Something Is Very Wrong With Modern Life - Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, and an author. Why do some people feel lost while others seem deeply fulfilled? When life feels empty, it's often not because you're missing success, money, or comfort; it's because you're missing meaning. So how do you find purpose? How do you create a life that feels worth living? And what does meaning look like in a world where so much feels fake? Expect to learn why so many people feel like modern life is simulated rather than real, why meaning can’t be simulated, how to break out of the antidepressant cycle, what meaning is actually made up of, why you need to learn to embrace suffering, the most important habits in order to increase the meaning in your life, and much more… - Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Are We Living in a Simulation? 6:42 What Are We Mistaking For Real Meaning? 11:00 Why Can’t Meaning Be Simulated? 15:30 The Most Meaningless Day Imaginable 19:29 Are Ambitious People Susceptible to Meaninglessness? 22:00 Are We Just Pursuing Approval? 30:24 The Big Questions Everyone Should Be Asking 34:33 Why Life Feels So Random 36:07 Why Are Directionless People So Fragile? 37:50 Why We Confuse Fame With Significance 41:12 How Your Weaknesses Become Strengths 52:59 Stop Blaming Your Parents 54:51 How Technology is Rewiring Our Brains 01:03:47 How to Escape the Doom Loop 01:10:19 Can You Recover From Meaninglessness? 01:14:51 How Important is Love to Meaning? 01:16:50 The Ladder of Love Explained 01:21:04 Should We Be Thinking About Transcendence More? 01:24:38 Why is Transcendence So Rare? 01:27:27 The Truth About Finding Your Calling 01:32:02 Why Changing Direction Feels So Scary 01:34:35 The Surprising Role of Beauty in Meaning 01:37:08 Is Suffering the Ultimate Meaning? 01:39:01 The Modern Unhappiness Crisis 01:47:09 How to Build a More Meaningful Life 01:53:02 Where to Find Arthur - 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why do so many people feel like modern life is simulated rather than real? Because it is. We're living in the Matrix. That movie, The Matrix, came out 27 years ago. I hate to shock and sadden you. It'll make anybody who was alive then feel old. But the plot of that movie was that a great artificial intelligence was dominating the human race and kept the human race placid in a pleasant simulation so that it could feed off human kinetic energy. It kept them in pods and ran a simulation. And the truth of the matter is that we are subjugated, not by people necessarily, but by algorithms that fundamentally are creating a simulated version of a real life that's pleasant enough, keeps us from being bored, and that feeds off our attention and

• 0:44Speaker 00

  energy and money. We're living in the Matrix. And that's why people say, I don't know, it doesn't feel like real dating. It doesn't feel like real friends. Scroll, scroll, scroll. It doesn't feel like real achievement. Game, game, game. Because we're living in a simulation. What's happening neurologically there? So what's happening neurobiologically is that we're literally in the wrong half of our brains. So this is the work of Ian DeGilchrist, the great, have you had him on the show? Friend of the show. He's fantastic. He's an Oxford neuroscientist. He's a great genius. And he brought back the whole idea of hemispheric lateralization. That's the concept that the two halves of your brain do different things.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  I mean, they do a lot of things the same too, but the fact is that they have different core competencies. Now, when I was a kid in the 70s, this is long before you youngsters were born, there was this belief that there were right-brained and left-brained people. Right-brained people were creative, left-brained people were analytical. My mom, who was an artist, was a right-brained person. My father, who was a mathematician, was a left-brained person. Growing up, I was a right-brained person like my mom because I was a musician. I was a classical musician. I painted and I wrote poetry. And then I got my PhD and I became apparently a left-brained person because I became a scientist. Well, the truth is that that theory didn't work. What does work, however, is what Ian McGilchrist brought back to show that we have, we ask and answer different questions with the different hemispheres of our brain.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  The right hemisphere is the complex why, the mystery and meaning of life, the things that set us out in the hunt for the things that matter in life. The left brain is the how to and what. It's how we execute. It's the linear side. It's the analysis. It's the engineering. It's the apps of life for the left brain side. And what's happening is that when we're running a simulation of life, we're running a left brain simulation to meet our right brain questions of love and mystery and meaning. And you can't simulate the meaning of life.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Is it not a good thing for people to be more rational and analytical and objective? Is this not something that only a couple of decades ago, we were trying to push more on people?

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose, except that we need both. The truth is that we need both because life is full of both kinds of problems. Look, if you, if you don't know the why of the things in your life, the how to and what mean nothing. But if you only know the how to and what, then the why and the why is elusive. I mean, you get the point that I'm trying to make. I mean, you can either be incompetent in executing anything in your life, or you'll have no purpose in the life that you lead. You actually need both. You know, I go to work every day. I'm, you know, traveling around, doing my job. It's great. I know how to do it. I'm competent at it because my left brain is working properly. I know how to get where I'm trying to go and do what I'm trying to do. I can write my speeches and my columns and books, et cetera. But I kind of know why, which is that I want to do something good for the world. I want to support the people that I love. I want to glorify God. That's what I want.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  That's the why side, and that originates on the right side of our brains. And furthermore, all the things we really care about are not the analytical things. The things that we care about are not the physical, they're the metaphysical. That's what we really care about. So I'll give you an example. A big left brain question is, how does my car work? I actually don't know. I have the slightest idea, right? It's just, I mean, it's a car, right? And, but I could know because I could actually get a book or I could, you know, get a guy and come teach me, or I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos. And that's knowable because those are complicated left brain questions. My marriage is a right brain problem. It's completely unsolvable. I have to live with it. I can't figure it out.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I will never figure out my marriage. Dude, I've been married 35 years before, just, you know, an hour ago. She texts me, I love you. Good luck on the podcast. I'm sure it's true. She loves me. Tonight I could call and she might be completely pissed off at me. I don't know.

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but you did decide to date somebody with Latina blood.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  That adds a level of complexity, I grant you.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  Correct. It's like, yeah, it's a multiplier.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  She's a big pulsing right hemisphere.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Sure enough, but, but this is the thing. The reason I love my marriage is because it's unsolvable. Right? The reason that people want to get a real cat, not a mechanical cat, is because it's alive and things that are alive are right brain problems. And things that are mechanical are left brain problems. And so what we've done is we've, we've solved life. We've solved life. I mean, we have, I mean, everything, we're trying to, the, the engineering, the Silicon Valley set of solutions for everything that we're trying to do that actually pops through the screen at us, that dominates our culture, that increasingly can be simulated and understood through artificial intelligence. All that's doing is it's a curve fit through the messy business of life

• 5:40Speaker 00

  using these left brain algorithms. And that's not going to get done what we need to get done. It is going to leave us lonelier and more depressed and more anxious. Here's the thing, your brain knows. So for example, this is one of the reasons that the more pornography people look at, largely young men, because more than 85% of pornography is being consumed by men. Now you're thinking, I know what you're thinking, who are the 15%?

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  Old men?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  No.

• 6:06Chris Williamson?

  Is it you?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  So the, the more pornography that men look at, the lonelier they get. So in the moment, they feel less lonely and the more satisfied they feel. But the more unsatisfied and the lonelier they actually get, because it's a simulation for the experience they're actually seeking. And it's unsatisfactory as a result of that. You want actual human connection with another person. That's what you actually want. And you're settling for a two dimensional simulacrum for it.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other? Counterfeit sources of meaning that people mistake for the real thing.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Achievement is a counterfeit source is something that you actually get that doesn't build anything real of any real consequence in life. So the idea of like the score in a game gives you a real short term sense of of achievement, which is a source of purpose, which is a component of meaning, but it isn't real. It's fake. It's a it's a it's counterfeit. It's a it's simulated. And that's one of the reasons that you'll find that you got to do more and more and more and more and more to keep up with it. You know, you know, they used to say, if you want to, if you really want to have lived a good life, you know, you need to do, you need to have a son, plant a tree and write a book. I don't know. I've done all those things. I don't know if I planted a tree.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  That's what you're missing.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  I don't have a green thumb. You know, so this is my problem. I mean, plant more trees. But the whole point is that what those things have in common is that they're real. They're in real life. They're real achievements in real life. They don't say, plant a tree online, you know, pretend you're planting a tree, you know, get really good at doing it. Have a son online. You know, the whole idea of simulating these experiences is unsatisfactory. What it does, it simulates the experience in the moment. That's another example. Having friends is another way is another way we think about it. Virtual friends, they simply don't meet your needs. And one of the ways that we know this is that the more virtual friends that you have, the less that you're actually illuminating in the experience of interacting with them, the right hemisphere of your brain. You know, one of the reasons

• 8:12Speaker 00

  that you don't like to do your show virtually is because you don't have the same experience. And the reason is that you and I are connecting with our right brains right now. Our right, you're in our friends. I mean, we text and talk to each other even when we're not doing a show, which is great, because we're friends and we have that texting relationship because we've actually looked at each other in the eyes and had real no fooling conversations with each other. And that's how you have to link with other human beings. Otherwise, it's a simulated friendship.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the biggest realizations I had when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life toward the end of my twenties. I had all of these friends because. Shock, horror in the nightlife industry in the northeast of the UK, there weren't many people that were into the things I was getting into. There weren't many people that, you know, maybe they'd heard about Sam Harris and they were thinking about doing meditation, or they'd read a bit of Robert Greene and then got stuck after a couple of pages and then were struggling with that and then felt real bad because they couldn't sit still. Like, all of these things I was going through, it was, I was finding it difficult on the front door of a nightclub to find people to resonate with. So I made friends online that were into the same sort of things that I was. And I found that these friends kind of distilled out into two strata of people,

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  even if all that I'd done was as I was going through a city on a train, stopped off for a 30 minute coffee with someone, that person immediately went into a different bracket of, I've actually met this person, they're real, in three dimensions, they're real.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, because your brain actually apprehended that person in a different way. What you did was you had an imprint of that person in, you know, flesh and blood in real life, which is, by the way, how the brain was evolved. You know, we are, our brains are more or less the same size and shape, slight physiological differences, but trivial for what we're talking about here, as they were 250,000 years ago in the mid, in the middle Pleistocene. And during that period, all human beings lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals who are kin-based and hierarchically related. And that meant that the relationship they had with each other was absolutely paramount, and our brains are wired for in-person relationships. That's one of the reasons that you get oxytocin when you look at somebody in the eyes. You and I have a better conversation when we have this

• 10:15Speaker 00

  bonding hormone that's actually going through our brains when we're looking at each other in real life. You don't get it through Zoom screens, there's a lot of research on this at this point. You get a different kind of experience when you have the in-real-life experience. And so, one of the things that I do, and I'm talking to couples, and my wife and I, we do, we do work, you know, we do, we'll do these marriage retreats, for example. One of the things that we'll do with couples, we'll say, okay, before you go to sleep, you need to stare into each other's eyes before you go to sleep, you know, lying on the, you know, lying in the bed, you know, on your sides, looking at each other, stare each other in the eyes for five minutes. That's it. That's the prescription, because you want to establish this thing that probably they haven't had for a really, really long time, and that your brain actually needs, so that your brain registers, that's my person. You can't get it any other way.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that meaning can't be simulated?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Meaning can't be simulated because meaning is this fundamentally complex, right hemispheric experience. And so when you're, the simulation is always in the wrong side of the brain. And so it'll look like it's meaningful. But it isn't, is what it comes down to. It'll feel like in the moment like love, but it isn't. It'll feel like friendship, but it isn't.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  So interesting with this conversation because a lot of people, when I think about how this lands on the internet, there is a kind of cohort of people that will say something like, this is good enough, this is actually as good, that there's a disbelief that you actually do need to go into three dimensions. There is a, I'm happy to wait for the sex robots to come. I'm happy to have the AI partner. There's even a company that makes AI versions of your exes. So if you don't ever want to leave the relationship with them, you can just keep on texting. And I think that kind of, when I read those comments, it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I think

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  it sounds like somebody who's got hurt or is scared that the world isn't going to be able to give them something that they know that they can get compliantly online, permissionlessly, with lower risk of rejection or zero risk of rejection. And it makes me, it makes me sad, but yeah, it's so much of what we're seeing in the modern world is people getting what they want, but not what they need. And this is something that people need, but don't realize that they want.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, they do know that they want it. They just don't know how to get it. And is ordinarily what's actually happening. I mean, I rarely meet somebody who would say, I actually would prefer not to meet anybody in real life. I mean, there are people who are agoraphobic, for example. There are people that have particular pathologies along these lines. But the truth is, it's, they feel like it's the best that they can actually get under the circumstances. Look, when, when 62% of couples are forming online, then it's very hard to form, it's increasingly hard to form a couple offline. And, and if you're an exceptionally online person, or you're living in a remote location, or you, you know, came of age during COVID, which means that you, you don't have social skills that were wired into you at a tender age, then, then you're going to struggle is what it comes down to.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  But here's the thing to keep in mind, the biggest predictor of depression and anxiety is, is to say, I don't know the meaning of my life or my life feels meaningless. That's the number one predictor.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Well, that will, it, it, it all gets down to the fact that these pathologies that actually follow from this sense of emptiness. You know, so people will often say, so why has depression tripled? Why has anxiety doubled? Which they literally have clinically since about 2008. Why? And they'll say, well, because generational difficulties, because, you know, boomers wrecked the economy and created income inequality and, and, and made houses expensive or something. They have all of these exogenous economic explanations for this stuff. These are all wrong, is what it comes down to. Since 2008, when life has become increasingly online and we, you know, the average American is now checking her or his phone 205 times a day. What you've done is you've shoved yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  And in so doing, you haven't been able to naturally experience this meaning. And that's what leads empirically, that's what actually leads people to feel empty, to feel depressed, to feel anxious, to actually feel lonely. That's the big predictor is what it comes down to. We have a meaning crisis.

• 14:26Chris Williamson?

  Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully? And it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where Function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged. You get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more or you need to play Creed louder in your car, Function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands. Normally this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's $365 a year.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. Let's say that you're going to design a life for someone to have as little meaning in it as possible.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  What would that consist to?

• 15:37Speaker 00

  It would start by waking up when the sun is warm. You know, making sure you don't start your day like before dawn. Make sure you start your day when, kind of when you get up. Make sure that if you have an alarm clock, that it's your phone. Look at your phone before you roll out of bed, right? Then make sure that the first thing that you do is eat a bunch of, you know, highly processed foods, high in sugar. Make sure you get your coffee in the first five minutes. So you get a big dose of caffeine and make sure that you're looking and scrolling on your phone while you're eating your first meal. That's a really important thing to do. Make sure that your whole first hour is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen. Then make sure that you have a remote job. It's very important that you go to work back in your bedroom.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  And you look at a screen and you look at a screen all day long so that your colleagues are kind of squares on the zoom screen. And you see them sometimes in the clients and et cetera, et cetera. And you don't actually know where anybody lives. You don't have a relationship with anybody, right? It's actually better if you don't see anybody the whole day, as a matter of fact. Now, if you're going to date, make sure that it's swipe right, swipe left, swipe left. And so that you're only getting a two dimensional understanding of the person that you might want to fall in love with as well. Like no multi dimensional, multi sensory understanding of who the person is. Make sure you can't smell that person, right? I mean, that's really important because, you know, the olfactory bulb does all kinds of meaning related things in the brain. So make sure you rule that out, right? And make sure that on your own dating profile, you're lying a lot. That's important too, right?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Then let's make sure that for fun, that you're spending sort of the evening not doing anything of real importance. I mean, you're not working on a big project. You're not going out and seeing people that you're kind of staying in and scrolling and watching YouTube shorts. And if you're doing something that's kind of competitive and achievement oriented, make sure this is gaming. Make sure that, you know, it's really oriented toward that. So it's kind of writing your life in disappearing ink. And then go to bed. Make sure you didn't do any exercise. Important not to do any exercise at all, right? And then, repeat.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Times for N equals any number that you can conceive of. So that that you're never bored. You're never bored, but your life is grindingly boring. See, here's the key. If you want your life to have no meaning, make sure that there's no boredom moment to moment, but that day to day and week to week and month to month, life is boring. That's what you're actually going for. As opposed, if you want your life to be really meaningful, make sure you got plenty of boredom moment to moment. And then then your life won't be boring at all.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  That's strange paradox.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  It is. I mean, my, my great grandfather, Lee Roy Brooks, he was born in Olathe, Kansas. He married the sheriff's daughter. John James was the sheriff, was strung up by Quantrell's Raiders during the Civil War. Kid you not, this is Americana in my family, Chris. And, and, and, and he married Mary Ellen in Olathe, Kansas. And that's pretty much what I know about him. But I'm going to make a prediction about good old Leroy. He never came home to Mary Ellen and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. His brain was working the way it was supposed to. I promise you that his life behind the mule, looking at a mule's butt was, was pretty boring moment to moment, but he was not bored.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  His life wasn't boring because he was living a real life. But a lot of people today who've figured out a way by checking the screen and living online and, and living the hustle and grind culture that's been engineered out of Silicon Valley and various other places around the world, Hyderabad and wherever you want, that not being bored from moment to moment gives them the most boring lives possible.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  Is it the case that ambitious people are particularly susceptible, vulnerable to meaninglessness?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  So asking for a friend, right?

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  Of course, of course.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Me too. I'm, I'm like a senior version of you, man.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Except you're not gonna be bald.

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  That's true. I'm gonna have to lose a lot of hair to.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  You're gonna have to lose a lot of hair. I know. If I had your hair, I'd be President of the United States right now.

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  I think you would.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yes and no. So, one of the, the, the problems that really ambitious people have is that they, they, they don't know how to live with themselves. So ambition, striving, busyness, is, is, is really a way that people anesthetize themselves because they're very, very uncomfortable. So, you know, one time, I'll give you an example. One time I was talking to a great friend of mine, who traveled constantly for work, constantly for work. And, and his wife was just in his grill. It's just like, he had kids, and she says that I miss you, and, and you always, every year you tell me that this year's gonna be different. And, and I realized, getting to know this guy really, really well, the problem wasn't that his job made him travel too much. The problem was he didn't want

• 20:41Speaker 00

  to be home. He didn't want to be home. He wanted to be distracted because his life stressed him out so much. This is what it's like to be a striver, is, is like having this unbelievably chaotic life. And, and, and you need to distract yourself all the time. And so sometimes your ambition will be distracting you. Sometimes your success will be distracting you. Sometimes your overriding need to be special, or to be applauded by others, is your way to distract yourself from all the things that are actually going on, all the storms and things inside your head. Right? And, and, and when you have a down moment, then you panic. And that's when the screen comes out. Or, or for that matter, that's when alcohol and drugs come out. There's very

• 21:21Speaker 00

  interesting data from the OECD that show that above-average, busier-than-average people are above-average risk in alcohol, in alcohol abuse. So you don't think, you think of it as somebody who's an alcoholic, as somebody who's down and out, you know, you know, a bum. Right? No. It's more likely to be an investment banker. It's more likely to be a wealthy, successful podcaster. And, and the reason is because successful strivers anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol, with pornography, with screens, with anything that will actually make you feel like, don't leave me alone in here, man. I don't want to be alone in there. Which is why they're strivers in the first place.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they genuinely want them versus because they want approval?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  So everybody pursues goals because human beings, Homo sapiens, only get satisfaction in their life when they're making progress. It's that satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress toward an accomplishment with struggle. That's what satisfaction is all about. That's why, that's why goals are incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important. That's what it comes down to. These are the two things to teach your kids is have goals, accomplish stuff and struggle and don't be afraid of pain. Those are the things that you teach your kids and they'll get a lot of satisfaction. Satisfaction is one of the macronutrients of happiness, to be sure. The trouble with that is that if it's somebody like you, highly intelligent, super hardworking,

• 22:49Speaker 00

  unbelievably energetic, then you can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it's actually not about making the progress and the struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself. It's actually about if I finally get that thing, then it's going to be okay. When I finally get that thing. So, you know, I've, I've, I've worked with Olympic athletes and, and, and it's funny because you'll often, they think they're alone in their struggles and you'll say, did you, when you won that gold, were you depressed afterward? They'll be like, how'd you know? Like, cause it's always true.

• 23:21Chris Williamson?

  Every other gold medalist. It's literally called gold medalist syndrome.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's called gold medalist. And, and what it is, it's all in, in, in my field in behavioral science is called the arrival fallacy. And the arrival fallacy is just like, I, I, I gotta get there and when I get there, I'm going to feel that thing. Now, what, what is the thing I'm going to feel? And this gets back to your question. I'm going to feel like I'm worthy. I'm going to feel like I'm something. I'm going to feel like I'm special. I'm finally going to feel like I'm special and you don't. And you don't. And that's the problem. That's what a big part of this driver's curse.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  You know what's fascinating about the arrival fallacy? No one's ever been able to make it popular.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  So the concept.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Has, tell me the most well-known book on the arrival fallacy that points it out exactly.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Fucking, so I was on my way out to Australia texting Mark Manson about this and I was explaining one of the problems I was trying to navigate with the show, this live show that I was doing, that I was putting together. And one of them is that a good bit of it is kind of about the, the arrival fallacy. It's a PG version because I'm aware that it's. Chronically the most unsexy topic to ever talk about.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  And his response was, good luck. I've tried to talk about this publicly and every single time it's fallen flat.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  I know.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  It's not just not memetic, that people don't want to talk about it. It's not just memetic neutral, that people will accept it and maybe bring it up or maybe not. It's actively anti-memetic.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  People don't want to hear it and won't tell their friends about it.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  No.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  It is.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  No, I know. I know.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  It feels, saying to people that are still climbing, which everybody is, the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be. Feels like you're sucking the gas out of their fuel tank.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:59Chris Williamson?

  While they're still on the way up. It's like you as a fat person, saying to someone who's starving, well, food's not that nice in any case.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  And it's an unteachable lesson. And the only way that you can learn it is by getting there. And because the, the alternative to this with the arrival fallacy, is that every successful person ever in history, has been inducted into some kind of cult, that pulls the ladder up after them, where everybody gets the same memo, which is, so I know that you, all of the problems that you had, all of the internal voids, your feeling of insufficiency, the chip on your shoulder from when you were a child, your desperate desire for validation from random humans on the internet. I know that all of that was fixed when you got the 30,000 square foot house. But we need to tell the pores that that's not the case. So you now are a part of this elite group of people that are trying to sigh up everybody else into not trying to strive for it.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:52Chris Williamson?

  That's the alternative.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  Which is, or is it more likely that that's just the sense that the gold medalists got? And that's not to say that it's everyone, but it does seem to be a pretty big cohort. Way more than the people that are striving would think it is.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So there, that, there's a reason that is anti-memetic. And that's because it goes against mother nature. Mother Nature wants you to be fooled. The reason that the ancient Williamson's, right? From someplace, some Anglo-Saxon tribe of something, something, right? Scotland and England. Yeah. The reason they passed on their genes is because they were fooled by Mother Nature. That they were fooled, that they actually, that they chased the arrival of Thales again and again and again and again. Now, the reason that you're not going to be satisfied, the reason that it can't be satisfied is because Mother Nature needs you in the hunt. But the only way you're going to stay in the hunt is with a promise that you're finally going to get there. Now, there's a side note to this. There's a metaphysical side note to this, by the way.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  This is kind of, this is a little, a little bit of a, a, a, a side note that kind of takes us in the transcendent dimension. We'll come back to the arrival of Thales in a second. But, you know, there is a philosophical set of arguments for the existence of something, which is that the, the desire for something is actually proof of the existence of its object. So for example, proof that water exists is that I feel thirst. Proof or, or, or evidence that food exists is that I feel hungry. Now, I want unremitting happiness. I want it. And I feel like I can actually get it somehow, but I, I can't, I can't. But that philosophically is a proof that it does exist. Not here.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  That's actually proof of a divine afterlife, actually. It's evidence of a divine afterlife, that you have this hunger for unremitting happiness, which suggests that it actually does exist, but you can't get it in this life. Maybe you can get it someplace else, is what it comes down to. And this is one of the great proofs in most of the both Abrahamic and Karmic religions for the existence of Nirvana, Heaven, whatever it happens to be. Anyway, Mother Nature, back to this question at hand. Why would Mother Nature play this trick on us? Because, because we got to stay hungry. She wants us to stay hungry. So she's wired in a mistake.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  She's wired in a mistake. She's wired in something that it is such a deep mistake that we make again and again and again, that even when people speak a manifest truth that people deeply believe, they still will reject it. I remember when David Brooks, you know, the author David Brooks, we and I have been our super old friends. We're not related, share a surname, it's a common surname, right? And so my Brooks is snuck out of Lancashire in 1630 to Massachusetts, one step ahead of the county sheriff. But in his came later. Anyway, David Brooks, he said, I remember years and years and years ago, he said, you know, being number one in the New York Times bestseller list, it's really not that great. We're having lunch. And I said, let me try. Let me see how it

• 28:56Speaker 00

  feels. Right? And, and that was exactly the point that you made. Now, now Ryan Holiday talks about that, too. The first time he had a book that was number one in the New York Times bestseller list, he's like, this is great. And the next week, it was some yo-yo who had a stupid book as number one, and he realized how, how little it actually meant. But he wanted the next one to be number one, too. Actually, it's more tyrannical than that. Because if your next one doesn't make number one, now you used to be great. And there's almost nothing worse than that.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the only thing worse than never having made it is having fallen off.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I almost, I wanted to do a show at one point where I talked to a producer about the idea of a TV show called I Used to be Famous, where, you know, I as a behavioral scientist will go talk to people who are like, living relatively ordinary lives and they used to be famous. Some are happy, some are not, some are addicts, some are crazy, some are like normally married.

• 29:49Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating show wildly unpopular. You know, like just, it's just.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Well, it did get made.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but if you, if you, if you want to have that, it's the underdog story.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  Right? It's from zero to hero, not from hero to zero.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Although it's pretty interesting when you, when you hear about people who are living, who are much, much, much happier than they were in the limelight. You know, when people are living ordinary lives, and, and they're, they used to be really famous, and people go, oh, I remember, he was so and so in the Partridge Family or something. Now he's got a happy marriage and four kids and, you know, he, you know, he works for a cardboard box company, or something.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  How can people work out the meaning that they've got in their life? What are the big questions that you should ask?

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there are three big why questions that constitute meaning. And this actually comes from the work of Michael Steger, who's a really good social psychologist in Colorado. And he has the three parts, the three elements of meaning, which are called coherence, purpose, and significance. And there are three why questions. Number one is you have to have an answer to the question. You know, why are things happening the way they are in my life? And if things are happening all around me all the time, why? Part of meaning is having an answer to that. Maybe that's your religious answer, like because of the mind of God. Maybe that's your scientific answer, because these are the laws of the universe. Maybe you're a conspiracy theorist and say, because powerful people are doing these things.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Conspiracy theories are nothing more than crying out for an answer to the coherence question, which is a meaning problem. You know, so if you have a relative who's going down the rabbit hole on the craziest conspiracy theories, don't throw data in their face and say, you moron. That's the wrong way to approach it. They're having a meaning crisis. They're having a happiness crisis is the reason they're doing this in the first place. So coherence, number one, you know, why things happen the way they do. Second, why am I doing what I'm doing? That's purpose. Purpose and meaning are not the same. Purpose is goals and direction, so you can make progress. So why am I doing what I'm doing? If the answer is, I don't know, then you can't make progress because you're just going in circles. You're just a carnival cruise ship, just kind of randomly going around and around and around and around.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  It's the reason I find cruises unbelievably depressing. They don't go someplace, right? I'm a teleological individual like you. I want a goal, right? And that's purpose. And so in the research, you know, Sonia Luwamersky's stuff, have you had her on the show?

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  She's coming on next week or the week after.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Super good.

• 32:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  She's awesome. And she's at UC Riverside. And she does these work on goals. And you'll give students these just random goals. Like you're getting a B minus in physics, you know? It's going to be plus this semester. Just that goal, they get happier, they get more directed. Life seems better because they have more meaning in their life. That's what it comes down to. Even arbitrary goals work. Better to have meaningful goals. And last but not least is significance, and that's. My life matters. You know, my life matters to someone, you know, to my dog, to my wife, to God, to my kids. And so that's the love question. And all these things are completely missing in modern culture for so many people. You know, why do things happen the way that they do? It's just random. I don't know. Why am I doing what I'm doing? I have no idea.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  I get up and I scroll. I get up and I surf. I get up and I go on a Zoom meeting for a company I don't really care about. And, and, and, you know, what is the significance of my life? Why does my life matter? I don't think it does. And that's, those are the three things to actually keep in mind.

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Mitopure from Timeline contains the only clinically validated form of erythelina A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your 30s, 40s, and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/ModernWisdom.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  And Modern Wisdom at checkout.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  What happens psychologically when life feels random? When life feels random, then it feels like anything could happen at any time and there is no control. There are no levers that you can actually pull. So you're not an active player in your own life when there is no coherence. When you don't see a pattern, it's a big problem. You know, when you, when you, you remember when you learned to drive? How old do you have to be in the UK? Seventeen. Okay. And when you first, you know, you got a lot of confidence, but when you're looking at the traffic and all like, and it's like, it's like chaos. Wildly intimidating. I learned to drive in a Mini, which is a very British way to do it, but it's fucking terrifying. I feel like half the height of everybody else. Yeah. And, you know, any, any system that you're in that doesn't seem to make sense,

• 35:16Speaker 00

  that's, that, that, that it tends to feel really, really meaningless because you don't know what you can actually do to have some sense of agency. There's no sense of agency when there is no coherence is what it comes down to. So for example, if you believe that things happen the way they do because that's what God wills, then you're going to try to work that lever. You're going to pray. For example, you know, how to have a relationship with God. If you believe it's because of the laws of science, you're going to learn more about science and you're going to actually enter into that particular dimension. So for example, I'm a behavioral scientist. I really believe in science. I really believe that it's just like, it gives you incredible amounts of power. My job is to explain the science and explain how people can interact with the science. It's a pure coherence play is what it comes down to. And if it's all about conspiracy theories, then I'm going to get

• 36:01Speaker 00

  online and, you know, share them with my friends. So that, that's why coherence really matters so that you can have agency over your life. And why are directionless people so psychologically fragile? They're fragile because they don't know actually in which direction that they're going, which means they can't make progress. Now remember, this whole idea of happiness comes from making progress toward a goal. And there's tons of really interesting examples of this. The weight loss literature is super interesting in this. So diets are all effective and they're all catastrophic failures is what it comes down to. Effective insofar as that almost any diet will make you lose weight, but they have between an 80 and 95% failure rate after a year, meaning you gain all the weight back and then some. It's a weird industry.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It's like a $40 billion industry in the United States that fails. It's a moriboros of nutritional advice. It's craziness, you know, nine out of 10 times that they fail. Now, now, why are they successful? Because? And economically, it's because temporarily they make you make progress. But they ultimately fail because once you get to your goal, your goal weight, the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. That and then you get the arrival fallacy is what it comes down to. So what you want in life is something where you can just make constant progress. I want to be like, I want to be a better dad. I want to be a better person. I want to create more value with my work. And that's there's no end to that. I can't be like, hey, well, I got to the best dad I can possibly be.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So that's all good. No, I'm, I can always work to be a better husband. I can always work to be a better friend. I can always work to be a better citizen. I can always work to love my country more. I can always work to actually do something more important in my work and reach more people with the, with the, the moral objectives that I have. And that's what I need. I need goals I can't meet.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  I don't, I think that the confusing thing is if significance is about being valuable to others and not famous. Why is it the case that modern people confuse the two?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Part of the reason is because what strivers they get into, there's actually a pathology that, that, that is in the middle of this. So what you find is that certain people, let me back up a little bit. I work, I'm sort of the striver whisperer. In my work, I specialize in people who do incredible things. Right? And that's just because that's fun, although it is, but because that's the kind of books that I write, you know, people who do amazing things and still don't have perfect lives. That's kind of my area of research. As a matter of fact, they have a common childhood and it kind of looks like this. You know, super strivers who were never satisfied and struggle.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  They generally speaking, um, found that they only got attention and affection from their parents when they did something, when they got good grades, when they made pitcher on the baseball team, when they made first chair in the orchestra, when they, right? When they, you know, set up a lemonade stand and made more money than anybody thought possible, whatever it was, right? And, and their parents, often their parents are immigrants or, or came from poverty and they'll reward their kids when they do a thing, thinking that they're actually wiring in success and happiness for their kids. What they're telling their kids is that love is earned. They're teaching their kids that love is earned. And they kids will learn that. And when your brain is synaptically plastic, boy, will you ever learn that lesson? And then you will go through life trying to earn love over and over and over and over again.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  You'll look for, if you're a man, you'll look for women who make you earn their love. Right? And and that you'll spend your marriage trying to bring in more and more and more and more money. For example, women will try to stay young forever by trying to earn their husband's love. You'll find that they will surround themselves with sycophants and yes men who are just like fake friends who make you make these people earn their love with gifts and favors and fanciness. And and you'll surround yourself with people because you believe that love is actually earned. Well, the truth is that's wrong. Real love isn't earned, it's a free gift, freely given, it's a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you. That's what it comes down to.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  But they don't learn that because that's actually what they've what they've what they've they've evolved over the course of their lives. And they're they're they're they become success addicts, winning addicts, looking for the specialness. And and in the modern economy, when you can metastasize that from one to your family, to your community, to your church, to your city, to the whole world on the internet, then you're going to be searching for the adoration of strangers because it's the best possible dopamine hit that you can get. And life is going to feel gray if you don't get it. So this is a pathology that actually people have. And the more talented you are, the more danger you're in.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  One of my favorite ideas of yours is this difference between specialness and happiness. Like, it's so good. When you see it, it's something that you kind of can't see anymore.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And and it's it's a lot of people who are, you know, there are people watch and listen to Modern Wisdom because they want an edge. You know, it's good, it's good entertainment. I'm I'm I'm a fan. Long for a matcha. Yeah, but it's it's actionable material for people who want it.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm I'm actively making less actionable material.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Which is an interesting pivot at the moment, I think. There's a new term floating around which you might not have seen yet. It's called grind slop. And grind slop is kind of this fuck your feelings, just work harder achievement and progress and optimization at any cost.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  And I think that people are feeling a lot of fatigue. I've felt that for a while. And, you know, if

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  I go back and look at what I was talking about two years ago, 18 months ago. A lot of that was, I'm going to try and feel my feelings a little bit more. I'm going to try and see if there's something a little bit deeper. I'm going to have a little bit more fun. I'm not going to optimize for outcomes at the expense of experience. And that has really come to a head. I think for a lot of people, I think it's worsened by AI. I think that if you can have an oracle in your pocket, which you always had, but now an oracle that speaks to you personally and knows exactly everything that you need and kind of gives you this very curated idiosyncratic customized version of what it is that you want in a chat format, as almost as if you're speaking to your best friend that happens to be God.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  People have got information overload. And what I don't think that they necessarily need more of is just getting like, have foie gras made, right? Just force feeding that high velocity, like high density stuff.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  And I think that, at least for me, what I'm finding myself enjoying lots of is, I took something away from that.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  And I had a good time.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to optimizing for, you know, you think about short form or Blinkist or Spark Notes or, you know, whatever your favorite book summary service of choice was. Like, what is it that you're doing? You're like trying to get to the outcome.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, you're trying to get points on the board.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  As fast as possible.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. No, and I can't remember, that was a digression from something from the original that we.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Me saying if significance is about being valuable to others.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  And not about being famous, how can people confuse those two?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And so specialness and happiness.

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so specialness and happiness is really, really interesting because the idea of, I mean, I will literally hear people say, look, any loser can have a family. You know, any loser can have an ordinary job and provide for his wife and kids. But not everybody can start a company. Not everybody can be CEO. Not everybody can have a famous podcast. Not everybody can do those things. And in other words, they're saying, I know what would make me happy and I'm going to forego that happiness for what I think is a happiness beyond it, which is specialness. And that will always lead to ruin. It always does. I mean, again and again and again, I talk to people my age, I've talked about people who are older than me. I mean, it's like this classic thing.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  It's a friend who is 25 years old and I have.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  An icon in finance, an absolute icon in finance. And I said, when I said, how old were you when you figured out you were going to be rich? He said, 32. He knew when it was. I was 32 years old. He said, it was like, I, you know, I actually left this bank and I actually went and opened my own firm and, and it was starting to make money and, and we weren't rich yet, but I, I realized I was going to be rich. And I said, he must have thought, what's it going to be like to be rich? What's it going to be like to be rich? What's going to happen? He said, yeah, he's not a very materialistic guy. He doesn't have a boat. He doesn't have 15 houses. He doesn't have any of this stuff. He's really, really wealthy.

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  Not Scott Galloway.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  My doppelganger, you know, I should go, I should, I said, I said to Scott the other day. So we were doing a thing together and I said, you know, we should go on tour together with Stanley Tucci.

• 44:52Chris Williamson?

  And put each of you under a big red cup.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right. It's like, you know, three card Monte or something like that. It's like, which one do you get?

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  Three card Baldi.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  And so, and he said, and I said, so what, what did you think? When you're, when you got rich, how life was going to be better? How did you really think life was going to be better? Cause this is interesting for me as a behavioral scientist. I mean, this is, this is deep. And he thought about for a while, he said, I thought that when I got rich, that my wife would love me. Really love me. And I said, so what happened? And he said, she didn't.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  I just stared at me. And it was this moment of pathos, right? It was this moment, it's like this.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  What's pathos?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  This moment of deep understanding and feeling, right? That, and it's almost as if when he, he'd never said it before, when he articulated it, he understood it for the very first time.

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  Do you think he'd selected a wife that? Was the sort of person whose love needed to be won.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Of course, of course, because you know, if you believe that love is earned, that you're going to surround yourself with people who will make you earn their love.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Every single time.

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  You've got, you've got cause and effect going on.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  I've got this line from an essay I wrote recently, what you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Nice. Give me an example.

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  Uh, your psychological resilience, you know, in the boardroom, people call it strength, they call it decisiveness, assertiveness. They call it uh, anti fragility.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  But around your kitchen table, it makes you put up with a relationship that you should have left long, but long ago.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  It makes you impenetrable to the actual psychological and emotional needs that your spouse needs.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  I had a Navy SEAL sat here, Andy Stumpf, and he said, you know, I built myself up, like my entire career was made out of being a person who doesn't quit.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  And that caused me to stay in a marriage that was toxic for 10 years longer than I should have done.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Your strengths are your weaknesses, but your weaknesses are your strengths.

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  You tell me.

• 46:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm fucking, I'm giving, Uno reverse carded me on a, a limerick that I don't understand.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  But I mean, think about it.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  Riddler sat opposite me here.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  I'm a Batman villain.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  The, the bald man, the baldy, the, um, the, um, what is your greatest weakness?

• 47:21Chris Williamson?

  Uncertainty.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Uh huh. How did you have you turned that into one of your greatest strengths in what you do?

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Paying attention to every different permutation of how things could go to ensure that the plan is in place. Hypervigilance, uh,

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  galactically unreasonable attention to detail.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Exactly right. What's your next biggest weakness?

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  In the similar sort of circuit, is that overthinking?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Uh huh. You fear failure. Right?

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  Fear.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  You fear shame?

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  Fear shame more than failure.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  How does your fear of shame? And like, I'm not, I'm not divulging anything to our friends.

• 47:57Chris Williamson?

  No one's, no one's fucking surprised.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  No one's surprised here. It's nothing that I haven't said on stage in front of thousands of people with tears in my eyes.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like the shame faced boy part of the program.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so how is, has a fear of shame? Which by the way, is very common for, for successful people.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  Working hard enough so that you don't have to feel it.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  You know, overachieving.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  Outstripping what anybody thought.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:20Chris Williamson?

  To this, the point where nobody could ever think that it would be something shameful.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  But it does cause you, again, what you, what you're praised for in public, you pay for in private. It means that you have, um, opening up about how you feel, especially about weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:35Chris Williamson?

  That's hard.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  It is hard.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  Because you go, well, I'm supposed to have it all together. The reason that the world gave me the love that it gave me is because of, look at my competence and here it is on display. And I'm ta ta ta ta. And then you go, I need to, I, and there's a, there's a hole in this armor. And I need to show it to somebody.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and I, I'm, the map that I have of reality from the real world gets ported across into the relational world.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  And that's very, very difficult to, that's a tough thing to, well, it feels like being Batman and Robin for a lot of people. Sorry. It feels like being Batman and Bruce Wayne for a lot of people, you know? It feels like you have one life out there.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  And then when you come home, you can either choose to keep the mask on.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 49:22Chris Williamson?

  But taking it off means that you have to start living this double life where you need to not feel the things that you do privately when you're in public and not use the tactics that you have publicly when you're in private.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Right. And that actually is, can be really disconcerting and it can be highly damaging for personal relationships. This is one of the reasons that you find that when people start to get really famous, that they're much more at ease in front of a thousand people than they are in front of one person. Because they actually have to use a different set of social skills. They've got the theater ability in front of a thousand people, but when they're actually talking to mom or, you know, an actual no fooling girlfriend, life, it gets real dicey, real fast, right? It's what it comes down to. But, but what you put your finger on is that, look, you will pay in private for what you're applauded for in public. But you'll also, you know, what you're paying for in private is the source of your strength in public.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  And that what that means is that you shouldn't just try to, you shouldn't just be thankful for what they're applauding you for in public. On the contrary, you should be down on your knees thankful for the weaknesses that you have as well. And that's, that's the, that's the pro move. That's what it comes down to. That's actually how we ultimately learn to manage ourselves is that we recognize that we have these frailties, that we have these weaknesses, that we have these, you know, feet of clay. And we say, thank you, thank you, thank you for that weakness because indeed that is the source of my strength.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, most of the things that you're most ashamed of are just the dark side of something light that you're really proud of.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:51Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, if you've got a sword, most swords are double edged and sometimes it nicks you on the backswing.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  That doesn't mean that you throw the sword away.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  Just means that you learn how to hold it properly.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then the ace move is being grateful for the wound, for the wound itself. It's really interesting because actually what you find in a lot of eastern philosophy is that, you know, we have a tendency to be very stoic about the way we talk about problems and suffering and weakness in our life to say, I will bear up under it. I will, I do accept it, I do accept it, but it's not enough to accept it. You need to love it. That's really, that, that ultimately is the, is what makes you fully human is to actually love it and to accept it as the divine will. This is the way it's going to be. And because it's happening, that's what I want. I, my will, I want, what I want is what is happening sort of axiomatically. I realize it's sort of philosophical in its way, but ultimately I think this is what

• 51:44Speaker 00

  we need to, where we need to get in our lives is, is recognizing that there are both strengths and weaknesses that we actually have, and we should be as grateful for our weaknesses as we are for our strengths.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the night gown, it's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep. The eight sleep pod five comes with a smart cover you throw on your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. And now they've added the world's first temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase. So you've got 360 degree coverage for deep uninterrupted rest. It's like being Walt Disney without the cryogenic chamber.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  And the racism. Best of all, their autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns and makes adjustments to improve your sleep in real time. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That's why Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to add up to one hour of quality sleep per night. They have a 30 day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod5 by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  I had this idea, the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error, that we are often prepared to, especially in the modern world, right? Blaming our parents for stuff is basically a rite of passage in modern psychology and modern therapy culture.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  But if we're not prepared to lay our strengths at the feet of our parents, then maybe we shouldn't be so quick to call them the villains for what's wrong with us. So, you know, you say that your desire to work hard is because you were never freely given love at home, but isn't that also the same thing that's made you so driven and ambitious?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  You say that your hypervigilance was brought out because people didn't observe your needs ahead of their own. Isn't that also the same reason that you're so concerned to ensure that everybody else's welfare is put before yours?

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  All of these things are, they're not even two sides of the same coin. It's just a single fucking piece of metal.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  This thing exists. It's woven throughout it all.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:52Chris Williamson?

  And, uh...

• 53:53Speaker 00

  What you're, what you're doing is, right now, you're being very subversive because what you're doing is subverting the culture of grievance. And which, actually, you're pretty good at that at this point. I've noticed that.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  People got really angry when I, when I talked about that.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  They didn't like it.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Well, the whole point is that, you know, the unhappiest people are people who are, whose identity revolves around grievance and victimization. And this is, by the way, one of the ways that people in positions of relative cultural authority and power keep you subjugated. The way that I, you know, a baby boomer like me, technically, I'm the last year of the baby boom, can conscript culture warriors who are Gen Z into my movement is by convincing them they're victims and they should be aggrieved. About how the world treats them, about how older people treat them, about how the culture treats.

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  It was easier before you, so there's no point in trying now.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, or you should be really mad about it. You should be angry about it. You should be, you know, carrying a sign in the streets.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Apply your efforts to complaining about the problem as opposed to lifting yourself out.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Starbucks. Yeah, yeah.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it seems like a lot of what you're laying at the feet here, the issue is largely technology. That that is one of the biggest movers. Is that a fair assessment?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  That's the tip of the spear. It's actually what it is. It's a, the technology is a manifestation of the way that the culture of engineering has given us this scientism, this conceit, that every problem is a complicated problem that can be solved. As opposed to the most important problems, which can't be solved, they can only be lived with and understood. That a more human approach to what we're talking about is that there are plenty of complicated problems that we can solve, but the most important ones are the ones we can't solve. And that's what a properly, it's interesting because that's what most of the, you know, Buddhist teachers will say that the, the wrong turn of the West was that, was the scientism that said that everything is a solvable complicated problem. Whereas you, what we need is a balance between complex and complicated.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  The complex problems of the right hemisphere, the complicated problems of the left hemisphere, and they exist in a system. And there are many things that we shouldn't try to solve because we can't. We should live with them. We should understand them. We should leave them as permanent mysteries that actually give our life flavor. But the truth is that especially over the past 25 years, in the era of hyper-development of technology, that is an expression of the idea that, no, no, we're going to hit the singularity, man. We're going to live forever. We're going to be actually be able to figure out how to upload our brains. We're going to be able to solve any problem with whatever app or doodad or, or, or supplement or whatever it happens to be,

• 56:25Speaker 00

  that we will have the scientific acumen to solve everything that actually is a problem in our lives. And that's just axiomatically wrong. And how do I know that? Because we're solving more and more of these problems and we're getting less and less and less happy. It's the same kind of thing to say, for example, if we had enough therapists, we wouldn't have any more depression. Well, depression has tripled and the number of therapists has tripled. So what's going on here? Obviously, there's a cause and effect problem and a glitch in our logic.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if this is part of the reason why people are feeling exhausted. They've got personal development fatigue.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  That permanently asking the why question, permanently trying to optimize everything becomes exhausting. The kind of cost that you pay of trying to optimize everything is worse than being under optimized.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:20Chris Williamson?

  The process of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections would. And yeah, all of this together is like, dude, I got enough on my plate.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:28Chris Williamson?

  I got enough on my plate. Do I need more homework?

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  Do I really need more homework?

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Right now, as opposed to like, ah, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying and I'm trying hard and that's, that's pretty good.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you know, there's nothing wrong with these big why questions. The problem is having these big why questions and believing that if you watch enough internet videos and take enough supplements, that you'll be able to answer these things. And this is one of the, this is a big generational difference that we actually find. So there, every philosophical school of note and of merit has something that the ancient Greeks called aporia, which is to sit in a state of puzzlement over questions that can't be answered. So Zen Buddhism is based on koans. Koans are riddles. You know, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And a strange, unanswerable question, you're supposed to ponder that. And in the pondering, you gain a certain kind of complex knowledge, which we know is, you know, the dominantly processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. Right?

• 58:25Speaker 00

  A big generational difference is that what's very, what's missing for a lot of those lives today is that at night with their friends, they're not having these BS philosophical conversations about big questions that can't be answered. That was what you did, right? 11:30 after you came home from a party with your friends at college in 1985. Is it like, I don't know, dude? Do you think God exists? Right? It's like, wow, dude. And, and, and now it's like, z, z, z. So we've stopped doing that one thing. There's nothing wrong with big why questions. The problem is that we only ask, either ask questions that can be addressed by Google or ChatGPT, or we believe that if we have enough scientific knowledge, that these questions can be answered.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Both of those are a big, big wrong turn. They're a big wrong turn philosophically, but they're also a wrong turn neurobiologically.

• 59:15Chris Williamson?

  Weird, isn't it? Because the promise of

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  Modern technology, culture, science, being able to answer a lot of questions and fix a lot of the problems that previously were huge. Infant mortality and fucking cuts on your. You know how Ignace Samuelwise died?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  No.

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  Bro, this is fucking money.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Tell me.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  So guy that discovered the germ theory of disease. He finds that child bed fever is being transmitted from corpses to newborn babies because the doctors weren't washing their hands in between. Begs his colleagues to adopt hand washing. He gets laughed out of every single institution he's trying to do it to. He keeps on talking about it for so long that he drives himself insane. Everybody thinks that he's insane and his wife helps to commit him to an asylum. While he's being removed from his own home by the nurses that are taking him away to the asylum. He gets a cut on his leg. The cut on his leg is treated by a doctor who doesn't wash his hands after touching a corpse and he dies due to an infection.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  The most like tragically ironic way to die. But yeah, we've got all of these promises that's been made by the modern world. And the problem is no one, it's the first time that we've had the oracle, right? It's the first time that humanity's gone through the wow, maybe we could answer everything. Maybe all of the problems as opposed to some of the problems.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And the all idea is that if we, we, we dig a little deeper, we'll find it. We dig a little deeper, we find it.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  But you're saying that there's a particular category of challenge, which is simply unsolvable.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  You're digging like when you're in a hole.

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  Saying what's the final digit of pi or something?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Now, this is important because this is, you know, a classic mistake that people make. This is a conceit that people have. I talked to a guy one time who was a big part of the war on poverty in America, which was this idea that we're going to be able to wipe out poverty with social programs, with social welfare service. And it did a lot. I mean, social welfare programs did a lot to lower caloric needs and make sure that there's more public access to education and all kinds of good stuff. But the truth of the matter is that after a certain point, it starts to wire in pathologies. Actually, it makes it harder for people to actually become independent, et cetera.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  Because they become reliant on the money?

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  That's the idea. Yeah, that's the, that's the whole idea of, of this. It's certainly not true for everybody, but it's certainly true for other people. And, and I asked him, who is one of the architects in this war on poverty, what would have made it that would truly have won? You really wiped out poverty once and for all. And he said, just a little more money.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Nah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  But that's what a lot of people in the valley think today. Is that we're gonna get enough for that, that these are civil war. We just need to go deeper. We need to go deeper.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you saw the, the test experiments with UBI from a couple of years ago.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  They failed.

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  Both of them failed.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  They failed.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Failed massively. Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  Why? Now tell me, don't, don't say, so say why? What do they do? You remember?

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  Not fully. I mean, I know that people, they looked at the discretionary spend. They looked at where people were putting money away. They looked at how much of it was being spent on things that people said they needed to prioritize. Stuff like healthcare, wasn't going on healthcare. What the quality of the food wasn't increasing.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  It wasn't going to education.

• 1:02:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  The whole point is that if it went toward human capital development, if it went toward what my parents would have put it into, right? Um, it would have been great. It would have been a fabulous thing. And the whole thing is, is based on this idea that everybody has the same values, that everybody has the same priorities, which they don't. And it wasn't a question of money. Furthermore, when you actually give people for nothing, you strip away their sense of earned success. And earned success is part of this idea of satisfaction. It gets into this idea of progress. It gets into the wiring of Homo sapiens. That's what it comes down to. It, it denies the primacy and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love, right? Me too, right? Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have. And so every time that we try to reorder

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea that we've got this technology, we've got this economic policy, we've got, I got, I got, I've got this new idea for how the, how the genders are gonna behave toward each other. Yeah, no, from now on, we're no longer gonna be like people were 50,000 years ago. It's gonna fail. It's gonna fail. And we, you need to, you need to go with the, the current. You need to actually swim with the current or you're ultimately going to fail, is what it turns out.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  Getting back to the technology thing, how do you interrupt this doom loop that everyone's on?

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  So the doom loop is that I'm, you know, I don't want to be bored because I don't like boredom because it's boring. Right. And so I distract myself. And when I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom. My life feels less meaningful because I'm actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that. And so I'm more at loose ends. And so I spend more time online, more time scrolling, more time, you know, doing what people do when they're, when they're really bored. And that makes the problem worse. Much the same way with drugs and alcohol, you know, and that's how escalation and dependence actually works. The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom. And so when I'm anxious and bored, I drink. Well, that makes boredom and anxiety worse the next day.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  And so I drink some more and then down and down and down and down it goes. And so what you have to, you're in a doom loop. Any addictive process is a doom loop. The same thing is true with the way that we use technology. The same way is true of, you know, anything, any.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  Which is totally hidden under the radar, by the way.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 1:04:51Chris Williamson?

  You know, and you, most people, despite the fact that alcohol is having a resurgence only after it was recently sort of stripped away.

• 1:04:59Chris Williamson?

  Most people understand, I, I, I, I'm, I'm doing this and I didn't use to do this. And when I do this, I keep, it seems to be ratcheting up. I'm drinking more than I used to. I'm, I'm, that's probably not good.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Well, it depends on how much you drink. It might be good.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, if you're getting to five, six, seven drinks a night.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  That's the big problem.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But how many times does that entropy start to build?

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Because your tolerance, you're chasing, you're not chasing having the drink, you're chasing the sensation of the drink.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Chris Williamson?

  And your tolerance, I.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. That's a doom loop.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  I'll drink 10, 20 times a year, maybe at most now. And that means half a Corona in. I'm like, it's nice. So I'd be in 14 again, you know, that's cool. But.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  I can put away a half rack at 14. I don't know.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  The problem with using your phone in this way is it's a completely socially acceptable, under the radar, nobody is ever gonna say, no one's ever gonna come up, how many times, like someone will make a joke about, dude, you're on your phone a lot tonight. It's very different to, dude, you're pissed again and it's five nights in a row.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's different.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  Right? It's much more obvious, the gambling thing, the porn thing, these kinds of compulsions, these kinds of habits are significantly more obviously destructive.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  Than using your phone is. And then while I'm doing it, I can feel myself internally fucking rolling my own eyes. Yes, okay, too much time on the phone is too much. You know what I mean?

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  I know. And there are other, by the way, there's a whole spectrum of these things, of these dependencies that are all involving the, you know, the dopamine cycle in your brain, some of which are not just sort of neutral and hidden, like the phone, some of which are applauded. You know, if you're a workaholic, nobody will say, I mean, if like, if you're a pathetic alcoholic, nobody will say, it's like, Chris, you were off, you drank, you know, you drank 750 milliliters of gin last night. I saw you put that, congratulations, you're excellent.

• 1:06:50Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  They're gonna say, you got some problems. I mean, I think you gotta get that looked at, right? But if you work 16 hours a day and neglect your family, you're gonna get a promotion and a raise. You're gonna get rewarded for that. So there's some addictions that, that, you know, people actually love because it works in their favor. It enriches them and it actually leads to the world's rewards, which people admire.

• 1:07:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  So the point is that we have a responsibility to look after ourselves, look after the pathologies that are actually inherent in our behavior and to see, is it actually making my life better or is it making my life worse, notwithstanding the reaction of the rest of the world?

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  What does fixing the doom loop look like?

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  What is fixing it means clipping it. It means cutting it at a particular place. So all addictions, getting out of addictions, they have sort of three steps in common. It's really, behaviorally, they have three steps in common. Now, I'm not talking medically, I'm not talking about the medical interventions, because that's different for different things with gambling and drinking and methamphetamine and whatever. But the three behavioral steps in getting out of an addiction are number one, you gotta get pissed. Get pissed. It's like, this is subjugating me. This is, I'm in a cage and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of actually being a wholly owned subsidiary of that company, or this behavior, or this culture. I'm tired of it. I'm not going to put up with it. You need to fight back by rebelling. That's number one. You need the spirit of rebellion. If you're not ready to rebel, you're not going to get out.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Number two is you need to figure out how to stop. You need to actually have an algorithm. And that's dependent on what the substance or behavior actually is. There are different ways to do it, but there's tons of science in every area. If you can get addicted to it, there's science that tells you how to stop. And then the third is you have to learn how to live with yourself again. Because you've been distracting yourself from yourself. If you're addicted to something, it means you didn't like being home in your head. That's what it comes down to. And you know, it's like, I haven't had a drink since I was 38 years old, right? And I remember in my 30s, I didn't like being home in my head. Didn't like it. Didn't want to be there, right? And so I left, right? I got a little relief. I got a little vacation in the bottle.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  And it just, it was going nowhere good. And it was really clear. And then my dad died. And, and, and you know, a couple of people I cared about said, this, that's your future. You just saw your future, right? And so I stopped. But it was, the hard part was step three. The hard part was actually being alone with myself, being awake with myself, being alive with myself is what it comes down to. And that's probably even more extreme for people who are very, very online. Because you're trying to break the doom loop of how technology is breaking your brain, not letting you find the meaning of your life, making you angry and depressed and anxious and lonely. You're addicted, which is why you keep doing these self terrible, self destructive things to yourself.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  First, you get pissed and second, you gotta quit. And look, I got the algorithms to help you do that. But then, you need new friends. Like, you know, you need, you need to live in a society. You need to live, you know, in people who are alive in real life. And you have to be able to sit behind the wheel of your car at a red light with nothing to do in your thoughts, right? And be in a supermarket checkout line without your phone. And, and walk before dawn without a device. And hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet and say, that's the sound of my feet on the path. And that takes work.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  How easy is it to recover from this? I think a lot of people feel like they're lost and totally unrecoverable.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  It's absolutely possible. I've seen it again and again and again and again. I mean, look, this is this, this is not heroin that we're talking about here. I mean, the, the, the process of detox, for example, isn't, you don't even have to give up your phone. You just have to put it in proper boundaries and have some rules in your life. Right. And, and actually have some proper habits. And you know, where our life is, if you have a fairly functional life, you've got good habits already. Right. I mean, you get up at a certain time, you work out every day, you, you eat something you don't eat like an 11 year old. I mean, you have good habits and then you just put protocols around it. You know, it's like Huberman talks about protocols and which is kind of affected the culture. It's a culture of protocols and, and I'm an absolute believer in that when it comes to your phone.

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  I mean, you, you wake up in the morning, if you can, don't look at it at all for the first hour. For neurocognitive programming, if you're a journalist or, you know, you have your job, you gotta look at it and make sure nothing's on fire. To put it down, that's it for the hour. Right. First hour of the day. While you eat, neurocognitive programming, while you eat is critically important. It's best not to eat alone and never eat with your device.

• 1:11:28Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  Brain is actually your, the, the neuropeptides in your brain, most notably oxytocin. They flow very liberally when you're eating with somebody. This is how, you know, Homo sapiens would establish and foster kin bonds. Is by sitting around a campfire, putting pieces of yak meat into their mouths. Discussing their day and looking into each other's eyes. That's how we're wired. If you have a phone on the table while you eat, or God forbid, if you're looking at it, there's no, none of this neurochemistry happens.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  What if you're on your own?

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Then you might read a book, you might listen to music, but don't look at your phone.

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a meme online of a guy starves to death even though he had food because he couldn't watch YouTube.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  Cause his phone had run out of battery.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Or it's like, or died of sepsis because he didn't go to the bathroom. Yeah. Yeah. He couldn't take his phone in there. So, and last, but at least it's the last hour of the day. Now, that part of that is sleep architecture and blue light, et cetera, et cetera. The pineal gland, melatonin, yada, yada. We all know the physiology of that. But part of that is just the way that you actually understand yourself at the end of your day and get ready to rest. If you're living with your partner, that's critically important to your relationship, is not to be looking at your device in the last hour. So you can be fully present as you drift off to sleep together. That's super, super important for your relationship. But just those three things. Then there's phone-free zones. You shouldn't have your phone in the bedroom, ever, ever, ever, ever. Because, I mean, God forbid, you get up to pee at three o'clock in the morning and look at your phone.

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  That's a big mistake. Yeah, no. Well, I mean, it's, it's your pineal gland shuts off, right? No more melatonin for you. And, and so, which is problematic on its face, but it's also you just, you, you spike your cortisol. I mean, it's bad stuff happens to you. So the phone should be in a different floor, in a closet, plugged in someplace from the hour before you go to bed until the after an hour after you get up. That's number one. It's a phone-free zone. Second is that, that, I mean, this is just, you know, basic public policy. There shouldn't be a, a phone in any classroom, in any school, in the world, between kindergarten and PhD. It is complete insanity, because it interrupts everything that we're actually trying to do.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  And it's, it's child abuse that there's phones in classrooms, you know, and, and the most important hour, they shouldn't have phones is during lunch, by the way. Hmm. Because they need to. It's even worse. It's even worse. It shouldn't be in a classroom. It definitely shouldn't be in a cafeteria. I mean, most of what's going on in the classroom is not interesting to begin with. I mean, I don't think I ever learned anything in public school. I think it was mostly babysitting, but, but, you know, at least I had friends and, and, and they don't have friends. And then, and then people need phone fasts. They need technology fasts. I recommend 96 hours a year is kind of where this is, and there's a little bit of research on this that shows that this actually can break the relationship that you have. So you prove to yourself that you actually don't need it, and you're kind of in a state of bliss by the fourth day.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  You know, it's really, really, I mean, I go on a spiritual retreat every year for four days. No phone. Oh, it's great. First day is like children screaming in my head. Yeah. Second day, I'm calming down. Fourth, third day, I like it. The fourth day, I wish it were the whole year. That's what it comes down to. But just those things, phone-free times, phone-free zones, phone fasts.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  Can re can can can can do this part two. This does not give you part one, which is rebellion or part three, which is you got to get comfortable back with yourself. Different processes. How important is romantic love to meaning? That's one of the best ways you can turn on the right hemisphere of your brain. Because that's something you will never solve. How do I know that? Because if we could have solved algorithmically romantic love, we wouldn't still have app developers that were trying to make the ultimate dating app. The dating apps are fundamentally a left brain solution to a right brain problem. Right now, they're getting better. But the way that they're getting better is by figuring out ways to add more human friction into the algorithm,

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  as opposed to taking human friction out of the algorithm. So for example, you're finding these early experiments, which suggest that a good way for you to find your matches on an app is to have your matches, some of your app matches go to your best friend and have your friend decide which ones you're going to go out with.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Because you're adding a right brain into the mix. Yeah. You're adding your friend's right brain to the mix, for example, or having a whole bunch of potential people in a group that I will actually meet in a mixture. You know, that's a good way to do it too. Yeah. Uh huh. And then pair up if it's meant to be or make friends. If it's not. And so that's that those are ways that we actually do that. But the point, the point of the matter is that the human brain is is highly attuned toward this incredibly complex, indescribable experience of falling in love. That's one of the reasons that all country and western songs are about romantic love. That's the reason that the greatest poetry is about romantic love, because it's not described scientifically, it's described artistically. Because it's a right hemispheric experience.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  So you want to, you want to turn on the meaning in your life. Go get your heart broken. I mean, go take a risk. I mean, that's, that's when you find the meaning of your life, right? I mean, when you've had your heart broken, that's horrible. And that's hard, but that's meaning rich. That's when you ask all those big questions. You're definitely alive. You'll learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about yourself, right? Unless you stay drunk. What's the ladder of love? So Diotima of Montina was this prophetess that Socrates sought out. So Socrates thought of the Diotima of Montina. And, and, and she described to him that the way to find the meaning of life starts with this ladder. And each rung of the ladder gets you closer to the meaning of life.

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  And the first rung of the ladder is falling in love. The first rung of the ladder is actually attraction toward the beautiful other. Romantic attraction, not just like, you know, Chris is awesome. He's so smart. He's got such a great show. It's such a great conversation. Such a good friend. Thank you. But it's, it's like that spark that you can't quite understand. Now, actually, we do understand neurochemically what's happening when you're falling in love. We know how the sex hormones start and then we get the catecholamines actually involved along the way. And then we get a really dramatic drop in serotonin and then we get the neuropeptides. And in the sequence, we know when the sequence is off between two people is why they don't, is why they don't actually succeed in a relationship.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  There's all kinds of really fascinating neuroscience of falling in love, but it's still a mystery. I tell you that the neuroscientists who are doing this cutting edge research, they can fall hard in love, just like anybody else. Like, I'm like, I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened. Yes, you do. You wrote that paper, right? But still, I mean, it's like, I, I, I teach this stuff to my students at the Harvard Business School about the, the neuroscience of falling in love. But I don't understand this relationship with my wife. I just love her, you know, I just, it's like, okay, yeah, a lot of oxytocin and vasopressin. And, you know, and there's some amount of dopamine and, and norepinephrine involved. And, and there drops of serotonin when you're fighting.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  That's not it. It's because it's this deep metaphysical experience. Most religions believe, as Montine of Diotima, Socrates's prophetess suggested, that romantic love is the beginning of an intended to the divine. That and and most religions believe that if you're in a serious marriage and you deny your spouse's love, you're denying your spouse God's love. That's how right brained and complex this actually is.

• 1:19:03Chris Williamson?

  And just because you can explain how gravity works doesn't mean that you're not going to hit the ground if you jump out of a skyscraper.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  You can understand it plenty well.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Still at the mercy of these things. There's that interview that Sam did with Daniel Kahneman, thinnest of thinking fast and slow, Nobel Prize winner. After many, many decades of studying the fallacies of the human mind and mental models and all of the different ways that our rationality goes awry, has it made you any more rational?

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  It's not really.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Not really, I know. I know, no, it's interesting too, you know, and and Sam and I, I've had one conversation more or less along these lines. He's the most soulful atheist I've ever met.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  He really is. He's a soulful guy. I really have.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  He'd be a great believer, apart from the lack of belief.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  But that's the point because his soulfulness would seem, might seem on the outside to contradict his his uber rationality as an atheist, but it doesn't because these things coexist. These things can reside next to each other and because Sam's brain has two hemispheres to it, so does mine, so does all of ours.

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet salty orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulates your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Do you think people think enough about transcendence?

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  No, I don't. And transcendence is important because it, once again, it contradicts Mother Nature's tyranny. So Mother Nature wants you in the psychodrama of your utter stultifying Christmas from moment to moment to moment. My job, my flights are late, you know, my podcast guest, you know, it might be good. I gotta prepare for that thing. And my stomach is rumbling. I forgot to eat lunch and, oh yeah, the payment didn't come in for that thing. It's so boring, but Mother Nature wants you to be the star of that psychodrama all day long in your head. That's what William James called a me self, the me self. It's looking at yourself and thinking about yourself all day long. And you need that for self-reference to make your way in the world. If you don't understand what you're doing, you're going to be a pretty bad driver.

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  You're going to be in a traffic accident pretty quickly. But there's also the I self, which is looking out at the world, which is transcending yourself by looking at out at the world. In which you're one player, but you're only one player in it. And it's interesting because transcendent experiences are those where the me self disappears and the I self becomes dominant. There are times actually when, when they, they become confused and that's kind of what a fugue state is psychologically. Where the, where you become disassociated with yourself in this weird way. And you, all of us have experienced this. I remember one time I had a lot on my mind and I was putting gas in my car.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And I was just like really worried about something. It was back when I was a CEO and my life was like a living, like dystopian hellhole, right? And everything was a problem every single day. And I was putting gas in my car and it was like eight o'clock at night and, and I, and I finished and, and I got back in my car and I was driving. My daughter was with me in the car. And she was a little girl then. And there's this like weird clanking sound behind me, like somebody had a muffler down right behind me, like they were following me. And I said, honey, what is that sound? She's, I don't know. It's like clanking, clanking, clanking, clanking. They're following me. What's going on? Until people started pointing to me at my car.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  And I realized that I had driven away with the hose in my gas tank and I pulled it out of the gas pump and I was dragging it behind me, the whole mechanism behind me, clankety clankety clank, right? And so I thought somebody else was doing a thing that I had actually done. I'd confused the me self and the I self. I was in this like weird fugue state. It got real, real fast when I took it back to the gas station and these four Iranian dudes were standing around the gas pump really mad, like who destroyed our pump? I also found out how much it costs to fix a gas pump. It's expensive. But the whole point is that, that what we want is not to get into a fugue state. We want to have these experiences where we can be in the I self, where we can stand

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  in awe, where we can get outside ourselves, which is religious experiences. And that's spiritual experiences and philosophical experiences and, and experiences of service and love toward other people, unbidden by any self-interest. And that's where life gets really interesting and beautiful. And when you do that, when you truly are in a transcendent state, that's when you're in the right hemisphere of your brain and you don't find meaning, meaning finds you. Which is why I'll often recommend to people, it's like, I don't know, how do I find the meaning of life? Go volunteer. Go volunteer, go pray. I'm not religious, I don't care, that's not what I said, go pray. Why? Because when you do that, you will induce a state in your brain and you'll want to do it more.

• 1:24:36Chris Williamson?

  What is it that people are missing? Why is transcendence so rare without engineering it in that way, at least in the modern world?

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's especially true in the modern world that it's rare because the modern world is a big mirror. It's a big me self. That's especially true in, online. Online, you're looking in a mirror constantly because you're looking not at the, at the dialogue you're having with other people, looking at them. What you're doing is that you're, think about it as the Zoom problem. The problem with Zoom, when you're in a Zoom meeting, is you're always looking at yourself in the Zoom meeting. It's really hard. It's a really good idea to turn off your own camera. Or at least your own view of your own camera so you can focus on the other people. But one of the ways that Zoom has has made communication a lot harder for people is because you're always in the me self, even when you're trying to be in the I self.

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  And this is true certainly with social media as well. You're looking at your likes and your mentions and how do people interact with what I was doing? And it's this one big virtual mirror of everything that we're doing. It's become very, it's induced narcissism where it wouldn't have existed otherwise, which is incredibly misery provoking because it kills meaning in the crib. From the very beginning, you can't get out of yourself, you can't get out of your head. And that is increasingly true. Now, it's interesting because people who have experimented with trying to stay in the I self. Um, in, in, in literature, but also just in a real life have had these incredible results. I had this PT, this guy worked on my back, my back hurts. And so you get to my age, your back hurts, right? And, um, and he always, he worked on my back every week.

• 1:26:15Speaker 00

  Great guy, unbelievable. I mean, just like talented, full of love, you know? And, uh, and I said, how did you get these skills? I mean, is this, did you, were you always a physical therapist, acupuncture? He said, no, no, no, I used to be a, I used to be a fitness influencer. I'm like, dude, tell me more. I gotta know, tell me more. Said, yeah, you know, I basically took off my shirt on Instagram and it was kind of sold supplements and it was all about the abs. And, and, and I said, how was that? He said, it was the worst, it was the worst. I didn't eat what I wanted for 10 years. I was so miserable, I didn't have any normal relationships at all. I couldn't have any functional relationships with women because I'd be so jealous about the fact that I'm showing my body off for other people. I'd be looking at my, I'd be, I gotta get a photographer because this guy doesn't understand

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  the shadows and he said, it was horrible and I was miserable and I was sad and I didn't know what to do. And so he said, I finally, I gave up. I deleted all my accounts. I, I enrolled in acupuncture school. But here's the most important part, he said, I got rid of all of the mirrors in my apartment, every single one of them. And I showered in the dark for a year, so I couldn't see my abs. And then I finally was free.

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  And he's happy.

• 1:27:27Chris Williamson?

  Most people, I think, look to their work for something that's supposed to be transcendent.

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Calling.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you think people, what do you think people think they're talking about when they talk about finding your calling?

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, they think it's going to be the thing that, well, I mean, there's kind of two versions of it. The two graduation speeches, you know, graduation speech. Number one is go find a job that that you love and it's fun. And you'll never work a day in your life. Now that speech is being given by a cardboard box magnet who's so severely workaholic that he's had three heart attacks and two divorces by the age of 40. Right? So don't believe it. Right? Or the second speech is go save the world. No pressure, you know? It's like, well, my generation wrecked the world. Go save the world, you know? That's a, that's the second speech. That's, both of those are wrong fundamentally.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  Your calling, generally speaking, finds you as the thing that you can't stop thinking about is the most interesting thing. Right? It's not the thing that you think I'm going to be the savior and be the great Messiah. And it's not the most fun thing necessarily. The thing that's most interesting to you is often not that fun. Actually, a lot of the time it's actually not that fun. It's just something you can't get out of your head. It's something you feel you really need to do. Second, the goal is creating value with your life, is earning your success, is being rewarded for something that you do well. Where you create real value with your hard work and, and, and personal motivation. And more importantly, where you're serving somebody where somebody needs you.

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  That's what it comes down to. Are you earning your success? Not only really earning, are you recognized and acknowledged for real value that you're creating? Not kissing up to the boss and not because somebody's trying to be nice to you. No, no, no, no. You're really creating value and does somebody actually need you? That's what it comes down to. That's your calling.

• 1:29:21Chris Williamson?

  How do you know? Or how does somebody know when they're chasing status instead of their calling, instead of meaning?

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  Mostly people deep down know.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Because what it comes down to is when you're creating true value and people need you, then you can, I mean, you can sort of imperfectly measure that with respect to status, but you actually know when there's true value behind it. Most people have an innate sense of that, a strong innate sense of that. And I've interviewed a lot of people about this. You know, I talked to a guy who builds homes, home builder, right? He had a, he got his master's degree in biochemistry from MIT, and is going on to get his PhD. And his parents really, really wanted him to be a scientist as the whole thing. But he recognized that he, he, his, he only felt truly alive. He was only truly interested when he was building stuff.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  That's what it came down to. And he became a home builder as a result of that. So it's really, really important to listen to what your heart is telling you about this. Status is a very, very bad barometer. A lot of people are using status, are using fame or power or money, because they don't want to look at the truth. They don't want, it's like looking into the sun of something. And a lot of people make big mistakes for a long time as a result of that. Like they're doing something they don't, that's not their calling. And that burns them out. They don't like it, but they should like it. It's paying so much. They should like it. They got so many followers for Pete's sake, but they're unhappy. That's what people need to be paying attention to. Look, if you're doing something that's highly rewarding, but you're unhappy, it's not your calling.

• 1:31:02Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I wonder how many people sit in that bucket. What proportion of you?

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  I meet a lot. I meet a lot. Look, I teach at a big business school. I meet a lot of people who honestly think that they go into business school thinking, I will, I will find my calling because it's going to be something that's going to pay me so well, which means I'm so good at this thing that it's got to be my calling. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. On the contrary. Look, I walked away from a career in classical music when I was 31 years old. I could have done it the rest of my life, right? It wasn't my calling. I'd done it since I was eight. I'd been doing it since I was a little boy, right? But it wasn't my calling and and I made a living and I made some records and I was so unhappy. It wasn't my calling.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  I'd spent many years on it. I spent decades on it, as a matter of fact, but there was no choice but to walk away because it wasn't my calling.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  What about the fear that comes up when someone is faced with that realization? They've got the inertia, the momentum, the sunk cost fallacy.

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, it's it's no joke. It actually requires an unbelievable personal entrepreneurship. Look, entrepreneurship is not about building business, it's about building your life. Right? Great entrepreneurs, they change all the time. They make all kinds of changes. You know what crummy entrepreneurs have in common? They have a bad business idea and they chase it until they're broke. That's what bad entrepreneurs have in common, right? Good entrepreneurs, they try this and it's not quite right and they change. And they go from this thing to that thing and they sell when it's time to start a new venture. That's what great entrepreneurs have in common. If you want to be an entrepreneur in the business of your life, you cannot afford the sunk cost fallacy with your own career or your own relationships or your own interests.

• 1:32:50Chris Williamson?

  Agile.

• 1:32:51Speaker 00

  You have to change is what it comes down to now. There's a very interesting theory about people who need to change the most. The people and and these are called spirals. This is the spiral career pattern. There's there's four career patterns psychologically. There's linears who just kind of go up and up and up and up and up and up and up in their careers. And they only change when something is better. There are transitory's who kind of just skip around all over the place. They don't live to work, they work to live. Right? That, you know, I'm going to be a barista, then I'm going to run it and, you know, drive a moving van. And I fell in love with a girl in San Diego, so you know. There are what's called expert, which is like slow and steady. Yeah, it's lifestyle, right? I have my dad had the same job for 42 years, for example.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  And the reason is because it was secure and because it was low stress.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Right. And that's what he wanted. The post office is an expert career path. But a lot of people, probably disproportionately, a lot of people who are watching this show are spirals. For every seven to 12 years, what they need is to take their career down to the studs and start again. And take everything they learned in the last one and fudge it into something that's meaningful in the next one. But to have a new adventure. The first turn is hardest. For me, leaving the French horn and becoming a scientist, that was brutal. Going back and getting a PhD when I didn't know what I was doing. It was really, really, really hard. Right? Second turn, easier. Third turn, easier. I'm on my fourth turn right now. Who knows? Maybe in 10 years, I'll be a circus clown or firefighter or something.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  But the whole point is that that's what it means to live an entrepreneurial life where you're pursuing your calling. Because you have the agility and the courage to be an entrepreneur in the enterprise and the business of life. What about the role of beauty? Physical beauty? Any kind of beauty. Beauty is a transcendent experience. So one of the things that a lot of people have observed about the modern technocratic life is it's not beautiful. It's bereft of beauty. Now, why is that? Because stuff that goes on in the left hemisphere of the brain never prioritizes beauty. Beauty is a right hemispheric experience. You know, it's when people see a beautiful sunset, sometimes they'll cry. You know, when people hear a work of music, you know, people listen to Bach B minor mass.

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  And it's like they weep. Why? And they can't experience. As a matter of fact, anytime that you become emotional and you can't quite explain it, it means you're having a right hemispheric experience. Something that moves you weirdly, right? When some people, when they talk about religion, they get really choked up. Some people, when they listen to music, they get really choked up. It's really interesting how this works, but those are right hemispheric experiences. And disproportionately, that's when it comes to beauty. So if we have a society that's entirely left hemispheric, that's technocratic, that's complicated, not complex, it's not going to be beautiful. And that's exactly what we find. I mean, there's compelling evidence that music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past.

• 1:35:52Speaker 00

  Newer music is less objectively beautiful than it was in the past. I can't really judge that. But you know, this is what, this is what we pay, you know, musicologists to do or something. That. Moral beauty is harder and harder to find. Moral beauty is just kindness toward others for no apparent reason. You find very little of that on X. You know, you find very little of that online.

• 1:36:16Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  Right? Um, that, that natural beauty is harder to find when you're, when you're never in nature, which is sort of axiomatic, but a lot of people will say, you know, it's like I've got this incredible screensaver of El Capitan in Yosemite. It's like, there's the real thing. It's gonna blow your mind. Right? And the reason is because it is an entirely different neurobiological experience for people when they're actually out in nature. If you're behind a screen, you're not getting beauty is what it comes down to. And so artistic beauty is absent, moral beauty is absent, natural beauty is absent. And the reason is because we're trying to filter everything through the left hemisphere. The simulation isn't beautiful. If you wanna know, if you're too much in the left hemisphere of your brain, it's whether

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  you ask yourself, is there enough beauty in my life? And if the answer is no, it probably means that you're too far left.

• 1:37:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about if there's not enough suffering?

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the hard one. I left, actually, I wrote about that in this, in this book and, and I left that to the last chapter because I was putting it off. I was putting it off. Um, suffering is the ultimate meaning-making experience. And we've talked about that. You know, we've talked about heartbreak, talk about loss, talk about grief. Um, there's a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that, that is really, really active when you experience social exclusion, when you experience loss. It's, it was evolved so that you would be averse to sadness. Sadness is supposed to be really, really painful and you don't want it. So people actually, they don't suffer so much from sadness.

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  They suffer a lot from fear of sadness. You know, you're trying to avoid sadness, which is what motivates a lot of our behaviors. Most of the things, most of the reasons we do what we do is because we're afraid of bad, we're afraid of negative emotions. But at the same time, most people will talk about the most meaningful periods of their lives where at times are the greatest negative emotion in their lives. Negative emotion brings meaning unless, unless we try to eliminate it. And this is another wrong turn that we've taken because once again, in our, our left hemisphere conceit of the complicated world, the singularity is one in which we will have eliminated pain, eliminated sadness, eliminated negative emotionality, eliminated negative experiences. That's not only impossible, it's actually suboptimal.

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  It's death for what it means to be fully alive. We don't wanna be, we don't wanna suffer, but we must suffer.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  Strange the things that people want and what they need.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:38:50Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that those two don't cross over all that much.

• 1:38:52Speaker 00

  And, and Mother Nature is a wicked tyrant. She's kept us alive for generation after generation, but animal impulses are not the same thing as moral aspirations.

• 1:39:01Chris Williamson?

  Seems like you're saying that enjoyment and satisfaction haven't collapsed.

• 1:39:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:39:06Chris Williamson?

  In the same way that meaning has.

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  No, that's right. That's right. It's really interesting. I mean, I didn't know, you know, when I see a big happiness problem and I, when I look at the, the depression explosion, the anxiety explosion, I know that one of the channels of happiness is blocked. This is as a diagnostic matter. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. We've talked about it on the show a couple of times, as a matter of fact. These are the three macronutrients of happiness. You wanna be a happy person, you need to enjoy your life, which back to an early part of the conversation, by the way. One of the reasons that you're moving from a pure achievement orientation in the show toward one where you're having more fun is because you wanna increase enjoyment, which many strivers struggle with. They don't enjoy their lives very much and they wanna enjoy their lives more and they don't know how.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Because they're always trying to put points on the board. So that's a different subject. I'm gonna write a book about how to enjoy your life because I wanna figure it out. Cause I need to figure it out before I die. So enjoyment, which is not pleasure, is pleasure plus people plus memory. It's a, it's a conscious phenomenon. Is actually pretty high for most young people. Satisfaction, which is the achievement of worthwhile goals with struggle. That's pretty high, especially for strivers. I mean, my MBA students at Harvard, they're real high satisfaction because they're accomplishing a lot and they're struggling a lot. It's meaning that's collapsed. And that's the reason that we have this unbelievable happiness, unhappiness crisis in our society today.

• 1:40:38Chris Williamson?

  Have they ever told you my idea about Frankl's inverse law?

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  Oh, no, tell me, Victor Frankl.

• 1:40:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's that famous quote, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Chris Williamson?

  Right? He's arguing lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing some.

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  And this is before scrolling even existed.

• 1:40:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

• 1:41:09Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:41:10Chris Williamson?

  If ease, grace, joy and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely. And always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble. Because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TLDR is you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude. But you know, it's absolutely the encapsulation of the strivers lament.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  You know, it's like, I can't. I can't, everybody else is having a great time. And I can't feel it. I don't, you know, they're out dancing and they're at a club. I mean, think about it. So you're a club promoter and your heart, I'm a French horn player in my heart. You're a club promoter in your heart, right? And everybody's having a great old time. You're like, no, no, this is my business.

• 1:41:59Chris Williamson?

  Go and enjoy yourself. I'm gonna suffer over here.

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  I think in a real way, the meaning part is quite right. But I think ordinarily strivers are addicts for satisfaction from achievement. And so they will put points on the board when they can't feel, they can't feel enjoyment. And so they put points on the board. And, and part of the reason is because they've actually never, they've never learned how to do it. They've actually never learned how to do that. So enjoyment, once again, is, is it takes, has at its root, things that actually make you feel good. But that's not the right, you know, feeling good, just pleasure is a terrible goal. I mean, the, the, the, the end of the road for pleasure is not happiness. It's, it's detox. Right? Because that's just addiction is what it comes down to. If it feels good, do it was the hippie motto and it didn't end well. Right? So.

• 1:42:48Speaker 00

  So that's so that's important that that you add people in memory to it. So it's a conscious experience. It's in the prefrontal cortex, not just in the limbic system. But it's not apparent for everybody how to do that, especially if you're brought up in this way where I gotta do more, I gotta do more, I gotta do more. Because what happens is that this idea that you're stopping and smelling the roses feels like wasted time. Maybe you have parents who say that. Are you practicing? I remember that. They would yell through the door. Practice. I was practicing five hours a day when I was in fifth grade. And and and so then the whole idea of stopping and going and having fun feels like you feel kind of guilty about it. And so you're you're frankly just bad at it. And you don't like to do things

• 1:43:30Speaker 00

  you're bad at. You don't learn how to. And then my wife is really good at enjoyment. Really, she just really enjoys life. She's Spanish. I mean, that's like it's a it's a whole country of people who enjoy life, right? And in the States, we're a little bit less good at it. And I'm especially bad at it. So part of that, actually, one of the one of the the protocols for helping people like you and me is understanding leisure and actually having a structured, disciplined approach to leisure. It's actually take it if you don't know how to do it, take it seriously. Need to work hard at not working so hard. But but it turns out, there's a philosopher who specializes in understanding leisure, and that's Joseph Pieper, who wrote Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Have you read it? Oh,

• 1:44:13Speaker 00

  it's great. It's a little thin book that he wrote. He's one of the greatest, you know, 20th century German philosophers, untainted by Nazism, thank God. And he wrote, you know, The Four Cardinal Virtues. He wrote these really beautiful books, but his his probably his most influential book was Leisure: The Basis of Culture, where he defined culture as a serious business. It's not chilling on a beach, which is called asedia, also known as laziness or torpor. You know, it's like, I can do that for like, an hour. And then you don't want to run away screaming. It's the worst. He says that leisure is something that you're not being compensated for by the outside world, but that's creating value. That's leisure, and that's what will bring you enjoyment. He talks about it in terms of deepening your spiritual or philosophical life, deepening your relationships, and learning

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  things you don't need to learn. Just learning things you don't need to learn. So when you think about what you're doing with podcasts, right? You're deepening relationships. You're talking about things you don't need to talk about, right? You're doing, Pieper would say, yeah, I'm not sure, you know, I'm not sure I would fit into this table, but that's leisure. Because you want enjoyment.

• 1:45:18Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend who was given a

• 1:45:23Chris Williamson?

  exercise by a coach. He was told that he needed to start doing a hobby, but that he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it. And he decided to take up watercolor painting, I think, and did the first few classes or sessions or whatever. And immediately found himself going to YouTube to find out what exactly the best kind of paintbrush was to do the thing. And I'm going to find, actually, what's the best class in Austin that can do it? Because I can get better if I can do this. And what's the cadence? Do I need to be doing it three times a week in order to maximize my, I'm going to be struggling, it's going to be difficult, but three times a week, because I got the need. And

• 1:45:55Speaker 00

  Turn it into a job.

• 1:45:55Chris Williamson?

  Coach Sharon came in and said, I, I, I, I, no, you're not allowed to try and become better at this thing.

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:02Chris Williamson?

  Doing it like telecally.

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Chris Williamson?

  Like exotically.

• 1:46:07Speaker 00

  It should be atelic.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  Atelic.

• 1:46:08Speaker 00

  Atelic. So that's, you know, and, and it's interesting because Aristotle talks about that with people. That real friendship is based or is atelic. You know, it's the same idea, right? So if you have your friends, because it's a telec relationship, it has a telos, it has, if they're useful. It's not, it's kind of deal friends, but real friends are atelic. They're actually useless. It's the same thing with your activities, the relationship that you have with, with the activities in your life. If it has a really, really strong telos, I'm going to get better at it because I don't know. Yeah. You know what? I bet I could sell that. You'll strip that, strip the love out of it. My, my brother and I were both very talented classical musicians. He's three years older than me. He's a bass player.

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  String bass, classical string bass. I was French horn. I had that. I was super telec. He was atelic. He's, and he still plays. He plays in community orchestras. He's an extremely skilled amateur. He loves playing the bass. He loves music. He loves it so much. He doesn't earn a dime from it. That's why he loves it.

• 1:47:10Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that someone feels completely empty right now.

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:13Chris Williamson?

  Where should they start? What are the most important habits in order to increase the meaning in your life?

• 1:47:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the things to be, the things to be thinking about are along the lines, the sustaining activities that will actually use your brain the way it's supposed to be used. So number one is understanding that your emptiness is not some sort of psychological weakness. That notwithstanding what anybody's going to tell you, there's not something wrong with you. On the contrary, your brain is working the way your brain works. And you're living in the world and it's, the malfunctions are not your fault. The malfunctions are you're going with kind of the slipstream of the culture. The culture is being driven by the technology. It's making you work in a way that's completely contrary to your ancestral habitat. And that's what's making you feel like garbage. That's what it comes down to. It's kind of like you're eating meal after meal of Twinkies.

• 1:48:02Speaker 00

  And wondering why your digestion is wonky and weird. That's why is what it comes down to. What we need to understand then is you need to become aligned. You need to have a brain that's properly hemispheric, that's properly balanced between the hemispheres of what you're doing, which means you need to change your behavior. So number one is getting right with technology. That's the number one thing that almost everybody today needs to do. Almost everybody's addicted. Almost everybody has a dysfunctional relationship with it, some more, some less, me less because I'm older. I remember the before times. Right? I mean, I could, you could throw Instagram up in front of me. I'm like, okay. You know, good, good. This is really good for my business.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  You know, this is good. I can wildly interesting for, for, you know, sharing my ideas with other people, right? You know, clips of you and me talking, people really like them. And that's great. Makes me feel great, but I'm not going to get, I'm not going to scroll for an hour and like, huh, right? But many, and the younger you are, the more prone you are because you don't remember the before times. So actually changing your behavior with respect to it, and there's ways to do it. That's what I write about. Then you gotta live in a new way. You gotta live in a new way. The first thing I recommend to almost everybody is go get bored. Go get bored. Get, get good at it, right? I don't mean like this whole thing where you stare at the front of the seat in front of you for a nine hour flight of the way to Greece.

• 1:49:27Chris Williamson?

  Raw dogging.

• 1:49:27Speaker 00

  Raw dogging a flight. Yeah. It's a great expression, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it's disturbing, but the whole, I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actually living moment to moment, you know, putting your hands in your lap when you're in the, on the train, looking out the window and saying, huh, it's a tree. You know, being fully alive and saying, I'm fully alive right now. So, you know, one of the ways to do that is to become more comfortable with, you know, repetitive prayer or meditative ideas that you would actually bring into your life. So you can be more mindful, just bring in some of those ideas. So you can become more comfortable with your brain working the way it's supposed to, which by the way, ignites the default mode network in your brain, which you know about, the set of structures that, that allow you to mind wander. Mind wandering leads to meaning.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  It's just as, as, as, as predictably as, as night turns to day. That's the second thing. And then is actually having the experiences that, that naturally open up the right hemisphere of your brain. That means allowing yourself to actually fall in love and make friends and doing things in real life with other people and relation to other people and taking risks in your relationship. It means actually entertaining the idea of something metaphysical beyond yourself. The left hemisphere is profoundly physical. The right hemisphere is metaphysical. It says there is something more. And again, you don't have to do it my way. I'm a Catholic. I got a mass every day. You don't have to do it that way. You can do it like Sam Harris. He's super right hemisphere guy, right?

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  Because he has a sense of soulfulness. He has a sense of things beyond what we can actually see and touch. He believes there are things that we can't see and touch that exist. He doesn't think it's God. So, you know, you do transcendence your own way. Looking for calling, how? By serving other people and being needed, by doing something, you know, by allowing yourself to be served and loved. This is actually how you can find these things. Looking for beauty, actually experiencing more beauty, real beauty, real beauty, not behind the screen. It's not there. It ain't there, man. I don't care how long you look at it. It's not going to be there. That means going someplace in nature, listening to music that really sends you. I don't know, read a poem, go to a museum, right?

• 1:51:39Speaker 00

  Witness somebody helping other people just for no reason. And last but not least is lean into your suffering. Bring it on. You know, it's like I have this. I make my students say, my suffering is sacred. Right? And there's a, there's a, you know, do you remember Norman Vincent Peale? Does that name ring a bell? Okay, he had a very famous self-help book in the sixties called The Power of Positive Thinking. That, that sound, that rings a bell, right? He was a minister at a Protestant church in New York City. And he would say every single day when he started the day, the Psalm, this is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And he would have you, you know, he was like the gratitude list originator and the whole thing. All these good things, good things, good things. List all the good things that are happening.

• 1:52:24Speaker 00

  You're like, list the bad things and say, I'm grateful for that too. Bring it on. Right? Say as you wake up in the morning, it's like, I'm really grateful for the beautiful things that are going to happen this day. And I woke up today, it's like, good to see Chris. It's gonna be great. I'm really grateful for that. But something's gonna happen today. I'm gonna get a phone call or a text or an email that I'm not gonna like. Bring it on. I'm grateful for that too. Because when I lean into that, then I'm gonna be fully alive. That's the moment that I'm gonna be fully alive. And that attitude of non-resistance to pain will actually lower the suffering paradoxically as it raises the meaning of life.

• 1:53:02Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen. Arthur, you're awesome. I appreciate the heck out of you, man.

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:53:08Chris Williamson?

  Where should people go? New book? What else is going on?

• 1:53:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm all about, you know, looking for the sources of meaning in life. And so my, my, my website, arthurbrooks.com, actually has all kinds of ways people can interact. We have the Meaning Experience, which is a collaboration of people from all over the world on the internet that meet once a month and, and, and talk about different ways to find the meaning in life. And I give like an academic lecture and then we have this great discussion. So we have all kinds of stuff and many ways to survey and measure where we are in our meaning journey. Many ways to interact with each other. It's all at, all the website, arthurbrooks.com.

• 1:53:41Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Alrighty. See you next time, everyone.

• 1:53:45Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you. You're great. I mean, you're, you're the best.

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.