 That's what I'm really excited to dive into today, which is this idea of the building the imperfect family. And one of the topics that I've been researching in the last, I guess, six months or so is building dynasties and creating a family that is insular and helps each other out in order to leave that dynasty, right? And for each generation that comes up and lives within that dynasty, lives within that family. And there's a lot of important pieces to that. And your book touched on those five very important topics that need to be expectations that need to be set up within that dynasty in order for it to flourish. For sure. You know that right now in the United States, one in six Americans is not talking to a close friend or family member because of politics. We find that family schisms are at an all-time high. And the result is that people are suffering just completely unnecessarily. Like people don't know the rules anymore. It's like I'm gonna step over $100 bills to get to Nichols. And I'm gonna stop talking to my mom because she voted for Trump or whatever. It's just so crazy. It's like we forgot all of these basics of what brings, how human love brings happiness to us. So that's one of the reasons that Oprah and I wrote that chapter is that everybody comes to us and is talking to us about this. It's like, ah, I haven't talked to my parents. I haven't talked to my children. I had a friend who told me that he has a 15-year-old grandson, he thinks, but he hasn't talked to his daughter for the past 30 years. I'm thinking, no way, man, no way. I said, why? He says, well, we just didn't see eye to eye. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah, growing up, I remember spirited political discussions around the holidays. We had family members on both sides and they'd argue and yell and then they'd hug it out and go on their merry way and we'd see each other again. The next holiday was not this complete schism and separate from one another based on politics. Yeah, our families are microcosms of what's actually happening to our country and to our world right now, which is being pulled apart for a lot of different reasons. One is that the people are predatory. Leaders and media are predatory and the more we hate, the more they profit. And the less happy we are. And there's technology that's actually accelerating these trends and this is a huge problem. So we gotta, man, we need a love rebellion in this world. That's what we need. Well, we've been laughing about that internally because we found that our negative show titles perform better than the positive ones. And we're a show about bringing positivity but it doesn't lead to the clicks and downloads. I know. So what we should call this one, this is gonna be all about positivity and love but let's call it how to hate your enemies more effectively. There we go. So there was something very brilliant right that you just said and I was talking to AJ about this earlier when we were prepping for this interview which is if we're gonna discuss love in such a way, right? Then what we have is people that we care immensely about and we need to protect them. And the only way to protect them is with intolerance to which that would harm them. Right, no, it's crazy. I've been getting a little bit dismayed with some of the guests who come on and it's always about this love. And but we need to protect our family which we're now discussing is how important it is to us. But also as we're developing, we find out what our core values are. Those core values propel us into our best self. And if you are not ready and able to protect those core values with intolerance or hate, you will be subjected by outside forces that will work to destroy you. Right, no, this is all true. And the truth of the matter is of course we have values and that's a very good thing to have. But here's the point. When you have values, they should be only ever used as a gift and never as a weapon. You've eviscerated the moral content of your opinions and your values and your, I mean, all of your beliefs. If you use them as a cudgel, you can say, oh, I have these beliefs about my politics or my religion, whatever it has to be. They're like a bouquet of flowers and you open the door and I smack you across the face with this bouquet of flowers. Well, guess what? That was not effective as a gesture of love. Quite the contrary, you have to understand that it only ever works as a gift, never as a weapon. And that's what people are being encouraged to forget quite frankly. They're like, if you have these views, if you have these values, if somebody disagrees with you, you need to cancel them. You need to get them out of your life. But those are the people who are encouraging you to do that. If they're your college professors or your cable host or your presidential candidate is telling you to do that, then they're trying to profit and even at your expense. What I'm really curious about your perspective on is, so looking at the family unit and love and bringing positivity to those around us, there's this growing virtual world that we're all exposing ourselves to where most of this hate and intolerance lies, but we're not sharing that even with family members. It will be on our screen separately at the dinner table. I was traveling across Europe and I didn't see as many screens, but in the US, if you go out to dinner, you see the parents are on their phones, my wife and I will turn to each other, we'll look, and then the kids are on their iPads and they're living in a virtual world that isn't supporting this love, isn't supporting each other. It's full of hate, full of negativity, but they're not actually sharing what they're seeing and consuming that's then leading to these ideas internally, the struggle and ultimately this unhappiness. Yeah, to understand that phenomenon, we got to get back to the basic neuroscience of what's happening and how we're being manipulated in terms of our neurophysiology. So if I said, hey, I got a strategy for you for how to get your calories and become healthy, eat every meal at McDonald's. You'd be like, yeah, crazy, that's insane, because it's nothing wrong with McDonald's from time to time, but if you eat every meal at McDonald's, you're gonna get too many calories, not enough nutrients, you'll become malnourished and obese at the same time, and you'll be constantly hungry because your body's gonna be craving all your macronutrients that you need in balance and abundance. Okay, now that's the same thing as what's happening to us when we're tied to our devices. Why? Because the one thing we really need from our family relationships, and for that matter from any relationships, is a neuropeptide in the brain that functions as a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the hormone of human bonding. It's intensely pleasurable. It's the reason that when your first child was born and you lay eyes, eye contact is like the fourth of July inside your head and you would immediately die for this infant who doesn't know who you are. And neuroscientists will say that so you don't leave the baby on the bus or something, but the truth of the matter is, no, no, no, no, no, it's magic, it's actually magic. We crave oxytocin with our family members, with our friends, with our close associates, with our kin, with our people is what it comes down to. Now, what happens is when we have social media, we think that it's gonna give us what we need because it's kind of a social contact, but oxytocin comes from eye contact and human touch. So social media is basically the McDonald's fries and milkshakes of social life is what it comes down to. And the problem is you don't get what you need but you get addicted. And so what's happening is that we're not getting what we need by being with our families because we're so addicted to this, we're not eating the asparagus and the salmon in front of us because the burgers and fries are so tasty but they're so low in nutritional value. That's what's going on. And that means, by the way, that our dopamine circuits are engaged, we're getting the reward circuits and they're unhealthy for us and we have to break the addiction or we're gonna get malnourished and obese, socially speaking. So how do we square that virtual world that we're consuming but not sharing with one another? Yeah, well, what we have to recognize knowledge is power. You know, there's a reason I do the work that I do because one of the things that I found is the best way for people to get better is to understand the problem in the first place. When I actually explain the science of what's going on, this new book with Oprah, by the way, it has a thousand academic references in it. Why? Because it's a version of the class I teach at Harvard on the science of happiness. And when people see, oh my goodness, this is what's happening inside my brain, they start to take control. When you actually see that you're being manipulated and your brain chemistry is getting torqued by these outside tools, then you're like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, it's so fast anymore. And then you start to recognize it, you start to take action and this is the beginning of the solution. It starts with knowledge, it goes to habits, you share it with others and then you're free. Which is so important in having an understanding of how those influences look to destroy the things that are important to you, which allow you to progress and become your best self. Absolutely, absolutely. Look, there's always been a lot of things out there that maladapt our evolution in nature. They're always happened. I mean, we're super good. We have natural endorphins in our brains that help us to cope with it, to mute our stress and pain responses in times of acute crisis. So what do chemists do? They figure out what those endorphins look like molecularly and they turn them into fentanyl. And it's like, oh good, yeah, you'll be super happy if you take this, it's all good. Words nobody's ever said, the secret of my happiness? Meth, you're fentanyl. Like no, of course, because you super charge these natural phenomena, you want more human contact. I'm gonna give it to you electronically and then we're wondering why it doesn't work out so great because we maladapt it with our human ingenuity. But if we understand that, then we can actually redress that with our own knowledge and our own conscious decisions as opposed to just kind of giving in. Exposing those forces and having a general understanding of the mechanisms and how they work is incredibly important. And now that all of the manipulation and marketing of what's going on online is now being exposed, people are now seeing it for what it is. We've now had what, 15 years, close to 20 years of all these social media platforms and what they're going to produce as we indulge in it as a culture, right? So once that happened, now I have to go back and think about television. And now I have to go back and think about radio. And again, it's those same forces looking to profit from that. And if families cannot build themselves up into powerful units and they cannot be competitive. Yeah, that's right. And so it works against the people who are running things, those forces in order to break that down and they keep those things atomized. So now when I look at my family on my grandfather's side, there was a large family and on my dad's side, there was a large family. But that was the end of it because everybody had divorces from every one of my dad's side, everyone in my mom's side. And we begin to see the atomizing and of course how it affected my own self and how I looked at family. And now of learning all of this and getting to a middle age in my life where I'm able to put a larger picture together, I can understand that these forces have been there for quite some time. And now we need to counter them with having an idea that the social media is junk food just like McDonald's is. And it may keep us sustained. It may have the illusion of keeping us connected but it's not nourishing us to be our best. And then of course to be able to lead those around us to be at their best because they need to model somebody. Right, yeah, no, that's right. And you're bringing up a super important point just from the secret to being a happier person is not being managed by your urges and emotions and desires, your attachments and your feelings, not being managed by those things. You know, I walk through all of my research and this new book in particular, it starts off with this truth that you can manage your feelings or they can manage you, you choose. And so we talk about this basic technique called metacognition that lies at the beginning of building a better life, building a better family, building a better religious life, friendships, work life, whatever you want. That starts with understanding that you have feelings all the time. You have feelings that come from the limbic system of your brain, a very ancient system that takes outside stimuli. It turns them into feelings so that you can react to them appropriately. It's a natural human language across all cultures. Fear, sadness, anger, disgust, joy, interest, these basic emotions, we all have them. The problem is if we react according to them, if we live according to our limbic system, then we're just gonna kind of take these stimuli and walk through life and hope for the best. And so when it comes down to, for example, there's been a lot of divorces in your family, John, a lot of divorces in your family. So basically, well, God, I don't know. I guess this is the way that things work in our family. And if I feel unhappy with my wife, I guess we're just gonna get divorced, let's know. Learn from it and choose your reaction so you can break the cycle. And the way you do that is with metacognition, putting more space between your limbic system and the prefrontal cortex of your brain where you can actually react on purpose. And this book is full of techniques on how to do that from journaling, to meditation, to prayer, to walking in nature, to actually, to therapy, whatever it happens to be, where you can learn about yourself and you can be the pilot, you can be the CEO. So the workers are not running a muck inside your brain. You've got executives that are actually running the operation. Well, when we talk about social media, the emotion that comes up the most is envy. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Because for the first time in our lives, we're being confronted with how everyone else on the planet is living. You could pick up your device at any moment and see what people across the world are doing and how much more they have than you. So let's talk about envy in particular. How do we manage that emotion as it's evoked by media? Envy is an emotion that actually comes through human evolution. And the reason is because you don't know your place in the hierarchy or how you work in your tribe unless you see how other people are acting and you need some sort of an impetus to get better. So envy comes because people want to get better related to others. That's a very normal human emotion. The problem is it's deeply maladapted to modern life. We're not worried about getting thrown out or walking the frozen tundra alone and dying. We're talking about how many Instagram followers you have. I mean, it's idiotic. And yet we treat it as if I don't have enough buffalo meat for the winter. If I don't have enough people following me on Twitter or X or whatever the heck it's called at this point. Yeah, I mean, you get it. It's just crazy how the human brain works. So what we have to do is recognize why it exists, understand it and manage it is the way that we work on that. Now, envy has two kinds. There's two types of envy. There's benign envy and there's malign or malignant or malicious envy. Now, the benign envy is where we envy somebody who actually deserves to have a good thing happen to them. You can envy my co-author Oprah Winfrey, but nobody's gonna say she didn't earn it, man. I mean, she kicked butt for decades and created tons of value and has admired because people really know that she's done a good thing and dedicated herself to making lives better for other people, astronauts, this kind of thing. And then fill in the blank on anybody who didn't earn it, which is the reason when you pick up these magazines, Us Weekly or something, and it's like the scandal of the week from some person who's famous for being famous and you're like, yes, right? Because that's malicious envy. And the worst thing in life is malicious envy. It will ruin your life. So the way to deal with it is to laugh at malicious envy on purpose, to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, forget about it. I am simply not, let me think a little bit about how crummy that person's life actually is. Famous for being famous, I'm sorry. I've met them, you guys have met them, you've had some on your show, not happy, right? And then think about the people that have benign envy. You think about the fact that they're actually admirable and say, I've decided to admire them instead of envying them. Turn your envy into admiration and you win. You win 10 times out of 10 because you're gonna try to be more like them but you're not gonna be consumed with this idea that take them down a peg. And so that's the way to do it. You disregard through reality the people with whom your envy is malicious and you turn your envy into admiration for the people who are on the good side of the ledger and then you start to win. The other way to look at that as well is if you get consumed by the malicious envy, it takes you off of your path and puts you on their path. And you cannot beat them if you are on their path because it is their path. And so you have to stay on your own. Now everything inside of you wants you to compete, wants you to jump in because that envy, if not checked will consume you, which is why to bring up your point, it is so important to understand that and to be able to chuckle and laugh it off and get back to what you need to be doing for you and your family. Yeah, for sure. It's also being in touch with the things that kind of touch you off and it bother you most about your envy. I mean, I'm looking at you John or you AJ and I'm thinking man with that hair, I couldn't be stopped. I mean, that's like, you're beautiful dudes with this head of hair. At one point, I mean, this is like a once great civilization on top of my head. Okay, so we all got our weak points, right? And we tend to focus on that kind of thing is the way that it works. And you got to turn it into a little source of hilarity because it's ridiculous. It's completely ridiculous the things that we end other people for. And this brings up the key point again, be conscious, be knowledgeable, be in charge, use your prefrontal cortex, don't feel, think, think, think is the way that it comes down. And that's the secret to almost everything with emotional self-management. And with that is a level of self-awareness. So some of our listeners are gonna say, okay, a Harvard professor on happiness, Oprah Winfrey, they're just naturally happy. Like what can I learn from them? And why should I be listening to you two tell me about happiness? Oprah actually is a naturally happy person. She's got a very, very sunny disposition, it's true. But not me, not me. I study happiness because I want it. You know, happiness is not like basketball where you get into the MBA because you're naturally good and then get better. I know everybody who's a serious scientist in the business of happiness from the social psychologist, the behavioral economist like me to the neuroscientist, et cetera, they're all studying it for a reason because they want it. It's not research, it's me search is what it comes down to. And I look at my students and I give them these happiness self-test. I have to take 16 of them in my graduate class and my graduate seminar in happiness. And the average comes above me every single time. Now I've gotten a lot happier since I started studying it because the whole idea was knowledge, practice, teaching. That's the algorithm for actually getting happier. And I've gotten 60% happier but I'm still below my students. Why? Because, you know, look, the data say that 60% or about 50% of your happiness is genetic. 50% of your happiness actually or your baseline mood come, literally your mother made you unhappy is the way that it works. And that's important to keep in mind because that means you got to work more on your habits. And for me, that means doing the work, man. You got to do the work like anything else, for sure. So you said something interesting there. How does teaching actually impact the happiness? Yeah, so there's this great set of studies that shows that if you want to learn something deeply and remember it, you got to teach it to others. This is how you do it. And the reason is because once again, there's a lot of research that shows that you think you understand something because it makes sense, but you actually haven't lodged it into a place in your brain and using parts of your brain where you can explain it appropriately and remember it. So the way that you can learn things very permanently is by teaching them to others even if your understanding is not yet perfect. So I assign people, my final exam in my happiness science class at the Harvard Business School is that they actually have to teach a version of the class and turn in a video to me of them teaching the class. So, and sometimes I'll get like a video in Indonesian or something, it's like, I don't know, man. I can look at the expression on your parents' faces over Zoom while you're teaching this class, but they have to teach it and turn in at least, certain number of minutes that kind of drops the needle at different points of the video when they're teaching this class because I know if they can teach it that they know it and that they're gonna remember it. This is the way that that works out. And so I have a lab at Harvard called the Leadership in Happiness Lab that is dedicated to teaching people how to be happiness teachers, whether it's formally in school or as a CEO or as a podcast host or a politician or whatever they happen to do, so they can embed the happiness technology in any other job that they have and become happiness teachers. I just wanna say to our X-Factor members who are listening to this right now, you're on deck, you're gonna be teaching one of the next sessions, guys. So how can we, is there a test that you recommend our listeners take to raise their own happiness self-awareness? Yeah, for sure. So there's a bunch of them, there's a couple of them in the book. There's a lot of general happiness inventories that you can take on the web. There's one by, that was developed by a researcher at the University of California at Riverside. Her name is Sonya Lyubomursky. And Google anything that sounds like that and you'll find her because she's one of the most distinguished, she's Russian, she's one of the most distinguished researchers in happiness and she has excellent self-tests on it. Now, if we wanna find out about our basic mood structure, this is where it really gets interesting because it turns out that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. Happiness is not the absence of unhappiness nor vice versa. They exist and they're largely emotions that are produced in different parts of the brain. So you could be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person or happy and low unhappiness, high unhappiness and low happiness or low in both. You gotta know that to be able to manage yourself and surround yourself with people who compliment you. I strongly recommend understanding this and marrying somebody who's your compliment and not somebody who's just like you because it'll be like daggers drawn forever or worse. So here's how it works. This is this test called the PANIS test, the positive affect, negative affect series, P-A-N-A-S. After September 12th, you can go to my website, arthurbrooks.com and take a version of that test. And it's a super scientifically validated test. And that'll show you if you're a high high, a high affect person, you have more than average intense positive and more than average intense negative emotions. You're unusually positive, but unusually not negative. In other words, that's high low or vice versa. So high high is called a mad scientist. Mad scientists have extremely strong affect both positive and negative. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm a mad scientist, like to the max, man. And so I didn't know this until I started doing this research, this neuroscience research, because I thought I was just, you know, kind of melancholy and didn't feel good along. No, no, no, I'm super happy. I'm just also super unhappy. And so what I need to do is I need to manage my negative affect, not my positive affect, my negative affect. My wife is a cheerleader. Cheerleader's high positive, low negative. Good for her, lucky for her. That's all I could say. Makes me sick. Anyway, so there's high, negative and low positive. Those are the poets. They tend to be extremely creative. They're really, they're really clear on what the threats to the environment are, right? They're not always fun to be around. And then there's low, low, people who are low affect. They're not less happy or less unhappy than others. They're just lower intensity of their emotions. These are called the judges. These are slow, they're steady. They're the people you want around in high stress professions, like being a surgeon or a judge, for example. Oprah Winfrey's a judge, by the way. She's very steady emotionally. So we're good compliments as writing partners because I'm a mad scientist, she's a judge. I find her incredibly reassuring. She finds me entertaining. And the result is that we work together really well. But when you have two people of the same kind, it can be a problem. You got to understand yourself because you have unique gifts. It's a quarter in each basket. We need all four in our society, but you also need to know how to manage it with the people around you. If you're a cheerleader, don't marry a cheerleader. Because you know what they do? They spend all the money. They always spend all the money because it's like, there's gonna be no problems, no problems. The money will come from someplace. It's like spend, spend, spend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, spend, spend, spend. So you get the idea on how you need to, and so that's all in this book and it's super interesting. And that's something I recommend everybody learn about themselves. So we touched on two of the four pillars, friends and family. What are the other four pillars? Well, the other two of the four pillars are faith and work. So it's basically think about it this way. If you want a better life on purpose, take it as a multi-year project, learn the science and build, starting with emotional self-management. When you've mastered that, that's the first half of this book, by the way. Then when you've got that, you can start, you won't be distracted with the stupid stuff in life like social media and shopping therapy and streaming Netflix in the middle of the day because you're feeling bored or whatever. You'll be able to pay attention to the stuff that you really want to pay attention to. And the four things, the four pillars on which to build your life, this is your happiness 401K plan, basically, is faith, family, friends and work. Those are the big four. Now, faith, I don't mean my faith. I'm a Catholic. I told you before that my kids get married at like nine years old or something like that and then have 40 kids each. You raise them Catholic, they do Catholic stuff. And I'm not saying that my way is the only way, but you need something transcendental to your day-to-day routine life. You need to get small is what you need to get, right? Back in the like in the 60s, I can't remember what rock and roller said that getting small was euphemism or getting high. That's not what I mean. Well, right now, yeah. People are a burning man doing just that. Getting small, man. No, but anyway, so getting small, that which means that you have to get yourself in perspective so you can have peace. So you're not focused on your own little thing again and again and again and again. And so that might mean reading the stoic philosophers like my buddy Ryan Holiday. That might mean practicing the faith of your youth or developing meditation practice or walking in nature or studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach with great seriousness or whatever it happens to be. But you need something that zooms you out. That's the faith one and then there's the work one. And the work one is really simple. It's not a hundred hours being a lawyer. It's not even earning a lot of money or having power prestige. It's two things, earning your success by creating value with your life and feeling like you're serving other people. Those are the characteristics. I don't care if you're an electrician or you're a general contractor or a lawyer or the president of the United States or a podcast host or a professor at Harvard. It's those two things all day long that'll bring you the joy that you need. So those are the four. Faith, family, friends, and work. So we have a lot of lone wolves listening to the show and that serving others peace. Why is that so important? Because dignity comes from being needed. Despair comes from being managed and not needed. That's the truth. I mean, everybody sort of asks why is American poverty policy such a catastrophe? And the answer is because we treat poor people like liabilities to manage. That's what we do. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem. If people are liabilities to manage you have stripped their dignity away. People need to be needed. That's the bottom line. If you want people to have a good life they have to feel like they're needed people. And that's the reason that serving others is what brings you that sense of dignity that comes from your work. We're pack animals, man. We're social and we're made to serve each other. And this is sort of the divine path of human life is the love that we can express. And again, remember the four pillars faith, family, friends, and work you can boil this down. Love of the divine. Love of your family. Love of your friends. And an expression of your love through everybody in the way you earn your daily bread. Love, love, love, and more love is what it comes down to. That idea of serving your fellow man and which is gonna put us in touch with each other in a positive manner of serving others. You can make an argument that was at least the beginning dismantling of that was an industrial revolution because now we have all these people working for a paycheck but not directly seeing how their work enhances and improves the lives of other. And once that result, that being able to see that was taken away then anything could be put in its place. That's a really good point. The truth is the ultra mechanization of how people work dehumanizes us not because of what we're actually doing, stamping out widgets, sitting next to a machine. That's not the problem. The problem is that we can't actually see the impact that we're having on other people. We're too far away. We're contributing a concept called subsidiarity which is pushing things down to the lowest possible level. Now it doesn't mean that we all have to be backed out in the fields in some primitive society that Europe had in the 14th century. I'm not talking to, I know people who want that. I don't want that as the bottom line. But we don't have to choose. We can actually have a wealthy society that's advanced and does all kinds of good things but is not highly, this is what Karl Marx talked about, alienation. He got so much wrong by saying that all that mattered was just units of labor and that capital didn't matter. And the way that he got so much wrong about how humans are wired, that you could change human society so we wouldn't compete against each other and from each one according to his abilities and to each one according to his needs. I mean, it gets so much wrong about human behavior but one thing he got right was this concept that we are alienated from the means of production because to be a true human means to sanctify your work and understand the benefit that it actually creates. And what I think has happened, we've talked a little bit about this trend on the show is with what happened through the pandemic and coming out of it is our survival instinct was so strong that our focus narrowed to the here and now, like the creature comforts in the moment. And a lot of what we're talking about here on happiness is long tail stuff. This is like your entire life and we've gone into a remote work environment. We've seen some studies recently that socialization in the workplace was actually really important to our health and happiness and that's been severed with more time spent in a hybrid model or completely remote. And our focus was on, well, the here and now is I'm getting DoorDash, I have streaming, I'm safe and comfortable in my house. Who cares about friends? Like, why do I need to worry about this stuff? Why do you need to worry about family? I can just have a FaceTime with them. When in actuality, it's these moments together of helping one another, being in love with their family, being in love with our social group that actually creates the meaning in life that we're talking about, long tail stuff, not short tail wins. Yeah, for sure. I mean, COVID-19 was absolutely catastrophic for human happiness. And if you look at the data, it just, it couldn't be clearer. So you find that happiness on average in the United States has been slightly declining since the late 90s and there's lots of reasons why. And then it would kind of punctuate the equilibrium a little bit. It's just sort of staying constant, slightly declining. Social media is introduced. It goes down like a big dog leg down because people start to get lonelier when they get on the burger and fry social diet we talked about before. And then COVID comes and it's in the tank. I mean, ordinarily about 30% of the population is very happy about their lives, 15% very unhappy about their lives. It's reversed. Those two things have been reversed since COVID-19. You're about twice as likely to say that you're unhappy as that you are about very happy about your life in general. And the reason is everything to do with the way that we've severed these social bonds for sure. And what happens, like anything else, when you provoke the symptoms of clinical depression which you will, if you take away all your social bonds, I mean, just will, what happens then is that tends to impair the executive functions of our brain. So we actually can't see the origin of the problem and we resist the way to fix the problem. So for example, you're really lonely and you're really sad. And so you cocoon in a warm, comfy blanket eating hog and DOS, watching Netflix at like two in the afternoon. That's a big problem. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. You should call a friend. You should ride your bike. You should get outside. You should see people. And those are all the things that are like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go to that part. Go to the party. And so that's the problem. And the whole nation had its executive centers impaired by the involuntary lockdowns. And you see people who still aren't going out. It's just the craziest thing. And people who have made life decisions that cut themselves off from other people. It's like, yeah, I decided to move into a cabin in the woods. It's like, I'm sure it's peaceful and beautiful, but bears are not gonna keep you warm at night, man. This comes back to somewhere we were saying earlier about hating the things that attack the things that are dear to us, especially our core values and the importance of relationships. And in the book, you discuss some different levels of relationships and how they make us feel. So I would love to discuss that for our audience a bit. There's a lot that definitely realize that since COVID something has happened and they also see that their peer group is dwindling without replacement friends. An idea we talked about with Steven Kotler. But the other part is I think a lot of people would recognize that they have acquaintances that are deal friends, but they don't have anyone who in the terms of the book, useless friends and what that meant and how important that actually is. Because I think we've now gotten to a point since COVID where we're now viewing everything as very transactional. Yeah. Now there's a lot to that. You find that people when they're dealing with each other, there's a particular reason for doing so. It's like, why am I gonna come into the office? Well, because I have to do X, Y and Z as opposed to the ordinary routine where you'd have some spontaneity and how you see particular people on your way to the office and around the water cooler. There's nothing spontaneous anymore when we have to plan everything out because of the logistics or such that people are working off-site unless they don't have to. So that basically gets to the big point that you're making right here, which is that when I ask people if they're lonely and a lot of people are but don't know it. This is a really interesting thing. And the reason is they don't know it is they're not isolated. 100%. I mean, there are around tons of people. And so I say, okay, okay. So let's do a little test for the audience here. We can go into the testing portion of the podcast here. It's like, make a list of the people that are closest to you by which I mean you have the most frequent interaction, okay? Now after each one right in R or D, real or deal, you know the difference. Everybody knows the difference between deal friends and real friends. And if you need a little primer on it then John just gave that to us, which is real friends or deal friends are useful. They're very useful to you. Real friends are cosmically useless to you. Not worthless. I love that. I have worthless friends too, but that's a different problem. So, useless friends, you just love them. You just love them. And that's by the way, there's a word in Greek that Aristotle used for useless friends. He called them italic. They're italic relationship. More telos means the reason for something. So they're just like reasonless friends. These are the people we lose contact with during COVID. These are the people we lose contact with when we become lawyers and join law firms and work a hundred hours a week. Why? Because it's costly to keep up with your useless friends. I mean, it requires that you go out of the way. Now, since I've done this research, by the way I've changed my life. I never do research that is not gonna work for my life. And my column every Thursday in the Atlantic, I always suggest three practices. And I've written my column eight weeks in advance and I've tried them out, right? So I'm the guinea pig on everything. So it's like I'm always cycling through these different practices. And when it came to real and deal, man, this was a game changer for me. I realized that I had a bazillion deal friends because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year. I have a company, I do all the stuff, right? And I teach at university, et cetera. The problem was that I was actually crowding out the real friendships. And so I said, no, no, no, no. I looked at the people that I have been closest with. I really love the most that are not my immediate family. And I made a point of an hour a week on the phone with a couple of guys. An hour a week on the phone with a couple of guys. And it's expensive. My hourly rate is like is $4 an hour. So that's not nothing, right? And so yeah, and it's been great. Because, you know, I'm eating my own cooking here and I can tell you it really works. Yeah, for our X Factor members, I encourage them all to have a Wednesday reconnection practice, hump day. Everyone's kind of doesn't have plans. They're tired of work and to reconnect and rekindle some of these connections that you've frayed or lost due to the pandemic or moving or career. As you said, it's so much easier to keep the deal friends because you think there's some payoff at the end. Oh, they're gonna help you move your career forward or they're gonna be there to do something that's gonna allow you to get to that next level for yourself. But in actuality, that's not really what we need only in our friend group. And another point that the book makes is that we've also started to homogenize our friends. So we talked a little bit about this in the beginning about, okay, writing off political disagreements and family members. We're doing this in droves with our friends. We hear an opinion we don't like. We hear a view we don't like. And we're like, all right, you're out. And we see this rise online. And we've talked a little bit about the show, toxic friends. But now everyone's being painted as toxic. Oh, you're toxic, get away from me. I don't wanna be involved with you, friend breakups. And in actuality, we need these social connections in our life to be happy to sustain us. Yeah, and we need people who are really different than us is actually the point, I think that you're making as well, which is, by the way, you wanna know the number one reason why internet dating is a disaster? Well, there's many, but which one? The number one reason, the number one reason. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons, like the paradox of choice, like swipe, swipe, swipe, better, better, better, better, that's horrible, right? But that's not it. The number one reason is because in dating apps, people curate for people who are just like themselves. They curate for compatibility, which is similarity, which as my adult kids would say, that's not hot, to look like a solicitous sibling, to look in the mirror and say, oh, that's what I want. No, but 71%, for example, people who describe themselves as politically progressive, 71% say they will not date somebody who's not politically progressive. Now, interestingly, 41% of conservatives say they won't date somebody who's not a conservative, which just shows that conservatives have lower standards. Conservatives are like, yeah, whatever, what do they look like? But it's impossible. If you're basically putting in your dating profile, I want somebody who likes, you know, tacos a lasado, I want somebody who, you know, likes, you know, classic Led Zeppelin. I want somebody who grew up in the outskirts of San Jose, who votes the Democratic Party, who went to, you know, USC. I don't know what, it would fill into blanks and suddenly you have a null set of everybody except you. It's just so, look, there's a lot of biology that shows, by the way, that we're not attracted to people who are too much like us. There's a lot, there's a wonderful study from the 90s that's since been replicated around the world in which these scientists, they go onto a college campus and they ask dudes to wear a t-shirt in for 48 hours and go like, sweat it up. And then they take it out, dry it off, put it in a shoebox and they poke holes in the shoebox and they give the shoeboxes to women who don't know the guys and ask them to sniff the shoeboxes and rank the most attractive smelling guys just by the smell of their sweaty t-shirts. Okay, now it turns out that by far women rank as most attractive, the guys who are most immunologically different than they are. Different. Different race, different part of the, if the same country, different part of the country, really different upbringings and part of the reason is because they're so far apart in the gene pool that they have different immunological profiles and they're sensing through the olfactory bulb in their brain that this is somebody, I better find them as hot because if I have kids with that person, our kids are gonna have a better immunological repertoire. Yeah. And so this is another example of even biologically we need more complementarity and less compatibility and we're gonna like each other a lot more. So the book goes through five challenges that we face socially right now with our relationships. We started to unpack a few of them but I'd love to dig into them because it really is the core tenet of the show and many of our listeners are feeling these things but they're not necessarily understanding how they can start to change and shift and build better relationships in their life. Right, so what's the first one as you look at it? What are you thinking? What's the first one that's on your mind? Well, the first one for me was the hemogeny because I find this over and over again and even with our X-Factor members, I challenge them to look outside of the box with who they're meeting and try to find activities that maybe on first glance wouldn't sound necessarily fun to them to meet people completely different than them to bring in different perspectives that allow you to have different experiences. Yeah, and if it's a potential romantic partner, it'll be much hotter is the point that, and look, this is just a science talking. So I say this from a scientific point of view, you're gonna enjoy your life a lot more for sure. The second is basically understanding how to deal with conflict. One of the biggest problems that we find is that there's tons and tons and tons of conflict but everybody's afraid of conflict. That's craziness is the way that that turns out. The best way to have a lonely life is to be resistant to actually having disagreements with other people. We don't need to disagree less. We need to disagree better and actually in a lot of cases to disagree more. That's actually what brings people together. When I talk to married couples, for example, you find that the coldest marriages never fight. Now, the marriages that fall apart, they fight like crazy, but they don't know how to fight is the way that that works. And so I work with couples all the time on how to fight and actually how they do that. And a lot of people will say, it's kind of interesting married couples will say, you know what, after we have, we haven't fought for a long time, you know, it's been weeks and weeks we haven't seen each other. We have a big argument. And then for some reason, we always have sex afterward. It's like, it's not makeup sex. That's actually not right. A fight is the most intimate thing that you have because you actually said something that you believe that you've been not saying. And when somebody's super honest with you and you're being super honest, you're just completely in love even if you're angry. That's the way that that works. And that's what we have to keep in mind that conflict can be incredibly healthy if we know the rules. I also want to add to that. And that's an incredible point. And to go back to a point I was discussing about my dad's family and my mom's family, both of the grandparents stayed married until there was a death. And you could look at that and think they hated each other. They should have been divorced a long time ago. Or you can look at that saying they did what it took to stay married for that family for all those years. So you could say, and it depends on observation and a worldview but learning to fight, learning to stay together, right? And that fighting plays an intimate role in that relationship and keeping those things together. Yeah, right. I mean, nobody knows what's going on inside an individual couple to be sure. Only the couple knows that. And you find out things about people after the fact et cetera, you're always kind of surprised about that. But when we say that these older couples, the reason that they stay together is because of the social strictures against divorce. That's not usually true. The number one reason is that they were highly complimentary to each other because they were probably set up by a loved one who thought they might make a kind of a good match based on their complementarity and their difference. And the second is because it was really, really inconvenient to split up, they learned how to have conflict. They just actually learned the rules of the road is what came down to. Now, when I'm working with couples, the number one thing that I work on is I listen to them having an argument and all the couples that are really, really struggling, it's always me and you and I and you, and they're always talking about these personal pronouns either in the first and second person, always move to the we and us pronouns. And it's gonna change the way you think and change the way you fight, it turns out. Because you don't say, you hurt my feelings. You say, we had an argument and that really hurt me. We had an argument that really hurt me. You're taking responsibility and you're defining the problem as a project for the two of you to solve. And so when you actually solve it, you've made progress together. It's like your fights become projects just because of the pronouns that you use. It's so critically important. And couples that always use we and us, always use we and us, they're a team and they don't split up is basically what you find. So that's idea number one. Well, not only you're staying married together, you're growing together because if you had gotten married kind of early in life in your 20s, you haven't really even discovered who you are, let alone your significant other. And that process, if you're able to be able to do that together, only lends itself to building, constructing a North Star between you and your partner and working towards that together. This is actually one of the reasons that the marriages, they tend to do better when they're startups than when they're mergers. You have to use the industrial language. And so people are like, you know, I got to get through law school and I need to get my career down. And then I'll think about marriage. That's the wrong order. Startups where people is like, we got nothing. We got nothing together. So, you know, I fell in love with my wife when I was 24 years old. And man, I was like a starving musician in those days all the way through my 20s. I had hair like you. I mean, it was, that's what she fell in love with me by the way. And we, you know, we got married. We were poor. We were, we had big ideas. We had dreams and we learned how to live together so that, you know, people change over the course of their life. Couples that are startups, they tend to change together. Mergers, it's harder. And don't get me started on hostile takeovers and acquisitions. Those are really there. You can tell I teach in a business school. Well, I mean, listen, a marriage basically is a business arrangement the way it is presented on paper. So let's be honest there. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the mergers of the, I mean, the mergers of the ones with the prenups, by the way, you know, no startups have prenups. I mean, you, I mean, it just, you don't think about your marriage in the same way. And it's why there's hostile takeovers. Oh yeah, that's right. And acquisitions, exactly right. Well, we've heard a lot of studies, you've mentioned it just that lowliness is rising. Right. And yet at the same time, we're making choices that don't move us away from loneliness, but entrenched loneliness. Right. The streaming platforms and the empty calories. What are the choices we should be making around building relationships that can start to foster and form these real relationships that we need? So the key thing to keep in mind is eye contact and touch, eye contact and touch. That's what we need to actually get the oxytocin. But those are also really good rules of the road for any sort of a relationship. Never substitute electronic media for eye contact and touch unless you absolutely have to. So have an order of operations. See somebody in person if you can. If you can't talk on the phone, if you can't talk on the phone, text and only then if you can't then actually use lesser order, less contact means of communication with other people and never, never, never, never binge the bad substitutes. When you're really lonely, don't binge social media. It's a complete mistake to do that. It's one of the things that we should always be thinking about that order of operations. The other thing is to just think about just in general in this and every other subject, what it is that we want. And people, when the kids come into my class, I say kids, they're 28. You can tell them an old dude at this point, but they say, I say, what do you want? They say, we're in this class professor, we're here because we want happiness. I say, okay, I got it. What is it? And they can't define it. Stop thinking of your happiness as a feeling that you're chasing. Feelings or evidence of happiness like the smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are like smell, just evidence of the food. The real food is the enjoyment that you get in life, the satisfaction you get in life, and the meaning you get in life. Now, I can go through that, and I can actually diagnostically figure out where somebody's problem is. The same way that I can go through, because I'm kind of a nutrition and fitness nerd, I can actually look at your diet and say that you've got a macros problem because you're getting too much carbohydrate and not enough protein or whatever it happens to be. It's the same sort of thing. And so that's where I really start with people, with their relationships or any other parts that I talk about a lot in this book and in every other place that I write. So I find, for example, a lot of young, a lot of lone wolves. The big mistake that they're making is they're trying to get enjoyment in their life, but all they're getting is pleasure. Why? Because pleasure is a limbic phenomenon that sets a neurochemical cascade in your brain going that you hit the lever and get the pleasure and it becomes a very short-term thing that wears off and then you get addiction, never happiness. What you need is the source of the pleasure plus people plus memory. That's what creates enjoyment. And so the rule of thumb for all the lone wolves and we've all been lone wolves in our lives, dudes, we know what's going on here. How do you actually get happier? And the answer is you don't have to stop doing anything. You just have to stop doing it alone. That's the key. Don't drink alone. Don't have sex alone. That's the key thing because what that does is it severs the pleasure from the enjoyment by taking away the people and the memory and then you're not gonna get the happiness that you seek. So you can see that this happiness science, this neurochemical happiness science is really important and very, very practical for our day-to-day living. So this goes to the levels of friendship that were discussed in the book. And we were, as you were mentioning with introversion, they tend to not have a lot of acquaintances but they'll have maybe it's easier to have deeper relationships because there's less people in their lives and those relationships are more important. And then the opposite with extroverted people, they're gonna tend to have more acquaintances but less deeper friends. Now here in lies, an issue that I've witnessed because AJ would consider me the extrovert and I would have to say, both of us, yes, I'm the extrovert as I've gotten older probably a little bit more of an ambivert. But however, in my extroverted days, I had tons of acquaintances. I could go anywhere. If I went to a bar, if I'm sitting next to you, guess what? You're my new best friend for evening and we're gonna have a blast and I'll see you again next week. However, outside of that, this is where I've recognized that I had become a lone wolf because though I had all these acquaintances, there wasn't anyone close to me. So if I was going to make plans, I wouldn't call anybody because I'm like, I'm just gonna hang out with whoever's there. Well, I'm gonna do this. Well, aren't you gonna call somebody to see who's going? No, because whoever's there is gonna be my new best friend for the evening. It almost goes to that idea, what's the movie AJ with single serving friends on the air club? Fight club, right? And being able to easily identify. I speak Johnny. Well, the first rule of fight club is not remembering the name of the movie, man. Yeah, there you go. Johnny nailed it. And exposed AJ. Well, it's funny because I say in the intro of the show that I'm a recovering introvert and some listeners are like, what's wrong with being an introvert? And it's like, I've recognized it has some weaknesses to it. It has some strengths, but it also has some weaknesses. I tend not to share my hopes and dreams with people. And because of that, I only have a few really close, deep friends, but I can't go like Johnny, no plans just go out socially and have as great of a time. Yeah, for sure. And the truth is, you're both bringing it up a very important point, which is you know yourselves, and when you have the knowledge, you can consciously change your habits and design your life the way you want it to be. Look, Johnny, you're gonna be at, you're gonna be an extrovert, but you can act in a way that introverts actually do and get happier as a result because now you know and you're doing it on purpose. And I had to learn to build deep relationships. I had to learn how to use vulnerability to my advantage in order to build relationships and then also become choosy about who was going to be coming into my life that I didn't bring in folks who would destroy my core values or take me off of my game. And in learning this, I was older and more aware of these behaviors in me that I wanted to fix. So it was a bit easier for me. However, for somebody who's younger, who may not be so aware of this is that each person that comes in is going to have a certain influence on your life to some degree, and you have to be able to manage that, whether it's gonna be a large influence, a small influence or no influence. Exactly right. Exactly right. To understand that, yes, I have a lot of acquaintances. Maybe I am extroverted, but I am a lone wolf due to not having many people that I can discuss what's important to me, my values, my dreams, because it is those relationships that are going to add the social pressures that produce you to being your best. Yeah, totally, yeah. So you're basically trying to find this balance, understanding that left to your own devices and going through life, not thinking about it, you will be missing something big and you have to add it in on purpose. Now, remember, we're all created in a particular way, we all have our differences, we all have our tendencies and our urges, and Mother Nature pushes us along this path, but Mother Nature doesn't care, Johnny, if you're happy. She doesn't care. She wants you to be at the bar and meet more people and pass on your genes and survive for another day. She does not care if you're happy. And that's true for all of us. That's the reason that know yourself, know the science, adjust your habits, teach the ideas, and what you'll get on is off the animal path and right on to the divine path. As sure as we're talking right now, I guarantee it's true. Beautiful way to end it. Our last question we asked you before, but I wonder if it shifted at all, what is your X factor? What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Arthur? Yeah, my X factor is the fact that I have learned that everything comes down to love. It all comes down to love. And when things are off, I've learned to ask myself, where is the love missing? Where am I denying the love that I need? Where am I pushing away the love that I need? Sometimes it's my love for the divine. And my prayer life has become desiccated over a week period, for example. Sometimes it's because I've denied my love for my lifelong companion on whom I will give my dying glance, which is my wife Esther. And I've just been cold to her. Sometimes it's because my real friends have drifted a little bit, but that's my X factor, is my knowledge of the fact that I need more love to be happy. So the book comes out tomorrow. Where can our audience find out all the great resources from the book? Oh, it's arthurbrooks.com. It's got all the details. There's classes you can take. There's surveys that you can take. And so if you read the book, which I hope people do and get a lot out of, it's fast read. It's not a very long book. It's only a couple of hundred pages. And then they want more. They can go to arthurbrooks.com and take all the surveys and take different classes and have downloaded exercises that they can do. And just remember, Oprah and I wrote the book for you. Thank you, Arthur. It's great having you back. Thanks. It's great to see you guys. Thanks for what you're doing. You're making the world better. Thank you, Arthur. You too. Thanks.