14 Habits for an Optimised Morning & Evening Routine - Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, and an author. What does it really take to live a fulfilling life? With endless advice on how to boost or sabotage happiness, what does science actually say about feeling better and living well? Expect to learn whether psychological or physical elements contribute to wellbeing more, if most people need more happiness or less unhappiness, what the most reliable lever is to lower negative feelings, what the gold standard is for how people should deal with a breakup, the most underrated happiness intervention in daily life, why reading aloud or being read to calms the brain so much, and much more… - 0:00 Is Wellbeing Physical or Mental? 8:37 Why Privilege Can Fuel Addiction 18:30 The Key To Managing Yourself More Effectively 35:51 How to Rewire Anxiety and Uncertainty 42:25 How Biology Shapes Our Relationships 50:33 Why Growth Stems From Pain 59:08 Designing the Optimal Morning Routine 01:08:55 The Physiology of Staying Fit as You Age 01:18:49 Engineering the Optimal Evening Routine 01:24:31 Can You Over-Optimise Your Wellbeing? 01:29:45 What Causes Us the Most Pain? 01:33:01 The Neuroscience of Heartbreak 01:39:57 Has Modern Freedom Backfired on Happiness? 01:47:27 Where to Find Arthur - Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to well-being.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:02Chris Williamson?

  What do you think contributes more psychological elements or physical elements? Because we experience our well-being.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  Psychologically.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 0:11Chris Williamson?

  And but we experience everything psychologically.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Including our physical well-being.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to well-being, what contributes more, psychological or physical elements?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  The answer is yes, because psychology is biology. Fundamentally, psychology is biology.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  That means that that you're you cannot disconnect from your brain. Now, perhaps there's some external consciousness that people are experiencing. But but the truth of the matter is that the functioning of the limbic system of your brain, where you're having positive and negative emotions all day long, that's that's that's biology. That's a part of the brain that was evolved between two and forty million years ago as an alert system to what's going on outside of you. You perceive things, threats and opportunities. You react, your brain reacts with negative and positive emotions, which then give you a sense of being happy or unhappy at any at any particular time. And so that being the case, we should be very grateful for our negative emotions. But we also need to learn how to manage them. That's the great goal of life.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  That's the great goal of becoming a self-managing, self-leading person when you're in a state of suffering, to understand why that is, how it can be productive, what you can learn and and how you can manage it such that it doesn't dysregulate you or ruin your complete quality of life.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  So if psychology is biology, should we just attack the biology?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Well, the way that we attack the biology is by understanding the psychology and actually acting in a different way.

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  It really does sound like the human centipede.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. It really is. No, it's a no. My whole philosophy is sort of a self-licking ice cream cone, because no matter if you say biology, I say psychology.

• 1:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  But but the truth of the matter is that once, if you want to become a happier person, the first thing you need to understand is the science, which is the reason that I teach the science of happiness to my students. I don't go in and teach woo-woo and say, you know, here's, you know, why don't we all try to manifest some sort of happiness? It's like, no, this is what's going on in your brain. When you're feeling sad, what's happening is that you've the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your limbic system is highly alerted to the fact that you're perceiving a loss. And that loss in your life of a person or something that you love is a very normal reaction in the ancestral environment where we lived in bands of thirty to fifty individuals. To be rejected, to have a breakup, to have a schism with somebody else in your band

• 2:25Speaker 01

  meant that you're at a real risk of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. You need to be really averse to that. That's why you feel grief when you're disconnected from somebody that you love. And you have a part of your brain that's evolved to make you feel that grief. And that's completely normal. That's the most normal thing that could possibly happen. And people find a lot of comfort in saying, oh, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. There's not something I need to cure. That's actually evidence of my brain is working the way that it should and I'm gonna be okay.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  Do most people need more happiness or less unhappiness?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Oh, such a good question. And the answer is it really depends on who you are. Okay, so let's back up a little bit. You made a very important distinction right now, which is that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not. People, for the longest time, thought that unhappiness was an absence of happiness.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  It's a single spectrum with happiness on one end and unhappiness on the other.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  And it's not true. I mean, it's like darkness is the absence of light, but unhappiness is not the absence of happiness. On the contrary, the emotions that are behind happiness and unhappiness, and again, happiness isn't emotions. Emotions are evidence of happiness. But they exist in different, they're produced in different parts of the brain for different reasons. And so the result of it is that you can be a very happy person and also a very unhappy person.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow, that's interesting.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  And that just means you're a high affect person. I have a test that I give. It's a test of affect. And that is to see the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. A quarter of the population is above average positive and above average negative.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  What's the rest of the split?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  The split is of the other four quadrants?

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  So if twenty-five percent of that were, what's the rest of the seventy-five percent constructed by?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's the other three profiles, which is above average positive and below average negative, below average positive and below average negative.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And above average negative and below average positive. And that's evenly split, twenty five, twenty five. Yeah, because it's the median, it's not the means. Right. And so it's by construction, it's those quarters. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not overrepresented among podcasters and entrepreneurs. You know, that's going to be seventy five percent high, high. You're a very high affect guy. And you're the mad scientist. That's what that quadrant is called. And so am I, by the way. I'm ninety fifth percentile in positive emotion. I'm ninetieth percentile in negative emotion. And so what does that mean? Which goes to show that it's not a single spectrum. Exactly right. And so, and I know a lot of people who are low, low. Those are called judges. Those are people who make really good surgeons. They make really good, you know, nuclear reactor managers.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  There are some people who are above average positive and below average negative. Those are the happiest people. Those are the cheerleaders. They have very intense positive emotion and very weak negative emotion. They're great to be around. They make terrible bosses because they can't stand negativity and they can't give criticism. No bad vibes. No bad vibes, man. And then there's low, low, right? I mean, sorry, there's, there's high negative, low positive. Those are the poets. And we know actually a lot about the neurobiology of the poetic temperament, as a matter of fact. We actually understand kind of what's going on in their brains. And they're the unhappiest, but they're unbelievably creative and romantic. And it's what we find. And the reason for that is there's this funny little part of the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that makes you ruminate. That's your rumination organ effectively.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And so if you're a, you're a sad ruminator, like which most people who have a little bit of depression, they ruminate a lot. That's the same part of your brain that you use when you're ruminating on a business plan or a poem or a symphony or another person when you're falling in love. It's really, really active. And so that's why poets, they tend to be depressive, romantic and creative. It's the same part of the brain. Psychology is biology. But the whole point is you ask, what's more important to manage? Happiness or unhappiness? The answer is what's the bigger challenge for you? So for you, you need to work more on your unhappiness because you're a mad scientist. Me too. You know, it's a happiness is really much more important to work on if you're a poet or you're a judge.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  You need to lift that happiness as opposed to moderating, managing the unhappiness. Okay.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  What are the big movers for the judge or the poet compared with the mad scientist? Or the, what was the fourth one?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  The cheerleader.

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  Cheerleader?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I guess the cheerleader is just, the cheerleader is just.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Cheerleader is doing great, except the cheerleader has weaknesses that the cheerleader doesn't recognize. Now, I'm just resentful, you know, I'm just jealous.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And I'm married to somebody who's more of a cheerleader than I am. And it's really interesting when you match these profiles because it turns out that, that certain marriages work better than others with respect to these temperaments. So people go to my website and they take this a lot with their partner. They take these tests a lot with their partner. So they can find out what their temperament is, what their, what their, what their partner's is. The best marriages for people who are really metacognitive, really in tune with their relationship, are ones where they balance each other.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Someone that's maybe a little bit less punitive.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you're a, for example, if you're a judge, you do really well with a mad scientist. So a really high affect person can do really well with a low affect person. If it's two really high affect people, it's gonna be daggers drawn. It's gonna be trouble because you're gonna spin each other up or bum each other out a lot. So you have to be really aware is kind of how this works. So, so the challenges are really different. Now, people who have high negative affect, they tend to manage their negative, unless they have science, so they know what they're doing, they tend to manage their negative affect in a destructive way. The most common way that high negative affect people manage their negative affect is drugs and alcohol. Because it's unbelievably effective. Alcohol in particular cuts the connection between the amygdala,

• 8:09Speaker 01

  which is the fear and anger part of the limbic system, and the prefrontal cortex. So you're all stressed out, but you don't know it. That's what alcohol does. So two martinis and you're like, life's okay. And so if you're an anxious person, that's why you gotta be super careful with alcohol. And that's why CEOs have more alcohol problems than people who are unemployed.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. OECD data shows that highly successful, highly educated, high earners, they have more trouble with alcohol than people on the other end of the spectrum.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  There was an interesting, maybe it was one of yours. I don't think it was. I remember reading this really great article that explained some of the justifications for why drug use among children from wealthy families is higher than those from low income families. You might think, well, maybe it's because they've got the money to access it, but that's, that's not right. Maybe it's because they go to these sort of like posh parties when they're in their teenage years and everybody else has got access and they think that the rules don't apply to them and like maybe a little bit. But the explanation that I thought was really, really great is that if you grow up as the child of somebody who has already

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  set the bar incredibly high, the pressure that's on you to be able to beat your intergenerational competition theory is unreal. It also explains one of the reasons, I thought this is such a fucking great psychological explanation that I'd never heard of, the higher rates of admission for children from wealthy families into prestigious higher education institutions. Maybe it's because of the prep. Maybe it's because of the access. Maybe it's because of legacy admissions. Maybe it's because, maybe it's because, or maybe it's because they are so fucking terrified of falling behind the standard that their parents set, that they are prepared to drive themselves in a manner that somebody who doesn't have that degree of pressure over the top of them wouldn't.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, fear of failure.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  I thought it's so, I thought that those two explanations were just so great.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  That's right. And, and there's almost certain, so there's kind of two reasons. Most of the literature is on alcohol, right? I mean, and in 20 years from now, we'll have more literature on cannabis, for example.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  Do you think we can, the rules of alcohol are ported across on the cannabis relatively well?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  Same thing.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, they're, they're self, they're self medicating euphorics for the most part. There's kind of two kinds of people that get in trouble with alcohol. People who have trouble with boredom and people have trouble with anxiety. So either you're a bored drunk or you're an anxious drunk. Are the two problems that people have. And so, and so this, the, the answer to these addiction problems are different in these two cases. If you're, you're an alcoholic or you're drinking too much because you're bored, you need to crowd out the, that the drinking by doing something interesting. That's why you take a kid and who's drinking a lot and partying a lot in high school and make them do something unbelievably hard and interesting. And they'll be like, I don't want to drink that much because drinking is not as good a party as whatever this thing is that I'm doing.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Anxious drunks are a different problem, right? Because anxiety is so unbelievably effectively dealt with by alcohol. It is so incredibly efficacious. And that means you need to deal with anxiety in a proper way. And drugs and alcohol are not the way to do it. Workaholism is a terrible way to deal with your anxiety. If you have a high, if you have high negative affect, this high.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  What's workaholism's uh point of intervention? If, if the uh link between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is being severed from alcohol? What is it that workaholism is doing at a biological level?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Distraction. So the amygdala is funny. So with little kids, you're going to see this when you have your children. That your, your two year old is going to be having a freak out because they're freaking out all the time. That's what two year olds do all the time because they have a completely dysregulated amygdala. And, and so they're, you know, fearful and angry and they get you cut the crusts off their little PB and J sandwich the wrong way. They totally freak out. That's because their amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, right? The way that you get them to not freak out and young parents never figure this out, right? They're going to be like, what? Use your words or something like this. No, no, no, distract them. Because the amygdala is in charge of distraction actually affects the amygdala. Attention is something that highly implicates the amygdala.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  So if you change their attention, so you're a little two year old, you're like, oh, oh, oh, do you see what I brought home from work today? I brought home something you really got to see and you pull something out of your briefcase.

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  Bullshit.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Totally. Cause they never figured it out.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  They're an idiot.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  But what happens is that you, you, you, you stop the activity of the amygdala that's leading to the freak out and you put it into attention. So that's the, basically what's going on. You're distracting yourself. Through workaholism, through a reliable way to distract yourself. That's what it was about.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  That's so great. I remember my therapist last year said to me, pay attention to fleeting thoughts. There's this line that she had, the whispers that sort of come, Rick Rubin would call them whispers, these little.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Transient little things, little bits of smoke. And if you're living in chaos, I'm about to go back on tour this week. I mean, got three shows in three states in four days. Awesome. And. You know, you love it. It's great. It's great. I love the, I love the chaos. But if I've got something that I've been trying to hide in the fog for a while. Oh, this fat piece of piss. I've got call, I've got lobby call at nine AM. We're gonna get on the flight. I'm gonna go skiing in Salt Lake City. Then I got the sound check, I got the sound check, I gotta do sound check. And then by the time we get there, someone brought a cake. Look at this cake. Isn't this nice? And then you just manana, manana, manana. And I think that this is why. Like chronic touring musicians have problems with, with alcohol.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  I had Aaron Gillespie from Underoath here and he said, I don't know how many times, like hundreds, hundreds of times, he checked himself into the ER on tour because he was sure he was having a heart attack. It got to the point where he knew the exact tests that they needed to run on him to disprove his own fear because he had just been drinking and medicating. Yeah, he just kept going. Funny that you said that thing about the two year old as well. So Connor Beaton from Mantalks, who you need to meet, he's fucking fantastic. We did a pod recently and we're in the car, he was gonna give me a left home. We're in the car and he's, I gotta ring, I gotta ring the kids first. Got a four year old, four and a bit year old and a one and a half year old. And his wife gets on the phone and the one and a half year old sees him,

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  smiles for about three seconds and then just screams and just starts screaming. And I spoke about it over breakfast this morning and he was like, yeah, the one and a half year old, she's just at the stage now where she screams. She just screams, but. Screams all the time. He said, the one thing that we can do if we need either of them to shut up and stop. If I come into the kitchen and I just have a moment with Vienna, my wife, if I pick her up and hug her, my son, four years old, just runs over and wants to get in between us, like in with us. And the one and a half year old just stops.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Just change the rhythm. Just change the rhythm, reprogram the amygdala.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  So cool.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  So that's unfortunately distracting yourself with work. And, and man, I've been on tour since I was 19. I, I've got the, I got the bug. I got it. I mean, I quit drinking when I was 38. A year older than you are now. I had to quit drinking. I mean, it was just not doing anything good for me. And it ends to, it goes to dark places in my family and the whole thing. But the, the workaholic tendency, I mean, that's, that's the go to, man. That's the go to.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, because it's publicly praised.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, nobody ever said, you know, dude, you drank an entire bottle of vodka last night. That was awesome. Nobody ever said that, right? But you worked nine 16 hour days in a row and made a bunch of money. And people praise you for that, for that highly addictive, dangerous behavior.

• 15:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  It's also a secondary addiction. The primary addiction is a, is an addiction to success. And one of the things that I sort of specialize in successful people and, and, and talking to and, and doing a lot. I mean, I teach at the Harvard Business School. These people are going to be the masters of the universe when it comes to business. And what I find is that the pathology actually of people who wind up workaholic. It starts when they're kids in, in this funny pattern. Um, and you're going to be able to respond to this because my guess is that you've seen this maybe up close. Um, I mean, friends, right?

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  Maybe closer than you might think. Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  They, they get the attention and affection of adults when they do stuff. When they do, when they bring home a good report card, when they make the baseball team, when they make first chair in the orchestra. That's when they get, that's when they really get praise. And so they make the connection as children that love is something that's earned. Now, love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. It's not a gift. Graces and gifts are different, but they learn that it's a gift that you get that's, sorry, it's an earned thing. And so the result of that is that they wire their little brains, their little prefrontal cortex is highly plastic. And they, they, they, they grow up thinking that they have to be special. This is what leads to the cult of specialness, which is a real pathology, because that leads to a success addiction.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  And, and, and literally, I mean, their brains don't actually get sufficient dopamine unless they're winning. Unless they're having an outlandish experience, unless they're getting praised and they're admired by strangers. It's pathological. It's not normal at all. And most people don't actually suffer from this, but by the way, they become billionaires.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

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• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  Right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3 K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit, plus bonus AG1 Travel Packs. And for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of Omega 3s. Just go to the link in the description below or head to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. Do most people not suffer from this? Is habituation to success not something that's kind of in for everybody? Is that not the whole game of happiness, the habituation thing?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Habituation to success. It depends on what success means. If success means it's really in these worldly terms of money, power, the admiration of strangers, it's very different than the success that people actually have in having a family life where, you know, your kids and your wife love you. And most people, actually, they sense success along these ordinary lines. What that success addict.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Most people?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really do. And it's possible, and it's funny, when you look at, you know, surveys of public opinion, people really admire the most worldly successful people, to be sure. And they think, well, wouldn't that be great? And they look on social media and they think, wouldn't that be great? But that's not my life. And so I guess I'm just gonna go to the park and play with my kid. And they're pretty happy as a result of that. I mean, there's an old axiom in my business, which is woe be to the man whose dreams come true, he will find he had the wrong dreams.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Why? Because the dreams that come true, the dreams that come true that are that people praise you for, that people envy you for, are the worldly idols. The worldly idols, that Aquinas talked about the idols game of money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four idols. And if you make them your instrument, those goals more than instrumentally, if you make these the ultimate goals of your life, you will find unhappiness. That's good, modern social science, but it's as old as Aquinas, who was lifting it from Aristotle. Those are the, as a matter of fact, I have a game I play with my students called What's My Idol? You wanna play? Sure. Let's find out what Chris's idol is. Okay. Now, the way that this game works is psychologically, you don't just say, pick one of the four.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  You eliminate the ones that is not. That's how you get much better fidelity in anything like this. So Aquinas suggested, and modern behavioral science validates the idea, that we're attracted to four worldly things, and they won't make us happy, but our animal impulse is that we need more, more, more. This is the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more. Money or resources, right? Power, which is influence over other people. It's not malevolent. It means that people do what you want them to do. You're the top dog, you're the king of the mambo. Number three is pleasure, and pleasure manifests in different ways. For some people, it's like feeling good. For some people, it's comfort. For some people, it's security.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Like people who check their stock portfolio every day, they have a security idol, which is in that pleasure. Like that, it's the alleviation of discomfort. And last is, is honor. Not in serving with honor, it means honor as the honor of the world. It means fame, prestige, admiration of other people. Those are the four idols, and everybody has one in particular. And when you know what it is, you'll say, oh yeah, that's why I always do the things that I regret later. This will be the source of your future regret, if you know this, gives you power. Okay, so money, power, pleasure, and honor. You have to get rid of one, which means that, not that you don't have it, what it means is that you have the population average in it, which for a super striver is torture.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Being normal, it wants to be normal, right? So one of the four, you gotta get rid of, and you gotta go to normal, normal population average, which in the United States, you know, is pretty freaking great. So which one do you get rid of, Chris?

• 21:59Chris Williamson?

  Money.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Power.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  Power.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Pleasure.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  Pleasure, honor.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Or fame.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  Fame.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Or fame or the admiration of others, the the adoration of the crowd.

• 22:10Chris Williamson?

  Power.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Tell me why.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  I tend to not use it much. I tend to not try. I tend to not influence other people, certainly not directly.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm an only child.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so solitude, a pretty small circle.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Right. You don't dream of being a big CEO?

• 22:31Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  So I will make a prediction. You hate it when people have power over you.

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes, massively.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  That's always the thing. Here's the interesting thing. When you look at would be dictators, you know who they admire? Dictators.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  You always admire the people who have the idol that you have, who are successful in accumulating the idol that you have.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Of course, because you see the currency more cleanly, right?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  So if you see a politician in the UK or the United States and they admire dictators, look out.

• 23:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Look out. Don't vote for that person.

• 23:06Chris Williamson?

  You know what I heard? Put a pin in it for the second. Uh, Isabel unraveled on Substack. Fucking great. So wonderful. She just got engaged. Um, she wrote this article, which I think is so true. She said, uh, extreme crushes are just misplaced ambition.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  And basically, we we see in our deepest romantic crushes, the ones that we do and don't date, traits that we wish that we had ourselves and that in the um, acceptance of us by this person, that is us finally validating the lack that we feel we have had all along. We see in them, oh, they're so charismatic, they're so confident, they're so popular, they're so talented, they're so resilient, they're so whatever, peaceful, whatever it might be. And that's what I feel I don't have. So it's an interesting inversion of this idea here, but I I, from what I can see, I think that that holds true too.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Because something that you think would complete you. They have something that you think would complete you. And if you can't get it yourself, then you're gonna rent it in somebody else.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  Ah, what a wonderful way to put it. Okay, so I've gotten rid of power.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  You've got to get rid of power, which means you have the normal amount of power.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which is basically none.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, everybody's got influence.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  You know, and you're gonna have children and you're gonna have power.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  As long as I can boss them around. Stop screaming. Pick your mother up.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Which won't work. So, okay, so you've got money, pleasure, and honor. Which one do you get rid of next?

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  Money.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  How do you know? How, or I should say why?

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  Ah, I don't tend, I don't have a particularly lavish life. I don't have expensive tastes.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  I've developed slightly expensive taste for flying in business class, if that counts, which I'm sure. It's like the first thing that everybody that gets money goes to.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  It's also a little bit of like.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  It's better.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  It's, yeah, well, it's, it's, it's the most immediate way to like spend your money in a better. But also, it helps you. It's, it's like a very publicly acceptable way.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  It's not a PJ.

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  No, no.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  PJ is 10x.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Correct. No, no, no, no, not fucking Scott Galloway. Um, he's, he's fucking cornered me at South by Southwest. He got me by, we were, we went out for dinner and he got me by the collar. He'd had a couple of beers. He's like, Chris, do you know what the only reason to get rich is? Private jet. It's like, it's the only, it's the only reason to get rich. It's like, it's the only reason that you need money. It's like, after private jet, there's nothing. It's like, the only difference between you and any future is you in a private jet. Heck, I've been such a giggle.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Okay, man.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  I thought he was, he's really cute, but he like, he's, he's kind of left-leaning capital. I like his, I like the Venn diagram of where he comes into that, but no, I've gotten rid of money.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. And you probably, I mean, you've made plenty of money because you're successful. You've figured out that there's not that much fun you can have with it. It's not that great.

• 26:08Chris Williamson?

  No, I mean, it, I. There's two paths, I think, that people who don't come from money, I did not come from any money. I grew up in the most working class town in the UK. That was, um, the only title it had was the widest high street in the UK and the highest teen pregnancy rating. And then it lost that.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  What town?

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Stockton, Stockton, yeah, it's northeast, it's just below Newcastle.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  And you're same town as, oh, you went to university with Mike Thurston, right?

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  I did, yeah, Newcastle. So he's from Leeds, he's from a little bit lower down the beach, but yeah. Um, uh, two directions. One is, I never had money. Wow. Like, look at all of this, like, spare money that I've got. I really don't know kind of how to use it. And maybe someone will coach me like how to make more of it or whatever. But I guess still have a bit of a puritanical work kind of ethic thing. And like, oh, like a, the Bill Perkins archetype, right? The die with, you need to read Die with Zero like fucking 20 times and learn how to spend some money.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  And then the other side, which is, I never had money. Woo! And it's just like a roller coaster all the way down.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  That gets all.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like, that's the NBA player.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And when you get married and have children, then that's, you know, then it's a different kettle of fish. Because you start thinking about intergenerational wealth and how you're building your family and your philanthropy and all that kind of stuff. But I completely believe you that the next thing to go is money. Now it's, of course, more difficult because the two that are left are left for a reason. And that's pleasure and fame. And, and fame can mean different things. You can mean fame in the eyes of the right people. So academics is like, I don't care about fame. Yes, you do. You want to walk into the room.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  You're age indexed, you're obsessed with your age index.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  That's Professor Williamson. He wrote the paper on, you know, the new string theory paper or something like that. Like, on what? Who cares? The point is that prestige is prestige. Or the, the really kind of dysregulated one is, is adoration in the, in the eyes of millions and millions of people on social media, which is a really dysregulated.

• 28:07Chris Williamson?

  A deranged version of it.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it, there's a real problem with it because fame is the only one of those that you can ever only be happy in spite of. You can be happy very easily with money. I can teach you how to be happy with a lot of money. But I can't teach you how to be happy with a lot of fame unless you do a lot of work. I mean, I know like my co-author is Oprah Winfrey and she's very, very, very famous and she's extremely happy person. But the only reason is because she realizes soulfully that her acclaim is a gift such that she can help other people. That's the only reason and it will be withdrawn immediately if she were to stop doing that in her view. Which is an incredibly healthy way to see it, which is why she's actually done well. Okay.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Comfort, or I should say pleasure, your version of pleasure or fame, which one do you get rid of?

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  So we've done this before, but the last time I didn't hear you talk about security or comfort.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  That's a big deal to me. That's a huge deal.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Partly because you grew up without money.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  Uh, the money thing was not, it wasn't like we had, um, uh, like poverty anxiety. It was more so, I'm a pretty big feeler and chaos doesn't agree with me. Like intensity agrees with me, but complexity doesn't agree with me. Ambiguity and uncertainty really do not agree with me at all.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So that's a good thing for us to work on, actually. Let's put a pin in that because we need to come back because that means you're an anxious person. Anxiety is unfocused fear and there's a way to fix that.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  There's a way to fix that without benzodiazepine drugs.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Well, I imagine that lots of other people are feeling the same here. What would I say?

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  Given where I'm at right now, I would actually say that the next one that could go would be fame.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  And that I would, I would keep myself with safety, comfort, security. I think that that would be top of the tree for me right now.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that would mean that the, the acclaim that you actually get from what you do for a living right now would go to the population. Mean, which would mean that you'd have to do something else for a living.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  That would suck a lot.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  That would kind of suck, right?

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but I would have a hundred out of a hundred security comfort. I don't know. I mean, maybe this is me speaking from my ivory tower. Maybe what's changed.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  The guy with the top, you know, three podcasts or something in the world.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I mean, where.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  By the time that, by the time that this comes out, Spotify will have released 2025 wrapped, which is Modern Wisdom's eighth on the planet.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Dude, that's unbelievable.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  I got the, I got the press release.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  That's sweet.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  Today. Yeah, it's fucking crazy. I'm on top of Jay Shetty, a position I've always wanted to be in. And actually, I'm the power bottom just below Andrew Huberman. So I'm in a Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman three way, which I imagine the internet has just been waiting for.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  This is what the world's been hoping for all along. That's great. Congratulations.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  That's a really wonderful thing. And the problem is that you're in a business that requires a claim, that requires fans, that requires followers, that requires people who recognize you and trust you. And so that kind of in a way to say, I don't really care about it is not meaningful. Because you, you actually, to do what you're able to do, it has to be something that's important.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  I think, do you know what I think it is, if I was being completely honest? And I think maybe other people, as they've played along at home, may have felt the same thing. There's two worlds. There is, what is it that I,

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  functionally, what am I driven by right now?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  And what do I want to be driven by?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  Like, what do I feel like my higher self? Like, if I was being incongruence, if I was coherent?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's what do you want and what do you want to want? And so what do you want to want is a really important exercise.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  I adore that. You know, the first ever essay that completely broke my brain is called, a guy called Kyle Eschenroda. It's no longer available. His website got hacked and taken over by some, like, one of those phishing porn websites. So you can't even see, but I've got the PDF saved and it's what do you want to want? And it was a 20,000 word essay and it snapped me in half in like 2018.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  It was so phenomenal.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  So it's really, you know, I'll, I'll ask people to answer a bunch of questions for their effective mission statement for life. And then I'll have them write their ideal mission statement. And the difference between the two is what you want, what you want to want. And that's the essence, the Buddhist essence of right desire. Because what we want is right desire. The problem is not what you want. The problem is that your desires aren't right. You don't want the right things. For all of misery, pretty much can be summed up in not wanting the right things. You don't need to do something differently. You need to want something differently.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  So this is the problem.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, Kyle's argument was that your wants define your path to least resistance.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Chris Williamson?

  And if you can choose, if you can get yourself to want what you want to want, then you get to row with the tide.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to rowing against it.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And you know, when you work with couples that are having trouble with infidelity, for example, the problem isn't the infidelity. It's the desire for infidelity. That's really what it comes down to. And what you need to do is to actually engineer a different kind of desire. That's how you fix problems. That's how you fix problems in yourself and in your, and in your relationship. That's how you, is really getting into the whole concept of what you want, is making sure that what you want and what you want to want are congruent.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  That's a lifetime goal. So, so what we've established is that comfort is important to you, or security is important to you. And that you've built a life, you've built a career that requires a lot of acclaim. And so these are the things to keep an eye on. These are always the things to keep an eye on, that you'll make decisions and cut corners because you're trying to feel more secure and that you'll hang on doggedly to acclaim and never hold it lightly. You won't ever hold it lightly because this is an asset. The claim that you have is a really, really important asset professionally for you. But it's also kind of who you understand who you are. I mean, I know the story of this podcast. I mean, you didn't start with millions of listeners.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  No, it took 450 episodes to hit 250,000 subscribers.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:06Chris Williamson?

  And I moved to America with like 250 and yeah, so the first half of the show was like.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  Five percent of the subscribers?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  First half of the show. To the fledgling podcasters out there, if you're expecting quick success. It is not.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  It's a really important lesson.

• 34:26Chris Williamson?

  Took four years, took four years and four.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  I remember hearing you early on, as a matter of fact. This is really good. This is going to be really good. And it turns out it was true.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, game recognizes game, as they say.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  So anyway, this is all this is really super important self knowledge. Because once you understand what beguiles you, you can manage yourself in a more effective way. Always a more effective way.

• 34:50Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance, but most people have no idea where theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. And seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting a blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's just $499.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $100 off, bringing it down to 399 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. That's functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. Talk to me about the anxiety and certainty thing. It feels like that based on a lot of the people that I speak to, the the hypervigilance that people have from maybe an uncertain atmosphere growing up.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:07Chris Williamson?

  Maybe communication wasn't super transparent and they needed to be able to detect the micro movements of exactly what was going on and read into sentences. Maybe love was contingent on performance. Maybe their nervous system just didn't feel soothed. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. I think that that, based on the conversations I have at the live shows as well, the people that come up and do the meet and greet or the questions that I get that are done at the Q and A's afterward. So many of them are basically around, I really fucking struggle with the uncertainty of the future.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  Like tolerating ambiguity, uncertainty, unpredictability feels like some weird personal curse.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So uncertainty is a problem. Risk isn't, by the way. Risk and uncertainty are different. And people use them interchangeably. Uncertainty means you don't know what might happen. So you can't assign probabilities. So you can't manage contingencies. Risk is that you know what might happen. So you're going to assign probabilities. So you can manage contingencies. That's the reason that people feel better when they buy insurance. Insurance is a happiness business. What it does is it converts uncertainty into risk and it no longer becomes a source of misery. That's why anybody who buys a life insurance policy feels better after they do it. Because they've just turned their uncertainty into risk. Uncertainty is a source of fear and that stimulates the amygdala. Because the amygdala says it makes you hyper vigilant.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And when there's a lot of uncertainty, you're more vigilant than you would have been otherwise. And that's a source of negative emotion. So you're feeling this constant sort of negative emotion.

• 37:35Chris Williamson?

  Why is vigilance a source of negative emotion?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Because you're vigilant against threat and it's the possibility of threat. When you're uncertain, it's funny because you know, there's all kinds of uncertainty that we don't worry about at all. Right? Uncertainty, like, things might be great. You're not worried about that. Right? It's funny because you know, I do a lot of stuff on waiting. Waiting is a funny thing. There's waiting that's wonderful. It's like I'm waiting for Christmas. And the reason that the Christmas lights go up in America after Halloween is because we want to savor the season longer because we want to wait longer and that's positive. There are certain things that might happen and might not. And so we're anxious about it, but anxious in kind of a happy way, in an optimistic way. There are certain things that might go wrong and might be okay, but might be terrible. That's like tests from the doctor.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And that's real anxiety. And then there's the one that you know it's going to be bad. That's dread. So there's a whole, there's a whole range.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Sweets of different uncertainties.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  When it, when it comes to, when it comes to waiting and uncertainty, for sure. So when people say, you know, I'm really worried about uncertainty, they're worried about threats. And threat vigilance is really part of human evolution. We've, you know, the species has survived because of threat vigilance in the way that we're vigilant in the face of uncertainty. The problem is it's really dysregulated. It's, it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. We're supposed to be occasionally really fearful and then have a sudden burst. The HPA axis goes bonkers and we start running and climb a tree. But that's supposed to be occasional and super intense and, and, and not very frequent.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  How, just on that, how likely do you think it is that the ancestral evolutionary zebras don't get ulcers explanation for? It comes and it goes and you shake it off. Do you think that that was ancestrally accurate? You think that that was like?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think it was. I don't think they, they didn't have Twitter. And so they weren't, you know, sitting around going, I wonder if, wonder how that tweet did.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  I understand, I understand on that, but what about the chronic? That guy in the next cave keeps eyeing up my misses and that this has been going on for a long time. Male parental uncertainty, the fear of abandonment from an, of a, a male partner from a new mother that like, those things are.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Those things have always existed for sure.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  And would that not cause this sort of chronic stress?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  It not chronic stress in the same way. It was a, a much sort of simpler, um, under stimulated kind of environment where you could, I mean, when you live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, it's a lot easier for you to have situational awareness. Now we live in an environment where you have no situational awareness because it's just too multi-dimensional. What's going on all the time? Something can be happening and you won't know about it all the time is really what it comes down to. So there's the big threats in, you know, 250,000 years ago, a neighboring band of Homo sapiens comes in, takes all your animal skins and flints and kills you. That's really, really scary. And then there's the smaller threats that you'd find where you're falling in the, and you're falling in the hierarchy in your band for some particular reason.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Now it's everything all the time. Everything all the time is stimulating the amygdala. And we're getting this little drip of cortisol and, and, you know, people get these panic attacks. You know, it's like, it's not that long ago, by the way. I mean, I'll tell you what the, you know, grandpa Williamson never said to grandma Williamson. I had a panic attack behind the mule today.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't a thing.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  What drives panic attack?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  It's an over, it's flooding of the HPA axis is that, you know, the adrenal system goes berserk. It becomes incredibly dysregulated and you know, when you have a lot of time without devices and you're doing a job that's relatively repetitive and your brain is working the way it's supposed to. So the default mode network is on and when the right hemisphere of your brain is properly activated, which is the part that questions mystery and meaning, the why questions in your life, you're not going to be freaking out all the time. And that's what people are doing is they're freaking out all the time because they're constantly distracted and they're overstimulated. That's what it comes down to.

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  Is this an argument to chop wood and carry water more?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's, it's an argument to live more like Grandpa Williamson, actually. It's an, but which is not ordinary anymore. That's the problem. He didn't have to think about it, but we do.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  Grandpa Williamson did also, I think he went to the Falklands War. He went to cause some tropical disease in the Falklands War. So.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  He fought in the Falklands War?

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  I think it was the Falklands.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  That's really.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, I mean, that was, um, that's a real source of meaning for these guys. Is that they did these things, they did these hard things and he wasn't looking at his phone the whole time.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  No, that's, that's.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And he wasn't posting, you know, his Falklands War pictures to Instagram. I mean, his life was in a way more simpler.

• 42:25Chris Williamson?

  It, I mean, the pulsatile nature of life.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  Is like real interesting to me.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  And the sort of flattening and the, the spreading of the curve.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  We've seen, there's a really great demographer dude, Stephen J. Shaw. He's the best on the, as far as I can see, he's the best on the planet for birth rate decline. The best on the planet.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  He's a demographer.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, he's a self-trained, but he's done it. He's been obsessed. He created the birth gap documentary. Brad Wilcox is also fantastic on this one. Lyman Stone, also fantastic.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Nick Everstad, yeah.

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Nicholas Everstad and, and his wife as well, although she's a different beast.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Mary.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fucking animal.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it so fortunate that we get to live in this time with all of these cool people?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It's great. It's unbelievable because you know, you live in the ideal world. And the ideal world is like an unbelievable sporgaspor.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  Infinite. Anyway, he's got this idea about the flattening of the vitality curve. So in the past, if you were 21 and you met a 21 year old, the likelihood that they're ready to have kids right now is pretty high.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Chris Williamson?

  As you flatten this curve, you can imagine that there is a left to right, there is a time. And then height is what proportion of the entire population is ready to go at that time?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:31Chris Williamson?

  You have both moved it rightward and you have flattened it down. And when you flatten it down, it means that if you, the likelihood of you finding someone that is ready at the same time that you are ready is actually low. And as you know, in some of the research, if you stick about in a relationship with somebody for more than five, more than seven years and no kids have come along, it is really, really tough to hold that together because your ancestral programming, your brain says to you, there is no world in which reliable contraception existed in paleo times. No kids have arrived. Maybe it's her, maybe it's me, but it's definitely one of us. And if we break up, if I just find the way that she used to sip her tea and I thought was cute now,

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  fucking horrendous and driving me up the wall, I just feel like we just fell out of love. We're not really too sure.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  And the, people hate to hear this because the, we're enjoying ourselves, we're bonding, we're doing all the rest of it. Like, I get it, I get it. But like there are, was it psychology or biology? There are some physics of the system that are risky to roll the dice against. I'm not saying it can't be done. Many of my friends have, but more of my friends haven't.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I mean, you and I have talked about this a lot, about the evolutionary desire and about David Buss's stuff and about the fact.

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  The king.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  The king. He's the king of this. He's really great. You know, I don't even know him personally and I cite him constantly. I gotta meet him.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  We're in his city. We should have gone.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I know, we should, we should, we should. Anyway, but, but the whole point is that there's this, it's funny thing in relationships. There's this, they talk about the seven year itch. It's actually a five year itch in relationships where you're most likely to break up after five years. And actually that's a divorce rate. So that's after you get married. So, and, and part of the reason for that is that. The tension, the honeymoon is over. And, and, and people get angry with each other. People start to have higher negative affect in the relationship. But that's when you start to, for example, fertility cues and resource cues. Go from positive to negative. And so, for example, women, they tend to admire their husbands less. If their husbands are not doing well, and it's five, at the five year mark, they're starting to think. Cut my losses?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Even if they don't know they're thinking that. And men, if there's fertility issues, as you suggest, around five years, they start thinking. Try someone else? That's the big problem.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  Horrible when. Our ultimate motives clash up against the much more publicly acceptable sort of proximate motives. Of things like, oh, well, you know, like, we just didn't really feel the same way about each other. We didn't really, it's like, I wasn't sure that he could provide for me and my family. Or I wasn't sure that our AMH level was actually where it needed to be in order to be able to keep this thing going.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and part of that is just because propaganda tells us that we're not biological creatures. That we don't have an evolutionary impulse behind us, and that's nonsense. The more that we actually understand how we're biologically wired, the more that we're actually able to stand up to our biology and live in our, in our space of moral aspiration. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is an incredible marvel. And, and it actually allows us, the fact that 30% of our brain by weight allows us to make decisions consciously that the dog can't. Your dog's prefrontal cortex is wafer thin. That's why all it has is animal impulses. We, on the other hand, have moral aspirations. But you're not going to get beyond your, your animal impulses into the space of your moral aspirations unless you understand those animal impulses.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  That's why I teach about the animal impulses, so that you know enough that you can reject them.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Start from the bottom of the brain stem up.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, the whole, you know, the fact that if you don't actually understand how you're wired and what your impulses make you want to do. You're unable to, to stand up to it and say, I choose to behave differently.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a weird blessing, but also a burden or an obligation, perhaps. Like you're obliged if you want to capture all that is available up here. There's an entry price that you have to pay for this weird inheritance that you've got, this like cosmic cognitive inheritance that you've been given.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  If you wanna, if you wanna make it work, you're gonna have to.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  You can just live like your dog. You can have the same moral goals as a squirrel. And a lot of people do that, you know.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  Peterson had a great line about this. That was a live event of his in like 2018. A show had been going for six years. Someone stands up at the end, like they do in my Q and As, and he says,

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  "The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply?" I was like, what a wonderful question. Give that guy a podcast. And.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  What did Jordan say?

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  Thought for a moment.

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  Said, "The only way out is through." "You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you." "You can try and regress back into a more animalistic state." "So it's too bloody late for that." "It's too bloody late for that." And I thought it was such a very apocalyptic on brand, but I thought it was such a wonderful answer.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an ancient answer, actually. That's an ancient answer. Saint Aaronias in the fourth century said, "The glory of God is a man fully alive." That means a man is suffering. You need to be fully alive because that is your teacher. It's interesting because, you know, the Buddhists have this math, where they say that suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. And, and you can go to the therapy industrial complex in the Western world today to try to lower your pain, or you can try to be fully alive and lower your resistance. In so doing, what happens is the suffering ultimately declines because you've turned it into learning. You've turned it into generativity. You've turned it into growth. And that's what Jordan means by you've gotta go through.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly, dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated? Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids. Each Grab and Go stick pack is a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. It's got no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients, or any other junk. This plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating your appetite, and curbing cravings. This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is a.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Sweet salty orangey nectar and you will genuinely feel the difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. The only way out is through. I remember this Daniel Kahneman idea. I think it's so great. I wonder if you've ever used this analogy in your work. Imagine that you have a spring and on both ends,

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  you're pulling this spring. Your goal is to get the midpoint of the spring to go in one direction. Now, you can either apply more pull to one end, or you can reduce more pull from the other. And the difference, the thing that I thought was so clever about it, was that if your solution is to hit the gas rather than to take your foot off the brake, yes, you move the center of the spring, but you have way more tension in the system.

• 51:12Chris Williamson?

  I thought that would, it stuck with me. I think that's such a-

• 51:14Speaker 01

  It's a nice analogy.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  Great analogy, because as you pull more, yes, you're overriding it and you are pulling it through, but there's so much more tension in the system.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  And you're having to work harder.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why, you know, the Zen Buddhists, it's an attitude of non-resistance, an attitude of non-resistance. Look, when it comes to suffering in general, and this is a lot of what I write about now, and part of the reason is because the most important teacher of the meaning of your life is your suffering. The most important. And one of the greatest ways for you to miss the meaning of your life is for you to try to avoid your suffering.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  Give me an example.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So, nobody ever said, "I really figured out what I was made of that we could debet and be fat." Now, they talked about when my mom died, when I almost lost my business, when I flunked out of college, when I got really sick, when I was truly scared, and I made my way through it. When I understood and I went through that suffering was my teacher, about who I am as a person and the meaning of my life. What you find is that in large groups of people, you find that when you ask them to talk about the meaning of their life, they always talk about their terrible times. They always talk about their suffering. Always. That's the way it is. And if we have a culture that tries to get rid of pain,

• 52:33Speaker 01

  you have a culture that gets rid of meaning.

• 52:35Chris Williamson?

  It's not only get rid of pain, it's resist it, right?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's more resistance is bad, just as getting, as trying to lower pain is bad.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  So you have a culture of that. That's what the therapy culture really is. The therapeutic culture is about getting rid of pain and not resisting anything, et cetera, et cetera. That's a really big problem because ultimately, at the end of the day, what that is, is that's antithetical to finding the meaning of your life, to finding the significance, the purpose and coherence of your life. So what we need is we need a culture of the Spartan Fife, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. There's the best essay on this, by the way. You've read it. But everybody who watches Modern Wisdom needs to read Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. It's like, read it tonight. It's an essay. It's like Ayn Rand, but not creepy.

• 53:28Chris Williamson?

  I liked, what else did I read recently? There's a, is there a Rilke poem on the shortness of life?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:37Chris Williamson?

  Fucking fuck.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  Talking about walking through some mad.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  But the whole point is we need a culture that embraces the inevitable suffering that is part of the human existence. That says, you know, so I ask my students to repeat after me, "My suffering is sacred." And it's like a really fun teacher, right? And and just have a little mantra at the beginning of the day. Sam's truly grateful for the happy things and the fun things that are going to happen this day. But I'm also grateful for the trouble I'm going to have because therein lies my growth. Bring it on and have that that to face it, to to face up to it. It's a really wonderful thing. It's actually one of the reasons that people get happier when they're older. That people start to get happier in their 50s and 60s.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And almost every it's like I tell my students, because almost everybody's happy to happiness declines. And their 20s or 30s and 40s.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  But almost everybody from early 20s until about 50, their happiness declines. And they think it's going to go up because their success and money, et cetera. Their their dreams are going to come true. They are. The problem is that, you know, that you're going to get less enjoyment and and it's going to be trouble. Almost everybody gets happy. So I tell my students, it's a good news, bad news story. So the bad news is that your happiness is declining. The good news is that I'm getting happier.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  See ya.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Your 50s and 60s, almost everybody is happier. And part of that is because you start to understand suffering for the first time. You're like, oh, oh, I'm not going to be suffering about this tomorrow. So I'm going to get a head start feeling better today. You you you understand yourself. You understand the nature of the experience.

• 55:16Chris Williamson?

  It's the sort of transient.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  The true nature of these things. I read this is a big sort of lesson for me that I really struggled earlier on. I still struggle with now, which was this is going to be the way it is forever. And it causes you to not savor things that are good, that are happening, and overly fear things that are bad.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  That are happening. Like when the world's on top of you, it doesn't last for as long as you're worried about. And when you're on top of the world, it doesn't last for as long as you hope.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Right. That's the hedonic treadmill. I mean, the fact that emotions are transient, because emotions are not there to give you a good day. Emotions are there as a signal that there are threats and opportunities in the environment, and that you need to avoid them or approach them. That's all your emotions are. They're just neurobiological signals to you. Negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust and sadness, there's only four. And they're in response to four different threats. Thank God for those threats. They keep you alive. But when you understand them as particular signals, then you can metacognitively manage them by understanding them better. And that's one of the great, that's one of the reasons that, that people get remarkably less neurotic. It's one of the ways that, that personality reliably changes as people get older. They become more agreeable, they become more conscientious, they don't become more open to experience,

• 56:32Speaker 01

  but they almost always get less neurotic because they have a better understanding of the fact that life is suffering.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. When it comes to

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  negative experiences, what are the, what are the most reliable levers to lower negative feelings?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  So number, the, the most reliable is, is anything that's metacognitive. It's, it's understanding of negative emotion. That's really what it comes down to. So, okay, so there's two different questions here. Number one is what will actually help you with negative emotions? Number two is what is the, the technique in your life? And so the, the, the least

• 57:18Speaker 01

  productive ways are drugs and alcohol and workaholism, like we talked about. And now it'll be mindless internet use or something like that.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  Sedation through distraction.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Sedation through distraction, et cetera. So it just kind of goes into those categories. The techniques that work really well and are extremely productive because they make you better through your suffering and actually alleviate a lot and they're non, and they're non resistant in their way. Number one is, is religious activity. And number two is picking up heavy things running around. So people ask me, do I get happier when I go to the gym? No, you get less unhappy. If you have naturally low negative affect, if you're naturally a very low intensity unhappiness person, which is to say that you're a cheerleader or you're a judge, you're not going to be able to stay in the gym because you're not going to feel better. You're going to be like, it just hurts.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that as we look around the gym, the more jacked people are, the harder they find life generally?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that means they have high intensity negative affect. That's the reason you love the gym.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  They're being alleviated.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you get lots and lots of, you get a lot of relief when you go to the gym of your, from your intense negative affect. So.

• 58:25Chris Williamson?

  Jacked guys are sad guys.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Jacked guys are guys with issues.

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Jacked guys are guys with issues. If you're a 61 year old and you look like you go to the gym a lot, it means that you're.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Hey.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  But the other thing is religious activity and religious activity is really, really important. That's part of, by the way, that's one of the reasons that I, that my own morning protocol starts with. Number one, I get up at four thirty, four forty-five to five forty-five in the gym every day. I have a gym in my house. Then I go to mass every day. I'm Catholic, go to mass every day because it goes body and soul because I have a negative affect problem.

• 59:00Chris Williamson?

  You're saying that you're using church and religion as a performance enhancer for your happiness?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  That's right, and it's completely legal.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, wow. Okay, so take me through your, if you were to create an evidence-based morning routine.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  Maximizing wellbeing, what would it look like?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  So I maximize both wellbeing and productivity. So this is really, really important because I have, I'm in a creative profession. I gotta write, think, speak, teach. I gotta work every day on, on having creative output because I have a weekly column and I write books and I have to give talks, et cetera, et cetera.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  Your output's terrifying.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And, and it's a, and I have a podcast. I mean, it's like, and it's, it takes a lot of work, this whole thing. So I need to be super productive and that means my brain has to be optimized for that. And I want to alleviate high levels of negative affect. So number one is the brahman mahorta, which is in Sanskrit means the creator's time. That has been around for 6,000 years. And the whole idea is if you get up before dawn, you've already won the day. Because that actually gives you better concentration, better focus and better creativity. If you get up when the sun is warm, you've already lost the first battle. And now a lot of people are like, yeah, my chronotype, I'm a night owl. No, I used to think I was a night owl tool too. I was actually just a musician who drank too much.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Morning larks, the chronotype is probably 60% environmental. And only about 40% genetic, so everybody can be a morning lark. It's harder for some, I never get up without an alarm clock, ever, ever, ever, ever. And year after year after year, I still have to, I would sleep in if I could. But that's the first battle and that's really a big swinger in, in improving your negative.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  You've really started off with a difficult one that especially if you're in summer somewhere and you think, oh, that's four thirty.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  No, no, of course, if you're in Helsinki in July, you're not gonna be able to do it because.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  No sleep.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, you gotta get up, you gotta get up before you went to bed.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  So I mean, your results may vary. You gotta, you gotta figure out how to, I mean, you never make the perfect the enemy of the good on this. The second part of that is what you do first thing, and that's substantial physical activity. Exercise is really important. So a lot of guys will write to me, 22 year old guys graduate from college, feel aimless, don't know what to do, feel really depressed, living with mom, whatever. I say, okay, you don't have to go to the gym and pick up heavy things and do something insane like your routine. I recommend getting up a half hour before dawn and walking for an hour without devices outside. Walk, not under treadmill, outside, hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet. No devices. This will give you a sense of transcendence. It will wake up the right hemisphere of your brain, which is what you

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  need for a sense of meaning and mysticism. It's important. I mean, it's great to listen to modern wisdom, but not during the walk. Right? And doing that while the sun comes up has special benefits. Huberman talks about that an awful lot, but this is very well studied. This is really important.

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so combine these two for me. If you're saying that it's great to pick up heavy things, and some people like to pick up heavy things, but you're also saying it's great to be out on a walk outside.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Those are incompatible unless you're working out outside.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Right? And, and that's great if you can actually do that. If you've got an outdoor gym, because you know, you're

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  Lift ATX, shout out Lift ATX in Austin, Texas.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Venice Beach, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, but, and so you gotta make choices along those lines. I have a gym in my house. So I go downstairs to the basement from 4:45 to 5:45 every day. I get about, I take about one, one day off per month because of travel. I'm on the road a lot. Then I clean up and I go to mass every day. And that's important to me. And these are my religious beliefs. And, and by the way, I go with my wife. We go to 6:30 mass every day when I'm home and I'm home about half the time. And here, I'm in Austin, Texas. I'll go to mass tomorrow morning at 6:30. There's a church near my, my, there's, it's like, being Catholic is great. It's like Starbucks. It's a complete franchise.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  It's the same every place. There's one in every corner. It's unbelievable.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Exactly what you're gonna get.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right. So, but that's important to me. But that, the whole point is not Catholicism. The whole, my path is not the only path. The point is transcendence and transcendence by getting smaller and making the universe larger. For some people, Vipassana meditation works really, really well. But that's, that's getting soul in line with body first thing in the morning. And there's a lot of neuroscience research that talks about why that's so, so important. Because I'm driving toward high F, high wellbeing and high productivity. Those are the twin goals and doing this alignment really works, really helps a lot. Because by seven, then you're, you're ready to, and I haven't taken any nutrition yet, except for,

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  you know, 15 grams of creatine monohydrate and a, you know, electrolyte, some, something salty. And yeah, so I'm not getting any calories. That's when I apply the psychostimulant. That's when I apply the caffeine because you don't want to use caffeine to wake up. You want to use caffeine to focus. We all know about how the A2A adenosine cycle works in the brain. No doubt, everybody in your show knows about this.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  I piped on about, look, I got a ton of shit because for a long time, Element, that's been a great partner on the show and I fucking love them.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  They're terrific.

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  My big pitch was for the first 90 minutes of the day, your adenosine system isn't what's in charge. Your adrenal system is and salt act on your adrenals more than it does. If you want to fuck about with cortisol and you wanted like increase that using caffeine. But so many people have a mid afternoon, early afternoon slump and then need to crank the caffeine lever again, but this is.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  They drank their caffeine too early.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. Just, but just push it. I'm telling you, New Year's resolution, push it back by two hours, by three hours and just see what happens, especially if you're using something like Neutonic as well, because the L-theanine is going to smooth out. Or just take L-theanine, you don't need to use Neutonic. Take L-theanine capsules with your morning coffee. And if you are really, really tired, you can go harder on the coffee, but the L-theanine will smooth out the titties. And then if you add 10 plus grams of creatine in.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  You're in good shape because it's the creatine monohydrate, the newest research says it's neuroprotective. It's not just good for muscle protein synthesis. So it's I mean, creatine is one of the most studied supplements. Super product. Super product. And I take a multivitamin and I do all the stuff that sensible people do. Okay, so you're up before the sun? Yep, up before the sun, hard workout, which is 75% resistance, 25% zone two. And then I'm going to be active for the rest of the day. So I get another five miles of walking over the course of the day, the rest of the day, which is important. Go to mass, go to church, which is or my meditation. How many steps is five miles, like 10,000? That's 10,000 steps. I just don't like saying 10,000 steps because it's so hackneyed. Okay, you've got to do it differently, don't you?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  I gotta be different. I gotta be me. Anyway, so I come back from, once we come back from church, that's when caffeine, that's when caffeine enters the picture. And I use about 350 milligrams of caffeine a day. It's usually. It's not a small amount. It's not a small amount. It's a one bolus. I grew up, I grew up in Seattle, dude. I grew up near the only Starbucks in the world. Okay. Yeah, so I'm used to burnt coffee. For me, the best coffee is like hot water through charcoal briquettes. You know, it's like if you, if you made something called Indonesian ashes, I would buy it. Anyway, so then, and then I take first, I take first protein. I try to get between 60 and 70 grams of protein first thing in the morning. And that means

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  whey protein with, with Greek yogurt and berries and to get the micronutrients with the berries and the nuts in there. And that's all I've, that's the only nutrition I take until the middle of the day when I get another bolus of protein. But that Greek yogurt has a ton of tryptophan in it. And tryptophan is real good for mood management. What's your favorite brand of Greek yogurt for this? I like, well, Faye's great, Chobani's good. Chobani's lovely. Oikosis is nice. Okay, so there's not, it's not like there's something that you found that doesn't have the. Unflavored, fat-free Greek yogurt. It sounds joyless, but you know, when you put some delicious berries and nuts in it, it's the best thing. Especially if you make some good protein powder in it too. Yeah, for sure. And you spike it with protein powder. You get up to 70 grams of

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  protein and that's a big bolus of protein. So you're getting the right amino acid. That you need and all of that is really good for focus. And so I get four hours of an appropriate amount of dopamine in my prefrontal cortex, equivalent to what I would, if I were taking metafenil. I mean, if I equivalent to taking an ADHD medication. And you can't get four hours of, I mean, if you're doing creative work, generally speaking, you can, you can expect two hours a day. You can extend that by about a hundred percent. If you design your, your protocol to, to make your brain chemistry work the right way. I'm happier and productive.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega threes. They reduce, hello, omega threes, there they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't. They support brain function. Maybe I should take more. They support brain function, reduce inflammation, improve heart health and are backed by hundreds of studies. But here's the thing, all omega threes are not made the same. Most brands cut corners. They use cheap fish oil, skip purity testing, throw in fillers and call it a day. But with Momentous, you know, you are getting the highest quality omega threes on the market. They're NSF certified for sport and they're tested for heavy metals and purity. So you can rest easy knowing anything that you take from Momentous is unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third party testing. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. This is, the happier and productive thing is an interesting non-tradeoff that you're making work. So it makes me think about varicose seal surgery. So I'm going to bring this back, wait. So most interventions that increase testosterone, decrease fertility.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  If you go on TRT, if you start taking PEDs, your fertility reliably drops. Firm count goes down, fertility morphology also usually not too great. Uh LH and FSH like just super suppressed.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  But one of the few interventions that I know, which is varicose cell surgery, which is to improve the like blood flow to testicles.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh make both go up.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Uh they see a mean change, I think a hundred and twenty points on test, which is, you know, for a lot of guys now going to be between like twenty five and maybe even like fifty percent or forty percent, something like that. Uh and you also see improvements in sperm count and motility.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Basically makes your boys younger.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct. It makes everything work a little bit better, if you've got varicose cell, obviously. Um and it's, this is one of those few interventions where having a bit more of a global perspective. So for instance, it's one of the reasons that we designed the new tonic drink. It felt like when I was drinking energy drinks, usually like I was borrowing health from tomorrow.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  For today.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:22Chris Williamson?

  And I didn't want that. I wanted something that felt like, oh, this is good. This is like compounding over time and this is contributing to better performance. And that's what you're talking about here too.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Exactly right. You can turn back the clock in a lot of ways because you're doing exercise. I mean, Peter Attia talks about this a lot. Exercise is the single best medicine. The single best longevity drug you can get.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  What are you piecing your uh energy, your uh exercise routine around? What's that look like to you?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  So I've been, when I was in my late thirties, when uh I changed.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  Fucking fantastic.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  It's. Well, thank you, Chris. I appreciate that a lot. It's gonna, it's gonna come in here. It's like with a tank top or something, but nobody needs to see that. Um so when I was in my late thirties, I changed my life up a lot. I quit drinking alcohol because I had to. It wasn't, it wasn't going no place good. And I recognized that if I didn't exercise.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  That the future, I was gonna be, I was gonna be broken down. I just looked at a lot of people that were in my profession. I was an academic, a professor in those days, looking at a lot of people who were in their sixties. And it was, it was grim. So I, I started doing what I do with everything else. I started studying it, studying the science of, you know, the exercise science, which when I'm in my thirties was way less advanced than what it is now, but we still knew a lot. You didn't have to get your science through muscle and fitness. There was, there were papers you could, on PubMed, that you could actually understand what, what the, you know, the, the proper exercise protocols looked like. But I did actually something that was more important than that. I started, every place I was going, I was starting to tour a lot as a, as a lecturer. And every time I was in a city, I would find the oldest iron gym I could find.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Cause that's where the old guys hang out. That's where the guys in the seventies hang out, that are still kinda, they're still pretty shredded. And they're like, you know, and, and now, now I'm one of those old guys, right? My wife says, sleeping with me is like, holding a leather bag of ropes.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, that's, that's nice. Anyway, it's a sack of ropes. That's exactly what my ambition was. But anyhow, I'd go to these old guys, I would say, give me advice. How do you not get hurt? How do you stay shredded? What do you eat? And I started just copying these old guys. I was just collecting data. But they're not necessarily the healthiest. They're not necessarily the healthiest, but that's why I wanted the oldest guys. That's why I didn't go for the youngest shredded guys. Cause you know, when you're 29 years old, you can look at a portrait of health and have, you know, uh, you can have a, a right ventricular hyperplasia or something. Who knows? You can get something as like hypertrophy of your ventricles because you're taking performance enhancing drugs. You could be on death's door when you're Looked right.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  When you're, you look, you look like, and you're, you're unable to have children. And, and, but when, if you're 75 years old and you're still picking up heavy things in the gym, a lot of things are going right. That means your back doesn't hurt too much and your joints are pretty healthy. And you're keeping proper muscle mass, you're keeping proper body fat. And what it did was it started me on a set of protocols that I've been adjusting and adjusting and adjusting. I'm still adjusting it, by the way. I mean, I'm down, I'm 15 pounds lighter than I was five years ago. Because I adjusted way up my protein content in my, in my exercise protocols. And what it comes down to is basically this, you need a proper balance of zone two cardio and resistance training. And the older you get, the less heroic you need to be under the, under the weights. And so I hate it. I don't want that, right?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  I still want to do heavy squats and I can't do that anymore because I'm going to hurt myself is what it comes down to. But you can maintain a lot of muscle mass. And so you can actually get rid of it. Yeah, I can maintain sub 10 body fat and, and keep, and keep muscle mass.

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  That's absolutely wild.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  And part of it is because genetics and I'm thin, right? But part of it is, I mean, you can, you can do a lot just by having good protocols, by being a really, really disciplined person. Also helps that I don't drink alcohol.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not, okay. So the alcohol thing is a big part. And what you're doing with a structure and a framework is you're trying to not rely on discipline, trying to just follow the, follow the program. I mean, if I could give, one of the things that I did that was great, I did lots of things in my twenties that were fucking ridiculous, especially.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  You're a club promoter in your twenties.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  I was, I, I, I spent a decade and a half sniffing random bags of unpronounceable white powder from dudes called Greg that were in the, in the bathroom of some fucking, like, unpronounceable nightclub in the northeast of the UK.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  This should be fine.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, I'm made of rubber and magic. What's it going to do? That was my point with COVID. When COVID came along, my main takeaway was that COVID should be scared of me, not be me scared of COVID. Like if you get into his blood, he's like, what the fuck is inside of this? Like get us, I'm, I'm no way, no thank you, I'm leaving. But the thing that I'm super happy with is I started training in the gym, me, Mike Thurston, he was one year younger than me. And we trained at the Center for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University. And I have been four days a week, three days a week on average compliance, like since I was 18 years old.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 1:15:22Chris Williamson?

  And the point is, if you are, if you are in your twenties, even if you're in your thirties, what you're doing is it's kind of like an investment into a future bank account. It's meh, meh, meh, it's about health, it's fucking that, forget that bit. Forget the, a tear, you're not going to fall over, you can pick your kids up when you're 70, that doesn't matter. What it means is that when you get to 37 or probably even 47, you can maintain. A beach-ready physique on two training sessions a week.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  You can do less than everybody else and look better than everybody else.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Chris Williamson?

  And not have to work as hard.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  So it's all, and you look great now, right? And it's good for your health and it's good for your mental and da, da, da, da, da. Like all of those things, but the main one that I can see is I am like an inheritor of shit that I did.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Chris Williamson?

  And it means that now I just, I don't have to work as hard. And it's like what every, it's this weird side effect that every gym bro didn't ever intend to be doing.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:15Chris Williamson?

  But realizes as they get a bit older, ah, I just, I don't really need to train all that much. And look, I'm never going to be shredded as I was when I was 25, but I, I hold on pretty fucking.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And your wife doesn't go, ew, when you see, we take your shirt. But it's also as you get older, you find that you want to do more days in the gym. And part of the reason for that is because of mood management. It's so incredibly effective as a means of mood management to pick up heavy things and run around.

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  I do seven days a week.

• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  How are you splitting the resistance training in the cardio?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it depends on, on, on the day and actually where I am or what I'm doing. So if I'm, if I'm someplace where I'm going to be relatively sedentary, then I'll do a lot more zone two. First thing in the morning. So I just plan it out according to that. If I'm in more pain, for whatever reason, because I'm stiff, I'll actually do more stretching, more yoga is what I'll do. So I, I, I apply it in particular ways. If I'm under an ordinary routine, then on the weekends, when I'm actually walking a lot with my family, with my wife, then I'll actually do 100% will be resistance. I'll have a, you know, a big pull day and a big push day, for example, for an hour of push and an hour of pull. And it's a lot. I mean, it's a, it's a, but, but I'm not using the kind of weights and I'm not putting the, I'm not having the impact on my joints. And I'm spreading things out enough that I'm actually not getting hurt.

• 1:17:34Chris Williamson?

  Covering.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Which is the great thing about being older.

• 1:17:36Chris Williamson?

  What's your favorite zone two?

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  My favorite zone, I, I have an elliptical. I'm, I'm a weak man. It's just, you know.

• 1:17:43Chris Williamson?

  Dude, honestly, I, I did this at the start of the year in Mexico as we're on a trip in Mexico. And, uh, just put the treadmill at 15 degrees.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Chris Williamson?

  Three miles an hour and you will just hold, I mean, people that weigh fitter than me probably would be fine, would need to push it. Between three and three point four, something like that, and you will just hold like a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty BPM.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  And you can text, you can think, you can.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, it's good.

• 1:18:08Chris Williamson?

  Like dude, and I'm like, oh my god, forty five minutes of that a couple of times a week.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  No, it's great. And my, my daughter, who, I, we have a treadmill too, because you know, my, my, my kids are, two of my three kids are complete gym rats. I mean, absolute gym rats. They're military.

• 1:18:21Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  And my daughter's a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps right now. She's four foot eleven. She's a hundred pounds.

• 1:18:27Chris Williamson?

  She does show that the treadmill's not gonna make it.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Well, she'll put it up at thirty degrees or some crazy thing like, just like practically, it looks like it's straight up. And then she'll put on a pack that's seventy pounds on her hundred pound frame. And, and go for an hour.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Free.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  She's an animal. So that's, I mean, that's hardcore. But then again, you know, she's twenty two years old.

• 1:18:49Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay, evening routine.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  So the evening routine is a little bit different because what you want is mood management and sleep. It's not mood management or productivity. You want mood management and sleep. And so that's a, that's a slightly different routine. And that routine starts at dinner. And one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they eat dinner too late. And, you know, I lived in Spain for a long time. I've lived off and on in Spain for thirty five years and dude,

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  no. Ten PM, I'm sorry. I mean, it's like, oh, it's so great and lifestyles. That's, that's unhealthy. I'm sorry. You know, it's like, lo siento mucho, pero no se puede hacer eso. It's like, in Spain, it's not good to do that. And so when we moved to the United States, that was a hard transition for my wife, who is from Barcelona.

• 1:19:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting. I've always thought that one of the worst incompatibilities that you could have with somebody that you loved was bedtimes.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Chris Williamson?

  You want to go to bed at nine and they want to go to bed at two.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, that would be difficult to navigate. I hadn't accounted for the fact that somebody could want to eat dinner at six and somebody else could want to eat dinner at ten.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And that was, that was, you know, we got through it, man. And we've married thirty four years, but, but now we both eat at six. And part of the reason is because, you know, we're in our sixties. And so we actually need an evening protocol that actually works. And we, and we have to get up early in the morning. She doesn't get up before forty five, but she gets up at six o'clock. She sleeps more than I do. I need about six and a half hours of sleep. She needs closer to eight. So, uh, to, to actually be. Have her, her, you know, biology working the way it's supposed to be working. So it starts at six o'clock and what that means is, you know, your last protein rich meal, really your last meal should be a couple, three hours before you go to sleep. For all sorts of reasons that Rhonda Patrick talks about a lot. Three, two, one. About that. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  So, and, and it shouldn't be your, your heaviest meal. And there's a lot of things that go into that. Now, having, never any caffeine with dinner. Never drink any caffeine with dinner. I mean, you can actually get away with it better when you're younger. But let me tell you, Chris, when you're, when you're 61 like me, it's like, I just looked at this, this is so delicious, what you gave me. It has 120 milligrams of caffeine in it. I'll be up like cleaning the garage tonight. The fact that you opened it in the same room as yourself is. I know. It's like, I smelled that thing and I'm not sleeping tonight. But it's you become way more, you, the metabolism of caffeine changes a lot with age and, and almost everybody. So that's why benzodiazepine drugs is the same kind of thing that you have to, you have to titrate what you use for, you know, for going to sleep or waking up very differently as you get older.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  And a lot of people will have insomnia when they're older because they're drinking an afternoon coffee and they don't realize that that's what's happening. That's, that's a really common thing. So no caffeine. I recommend no alcohol in the evenings for anybody, even for people who can drink appropriately. Not doing that because that will, that just messes up your sleep architecture. And the hardest one for me is sweets. I have a huge sweet tooth. Me too. All former drinkers all love sweets. Okay. Cause you metabolize in the same way. And the result of it is that I want. Sedative, the big chunk of sugar is the same like, ah. So good. It's so good. But it's just not good for your sleep architecture is the way that that works. Of the three, sweets are a little less bad than the other two is what it comes down to.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Then actually, um, walking right after you eat is really important. And so we walk 30 to 40 minutes after dinner every night. So good. When I'm home and I'm home about half the time. So I get to do that. And that's really good for you because it actually, the way that you, that your insulin response, your glucose, et cetera, et cetera. So just much better for your sleep and, and mood management later on. And then getting to sleep, actually going to bed. Going to bed is really important. And if you're sleeping with your partner, this is the best thing ever because you can actually work on your, both your mood management, your relationship by going to bed early, but don't go to sleep. Early, the thing to do is to actually have about five minutes of hardcore oxytocin release by staring into each other's eyes in bed.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  This really, really, really works. Now, this is more important for women. Women can have about three times as much oxytocin as men. That's why women need more eye contact than men. Men need more touch than women. Women need more eye contact than men. Hold hands while you stare into each other's eyes deeply for five, 10 minutes and you're having a real conversation. You can save most marriages, by the way, by holding hands more and always looking at each other in the eyes when you talk. This will save most marriages. And I can add a couple more things than like having more fun and praying together or something. But eye contact and touch is super important. A B T, always be touching, always be touching. It's what it comes down to and never be not looking at each other in the eyes when you're talking. That's in bed or out of bed, but in bed, that's a really good way to do it.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Reading to your partner is an incredibly good way.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Reading to your partner.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Reading to your partner. Or being, yeah, or being read to. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting studies on this, but it's like, for me, it's like narcotics. If you read to me in a feminine Spanish accent in bed. Unbelievable. And so, you know, we've been reading Psalms and love poetry and things we read to each other a lot at night is really what it comes down to. It's a really, really, really good thing.

• 1:23:58Chris Williamson?

  A nice bonding experience.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then actually getting to bed on time, getting to bed at a reasonable time. And so you're managing your, you know, your blood sugars and your blood chemistry, your blood glucose, et cetera, through your activities, et cetera. And then you're doing what actually your brain needs, which is, uh, is connection and relaxation in, in a really, really healthy way. And, and these are the protocols that when I'm home, at least we use pretty regularly. It's helped, it's helped a lot because I'm an insomniac. And so I need to, I need to be really rigorous about my sleep hygiene.

• 1:24:31Chris Williamson?

  Is there a risk of people over optimizing wellbeing to the point of neurosis?

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. And that's the reason that, you know, wearables can be a real curse for a lot of people. What do you use for wearables?

• 1:24:41Chris Williamson?

  Whoop.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  You use whoop. That's great. Those guys, Will, Will Ahmed, it's a great company.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  Sat in that seat.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  He's a, it's, he's a, that's, he's a terrific entrepreneur.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  It's fantastic what they do, but I understand the health anxiety.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Aura, same thing. Yeah. And so you have to be real, real cognizant of that. And some people, like my, my wife doesn't use her wearable when she's in bed. Because she doesn't want to know how many minutes she slept and how many minutes she was awake and what her sleep score is. She doesn't want those data. Her life is better when she doesn't have those data. So you got to figure out how much data you need and not to gorge on it in such a way that you become really, really neurotic. Some people are. And so I have to be, you know, pretty careful about that. But what I find is that when I take, I take the, the, the cognition, the, the conscient, the consciousness out of everything. And I just turn it into what I do when I wake up in the morning, what I do before I go to bed at night, that my life is better. Because I'm able to use the cycles.

• 1:25:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've got a system two, system one, this, right?

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  You've got to go, okay. And this is why, you know, when I first started the show, and it's one of the great things about having a, a ledger of proof of work of where you were at, at what time. The first two or three years of the show was me being a productivity bro. It was me talking about morning routines and P to C Brown, make it stick, learning how to learn and Ebbinghaus forgetting curves and spaced repetition and Anki note cards and like fucking Evernote external brains. It was all that.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Chris Williamson?

  Because you have to go through this sort of big, over complicated, is the solution over here or over there? Or is it this thing? And you go really hard and deep on this. And then you move on to the health and fitness thing. And then you move on to the, for me, the sort of relational thing. And then you move into the culture thing. And then my current era is like the emotions thing.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:28Chris Williamson?

  It's like the emotional thing. I'm like, I'm getting below the neck.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  The.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  But below the neck is still above the neck because psychology is biology.

• 1:26:35Chris Williamson?

  All right. Fucking, all right, professor.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  The. Realization is you're going to have to do a much more obsessive version of this first.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Chris Williamson?

  You're going to have to do a very deliberate.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:49Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna look super nerdy. It's gonna be really clunky. You're probably gonna hate it. Half the shit that you do is gonna fall away.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:55Chris Williamson?

  Because for you, the pasta just doesn't work, but mass may, or mass just doesn't work, but breathwork does.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Chris Williamson?

  Whatever. Like, you're gonna find your particular flavor of what it is, and that's gonna take time.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, so I think that everybody needs to go through a productivity bro phase. And I was fortunate that I did basically five years of like this obscene morning routine. Maybe compared with yours, it's comparable, but like this big, you know, opulent, two and a half hour monstrosity. This cathedral of stuff that I would do, I'd get up and I'd walk, I'd come back and I'd sit down.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Journal.

• 1:27:31Chris Williamson?

  Journal, and then I would do breathwork, and then I would meditate, and then I would read, and then I would do yin yoga, and then I would prep my food, and then I would go to the gym, and then I would come back and it would be midday. And I'd have got up at seven AM, and I'm like, well, I've done so, like, all of the things I wanted to do, I've done. And that was me trying to reach escape velocity from the adult infant that sniffed random bags of drugs for 15 years.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got it. I got it completely. And, and, you know, that, that ultimately is not the solution. What that is, is gaining information. That's not the solution. So as a matter of fact, when it comes to the person that you want to be, that's not a problem you can solve. That's a problem you can understand. There's two kinds of problems. There's the solvable problems and the understandable problems. There's the complicated problems of life and the complex problems of life. Complicated problems, you can solve with enough brain power and enough discipline and enough computational horsepower and enough information. That's like a jet engine or making a toaster, or, you know, that's, that's actually figuring out how to put together a podcast.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  It's a complicated problem. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but they're impossible to solve. You can only live them. That's like a football game. It's very simple. One team has more goals than the other. But the reason that you care about it is because you can't solve it in advance. You can only live it in real time. My marriage is the ultimate complex problem. I can't solve it. I'll never, Chris will never solve it. My wife, before I came over, she said, I love you. She texted me. We text all the time. And when I finish this, she might be super pissed off at me. I don't know.

• 1:29:08Chris Williamson?

  Let's hope not.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. She's Spanish, and that's part of the complexity. But, I mean, that's why I love my marriage. That's why I love my cat and not my toaster. Because my toaster is complicated, and my cat is complex. That's why. All the things you really care about are complex. Your life, you, the Christmas, is a complex problem. You start off as a bro, trying to treat Christmas as a complicated problem. And what you do find at the end of the day is the complexity therein. To understand it and actually live your life.

• 1:29:45Chris Williamson?

  Talking earlier on about do people need more happiness, less unhappiness? What are the experiences in life that give people the most pain? What makes us miserable the fastest, reliably?

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Is sadness is what is the hardest thing that people can actually bear.

• 1:30:04Chris Williamson?

  And what's sadness?

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Sadness is losing something or someone that you love. That's what reliably brings you the most pain, is loss.

• 1:30:13Chris Williamson?

  Is that grief?

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, grief is an extreme form of sadness.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  And that's when somebody is removed from your life. That's the most pain that people actually go through. That's the negative emotion that's most intense. And part of the reason is because that is, on its face, the most catastrophic of the occurrences. That's why you're the most averse to it. That's why you have the most pain from it. You know, there's this little place in your brain, this dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in your brain, that little thing in your limbic system. That gives you what's called affective pain. Pain has two parts, sensory and affective. Sensory pain is really the stimulus from the nerve endings, when you burn yourself on the stove or something. That has to do with inflammation. Affective pain is where it hits your brain and you say, "I hate this." So there's ouch, and I hate it.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  So when you physically hurt yourself, that's what happens.

• 1:31:02Chris Williamson?

  That's a good distinction.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's two parts. And working in different parts of your brain, so the pain has two parts. When you have mental pain, like rejection or loss, that's only the affective component.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  And that's worse. That's worse. Now, interestingly, acetaminophen, which you Brits called paracetamol, I think, that's Tylenol, that works on the affective component of pain, whereas Advil, you know, ibuprofen, that works on the sensory component of pain. So that lowers inflammation. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, they work on inflammation, whereas Tylenol works on the affective component. Tylenol actually doesn't make you feel less pain, it just makes you care less.

• 1:31:43Chris Williamson?

  Is that right?

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's why when you take Tylenol and ibuprofen, when you take acetaminophen and ibuprofen together, it's a potent thing. It works on the two parts of pain, really effectively.

• 1:31:51Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  And it's actually, that mix is better than opiates. That actually is more effective than opiate drugs in managing pain. But here's the point. When you're really, really, really sad, and there's a study of college students who are in bad breakups, and some of them get Tylenol and some of them don't, those who take Tylenol, a course of Tylenol, are about a third less heartbroken.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:18Chris Williamson?

  But did you not say earlier on that we want to embrace our suffering?

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Chris Williamson?

  We want to feel our suffering.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Of course. What you want to do is manage it. And so what you don't want to do is eradicate it, but there are times when it's good to manage it.

• 1:32:28Chris Williamson?

  How do you know when it's time to manage it and when it's time to feel it?

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  When you, you want to know when it's there, but you don't want it to actually interfere with your ability to live your life. That's usually at the therapeutic line, where they, when they talk. And that's one of the reasons that over-the-counter analgesics are fine, but opiates are bad for most people. And one of the reasons that people will take opiates is because they're trying to use them as an analgesic against the pain of life. Just the pain of life, the pain of life. And that's a really dangerous business.

• 1:33:01Chris Williamson?

  Why do breakups hurt so much?

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Because they're a signal to you that you're going to be cast out of your tribe and walk the savanna and die alone. That's a, it's, it's a, it's that you're going to die alone. That's when, that's why breakups hurt so much. Because they say, there'll never be anybody for me. I'm incapable of falling in love. You catastrophize because your brain wants you to avoid that. Your brain wants you to not break up. And so it's going to make you feel like this is the end of the world so that you won't break up. It's not the end of the world. But if you knew it wasn't the end of the world, you'd be like, whatever, whatevs. That's why you won't leave a crummy relationship. Because you're afraid, you're not afraid of the breakup. You're afraid of the pain for the breakup. You're not afraid of failing. You're afraid of how you'll feel about yourself if you fail. People are afraid of their emotions.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  They're not afraid of the catastrophes. It's what it comes down to. Because the emotions are so aversive and that's what they're evolved to do. So once you understand that and you're saying, look, this is a crummy relationship. This is an unhealthy relationship. This is not going anywhere. 10 years from now, this is not going to be better than it is today. I've got to do that. And then with the knowledge, this is going to hurt, but it's going to be temporary pain. And that's a normal biological process. You can handle it. That's how knowledge is power.

• 1:34:16Chris Williamson?

  What, what happens in the brain when you put off the breakup? When you end up in a relationship with the relationship with the breakup?

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  And you're constantly ruminating and thinking and pushing off.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  That you're not getting, you're actually, the inevitable is still inevitable. But you're just elongating the suffering that leads up to the inevitable. That's a problem. Now, if you don't know, you don't know, is what it comes down to. But if you're trying to just avoid doing something that's difficult, firing that employee, saying that difficult thing, facing up to the fact that the business is not going well, then you're just going to suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer about it. And then the inevitable is going to happen. That's why the Band-Aid write-off is usually the right approach. You know.

• 1:35:01Chris Williamson?

  What's the gold standard for how people should deal with a breakup?

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  So the gold standard, and there's a, there's a bunch of interesting protocols that actually show up in the literature, the breakup protocol. There's a bunch of stuff to not do too. So there's two do's and there's two don'ts. Uh, number one is take some Tylenol, perhaps. Why not? I mean, it's a, don't, and obviously, check with your physician. This is not medical advice on modern wisdom, but, um, but there are a lot of other things to do. One of the things that you find is that when people actually, they wanna curl up and cocoon when they're in the midst of a breakup. Actually, having more fun is really important. Distraction is extremely important. Distraction is something that you enjoy with people that you love is a critically important thing. Go ride your bike with your friends, even though you

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  don't want to. Doing that is a very effective way for you to actually start to heal. The second is to consider not the things that you're missing, but the things that you're not missing. Is actually focus in a relationship, in every relationship. You broke up for a reason, right? If you have a breakup, you broke up for a reason. Focusing on what was good about it is actually gonna prolong the grief. Focusing on the reason that you broke up is really, really important. Because that actually aligns, that's metacognitive, it aligns your prefrontal cortex with your limbic system. Like, I broke up for a reason. Why did I break up? I broke up because this wasn't gonna go anyplace, and here's the reason it wasn't gonna go anyplace. So focus on that. You know, so if you're, if, you know, for women, for example, they get into these relationships with these terrible dark triad

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  guys, narcissistic Machiavellian psychopaths, which is, you know, by the way, 7% of the population, and, you know, it's, it's your first husband, right? And focus on the reasons that you had to get away from that guy, not the reasons that you missed that guy. And last but not least, there's a really interesting study that actually talks about the effects of sad music. It's like, you wouldn't put on a marching band after you, after you break up. Even the, you think, that, that should improve my mood. The reason is that you don't, you're trying to, when you're sad, you're trying to understand your feelings. You're making a real effort to understand your emotions. And your emotions are very confusing to you in a period of high negative affect. And when you listen

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  to sad music, sad music literally, because it, it, it, it expands, it stimulates the right hemisphere of the brain, where you process aesthetics, where you process beauty, it helps you to understand your emotions better than you did before. And understanding your emotions is part of the healing process.

• 1:37:32Chris Williamson?

  So some Lewis Capaldi. Would be.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Whatever your favorite sad song is, right?

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so one thing that you said that was really interesting, this sort of um odd duality that people are in when they go through a breakup of prior to the breakup, thinking about all of the reasons that they should break up.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:48Chris Williamson?

  And then as soon as the breakup is done, thinking about all of the reasons about why they shouldn't have broken up.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:37:52Chris Williamson?

  What's the switch that seems to be happening in lots of people's brains there?

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  When, you know, when switched such that they actually pull the trigger?

• 1:38:00Chris Williamson?

  No, the switch that prior to the thing, prior to the breakup, hear all of the things that are bad.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Because we focus on losses, because we're always focusing on losses.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  You're focusing on losses when you're in it and focusing on losses when you're out.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  That's the negativity bias inherent in Homo sapiens. So we're always focusing on the negative because the negative emotions and attention to threat is what keeps us alive. Thinking about what's good doesn't keep us alive that's nice to have. That's why you have literally more brain space dedicated to negative emotions than to positive emotions. So you're always looking for the bad side of whatever's going on. I mean, I found myself saying the other day, you know, first classing United Airlines has really gone downhill.

• 1:38:40Chris Williamson?

  It has. Was it transatlantic or domestic?

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  It's all of it, but yeah, it was some domestic, it was like east coast to west coast.

• 1:38:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that sucks. It sucks. It blows.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, I mean, I'm getting there in five and a half hours for Pete's sake.

• 1:38:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  It's so, but, but that's how we're wired. And so when you're in the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of the relationship. And when you're out of the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of not being in the relationship. Because we have a negativity bias, which can be overridden metacognitively. And so if you're in a relationship and it's till death do you part, you're going to have a lot of negativity. You're really going to have a lot of negativity. And the thing to do is to focus consciously and systematically and therapeutically on what's right about your marriage. Every single day and giving thanks for what's actually in your marriage. If you have to break up with your partner and you do, then the thing to focus on is not what you're missing, because that's the negative stimulus. But to be focusing on the reason that you did it and the fact that it was the right thing to do

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  and the things that are actually giving you relief. Like, I'm not screaming at somebody today. I'm not jealous about something today. I'm not wasting another year of my life in a relationship that's unproductive today. And so focusing consciously as opposed to focusing unconsciously on the negative. That's the reason we do that.

• 1:39:57Chris Williamson?

  Do you think the? Modern freedom has made happiness harder, not easier?

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I actually do. And I think that that's actually escalated a lot in the last thirty or forty years, as a matter of fact. And that's the evidence of that is that in the UK and the United States, that happiness has declined since about nineteen ninety. It's been consistently declining. And part of the reason is we make just tons of errors. I don't think, you know, I'm not, I'm not of the view that we have too much freedom, or we have too much abundance, or we have too much affluence. I think that what we have is a tendency, well, we have kind of a climate and a weather problem with happiness. The climate is that in modern society, we've gotten away from things that we took for granted, which are faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the four habits of the happiest people. They're serious about their

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  faith or life philosophy, if they're not religious. They have serious family life. They have close friends, and they pay attention to the meaning in their work. And all those things have been in decline for the past thirty years. The weather problems are screens, hatred, political polarization, and COVID. Those are the three big storms of unhappiness that have come our way.

• 1:41:13Chris Williamson?

  Surprising that anybody's managed to make it through the last half decade.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  But, you know, we do. I mean, we're tough, man. People are really, really tough. And the way that we do it, by the way, is by, by, by having personal, by having personal protocols that, that fight against those tendencies. It's to say, okay, yeah, I mean, that life is making it less likely for me to worship or practice philosophy of life. I'm being distracted constantly by those dude ads and googas and stupid nonsense on the internet. No, I'm putting that down. I'm going to study the Holy Book, or whatever it happens to be. Yeah, I mean, that life says that you're tied down, that you're losing your freedom if you get married and have kids. Wrong. Get married and have kids. It's the secret of happiness for most people. Most of the-

• 1:41:57Chris Williamson?

  Get married to the right person.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Chris Williamson?

  Kids with the right person.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:42:01Chris Williamson?

  The ref be disaster to do it the wrong.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Your show is, you know, the reason I always, I always like your show, because modern wisdom actually is ancient wisdom.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the twist.

• 1:42:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, the thing that's been fascinating about it is the mismatch.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:14Chris Williamson?

  As you would say in evolutionary psychology, the mismatch principle, that a lot of the systems that were built to protect us or keep us effective ancestrally are maladaptive.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Chris Williamson?

  In the modern environment.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Or they're maladapted.

• 1:42:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  A lot of the time.

• 1:42:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  So it's, you know, there's, there's, there's nothing wrong with resource cues and fertility cues. The problem is the way that we melt, they're maladapted in modern culture and the extent to which we believe the propaganda that they don't exist.

• 1:42:42Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever look at Seth Stephens Davidowitz's work?

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:42:45Chris Williamson?

  So he is a, used to be a data scientist at Google. He wrote, first book was Everybody Lies. And then his next one was Don't Trust Your Gut.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:54Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Don't Trust Your Gut is fucking money. It is so, I can't believe that he managed to like, he danced through a minefield of political incorrectness and just got away with it somehow. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of the way he presents. He presents as this sort of slightly nerdy, slightly Jewish guy. Uh, but he, he fucking crushed it with that book and he highlighted what are the traits that people optimize for to click on and what are the traits that are actually reliable for who you'll click with?

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:24Chris Williamson?

  What predicts long-term relationship satisfaction and happiness versus what are the things that people tend to optimize for the front end? And the two are totally different. I mean, he did some, in that book, did he did some really spicy shit. He did some stuff around, uh, sex and race and which ones are most preferred by each sex and race. And he had one of those crossover charts.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Brutal, yeah.

• 1:43:44Chris Williamson?

  And he's, he was like, hey, Asian guys and black women, like you guys have got a tough end of the deal at the moment because it seems like certain groups from that. And he's, I'm like, how?

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Did you get away with that?

• 1:43:56Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, did you write this book and put this out there? And it just, people just said, oh, it's very interesting, isn't it? But have I, because it was in the middle, I think this came out in 2020, 2020, 2021? Like this could not have been more in the bullseye of like exactly how this is.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  The woke apocalypse is upon us.

• 1:44:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And, you know, like real, real.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:15Chris Williamson?

  Harsh, brusque.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Chris Williamson?

  Insights.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Here's, here's how you do it. So here's how you do it. So I've been, you know, I've been in the business of saying, you know.

• 1:44:22Chris Williamson?

  Unspeakable thing.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you can, if you use the truth as a weapon versus if you use the truth as a gift. Do you bring the truth in love? Or do you bring the truth in hostility? Do you say these things about race and sex? Because you're trying to score a point? You're trying to

• 1:44:39Chris Williamson?

  Make someone look silly.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Or you're trying to do it because you love people and you want people to live better, happier lives? It's the motive. I mean, you can still get canceled with a pure motive, but the truth of the matter is that motive matters a lot and people know your motive.

• 1:44:52Chris Williamson?

  Someone, I watched this video online about comedians. And they were talking about how, I can't remember the comparison was between a couple of comedians. And they said about how one of them, you just didn't believe that he was doing it to be nice.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Chris Williamson?

  That he was saying that thing because he kind of maybe had

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  People know.

• 1:45:08Chris Williamson?

  A secret axe to grind. And this other one, you go, yeah, I mean, it's kind of the same group that you're punching at or whatever. But it doesn't feel as, it doesn't feel the same.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't feel

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  We have a hundred ways to discern that. A hundred ways to discern that. We have so many ways below our level of consciousness when you know, to know whether somebody's friend or foe. And somebody can say the same thing. You can criticize somebody. I mean, I, if you criticize me right now, I'm going to take it as an expression of love. I'm going to take it as a way that you want me to be better. Cause I know you will my, my good. To love, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, is to will the good of the other as other. To will the good of the other as, nothing about your feelings, nonsense. To, if I, I will Chris as good as Chris. And when you believe that I have love in my heart for you like that, I can say hard things. You're going to be like, thanks, man. It's amazing, actually. And so that's what we need to work in. This is the wanna want.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  This is the right desire. If you have to, if, if we want to be interesting people in the world, we have to have right desire, which is love for everybody else. Just be full of love. And then it's like, it's funny because Saint, Saint Augustine.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  It's like, it's very biblical in its way. It's very Buddhist in its way, but it's very biblical in its way. So, you know, you got the 10 commandments and, and the, the, the, the young guy comes up to Jesus and he says, I've got a lot to remember, Lord. Can you boil it down? Something I can remember? He says, yeah, I mean, there's really just, you know, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. You know, and that, and he said, okay, that's great. So St. Augustine was asked, you know, can you boil it down? St. Augustine said, love and do what you will. So, so we're really good at the do what you will part, but we're really not good at the love part. So this is the important thing for everybody watching us and for us to live. We're going to do what we will. And that's great. I love living

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  in a, a society in which we have all these opportunities to have conversations like this and get paid. It's insane. But if it's not based in love, it's bad. If it's not based in love, it's a problem. It's making life worse and you're going to get in trouble. That's what it comes down to. But if it's based in love, you can be pretty confident because people are going to know that.

• 1:47:27Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're great. I love you to bits. What have you got going on at the moment?

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  I've got a big book coming out in March called The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. We got to talk about that again.

• 1:47:42Chris Williamson?

  Can't wait.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  Me too. Thank you.

• 1:47:44Chris Williamson?

  Podcast. You've got a podcast.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  I got a podcast. Yeah, sorry. Office Hours with Arthur Brooks. It's brand new. It's doing really well.

• 1:47:51Chris Williamson?

  It's crushing.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it's super fun. I mean, it's like, um, it's a lecture. It's not, it's, I'm, I'm talking about behavioral science and in front of a camera. It's cool.

• 1:48:01Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

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