain and then your relationship to the pain. It's funny as you're saying this, we've all experienced this as trainers. You'll train somebody who's never exercised before and the pain that they feel from an exercise. They'll drop, we've had, it's common, they'll drop away. Oh my God. But then they develop a different relationship with the pain through practice. So what you're saying is you can change your relationship to pain, psychological and physical to the point where it still hurts, but it doesn't, you don't have the same. You're separating out the affective and sensory components of the pain. Wow. You're separating those two components from one another. And once you do that, you win. Once you do that, you're managing the pain and the pain is no longer managing you. That's how you do that. And that's why neuroscience is so critically important for what we're talking about here. It'd be interesting to see the people they study to figure that out, right? You probably, people, cause you would take- Like monks that can meditate for hours. Or people who are MMA fighters and just take beatings and they can shift the way they receive. They figured it out without knowing actually what's going on. They've just kind of figured it out that, and it's also the funny thing. You know, there are a lot of people who are like, I like, I like, if some people are like perverted, they like pain. And they've done it in a not very constructive way. Right. Well, we just, we just speculated like, I don't know, last week on the podcast, we were talking about Justin's history of playing football. And I'm like, you know, what is, and I was actually asking the guys, what is it you think is different about that person who gets hit, de-cleated the first time in football and gets back up and goes, oh, I want to do that again. Versus someone like me, I remember when I got played football for the first time, I was like, oh, this isn't for me. I don't want to do anything. I don't want to do this. There has to be something going on. And you explained that neurologically, that person has that ability to already shift whether they did it. Well, the experience and the practice, the practice is, cause this, all this stuff comes with practice. Managing your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex takes reps and this gets us back to the early part of the conversation about how it's different to be a dad when you're 44 as opposed to when you're 26. What's going on is that you, I mean, you're up at three o'clock in the morning with a dirty diaper and a feeding. And that creates all sorts of affective pain. You know, it's like, I'll want to be asleep. I don't want to be doing this. I can't believe that she's just lying there. I mean, all this affective pain that you're feeling. And when you're 44, it's like, I can handle that. I've had a lot worse. And when I manage this kind of thing, I get better. You have this sense of, and that's what's happening. Okay, so explain to me what's happening on a neurological level when I do this. Okay, so I've shared this before with talking about how I've overcome fear and struggle in my life. As I've practiced this over years, I've learned that the bigger the fear, the greater the challenge, the more rewarding it is on the other side. So I've learned over years to when I get those moments of, oh my God, I'm scared. Or, oh my God, this is so bad to actually reframe and go, oh, you know what that means? If this is the scariest or the worst time ever in my life, that means when I get through this on the other side, I'm gonna have one of the best rewards. So what's happening neurologically that I've figured out that I can't put words to? Well, so there's a couple of things happening. Number one is you're more experienced. You just didn't have the reps to know that it was gonna be okay. You've seen to the end of the story already. That's a big constellation to be over 40. That is a big constellation that nobody under 40 knows. That's why the reason that people over 80 are much happier, generally speaking, because they have more emotional regulation because they have more experience. So they feel the same negative basic emotions. The negative basic emotions are discussed, sadness, anger, and fear. Those are the basic negative emotions produced by the limbic system of the brain. And they're giving you signals that there's a threat. Like, don't eat that or you'll die. Or, you know, better run, that's a predator. Or, you know, sadness, don't be disconnected from that person because you'll wander the frozen tundra alone and die, or whatever it happens to be. They're all signals to you. What happens when you're 25 is everything feels like a mortal threat and you don't know the end of the story. By the time you're 40, you're like, yeah, I've seen this story before. It's gonna be okay. I don't like it, but it's gonna be okay. And when you know something's gonna be okay, you can do anything. And when you're 80, you're like, not only is it gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay by tomorrow. And so I'm gonna cut till tomorrow and start feeling better already. I'm just gonna cut to the chase and start feeling better. And so he's like, yeah, that sucks, but, you know, tomorrow I'm gonna feel better. So I'm gonna get ahead and start feeling better. And that's what's happening. The second thing is now you've got reps on satisfaction. Remember, satisfaction is the reward after struggle. So when you get a lot more experience on that, you start to see struggle as something that's gonna have a reward. And your brain has started to make that connection between the struggle and the reward. So when something starts to hurt, you're like, oh no, oh no, ooh, but I know it's gonna happen. I know I'm gonna get an ice cream sundae at the end of this. I know it's gonna be so good when I get through this. It's kind of like, you know, I'm hitting your hand with a hammer because, you know, it's gonna feel so good when you stop. That's hilarious. So we're, okay. So in terms of pain and all that, it's fascinating to me because I've noticed too, like there can be a dark side to that in terms of like, I've learned those same things where I'm like re-associating it and I'm actually seeking it out. Seeking out opportunities make me uncomfortable because I know there's growth there. But then, you know, at what point does that become like a self-sabotaging type of mentality? Yeah, well, you know that no benefits come without costs, but you also have to have a prudential judgment about cost-benefit analysis. So you guys know, for example, if you're investing in real estate, you gotta hold some debt. I mean, unless you're bootstrapping everything, but you're not gonna own very much real estate if you're bootstrapping your whole portfolio and paying for everything in cash, you're gonna carry some debt. That's got risks. They're manageable risks. You gotta understand the risks. You get more experience with the risks, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, you take out a new, every time you sign a mortgage, you're like, oh my, I mean, this always gets your attention when you're signing a mortgage and you owe a million dollars or more, for sure. And or whatever, you know, whatever that number, that high number is for you. But you can cross the line into being imprudent, you know, and people do that all the time where they're basically taking on too much cost relative to the benefit. And that's, and one of the things that you find is some people will only get their dopamine from disproportionate risk. They're these risk fakers. Gamblers. Yeah. And what'll happen with that is pretty interesting. So people who are, who get the, gambling is a really interesting dopamine phenomenon, as a matter of fact, because what you find is that there's, the casinos have figured out how to give you maximum dopamine if that's your thing. The way is that you're, if you kept winning predictably, you wouldn't get any dopamine. It has to be very unpredictable. And- You have to lose too. You got to lose to get the right amount of dopamine too. And so they understand that that's how the neurochemistry works. And everybody kind of gambles in their own way. And what happens is if you become too much of a gambler and the costs start to cross, across the benefits, it's a problem. The other thing is that there are certain things that, where the cost is actually really, really damaging. You know, wouldn't want to get into a bad fight with your wife and say terrible things that are hurtful and she's going to remember for years, just because you want to have makeup sex. That's a bad trade. Right? That's not so good. Depends on the sex. Your results may differ, I think. Arthur, fire beware. You're, you know, you're very experienced working with entrepreneurs. You comment on entrepreneurship. What about the neurochemistry or the makeup of entrepreneurs? When I meet other business owners there's a lot of famous sayings, like an entrepreneur, someone that's willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week. You know, like crazy statements like that. Like what is it that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur versus somebody who- Or delusional. So there's a whole literature, psychological literature on what's called EO, entrepreneurial orientation. And it's everybody is on the entrepreneurial orientation spectrum is from zero to one. Zero would be where there's none and one is where you're pure. Nobody is on either pole of the entrepreneurial orientation spectrum. Everybody's along that line and getting more exposure to risk and understanding it and being able to manage it and become more comfortable with it will move you closer to one, everybody. But almost everybody has a, has a predisposition toward it as well. To be an actual natural entrepreneur the estimate starts about 2% of the population. Two? 2% of the population is a natural entrepreneur. They're like, yeah. I don't, and they'll say it's not like working for anybody, but really what they want is they want, it's a mutation from the norm and they want the thrill. Now, where do you see it most evidently? We think of as business startups, it's immigration. Immigration is the single most entrepreneurial thing you can do, why? Because entrepreneurship is the willingness and ability to put your capital at risk. What about your linguistic capital? Your social capital, your religious capital, your emotional capital, all of it. That's way more important than your financial capital because most immigrants have like no financial capital. They're putting all this stuff at risk and that's the single most entrepreneurial experience. That's the reason that when the United States starts cutting off the flow of immigrants, we become less entrepreneurial. We need like bring them in, bring them in, bring them in, bring them in. That's the ferment that's gonna continue to make us a very upwardly mobile progress oriented entrepreneurial population is bringing in the people who've got the mutation. They're in the 2% in their country and they're gonna bail on their country. The DeStefanos, they're like, Sicily is boring and has no opportunity, buh-bye, that's what you want. You wanna self-select for that in your culture and then make it super easy for people to display that in business and in work. Then you wanna make it easy for them to do that. And that's the kind of culture that will actually lead to the greatest amount of progress. You're mentioning mutations, so there's genetic components to this. Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, that's somewhat speculative research. I say for sure because I think it's very compelling. But there's, we've mapped the human genome and they haven't found the entrepreneurship gene. No doubt it's a combination of all sorts of effects is what it comes down to. But it's unthinkable that this is not something that's in no small part genetic. So I've had this conversation with my family. So we're obviously all from immigrants and America has always been known to be this entrepreneurial place built by immigrants. So it's like we took the 2% from the world and America at one point was a lot more than 2% entrepreneurs, if you consider that. And so those genes have been passed on. And so we just have a culture that's been built around. That's right. Then you get mutants. I mean, when did the Shaffers come here? Oh, I don't know. Long time ago. Yeah, yeah. So that means you're a mutant. That means that you basically mutated from that because you're like, I like it. Now, everybody's an entrepreneur with the enterprise of your life. And that's an important thing to keep in mind, that risk management, willingness and ability to try new things in your personal life. And for most people, the most entrepreneurial thing they're gonna do with the enterprise of their life is fall in love and stay in love. I mean, getting married, it's a very entrepreneurial thing to do. That's like, I don't know, but I'm signing this thing. I'm gonna bet half of everything I have on this right here. That's a very entrepreneurial thing to do. And so it's important to talk to young people today about are you an entrepreneur or not? I mean, the stupidest thing I see are these like young guys today who are willing to put $10 million of somebody else's capital at risk, but they're not willing to fall in love. That is so non-entrepreneurial, right? And it signals to me that it's not a real entrepreneur and it's somebody I would not invest in. Oh, wow. That's a valid point. Wow, that's interesting. I had a really weird like entrepreneurial journey because I did it when I was in high school, like at 14, 15 years old out of necessity, like you can't, no one would hire a 14 year old. So I had to figure out how to, and we didn't have a lot. So I had to figure out how to make money. So mowing people's lawns was like the obvious answer as a kid. And then I had the opportunity to, when I was late high school into junior college, got to work for a dairy. And it was like a very small organic dairy back then that was private. And I got to see how hard they worked, husband and wife with two kids, never took a day off. Were they the founders? Yeah. So it was just small mom pot dairy. We only had about 150, 200 cattle or so in an almond ranch. And I mean, at one point I got close enough in the family to see the books and realize these people worked every day of their life to have the freedom to say they're entrepreneurs. And literally it was like clearing 50 grand a year. And I thought, oh my God, I don't wanna be an entrepreneur. It's way harder than I thought it was gonna be. Then go work for a company for years that I loved working for, but realized that the bosses had control of my paycheck. I could work hard, I could be successful, but even then these comp plan changes would come out every year and it would dictate how much I could or could not make. And I didn't like that. And that kind of drove me into entrepreneur. And then I fell in love with that. I fell in love with the ability to have that autonomy and control. Yeah, no, no. And you've definitely got the gene. You've definitely got the gene. And anybody who's like, I'm gonna go and do whatever I have to do to make money at 14, that's an entrepreneurial thing to do. Most people don't do that is what it turns out. And if we had every single person had the gene, it would be a nightmare. I mean, our society would be completely ungovernable. Right? It was like the, the mind pump guys times a hundred million. Oh my God. It would be, well, it would be a different kind of country. That's for sure. We'd have to figure out other structures of impulse, but free gym memberships for everybody. I know it's like, wow, let's experiment with anarchy. You know what, that's so true. But we got to have enough of it. You got to have enough of it or you become a, you become a moribund country with a, you know, just an economy that doesn't work at all. It's got no dynamism. It's got no adventure. I mean, you look, you see places like this around the world and that's not what we want to be. How worried are you that we're heading the other direction? I don't like it. I know, I know your whole documentary was the obviously opposite of that, right? So, you know, what do you see happening? Do you think that we're, you know, moving in this more socialist type of direction? Yeah, part of it is the aging of the population. People tend to be less open to new experience. Human personality is really thought of as having five dimensions to it. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. And as you get older, there's certain things that are really good. Neuroticism tends to fall as you get older. You tend to be less hung up about dumb stuff as you get older. People tend to be more agreeable as they get older. They're just like, it's too much hassle to be a jerk. And so people get agreeable. The problem is that openness to experience tends to fall a lot. So it falls by about 50% between the ages of 19 and 60. And you're just less open to experiences. That's one of the reasons that, you know, 19-year-old dudes would be like, yeah, I'll eat that. Yeah, I'll eat that. Yeah, I'll eat that. It's like, I'm down. It's like, what is it? I'll take it. Famous last words. I know, I know. It's like the famous last words, like, watch, look, no hands and part of that has to do with the lack of connection between the wiring of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which the amygdala is part of the limbic system that governs, you know, excitement and fear and the prefrontal cortex, which gives you a prudential judgment. You know, the executive center of the brain, when they're not wired together, then risk-taking and cost-benefit analysis are not, you know, communicating properly. And that's the reason that you, you know, my son joined the Marines at 19 and he probably wouldn't at 39 is kind of what it boils down to. So under the circumstances though, the dark side of being less open to experience is that you're less likely to be entrepreneurial. And as we see the aging of the population, we're gonna have a less entrepreneurial country and less we have more immigration. That's just the way it's gonna be. And there's no two ways about it. We're gonna be, we're on the trajectory that we're on right now, 25 years from now, it's gonna be retired America. And we're gonna act like a retired guy. And I don't want that. Yeah, it makes me sad because, you know, I could see the argument on both sides, but really if people come here and they don't get free stuff, that's the problem. Come over here, we'll pay for everything. Then that's different. But if you come over here, like when my grandfather came here, they're not gonna get free stuff. You can only contribute and make that easy. I feel like that, that would be the solution right there. Well, there's a lot to it. But you know, the other thing that's worth keeping in mind is that it's very sort of politically correct in my business to say, I want more skilled immigration. We have 85,000 H1B1 visas for people to come into the United States and start businesses and, you know, work for Google, et cetera. And we should change it to 200,000 or 300,000 or whatever it wants to be. But the truth is that people who are unskilled are super entrepreneurial too. They're super entrepreneurial. And even if you have lots and lots of services, I mean, and this is a political discussion where they should have more or fewer services to be sure, but that's not gonna deter somebody or encourage somebody. It's like, you know, I'm gonna go to America where there's a better system of income redistribution. No, nobody's saying that. They're like, I want out of this place and I wanna go to that place because there's more to do. That's a good point. Like I'm gonna go to a place where I'm living there illegally. I mean, say what you want. That's taking a lot of risk. That's living in a very risky way as it turns out. So I'm of the view, and also by the way, the data are very clear that low-scale immigrants, they'd hardly displace any native-born Americans. There's almost no displacement. In an economy that's 3.4% unemployment, uh-uh, uh-uh. That's just not going on at all. So for me, it's like more and more and more. I want more of everybody. Part of it is like, look, my grandparents were illiterate, first grade education orphans. And you know, the wrong religion. And so if I'm like, no, no, no, close the gates. Yeah. Like that takes some nerve, man. Yeah. No, that's a great point. Yeah. You know, you wrote in one of your articles, great articles by the way in the Atlantic, but I believe in one of them, you talked about the connection between intelligence and like mental illness or mental health problems. Why is there a connection between being smart and having mental health issues? Yeah. Well, it's a good question. And a lot of people have asked that, but it's part of it is that when you're inside your head too much, it's very easy to be very, very involved in what philosophers call the difference between the I self and the me self. You're two people. When you're looking in the mirror, you're the guy looking and you're the guy being looked at. That's two people. That's the I self versus the me self. The I self is observation about the world. The me self is your reflection that you're perceiving in everything and all of your interactions and your social media mentions and the literal mirrors around your house. And what happens is you have more and more ways to be the me self and to be observing yourself and your feelings and my thoughts and my fears and everything when you're in your head all the time, which people who are more sort of traditionally intellectual and educated and traditional means they tend to be. And that's not good for you. The truth is it's not good for you. Me self is, I mean, you got to have it so you know who you are. And so you don't, you know, you don't get fired from your job and whatever. You know if that girl likes you or whatever, but we're way too me self, way too me self. It's very interesting. I had a conversation with a guy that I know lives in Boston who was a fitness influencer. So this is a guy. Got an educator influencer. Fitness influencer. Like and personal trainer. And this is a guy who lived all year round at sub 10 body fat, all year round and was magazine covers. Cause it was a little bit before social media is what it is today. And for 10 years, 16 to 26. And he said he was so unhappy. He was so unhappy. And the way that he solved it, he's a very smart guy. So the way that he solved it, he literally took every mirror out of his apartment and showered in the dark for a year. What? So that he couldn't see his body. That's wild. And he didn't know that what he was trying to do was to turn his entire life from me self to I self. Wow. And he cracked the code. He did. Any other tips on that? Still in good shape. He's still in good shape for strength and health. He has a better relationship with it. Yeah, for strength and health. Any other tips on that? Cause my oldest is, he's very smart, highly intelligent. Definitely gets stuck in his head. Definitely gets stuck in that. Any other tips? Yeah. So use it for good advantage. So there's a technique called metacognition. This isn't my new book that I'm, I just finished with Oprah about, about one of the most important principles of emotional self-management is to separate out your feelings from your experience of your feelings in the following way. Feelings occur. Emotions occur because there's signals about the outside world to you. People think of emotions as, you know, good things and bad things and no, no, no. Emotions are signals to you so that you get proper calories and know it or run away from a tiger. Bad feelings are so that you'll act fast. Good feelings are that you'll be attracted to something so that you'll survive and pass on your genes. That's what feelings are all about. That's what they're for. And they're limbic. They come from an ancient part of your brain and they happen to you. Now here's the key thing about being a fully formed, evolved human being. You can be managed by those feelings or you can manage those feelings. So if you're of an intellectual bent like your son, the key thing is to get into the space between your feelings happening to you and you deciding what you're going to do. This is really critically important. So you say to yourself, for example, this is what meditators do. It's like, Arthur's feeling sad right now. How interesting that Arthur's feeling sad right now. I wonder why Arthur's feeling sad right now. Mark Hart totally talks about this. Yeah, yeah. That's the gap. And there's lots and lots of ways to do that. Journaling is a way to do that. That's when people go to therapy. I've never been therapy, but when people go to therapy, they're learning about themselves so they can manage their own feelings. You use your intellect, which is an executive function of your brain is largely part of the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue behind your forehead. And you say to that, I'm going to analyze myself and see what these things mean. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to journalist thing. I'm going to talk about this thing. I'm going to talk about it with close friends. I'm going to meditate on this particular thing. And I'm going to get really, really super interested in these particular feelings. That's metacognition. That's awareness of awareness. That's the most human thing you can possibly do. Yeah, that's what makes this human. So it's like observing the feeling, no judgment. No judgment. Isn't that interesting? Like you're watching it. Yeah, isn't that interesting? And then you say, if I were advising Sal on this feeling, what would I tell him? Wow. This would be a good tip for anybody who can get managed or run by a particular feeling. Cause I have good relationships with a lot of feelings. Some of them I don't. Some of them can run me. So a good- If you have a temper, for example. Yeah, so that's a common run. So that would be a good strategy. Like, oh, I'm mad. Interesting. Let me look. Okay. For sure. You got to figure out which one. And for a lot of people, their real problem is sadness. The problem isn't the sadness. The problem is that they're being managed by their sadness. That's the problem. You choose by getting into the gap how you're going to manage the sadness. And it starts with your analysis of it. Like, why am I feeling that? What's the best way to use this for good? Why is this happening? This is extremely interesting. Right. Explore why versus letting it dictate what you do. Then you can do all kinds of good stuff. I mean, there's this, I read a lot about emotional substitution, which is to say that once you've established that there's a particular emotion and that you want to react in a particular way, then you can choose a reaction that's also appropriate. In any situation, there's more than one reaction that's appropriate. But only when you're in the gap can you choose the appropriate reaction. So for example, you're really feeling negative about something. You can choose to say something negative or you can choose to make a joke. Both are entirely appropriate to this. When you're feeling pessimistic, you can choose to, even though you're pessimistic, to be hopeful. Hopeful is to say, something can be done and I can do something about it. I don't know what the odds are. But you can only do emotional substitution once you've gotten into the gap on this. Otherwise, you know, when your kids are little and you're like, your son, you're like, use your words. What you're asking them to do is to be met a cognitive. Yeah. Wow. That's what you're asking them to do. And very reactive people are piss poor at that. That's when people that they feel mad and they yell. And when you're most ashamed of yourself with your kids, it's where they pushed your buttons and yelled at them. Always. And that's because your limbic system was managing you. Totally. And you weren't met a cognitive as a dad. You're not made of stone. So someone's going to have it. Happened the other day with my kid. He screamed at his sister and I was like, oh yeah. Yeah, totally. What's getting you most excited right now? What are you getting into the most that's getting you excited? Yeah. I'm really excited about this collaboration with Oprah Winfrey because it's a brand new world. And what I really like is the ventures. So I have a company called ACB Ideas that's sort of dedicated to propagating the science of happiness all around the world, of writing and teaching and speaking about happiness. I don't know, so ACB? Yeah, Ideas. It's just the company that actually manages a lot of what we do. And it's beautiful because I've got these colleagues that are super into it and I'm very excited about it. But we have, you know, you guys have an order of operations for Mind Pump, right? I mean, you have a mission and you know what you're trying to do and the order of operations literally is an order. My order of operations is fourfold. I'm going to serve God. I'm going to lift up other people. I'm going to have fun adventures and I'm going to make a really good living. And it's in that order. It's in that order, man. And I'm super excited about the fact because I'm living the way I think God wants me to live. I hear every single day now from people. Ten emails a day from people who are like, that thing really helped me. And I'm having an incredible adventure because every day it's like this, what is happening? What is happening here? And last but not least, it's a good living and I'm really lucky to be making a good living. I'm feeling really grateful for that. So that makes me excited to have this particular business. I'm an entrepreneur. You know, I didn't think that I was going to be running a business. I mean, it's completely concordant with my work at Harvard because I have a lab at Harvard that I'm working on this part of the same whole thing too. And it's just, man, I'm busting. I can't wait to get up in the morning and I wake up, go to the gym, go to Mass, hit the coffee and get started. You do that every day, right? Every day. Every single day. Every single day. Where do you do Mass? Do you have a church nearby? Like when you find one? My wife and I, we bought a house because there was a Mass schedule at a local parish that we liked. Like walk to or whatever. 6.50 in the morning, it's a mile from my house. So I get up at 4.45, I work out from five to six. This is when I'll get texts from you sometimes. Yeah, yeah. That's when you hear from me. This first thing, yeah, yeah. Six, when I'm thinking about, I got to tell Sal this, you know, between reps, between sets. And at 6.50 in the morning is Mass. It's done by 7.20. I've got hit the coffee maker because I strategically use caffeine to block my adenosine 90 minutes into my day or 120 minutes into my day. The neuroscience is very helpful in that. And then I work, if I'm at home, then I have uninterrupted creative time. And if I'm on the road, like I'm here in San Jose, maybe I have an app that tells me where the Mass is. I got up real early and went to morning Mass and then I got to see you guys. Wow, that's awesome, that's great. You just recently did a huge, what was that hike you did in Europe where you did, it was like a- The Camino, the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain. Yeah, what is that? So I kind of looked it up and it's like this insane long- It's like a pilgrimage, yeah. It's an ancient, ancient religious pilgrimage. But most people who do it are not religious and you don't have to be religious to do it. It's a walk. If you do the whole thing, it's 800K. Oh, wow. It's 33 days of walking. As your whole gig is walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. And but it beats you down, mentally beats you down. Who'd you do it with by yourself or what? I did it the first time with my wife and the second time with my wife and daughter. And but I didn't do the whole 33 days. I just did the last eight days because my wife's like, no. At some point I'm going to do the whole 33 days and I'm going to do it alone or in weeks at a time with different people but because I want to do it. And by the way, walking is incredibly, I've heard you guys talking about walking. Oh, it's the best. I mean, everybody thinks it's like you guys lift and you're really, really ripped. So why, no, no. Now walking is the best. Steps. It's ergonomically sound. It's incredibly good for your body. Totally. It's great on the joints and you're walking 25K a day. It's beautiful. Is it an easy walk or is it like hard? It's up and down, it's up and down, it's up and down. Does that mean 25K a day? You can do that. Totally doable. Anybody who's in remotely good shape and has decent shoes, you can actually get that done. But every day and you're offering up prayers for different intentions and for when I'm doing it I'll be going to Mass at these Romanesque churches along the Camino that have been continuously doing Mass every day for a thousand years. And it's heavy, man. That's awesome. It's heavy. And we're talking about deep things that we have no chance to talk about and think about for a really long time. And our love deepens and our spirituality gets deeper. I mean, a pilgrimage is a very, it's almost an every religious tradition. People do pilgrimages and almost every religious tradition. When I go to India a lot and I just got back from India last month and you always see pilgrims walking along the road, walking along the road. And if they're walking to something, because life is a pilgrimage. We're all walking towards something. And the reason that we have an intentionality that gives us energy is because we actually understand what it is that we're walking toward. And the people who don't have that sense of purpose who can't answer the meaning questions. Why are you alive? For what are you willing to die? They're not, they're just kind of either sitting on the couch or wandering in circles. But once you see your life as kind of a pilgrimage and maybe even use the metaphor with a real pilgrimage, it's good. It's really good. Awesome. Arthur, always my favorite podcast with you. I just love it. And I love the work that you're doing. You're helping people and you're relentlessly positive and funny. It's just great. And the first, by the way, everybody who cuts to the last hour, after the last hour, don't do that. Listen to the banter is the best part. We have a good time, but we really appreciate you, Arthur. And you always make time for us. And so we love that. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for what you're doing. Thank you for your friendship. Thanks again. Thanks.