#692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More

Brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim high-yield savings account, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Arthur C. Brooks (@arthurbrooks http://twitter.com/arthurbrooks) is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular “How to Build a Life” column. Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Finding-Success-Happiness-Purpose/dp/059319148X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and his newest Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier https://www.amazon.com/Build-Life-You-Want-Science/dp/0593545400/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. * This episode is also brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/tim! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.80% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account http://wealthfront.com/tim. That’s more than eleven times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.8% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus http://wealthfront.com/tim with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/tim to get started. * [07:10] The reverse bucket list. [13:00] Intention without attachment. [14:49] Writing Thích Nhất Hạnh’s obituary. [17:30] Buddhist views through a Catholic lens. [20:43] Blood occlusion training and physical fitness over 40. [24:22] Arthur’s semi-mystical teenage experiences in Mexico. [30:30] Arthur’s academic dad on complex vs. complicated. [33:35] Happiness hygiene for genetically baseline gloominess. [36:19] Happiness and unhappiness: hand in hand. [39:31] Being effective with one’s affects. [42:53] The three macronutrients of happiness. [51:21] Identifying (and learning to live with) our idols. [1:03:48] Secularly securing transcendent perspective. [1:10:32] Money doesn’t buy happiness — it lowers unhappiness. [1:15:17] Tithing and adoption. [1:18:43] How Arthur and his wife met, and how their values aligned over time. [1:25:58] Advice for seeking love in the modern world. [1:33:06] Death meditation. [1:42:54] Finding personal purpose and meaning. [1:56:50] Four fundamental micronutrients of happiness. [1:59:53] Translating a need for change into action. [2:07:13] Aristotle’s secrets to happiness. [2:11:57] Real friends help us put the kibosh on self-deception. [2:19:13] Reflecting on the repercussions of living for the mirror’s approval. [2:22:46] Collaborating with Oprah on Build the Life You Want. [2:28:14] The point Arthur hopes people don’t miss in Build the Life You Want. [2:31:54] Reading recommendation: The Noonday Demon. [2:33:32] Exposure therapy: making pain part of one’s medicine. [2:38:15] A practical way to be grateful for life’s bad things. [2:41:12] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada and the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole-body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally-dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases.

• 2:14Tim Ferriss?

  I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole-food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible, using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral, superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help

• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

  manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sport, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So, learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:42Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, or those performers who study world-class performers, who pick out the meta-patterns, the things that you can apply to your own lives, whether they be tools, favorite books, frameworks, rituals, annual reviews, perhaps, reverse bucket lists, in the case of my guest today. And that guest is Arthur C. Brooks. Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he

• 5:26Tim Ferriss?

  writes the popular "How to Build a Life" column, mega-popular. And Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 number-one New York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday. His newest book is Build the Life You Want, subtitle, "The Art and Science of Getting Happier," with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. We cover a lot of ground. He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks and practices that he implements in his own life,

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many other projects. You can find him on Instagram, @ArthurCBrooks, on Twitter, @ArthurBrooks. Without further ado, please enjoy my very thought-provoking and actionable, highly tactical conversation with Arthur C. Brooks.

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  Arthur, so nice to have you here. Thanks for joining.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tim. It's great to be with you. I've been looking forward to this.

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  Me, too.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I feel like we've been looking forward to meeting, and we've been warming up for this for a long time. We have so many friends in common.

• 6:41Tim Ferriss?

  We have a lot of friends in common. I have read your prior work, From Strength to Strength, excellent book, recommended to me by Peter Attia. People may know him as Dr. Peter Attia, good friend. Proud Texan, also now.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Where all the cool kids live.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  For all the Texan.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Where all the cool kids are.

• 7:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I have more questions than we will have time, but I'm hoping to really explore broadly. And I wanted to start with something that I thought would pique the interest of many people listening, and that is the reverse bucket list. Is this something you still do? And what does it entail?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  The reverse bucket list is something I do. Oh, boy, do I ever do it. And it took me too long to figure this one out. When I was 50, I'm 59 years old. When I was 50, I found my bucket list from when I was 40. And I was a classic thing. And on my birthday, I would make a list of my desires, my ambitions, and I would imagine myself, visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things, and it would fire me up and make me, well, kind of feel like a loser, quite frankly, because it was lowering my sense of satisfaction, I subsequently found out. And I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I checked everything off that list, and I was less happy.

• 8:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  At 50 than I was at 40. And so I thought, I'm a social scientist, so I thought to myself, obviously, I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? And basically, this is the problem. This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem, all rolled into one handy package. I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in like a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants. Haves divided by wants, that's the model. So, you know, it's like, I'll slow down because I know people watching are like, let me write that down. Haves divided by wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more, or permanently

• 8:48Speaker 02

  and securely by wanting less. I thought to myself, hmm, so what does that mean? And the answer to that, what does that mean, is I need a reverse bucket list. Not that I'm not going to get nice things in my life, but I'm going to be consciously detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out. So on my birthday now, my 59th birthday a couple of months ago, I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever, power, ambition, admiration, all these things that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and Mother Nature wires us to accumulate the rewards that'll help us survive and pass on our genes. I got it. I know how evolutionary psychology works.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals. But I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them. I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me. I want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive manager, the bumper of tissue right behind my forehead. And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying, maybe I get it and maybe I don't. But I'm going to cross it out as an attachment. And I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free.

• 10:05Tim Ferriss?

  And so you found that to work?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Oh, it works. It does not because you don't care about it, but because you're not attached to it in the same way. You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire, a ghost in your head. You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain.

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  So you go through this exercise. So you write down whatever it is. Receive such and such an honor.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:28Tim Ferriss?

  Sell so many copies of book X.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever these are.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  All the stuff that guys like you and me do.

• 10:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And then you have 37-inch arms, in your case possibly. You're incredibly fit. I'm not hitting on you. I'm just saying I aspire to...

• 10:44Speaker 02

  You're a beautiful man too, Tim.

• 10:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we go to the same stylist for our haircuts, but I would say we will maybe get to like self-care and physical practice later. You go through this exercise. You write those things down. You cross them out.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:58Tim Ferriss?

  In a sort of idol worship sleight of hand move.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:02Tim Ferriss?

  Then, following that, I'm curious, when there is, if there is, the spark of this desire, whatever it might be. Do you have self-talk or something that acts as an interrupt?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I keep the list.

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  You keep the list?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  I keep the list and I go back and I look at the list, just like I would look at my bucket list. Later, every six months, every year, every 10 years, whatever it happened to be, I go back and look at my reverse bucket list and say, "Am I living up to this? Am I truly conscious?"

• 11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Am I living up to not being attached?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Am I practicing the detachment that I committed myself to? And the truth is, usually, yeah, kinda. I mean, the phantasm will be back. It will be flying around in your head again. But you brought it to your prefrontal cortex for a reason, and your prefrontal cortex is an adult and will govern the children. But sometimes you have to remind yourself, remember, look, I mean, you're an adult here. And you look back on it and you say, "Huh." And it's funny. Actually, it's pretty amusing when you look at it and you say, "Oh, I can't believe that thing is bugging me again." But you're not governed by it in the same way. You know what I actually put on my list? I was reading, just for clarity, so it's okay to have the goal and to have it as a target and plan for it, let's say, selling X number of copies, but not to have that hungry ghost attachment to it.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  It's nothing more than an intention. Intention is fine, but attachment is bad. And this is what the Dalai Lama talks about, too. He talks about intention without attachment. There's a word in sailing, the rum line. In Spanish, rumbo, which is a lot more common in normal, everyday speech. And what it means is it's the intention of your voyage. You have to have that, even though you know you're not going to be true to it. Because if you don't know, you're just going to be going in circles. You'll, you know, you'll just be, like, "I don't know, I've been out to sea for a long time. Who knows where I am?" You know, it'll be like one of your vacations. It's like, "I don't know where I am. I'm just, like, doing nothing, man." And it can be therapeutically important, but it's actually not the way that you get from Europe to the Americas.

• 12:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you need a, you need a location and your endpoint on the GPS.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  But if you're super attached to it, then you're going to freak out when something throws you off. And furthermore, you're not going to recognize the fact that it is the voyage itself that is the adventure of life, not actually reaching the particular destination, whether it's the original one, or one that turns out to be better or worse, or wherever you wind up. And that's the way you've got to live your life. So it's intention without attachment. Now, there's another thing that I was thinking about this year, because Thich Nhat Hanh died. You know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And I wrote his obituary in the Washington Post, actually. It was a really interesting experience, because I talked about all, what he's taught all of us. Thich Nhat Hanh said, and it almost had an impact on me, but I reflected on it upon his death, that one of the greatest attachments that people have in modern life is to their views and opinions.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  That's a real attachment. It can be as dangerous as your attachment to money or power. Why? Because people treat their opinions as if they were gold, they're jewels. You know, get between me and my political opinions, man, I'll cancel you. I'll get you fired, I'll denounce you on social media. Who knows, maybe I'll be violent. I mean, life is crazy these days. And so I looked at it and I thought, am I weighed down by attachment to my views? To my political views? So I wrote down five of my strongest political views and I crossed them out.

• 14:17Tim Ferriss?

  This was after writing the obituary?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was on my reverse bucket list when I turned 59. And I said, look, it's not that I don't have these views. I just don't have the attachment to these views. Look, man, I need more friends. And strong political opinions is not going to get me there. It's not going to get me there. Love is going to get me there. Tolerance is going to get me there. A sense of curiosity about other people is going to get me there. And strong political opinions is going to put me in the wrong direction. So, man, dead. The attachment, dead.

• 14:48Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh. So, maybe this is a little too granular, but I'm curious. Thich Nhat Hanh, this is a legendary figure. I would be very intimidated by the task of writing an obituary for such a person. I've read numbers of his books, been very influenced by his thinking. How do you go about deciding what goes into an obituary? For someone like that, or for anyone for that matter, but in this particular case?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  The Germans talk about doing something called a fest shrift. It's a word that means kind of this encomium. It's a celebration of the work of somebody. And what you always start when you do one of these things, it's a typical sort of European intellectual deal, is you look at the things that they said and did that had the most impact. And that was most meaningful to them in the same way. Now, I didn't know Thich Nhat Hanh. I've worked very closely with the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but the Theravada Buddhist tradition, I've never penetrated personally. And so I didn't know Thich Nhat Hanh. But I do know the things that he said and taught that really changed the way that Westerners think. And so that's what I wanted to talk about. Now, what did he do that changed Theravada Buddhism? I'm not a Theravada Buddhist. I'm not equipped to write that.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  But I can talk about the way he changed me as a Catholic. I can talk about how he changed me as a public policy person. Because I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh when I was running a think tank in Washington DC. How he influenced me as a happiness professor at Harvard. That's the stuff that I really wanted to focus on. That was the idea of attachment and detachment. That was the idea of the illusion of individuality. I mean, these are concepts that people didn't think about. He also was really behind the whole mindfulness revolution in the West. He starts off The Miracle of Mindfulness, that famous book, big bestseller, with this simple description of washing the dishes.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  And he says, when you're washing the dishes, you should be thinking about washing the dishes. Because if you don't think about washing the dishes, you're not really there washing the dishes, are you? And he persuades you with this kind of hypnotic prose to remember that if you don't think about washing the dishes, but you're thinking about doing something at work tomorrow, or you're thinking about something that happened yesterday, that you're living in the future of the past and you've missed your life.

• 17:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or if you're thinking about eating the juicy peach, which is a story, may not have been in that book that I remember him telling, but it was paired with the washing of the dishes. He said, if you're thinking about the peach while you're washing the dishes, when you're eating the peach, you'll probably be thinking of something else.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Exactly right. And then what you're doing is you're, while you're doing this, you're planning for a future existence that's better than now. And when you reach it, it will be a phantasm as well. It will be nothing more than a mythical past while you're thinking about a new future that doesn't quite exist and you've missed your whole life.

• 17:30Tim Ferriss?

  How did he change you or influence you as a Catholic?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  And the Dalai Lama too, by the way. I mean, a lot of Buddhist thinking has been incredibly helpful to me to understand exactly what I'm trying to do as a person when I'm centering myself in prayer. So for example, Catholics, traditional Catholics, they generally pray what's called the rosary. And the rosary is a set of beads that you pray repetitive prayers. It's about a thousand-year-old Catholic meditation. I do it every day. And I noticed that I was having a hard time focusing. I was having a hard time understanding what I was trying to do for myself for this offering. I didn't know how to make it fruitful in its way. I didn't know exactly what the point was. And studying the work of Thich Nhat Hanh and also studying at the Dalai Lama's monastery

• 18:19Speaker 02

  in Dharamsala, India, sitting in meditation and studying meditation techniques with the Tibetan Buddhist monks, I actually learned what I was supposed to be doing as a Catholic, praying my rosary, how I actually could center my prayer and make it deeply worshipful in a meaningful way. And perhaps God wanted me to learn that from my Buddhist sisters and brothers.

• 18:41Tim Ferriss?

  This is going to be adjacent to this conversation, this topic. But I'm curious, do you believe that, and we can always cut this, but I'm very curious, do you believe that direct transmission and some of these lines, which is very important in certain schools of, we could call it mindfulness, but that is a real phenomenon? Or at least, I suppose it's undeniably important in the tradition, but the idea that sitting with someone in meditation with them, that there are teachings that are sort of directly transmitted? What is your thought on that, if you have any thoughts?

• 19:17Speaker 02

  I don't know the answer to that. I do know that you can deeply be in communion with somebody really intimately. And my wife Esther and I, we actually, we teach young couples that are engaged about, you know, she teaches the theological part, I teach the social science, because I'm just a, you know, I'm a total wonk. And what we do tell them is that according to the best science and our experience and common sense, that one of the most intimate things that you can do with your partner or spouse is pray together. It's super intimate. I know couples that have been married for 25 years that will have sex together but won't pray together because it's too embarrassing to pray together. Because praying together is just too intimate. They don't know how to do it. It's embarrassing to them.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I imagine you'll get naked in front of somebody else, but you won't pray in front of them? And that's because it's such a deeply intimate thing. Okay, so when you cross the boundary of the greatest intimacy with another person, there's going to be some transmission. The idea of direct transmission rings true to me because of the nature and intensity of the intimacy that comes from that experience.

• 20:22Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna take a hard left for a second.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:25Tim Ferriss?

  And we're gonna come back to a through line, which I am tracking. Because it's just what is top of mind for me. And then we're gonna come back to possible mystical slash semi mystical experiences in Mexico. So I'm giving an idea of

• 20:36Speaker 02

  All right, I can't wait.

• 20:37Tim Ferriss?

  Where in my head?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I get to go to Mexico with you and have mystical experiences?

• 20:41Tim Ferriss?

  The imitation is not formal. But first, for those who are not watching this video, I mean, you are incredibly physically fit. And I know that you have some very deliberate, consistent practices, including weight training and so on. Blood occlusion training? Are you still using cuffs?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. And I recommend it for anybody over 40.

• 21:00Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain what this is and why you recommend it?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  So occlusion training, what it effectively does is it, it's not a tourniquet. But what it is, it's a band around your arms and/or legs. So that when you're lifting, you actually will get a much greater, as you know, in the vernacular, the burn from resistance training with lower weight. Now, the reason I recommend this very strongly is because the research suggests that it's very good for both strength and hypertrophy at lower weight levels. So it saves your joints, but gives you results. And that's what you need to do when you're over 40. Save the joints.

• 21:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. And I really strongly encourage people to check this out. I've done some of it.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:37Tim Ferriss?

  And to say that it increases the burn or the pump is certainly true.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  You gotta love pain.

• 21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would, exactly. I would say, start conservative. Because you might feel weak dialing back the weights, but just wait.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  It hurts.

• 21:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just give it a bit.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  It really does. And you then, but then you learn to love the pain.

• 21:57Tim Ferriss?

  And you can travel with, there are cuffs you can travel with.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I have them. I carry them with me all the time. I'm on the road 48 weeks a year.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Is there a particular type that you use?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  I don't actually remember the brand, but they're actually, they use Velcro. And they're about two inches thick. So too thick and I actually can't get the kind of occlusion that I really want. So experiment with, you know, what works with, you know, the size and shape of your biceps and triceps. And then, and then learn how to use them and then make them tighter and then, and then get in touch with the pain.

• 22:21Tim Ferriss?

  And they're easy to travel with.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do your homework and start conservative. Kelly Starrett, a very famous performance coach and PT, who's a friend, has been on the show many times, introduced me to that.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  And he had a very similar argument, which is effectively, he doesn't say this, but I would say like, you're kind of as old as your joints and connective tissue feel. I mean, there's certainly a cognitive component. And this is a really elegant way. To preserve or build muscle mass without?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I learned this from my friend Salva Stefano, who started Mind Pump with his partners and

• 22:55Tim Ferriss?

  Mind Pump?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mind Pump, it's a fitness and culture podcast. I've been listening to it for years and years. And he taught me how to do it. He actually is gives me training tips and good ideas and now it's great. It's been very helpful. And by the way, you know, when I was a younger man, you know, when I was in my 30s, I figured, you know, like, what's my goal with fitness? And the answer is to still be lifting when I'm 80. Why? Because we know of all the health benefits from it, but the truth is that physical fitness for me is a way to manage my negative affect. It's actually a happiness technique for me. It doesn't make me happier. It makes me less unhappy. That's what physical fitness will do. It will buy you less unhappiness. And so I manage my negative affect that way. And I know when I'm 80, I'm going to need to manage my negative affect, so I don't want to hurt myself. So I would go to the gym when I was 35 or 40 years old and I would,

• 23:40Speaker 02

  I'd go to these iron gyms wherever I was traveling and I would find the oldest dude,

• 23:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  the old guy who's still lifting heavy things. And I would go up to him, I'd say, can I ask your advice? And they always want to give you advice. You know, the 76 year old guy who's, he's like, don't bench press. It restricts your range of movement and that's going to hurt. You're going to get impingement injuries along the way. So that's why as you get older, you should actually press with dumbbells and, and then do higher rep to get volume, do higher reps with lower weight, et cetera. And just sensible stuff, but it's actually been incredibly helpful for me to not get hurt and stay in the gym.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 100%. All right. So naturally.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  From the sublime to the ridiculous.

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, maybe ridiculous, maybe not. So.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Not for me, it's not. That's for sure.

• 24:23Tim Ferriss?

  Could you please describe your experience? I think it was as a teenager, was it as a teenager? In Mexico.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The Mexican. It was not out in the woods with a shaman and ayahuasca.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  When I was 15, I was on a band trip. I used to be a musician and I started as a kid. I was a real serious musician and I wound up being a professional musician from when I was 19 until I was 31.

• 24:44Tim Ferriss?

  French horn?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was a French horn player, classical French horn player all the way through my twenties. I didn't go to college till I was 30, but it's my gap decade. And when I was.

• 24:53Tim Ferriss?

  I need one of those. We're too late.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  And when I was 15 years old, I was on this trip with a group, not a professional, it was like an amateur concert band, but you know, doing a tour through Mexico and we were doing a lot of tourism. And one of the tourist activities was to go to the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Now, this is a famous place for Catholics because it's one of the great pilgrimage sites of the world. In Catholic teaching, this is where, when the Spanish explorers came to Mexico and having a horrible time because their marketing was all goofed up for the Catholic Church. I mean, convert or die is not a very compelling pitch, it turns out, you know, and racist and you know, everything that you possibly could want. What happens then is this weirdly miraculous thing for Catholics and fellow travelers. I mean, just it was a mystical experience.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  So there was a peasant man by the name of Juan Diego, who was outside on a hill outside of Mexico City and sees an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he, on his poncho, has imprinted the Blessed Virgin Mary's image on his tilma. He takes it back. Tilma is a textile? It's sort of a poncho. The tilma is what they would wear. And it was based on a fabric made out of cactus. It's beautiful imprint in color. We've all seen the picture of, almost everybody's seen the Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe on this, and if you Google it, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and you see, you say, "Oh, I've seen that a million times," because it's in every Latino church. For the Catholic Church, she's the patroness of all the Americas, including the United States. I mean, this is a big deal for the Church.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  So the bishop sees it, they take the tilma, they display the tilma in public, and for the first time, they start getting converts. In the next nine years, 7 million people convert to the Catholic Church. Now, why? There's worldly explanation, and there's divine explanations for it. Here's a worldly explanation that's pretty compelling. Our Lady of Guadalupe is not white. She's not Spanish. She's a mestiza. She's a woman of mixed race. Now, we don't realize today how incredibly subversive that is, how unbelievably culturally transgressive that would have been. The Blessed Virgin Mary is not... Not white? What are you talking about? No, no, no. She's us. She's us. She's every person in the world. She loves you, she loves me, and she's one of us because she's in all of us.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  And that was this weird message that nobody really would have thought of at the time, or so lore goes. And that's why people started saying, "Ah, oh, this actually is for me." Because she actually looks like me. Crazy. So I'm in this church in Mexico City, this shrine of Guadalupe, and, you know, I'm looking at the tilma. It's just sitting up there, and I'm thinking, "This is boring." But then I noticed, she was looking at me. Now, to be sure, I didn't realize that you can look at Elvis on velvet and the eyes will follow you. Right? Okay, fair is fair. But I couldn't get it out of my head. I couldn't get it out of my head. So worldly, or divine, or mystical, or not, reasonable people can disagree. But I couldn't get the image out of my head. I couldn't.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  And I realized I needed more in my life. I needed a deeper sense of the metaphysical in my life. I needed the transcendent in my life. And every time I thought of it, I thought of that image. And so, I became a Catholic. At 16 years old, and I've been a Catholic man ever since.

• 28:12Tim Ferriss?

  And did you have a family history of Catholicism?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Zero?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Zero. No, I grew up in a Christian family. So I had a little bit of wiring, but I literally knew no Catholics. There's just this thing, okay. And, you know, my parents are like, "Ah, adolescent rebellion. I guess it's better than drugs."

• 28:32Tim Ferriss?

  It is better than heroin.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  But, and the point is, a lot of people watching us, some are traditionally religious, and some are spiritual, and some are not. But the whole point is, we have a sense that there's something else. We have a sense that there's something deeper. Let something in your life take you to the deeper place. Something needs to take you by the hand to the deeper place. There's a lot of research that suggests this is the case. Don't try to go to the deeper place to find it randomly on your own. Let someone take you. Now, that insight is ambiguous. But once people start to say, "I'm ready to be taken to a deeper place, a more transcendent state," that person, that entity will appear.

• 29:17Tim Ferriss?

  We may come back to that. Thank you.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:19Tim Ferriss?

  And I do think that... Many different paths touch corners of the same thing is my impression, which we may not have time for in this conversation, but to be continued. And the reason I'm asking about this experience, for those people who are wondering how this ties into maybe the headline of the podcast, is because I want to better understand the influences and experiences that have shaped you and your perceptual apparatus and your thinking. So another would be, you've had multiple wake up calls in your life. And as you described, you didn't exactly have the linear path to Harvard prof that people might have envisioned, right?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  I got rejected from Harvard.

• 29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Exeter, Harvard, McKinsey.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. I actually applied to Harvard for graduate school and they're like, no. It took two weeks for them to reject my... Part of it is, at the time I was 31, I was a college dropout. I had a degree from a correspondence school. I was a French horn player. These are not the core demographics of your typical Harvard graduate student. And so, yeah, I got rejected, which suggests, by the way, Tim, that our standards for faculty today are lower than our standards for our students. But be that as it may.

• 30:26Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe, maybe. I'm skeptical in your case. I'd like to talk about your dad.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:31Tim Ferriss?

  So who was your father? What was he like? And how did his life end?

• 30:36Speaker 02

  My dad was a mathematician. He had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a lifelong college professor, most of it at a small Christian college in Seattle called Seattle Pacific University. He was born to missionary parents, evangelical missionary parents. He was born in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, where my grandfather ran a mission school, actually. And then my grandfather went on to become the dean of a very famous college outside Chicago called Wheaton College, where all of our family members had gone. My aunt went there in the 40s and dated Billy Graham in college, as it turns out. Yeah, yeah. So, and then my dad, you know, went on to another Christian college, to the college where he

• 31:17Speaker 02

  ultimately taught. And he was just absolutely in love with the beauty of mathematics. As kids, you know, my mother was an artist. My mother was a painter. My dad was a mathematician. And, you know, and around the dinner table, we would talk about art and we would talk about math. Those are the things. My father would pose math problems to us. He would say, okay, okay, boys, me and my brother, imagine all of the integers between one and 100. One, two, three, four. Okay. Add them all together. What's the result?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  And we were like, I don't know, I need a piece of paper. He said, no, you don't. Think in another way. Think of another way. The solution, by the way, is one plus 100 equals 101 and two plus 99 equals 101 and three plus 98 equals 101 and there are 51 of those, which makes 51 combinations of 101. 5,050. That's what we would do. That's what my father would do.

• 32:06Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, Tad, I'm just trying to eat my macaroni and cheese.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I know, so eat my macaroni and cheese. And they would say something like, see, isn't that beautiful? Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that evidence of God?

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's what he or your mom would say. That's what he would say.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  My dad would say.

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  The elegance of that.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  My dad believed, not that what we know is what we should pay attention to, but to marvel at what we can do and still not know anything. So my father would explain, this had a big impact on me, that there's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems and there's complex problems. It's a mathematical difference, but the technique doesn't matter. Complicated problems are all the things that you can solve with computational horsepower and tech. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but you can never solve them. Like, who's gonna win between the Patriots and the Dolphins? I know what winning looks like. It's more points on the scoreboard, but I have no idea. And that's why it's beautiful to watch the game and you don't want to simulate it on the computer because it'll be inaccurate.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Love is complex. A jet engine is complicated. A cat is complex. A toaster is complicated. And he said, two kinds of problems. And this, he said, as a basic math problem, the reason that we're always unsatisfied in life is because we have complex problems. We want love. And all we have is complicated solutions that the world is offering us, like, you know, computers and the internet and social media and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll never be satisfied because it's the wrong kind of solution for the wrong kind of problem.

• 33:35Tim Ferriss?

  So that seems like tremendously valuable insight. Would you describe your father as a happy man?

• 33:43Speaker 02

  No, my father was a gloomy man. And no doubt that had a lot to do with genetics because 50% of our emotional baseline is genetic. We know this from identical twin studies where twins are born and separated at birth into separate families. This is not an experiment that social scientists have done because that would be horribly unethical.

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  But three identical strangers shows how that turns out.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  And brutal doc. Uh huh. Oh, yeah. That's a great documentary.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  It is great.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  But 50% of your baseline mood, your tendency toward ebullience or gloominess is sitting in your DNA. And this is the reason, Tim, that I came to the happiness field because I saw my grandfather, who was a wonderful man and gloomy, and my father, who was brilliant and a lovely person and an excellent, ethical, kind man who was gloomy. And I said, no more, man. No more. I'm going to live on the other 50%. I am not going to be governed by that 50% that made my father an unhappy man. And so he died young, 66, you know? I mean, he had cancer and they gave him 10 or 15 years or more. And he died in two.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  And as a statistician, he explained it. He was a biostatistician by his graduate degree. And I said, Ted, it's terrible luck. And he said, look, there's got to be people on that side of the curve too.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  But he had a good sense of humor. But the whole point was he wasn't prepared to fight for life because he didn't have the hygiene for his own happiness. And that example set me on the path to learn about this and to share these ideas. And it has transformed my life. I'm grateful to my father and I will be for the rest of my life for the example that he gave me and the lesson he taught me, even through his unhappiness.

• 35:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hi, everyone. Tim here. Pardon the interruption. Just a quick announcement. The recording studio had a small glitch, so the audio for the next two or so minutes is not perfect. But we correct it quickly. Please bear with us. Thank you for understanding. And now, back to the conversation. What were some decisions you made, or things you began doing, or stopped doing after your father's death?

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I started exercising. There is a little vanity to it, but not that much. The whole point of the matter is, this is one of the single best ways to manage your negative affect, is to be in the gym for an hour a day.

• 36:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it's a bit dated, probably, but there's a book called Spark, which also goes into a lot of like, BDNF, and a lot of the circuitry and biochemical reasons for exercise for this explicit purpose.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  When I'm working with students, I put them through a battery of tests to look at whether the bigger challenge in their life is happiness or unhappiness. The world is really scarce in the definitions that it gives us. And there's a big mistake that almost everybody makes about happiness, which is, there are a lot of mistakes. Number one, that it's the absence of unhappiness. Number two, that it's a feeling. Both of those are wrong. Number three is that we can get it. So, we can approach happiness, but we can't get there because we actually need unhappiness. And unhappiness and happiness are not opposites and can coexist. So, there's a lot to unpack.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's lots to unpack.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  So, to begin with, happiness and unhappiness, in terms of moods, are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. A lot of neuroscientists believe that unhappy cognitions and emotions are largely dominated by activity in the right side of the brain. And the way that we know this, there's a terrific neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson. And he's done work that shows that that the left side of the musculature on your face is more active when you're unhappy, when you're experiencing negative emotions, anger, fear, disgust, sadness. And it's actually funny, when my kids were little, I would notice that when they fall down, you get a moment where you don't know what's going to happen next. Are they going to laugh and keep playing? Or are they going to get the waterworks, right? And the way to tell on that, because it's usually five or six seconds because the wiring in the brain is actually not complete.

• 37:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's a work in progress. So, what are the tests that I administer? My students and I'm

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Put in my new book, as a matter of fact, because it's so important for me and for understanding ourselves. It's called the Positive Affect Negative Affect Series, P A N A S. It's on my website and it's easy to find. I didn't create it. It's been psychometrically validated a bunch of times. It's a great test. And what it does is it helps you figure out if you're high positive, high negative, or low positive, low negative, and there's four combinations. It's a two by two matrix. You can be a high positive affect person and a high negative affect person. That's a high affect person who's got a lot of strong moods about everything. That's the mad scientist. That's the mad scientist profile. That's me. I'm at the 85th percentile in happy affect and I'm at the 85th percentile in negative affect.

• 38:25Tim Ferriss?

  So the highs are high and the lows are low.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Right. So I don't have a happiness problem. I have an unhappiness problem is what it comes down to. It's not a problem because unhappiness is really important. You won't be happy if you get rid of your unhappiness because you got to be fully alive to get happier. But you do need to manage yourself. Some people are really high positive and really low negative. Those are the cheerleaders. Those people can't stay in the gym. Why? Because they don't feel better when they go to the gym because their negative affect is already in the cellar. The third is high negative and low positive. That's the poet. And nobody wants to be a poet, but the truth is that the part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is highly active for people who are sad and people who are creative. That's the reason when I say poet, you don't think about somebody who's skipping down the street. Right? You think of a creative person.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  With a cigarette in the beret.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Exactly right. You're in a French cafe, you know, thinking about, you know, thinking nihilistic thoughts and writing poetry. So that's the poetic disposition. And the last is low, low. So you could be perfectly happy or unhappy, but you have low affect levels. That's called the judge, the sober judge.

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  I wish it were otherwise, but I would put high confidence that I am right down the beret wearing way.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  How would you advise someone, and I know this won't apply to everybody listening, but just by way of a working example, what does someone do with, what are their options for how to act upon that? Okay. So if you know that you're a poet, this is an affect level. It doesn't mean that you're cosmically happy or unhappy. It just means that this is your natural disposition. So this is important, right? So it also means that you need to manage two levers. You need to manage your happiness levels up and you need to manage your unhappiness levels, not to zero, there's nothing wrong with unhappiness. You need to mute them. You don't need to numb them. You need to manage them.

• 40:13Tim Ferriss?

  And could you, and I may have already missed the plot, but just define those two, because I think a lot of people, myself maybe included, would think if you remove unhappiness, by default, since it's unhappiness, they seem to be antonyms, so you remove one, you have more of the other. So how should we think about these two?

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a very good question. And by the way, the answer is not obvious. As a matter of fact, psychologists until about 50 years ago, really believed that unhappiness was the absence of happiness. But it's not true, because we actually find that the basic negative and positive emotions are coming from different parts of the limbic system and can coexist.

• 40:46Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So if you're thinking about it, you can think about it then neuroanatomically as opposed to semantically with the words.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  Not to dumb it down too hard, but it's like if your left hand performed X types of tasks and your right hand performed Y type of tasks, it's like, okay, you can sort of decide what ratio.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Right. And your negative emotions are much more intense than your positive emotions. This has evolved to keep you alive. Positive emotions are kind of nice to have. Negative emotions are signals or alarms that something might kill you. A sweet smile from somebody across the room is very pleasant, but a frowning face might be somebody who wants to murder you. And so therefore, we've evolved to pay attention. This is called the negativity bias that we have. We also have mixed states that we go through all day long. And so if you look, you ask people in surveys what they're feeling at any given moment. So you'll, you'll say, you know, in five-minute increments, what are you feeling, positive or negative? You'll find that about 90% of the time, people can tell you how they're feeling. In 40% of the time, for the average person, it's really pure positive emotions at a low level. It's your idol, is most of the time. It's, it's okay. It's kind of sunny today, whatever, whatever. All good.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  About 16% of the time is pure negative emotion. And that usually means something's happening that you don't like. Now, 33% of the time, you've got both. And usually, the way that this looks in people's lives is that you're in your positive idol, but something's intruding. So there's some Something bugging you that you don't always remember, you know, we go through life and you know, on a certain day, it's like, yeah, it's all good. Oh, yeah, that thing. And then you go back to kind of going back to your positive violent, oh, yeah, that thing. You know, that thing. And so that's the mixed state.

• 42:19Tim Ferriss?

  Like Twitter.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. And by the way, I mean, it's an unhappiness machine. You mean X?

• 42:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sorry. Exactly.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  That's right. A big black X. You mean, it's like X. It's so appropriate, you know? So this is important because we understand that these are separable phenomena. We need both these emotions, but we need to be able to manage our emotions like pros. And that's a lot of what I do.

• 42:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So what are some options? So I go through the panis, end up poet. There are these two levers. What might be the process of thinking through how to pull these levers in different ways?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  So happiness side is what I spend a lot more time on because it's just so interesting on how we can pull the happiness lever. It starts by actually a good definition, which is not feelings. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And thank God, happiness isn't a feeling. Can you imagine going through life chasing a feeling? That's awful. It's like, if it feels good, do it. Or if it feels bad, make it stop. It's a terrible life strategy. Happiness and its feelings are associated with three tangible phenomena in our lives that we can actually understand and manage. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need in balance and abundance. Think of these as the macronutrients of happiness, the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  If you don't have protein and carbohydrates and fat and balance and abundance, all kinds of weird things are going to happen to you. You're not going to be as healthy as you should be and you won't feel good. Same thing is true. You need to enjoy your life. You need to get satisfaction from your accomplishments and you need to have a deep sense of meaning. And each one of these is a big challenge. When I meet somebody through a series of structured questions, I can figure out if there's a problem along one of these macronutrient dimensions. And it turns out that it's, there's some very easy interventions that we can make across all three. And I'll give you an example. The first one is enjoyment. I say, you enjoy your life. They'll think about their little pleasures. I say, that's not it. Pleasure is not a secret to happiness. Pleasure is the fast road to obsessive-compulsive activity and addiction. Why?

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Because all pleasure is, is a phenomenon from the limbic system of your brain saying, "Do more of that thing because you're more likely to survive and pass on your genes if you get those calories, if you have that sex, whatever it happens to be." The way that you can actually turn that into a source of happiness is by mixing in two ingredients with your pleasure: people and memory. Never do something that gives you pleasure alone. That's the rule of thumb. If you're doing it alone, it's a problem. So Anheuser-Busch does a beer ad. They never have in the beer ad- A guy drinking in his closet. Yeah, a guy pounding a 12-pack in his apartment alone. You know? Why? Because that's pleasure and that actually leads to addiction. It's problematic. They always have an ad of a guy cracking a beer with his buddies, people, and doing something he's gonna remember: memory.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  That's the secret to it. So I'll take a survey of people's habits. Now, this is the reason that pornography is a big problem. You're not consuming it in public with friends to make a memory, for God's sake. It's just some sort of weird- Very rarely. That's a pretty weird thing to do, right? I mean, it hits the dopamine lever. I mean, they all are neurophysiologically similar phenomenon. They hit dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, over and over and over again, and they ruin your life. Because they become addictive, they become monomaniacal, and they're not the secret to happiness. If you're at 3 o'clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the lever on the slot machine by yourself, that's not the secret to happiness, to anybody I know. And I've never heard somebody say, "You know, you know what gives my life happiness? Methamphetamine." Never been said, right?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And the reason for that is because these are drugs- People say drugs of abuse. No, no, it's your drugs of pleasure. Let's not lie about it. They give you pleasure. And pleasure alone, without memory, is a problem. This is a very practical example of how we can use the science and turn it into a set of guideposts for our life.

• 46:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.8 APY, that's the annual percentage yield with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That's more than 11 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. So, why wait?

• 46:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 47:28Tim Ferriss?

  And so you have enjoyment, which you clarify.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Satisfaction.

• 47:32Tim Ferriss?

  Satisfaction.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Meaning you're next.

• 47:34Tim Ferriss?

  And how would you make satisfaction, grandly? Because I think about satisfaction, I'm like, hmm, I might conflate being satisfied with doing, say, a large project with some form of meaning. I can see how I might get my wires crossed. So, how should we think about these two in your framework?

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Satisfaction is achieving something with struggle. It really is that project that you're talking about, which it will give you meaning as well. The project, per se, can actually cross the boundaries across the macronutrients, just like something that you eat has one, more than one macronutrient. But satisfaction, per se, is doing something that takes effort and expending the effort. So, if my graduate students, they cheat to get an A and unexamine my class, they'll get the grade, but they won't get the satisfaction. The satisfaction, like, comes from the pain. This is one of the paradoxes. of life, you gotta suffer to get the satisfaction. You gotta defer the gratification. When somebody's on the pleasure meal, by the way, they also don't get satisfaction from anything because they can't defer their gratification anymore.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  These problems bleed into each other. So, one of the things that you find is that people who are very accomplished, you know, the people, you, are good at satisfaction because you can defer your gratification and do long-term projects. You're a satisfaction guy. The problem for you and me and a lot of people are gonna watch your show because they want to be better. I mean, nobody's watching this show just for giggles. They're watching this show because

• 48:58Tim Ferriss?

  Funny enough.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  They're watching your show because they want to be better in their lives. And so they're gonna be good at deferring their gratification and doing hard things.

• 49:06Tim Ferriss?

  Or at least aspire.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, it's like, I've read your books. It's interestingly deceptive. The four-hour fill-in-the-blank, the early books, it makes it sound like it's a hack and it's easy? No. No, it's not. The four hours is hard, is the point. Those four hours are gonna hurt.

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and there's a lot of front-loading. There's also hard work without forethought and planning. So there is built into any of those books a strategic deferral.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So that's what brings satisfaction. Here's the problem with satisfaction. And this goes back to where we started the conversation. Mick Jagger saying, "I can't get no satisfaction," that's wrong. You can't keep no satisfaction. That's why you try and you try and you try. And there's a reason for that. You know, neuroscientists talk about homeostasis, which is a phenomenon of always going back physically and emotionally to your baseline. And there's a reason for that, because you need to go back to the baseline in your life so you can be ready to react to the next set of circumstances. If emotionally, you were gonna be bummed out for the rest of your life, you'd become immobilized. And if you felt super happy when something good happened, you wouldn't be in the hunt anymore.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Mother Nature wants you to think that you're gonna feel this emotion for the rest of your life so that you will either avoid one thing or pursue something. But she wants to fool you and send you back again and again and again and have you never figure it out. "Man, if I get that car, I'm gonna love it. If I move to California, I'm gonna enjoy it." Enjoy the sunshine for the rest of my life. Turns out you get six months, by the way, of enjoying weather, but the taxes are forever. And that experience of never learning is called the hedonic treadmill and it's unbelievably painful. The way to solve that problem is haves divided by wants. The way to get real satisfaction is not having more but wanting less. And that's the reverse bucket list, et cetera.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  That's the, the set of habits that helps you dominate that particular science and short circuit the loop that you're on because of mother nature's plans for you, which are not really in your happiness interest. She doesn't care if you're happy, by the way. No.

• 51:08Tim Ferriss?

  Passing on, producing progeny is not dependent on big smiles.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  DNA, man, it's all survival to pass on your genes. And, you know, that's, that's great for the propagation of the species. It's not good for having the, for, I don't know, for pursuing the divine path.

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  We are going to come back to meeting. I want to just take sidebar on reducing wants for a second.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 51:29Tim Ferriss?

  And talk about exercises that you've had your students do in your classes. And I'm pulling this from memory, so I may not get the wording spot on, but identifying their idols. Am I getting this right? So if, if you could expand on what that looks like.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a game. I have a game show in my class at Harvard. It's called What's My Idol? Now, you can tell how old I am. When I was a really little kid, there was a game show on TV called What's My Line?

• 52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sure.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Your viewers can Google it. I'm sure there's some black and white grainy footage of it or something from, you know, when I was in the seventies or back. What's My Idol is actually based on the insight of a, you know, a medieval philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. Theologian, but really a philosopher in the neo Platonic tradition. Aquinas is responsible for introducing Aristotle to the modern world. Up until that point, nobody read Aristotle. It was all Plato, Aristotle's teacher. St. Thomas Aquinas, he said, no, no, no, no, guys, read this one. This is the one. And he interpreted Aristotle for the modern world. It was the same thing, more or less, that Averroes was doing for the Muslim world and that Maimonides was doing for the Jewish world, because they were coexisting in Southern Spain in this intellectual soup.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  That's hard for us to understand today. It was so deep what was going on. So St. Thomas Aquinas was an unbelievably adroit social scientist.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  He was also, by the way-

• 52:55Tim Ferriss?

  Phenomenally impressive figure. I mean, for people who aren't familiar, just go read the Wikipedia entry and a few other things.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:02Tim Ferriss?

  Blow your mind.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  And his magisterial work was the Summa Theologiae. And the way that he does it, by the way, is just, it's a masterclass in the way that we should be thinking about big topics today, which is by saying, by starting the topic with the best objection. Here's the question, here's the supposition, what's the best objection? Here's how I meet that objection. What's the second best objection? Here's how I meet the objection. The whole book is written this way, it's unbelievable. And in the section on human happiness, which he pulls from Aristotle, who claims without any need for proof, that this is what we all want, whether we act that way or not, that there's four things that we do that distract us from happiness. Now, his definition of happiness is seeking the divine. You know, this is what we all want. What do you want? The divine. Do you know that? Not necessarily.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Is it hard? Yeah, and that's the reason we don't actually act like we're pursuing the divine, because, you know, pursuing God, or the divine, or the metaphysical singularity, or exterior consciousness, or what your thing is, has a lot of one-sided conversations, and a lot of inconvenient morality attached to it. So, we take these divinity substitutes. These are the idols. Idols are biblically and in mythology, what idols all have in common is that they're God-like, but they're not God. They're convenient substitutes for God. That's all an idol is. And St. Thomas Aquinas says there's four substitutes for God, which we can think of as the four substitutes for the real secrets of happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

• 54:30Tim Ferriss?

  How little things change.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Ah. And when he said fame, he actually didn't say fame, he said honor. But that has a different connotation in English. You know, I have a son who's like, special forces in military, and he serves with honor. That's not what they mean. Honor means to be honored. It's fame, it's reputation, it's the admiration of other people. Maybe it's Instagram followers, or something ridiculous, but it is something that we want, in the opinion of other people, and we thirst after it. And he says, everybody is motivated by one thing, and even throwaway comments, like, communities, they coalesce around it. Idol is so true. You know, we're recording this podcast in New York. Money, baby. You go to a party in New York and everybody's like, how's your fund this year? How are you doing this year? And like, how much does this apartment cost?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  It's all about money. You go to LA, what's the idol?

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm not gonna even call it honor, fame.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Fame, fame. Okay, okay, let's keep with the quiz. DC, what's the idol?

• 55:26Tim Ferriss?

  Power.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Power, man. It's how close are you to the president? What senator do you know? Right? Vegas?

• 55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, communities will call us around this, but each one of us has our idol too. So here's the game. You want to play?

• 55:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Let's play the game. Okay, so the truth is, none of us has all four. None of us is so vicered, and we don't have the energy or time to be serving all four of these idols. I mean, come on, life is short.

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  You underestimate me, sir.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  But we all have one or two that really animate us, and we don't always know it because we're not paying attention to it. Now, Aquinas's point, and modern psychology bears all this out, that as a normal adult with a complicated life, if you know your idol, you will recognize the thing that always leads you astray and leads you to do the things that you later regret because you were following that idol. So it's very important to figure out which idol that is so that you can manage it. Not that you'll make it go away because you're human, but you can manage your idol. Okay, so I start by saying, what's not your idol? Because of the four, there's something that you could ditch.

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, power is not, yeah, power immediately, I'll name one to start with.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  That's why you're not a CEO. I mean, you've got a company and you, you know, you, but you're not like trying to run a corporation.

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a lot of things that are, and I know a lot of people who are power focused in a sense, in one form or another, it just doesn't.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Do you dislike it? Do you actively dislike power? Like people having power over you and you having power over others?

• 56:57Tim Ferriss?

  I don't dislike it necessarily. I mean, I think that. It's an inherent dynamic in particularly chimpanzee politics, but just in nature in general.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Speaking of which, let me react to this phrase. Tim Ferriss for Congress?

• 57:12Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 57:14Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely not.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Your answer is correct. You are not motivated by power is the first one to get rid of. Okay, you've got three left. Money, pleasure, fame. You gotta kick one out. You gotta get rid of one. What's the next one to go?

• 57:26Tim Ferriss?

  I can get rid of fame easily. I think that there was a point in my life where I saw a lot of social validation, but having seen the flip side and the shadow elements of that, it has, it holds.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  But you got pretty famous young. And so you saw the dark side of that, which is what social scientists and even neuroscientists will tell you with their research is that fame is really the only of the idols that you can ever be happy in spite of. You know, when Lady Gaga tweeted, fame is prison, and everybody derided that. I'm thinking that's deeply adept. That is a deeply clarifying comment. And by the way, I mean, you know, John Milton wrote that in, you know, the 17th century, that it is the idol that we thirst after and sacrifice the happiness of our days for that. And you learn that by experience, not because of disposition, because you did hunger after it and then experienced it. And you realize that it's a very, very, very bitter fruit.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there are a lot of footnotes and a lot of fine print in that Faustian bargain. So I.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Forty-six-year-old Tim Ferriss, that's number two that goes out the door.

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  Don't care. In fact, if I could put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube, in numerous ways, I would do that.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, you've got two left and it's getting hot in here, right?

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Money and pleasure, wealth and pleasure. Which one do you get rid of?

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  I would say money I can, in the hierarchy, I can get rid of. The marginal utility of each additional dollars is just makes no difference in the things that I care about.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  And in a middle-class life, wouldn't freak you out.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  No, at this point.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not talking about poverty. I'm not talking about not getting three squares. I'm talking about not having the money for the nice stuff that people think is really wonderful to have, the houses, the boats, the cars.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't really buy that stuff. Yeah, I don't, I don't really care. And I care less and less because also the more financial success you have, the more time you spend with people who have even greater financial success. And I've seen no indication, in fact, it might even be a contra indication that wealth produces the things I'm after. And I think there are significant adverse side effects.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot of research that shows that there is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff. It's by buying experiences, it's by buying time and by giving it away. And you already figured that one out.

• 59:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, quick example of that for me in the last handful of years, I owe Tim Urban a huge thank you for his article, The Tail End. I ended up booking most years, depending on my family's health and so on, a family trip once a year that we can look forward to for like six months and have group chats about and so on. And then even today was, was discussing a boy's trip with some of my closest friends, probably like six months from now. And the ROI on those is huge, but I would say money, I can get rid of money.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  So we found your idol.

• 1:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Tim Ferriss likes to feel good.

• 1:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  I do, yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yep. And again, there's nothing wrong with feeling good, but for you, we need to watch to make sure that you're getting enjoyment and not pleasure.

• 1:00:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  And we need to be very disciplined about enjoyment, not pleasure.

• 1:00:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I would also add to this that I do think I'm a pleasure junkie for certain things.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. The sensual, the sexual being very high on the list. There's also, I think, a wrinkle to this, like the sort of Mara sitting on my shoulder, if anybody gets the reference, would be, given a history of depression.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  I fear its opposite.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  So I chase pleasure as hopefully some inoculation against darkness. So there are many things contributing to that.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, pleasure tends to be numbing. It does tend to be numbing of negative emotion. So people will pursue pleasure because they're actually trying to, it's, it's fentanyl. There's a reason that, there's nobody who enjoys fentanyl. Because it's not something you, like, I wanna go hang out with my buddies and take fentanyl. And make a memory. On the contrary, you're trying to eviscerate memory. You're trying to get rid of memory with these types of things. And so numbing things tend to work that way. And I understand, I mean, you've actually had, you have a history of mood disorders in your life. And you don't want them, you don't want them back. You don't wanna invite them back. And so you do something that feels like an inoculation from those depths. The key thing is that the real insurance policy is enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. That's the real insurance policy.

• 1:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  And again, because, because it doesn't eradicate the unhappiness, the darkness. But it puts it into context such that it's part of the quilt of your life. And so it's just one square in the quilt of your life and not the whole blanket.

• 1:02:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I, so I wanna, I wanna expand on this. This is a thread selfishly that I'd like to pull on.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  No, you're, you got it.

• 1:02:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I will add maybe just one thought, which is much of the pleasure that I pursue is not numbing. It's actually a volume competition in the sense that if I start to feel like there are whispers of the potential of an onset of a depressive episode. Or maybe it's the ruminative thoughts and anxiety that comes with that. But let's just say those are at a two out of 10 volume. There's fear because I worry that that is going to spiral.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  And so I seek out something on the positive side of the ledger, or let me just say the pleasure side of the ledger.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  That is higher volume.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're trying to knock yourself out of a groove.

• 1:02:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so it's like overcoming a dread of deadness with greater aliveness.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Right. What's one possible strategy? There could be a substitute strategy for that. That's why I'm here, doctor.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  So, so, and there are.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  So.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Right. There are meditation and prayer, a seeking for the divine, a serious spiritual practice. These are the things that will actually do much the same things, but without the numbing and without the danger. Cause it's tricky, right? I mean, hitting the dopamine lever has consequences.

• 1:03:21Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Hitting, hitting it hard and often has, you know, desperate consequences for it. And we know, none of us needs problems in our lives. We have plenty of those already.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. So, yes, and let's just say spare meditate, uh, prayer, spare, spare prayer, name of my forthcoming book.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  I like your whole sound of it.

• 1:03:41Tim Ferriss?

  Meditation, I can see the difference. It's easy for, say, a secular listener.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:46Tim Ferriss?

  To consider.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say to people who are perhaps secular, not necessarily militant atheists?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  Who I think recognizes I do. In some ways I am deeply, just to layer on my sins here, envious.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:02Tim Ferriss?

  Of people who have strong religious conviction. I recognize the value. And from a, at least in the sort of monotheistic Judeo-Christian traditions, I don't think I'm likely to join.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  One of the bands.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  I'll work on you.

• 1:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I recognize we can go do some, some blood occlusion training and you can just, and we'll say a rosary together.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  In between, in between, right, in between reps. Lay, lay the prayer on thick.

• 1:04:33Tim Ferriss?

  So what would you suggest to me or someone who recognizes the value? I don't, I do not have a counter argument.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm not sure how to embrace that.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  So there are alternatives. So I, I mean, I can tell you as a Catholic that that's my thing, but I can tell you as a social scientist, that it's not the only thing that will actually bring the same neurophysiological and psychological benefits. What we need is a sense of the transcendent that makes us small. That's what we need. Why? Because we need perspective and peace. I mean, Tim, you're going to go through all day. It's like my podcast and you know, it's my commute and my lunch, my money and my friends and my mom and my Mimi. It's so, man, it's just so, it's like watching the same episode every single night of Better Call Saul for the rest of your life.

• 1:05:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's like having the seagulls from Finding Nemo in your head.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  Mine, mine.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Me, mine, mine, mine, mine. I mean, it's just, it's the worst. And so you have to find a way to get peace, but. What we really need is to put ourselves in perspective. Now, most people are afraid to be little, are really afraid to be insignificant. Perspective requires that we see reality and we get smaller and we stand in awe of the universe and what it can bring. There's lots of ways to do that. Meditation practices are very good for that. Prayer is very good for that. Religion, in most traditional circumstances, is very good for that. But walking in nature without devices before dawn for an hour is incredibly good for that, for all sorts of reasons. And this is extremely well-validated in the social science literature.

• 1:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  How important is the timing on that?

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's good because you start the day that way and it's the programming of it. And by the way, the experience of seeing the sunrise is incredibly awe-inspiring. Plus, it's quiet and cool.

• 1:06:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, all pluses.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Quiet and cool, for sure. And therefore, you get just a bigger bolus of, you know, the benefits that you actually get from being in contact with the earth and being in contact with nature, et cetera. Another way to do this is to stand in awe of human genius that's way outside the realm of your experience. So, learn about the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Read about his life.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  Your favorite.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And listen to a hundred of his cantatas and learn how to analyze them. I mean, your life will never be the same. Or, your neighbor and our mutual friend Ryan Holiday, read the stoics. Read the stoics. I mean, it's a quasi-religious experience. You will feel a deep satisfaction at your littleness, probably for the first time in years. As a matter of fact, there are many ways to get this, but you need to get small in front of Bach, in front of Epictetus, in front of God. You need to get small, is the whole point.

• 1:07:06Tim Ferriss?

  I love that. It's easy to remember, right? Get small. And there, just to underscore that for myself, I mean, a few things that have been helpful.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:14Tim Ferriss?

  Nature, yes.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure.

• 1:07:17Tim Ferriss?

  Studying, or could take the form of listening to, say, Hardcore History and listening to Kings of Kings, the Assyrians, and really widening the aperture of your historic lens, just to put the problems of this week in perspective. And also the impermanence of empires, like, maybe relevant these days.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  This is a moment in time and...

• 1:07:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So, going back and realizing, like, the most, some of the most powerful figures in the history of humankind you will not recognize, which also, I think, for me, has been very relieving and also has taken a lot of the... Earlier fixation on money away because I realize it's just ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  To quote the Ecclesiastes.

• 1:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. Give me the full name of Alexander the Great. Most people can't. So rather than get fixed on some vague notion of legacy, like let's actually focus on other things. The getting small, looking at the stars. Honestly, I did so much as a kid and I lost it. And have sort of reclaimed as this thing that can be used as such a tool for zooming out. And I have two friends, Ed Cook is is one notable example, who when he thinks of his problems, and I'm going to paraphrase this, but he will look at stars and sort of zoom out from his neighborhood himself to the planet, to the solar system. And when he then returns back to laying on the ground, looking at the stars,

• 1:08:45Tim Ferriss?

  like the problems that were plaguing you just do not seem

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  That's the point.

• 1:08:49Tim Ferriss?

  So significant.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  That's really the point. It's not just a question of minimizing your problems. It's also minimizing the scale of your hopes and dreams and opportunities. And recognizing that what really matters, you're in that, to be sure. But you're one part of that. It's okay. It's all okay. The great is just okay and the bad is okay, too. And you know, that's so deeply comforting and it leads to so many improvements in mental health.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  I just don't know how you can put one foot in front of the other without doing something like this every day. Now, people often ask, okay, how do we get started? How do I get started? Read 15 minutes a day. Pick up The Brothers K.

• 1:09:30Tim Ferriss?

  Brothers Karamazov?

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Tim Ferriss?

  Am I saying that? Probably not.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you are.

• 1:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you like fiction, stop wasting your time on trivialities. Go get The Brothers K. Why? Because it's a deeply awe inspiring experience about the human condition and the absurdity of it. It's beautiful. Get the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who by the way, a world historical figure because he was a Roman emperor. Nobody remembers that practically a single thing that happened as Roman emperor. We remember what was written in his private diary.

• 1:10:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's wild.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 1:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Last of the great emperors.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Mostly because he was dumb enough to leave his son in charge.

• 1:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oops.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  His wastrel.

• 1:10:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's like the story of of humankind also.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Speaking with, I think I want to leave my business to my kids. What do you think, Tim?

• 1:10:15Tim Ferriss?

  You know, there's a, there's a long conversation.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  My kids are awesome. I wonder if I wonder if I can get them into the happiness business.

• 1:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  Dad, I know you're always beating us over the head on this happiness business. It's not my path.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  It's your path. Eye roll.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm curious for you personally, having thought about this deeply, having tracked a lot of things also. What are some of the best uses of money that you have found personally? What types of things? Are there any concrete examples that you can give?

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  We rolled through that fast just a second ago, but it turns out there's a ton of research on this. My colleague, Mike Norton and my colleagues, Mike Norton and Ashley Willens at the Harvard Business School. They've done this exhaustive research on how to buy happiness, how to buy happiness, right? Okay. Mother nature says get more stuff. Why? Because satisfaction comes from having more. What's the strategy for life? More. Mother nature tells you that she lies, lies and lies and laughs at you. That's not the strategy. You need to buy enough, but no possession will do anything beyond bring you out of misery. That's the reason that the studies, you know, the famous Kahneman and Deaton study from Princeton shows that happiness flattens out after $75,000 a year. And you know, Matt Killingsworth at Penn actually reran the data and finds that it's higher, but it still flattens out.

• 1:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Inflation adjusted, but still.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  If inflation adjusted or, you know, your results may vary or whatever it is. But the whole point is you just don't get happier and happier and happier as millions. The reason, by the way, that we think that is an illusion that comes from our experience. Most people have less than they perceive that they need when they're young. And the result of it is that they, a lot of people and a lot of people listening to us, they suffer a lack of, you know, meeting some basic needs. You know, when I was 19 to 25, I was too poor for six years to go to the dentist for six years. No, of course, I don't think I ever went a day without cigarettes, so I guess it was priorities, but.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  But the point is that when I was-

• 1:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Breakfast of champions.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, beer, cigarettes, pizza, you know, I was living on the, I was living in Washington Heights in those days. And when I was 25, I took a job in the Barcelona Orchestra and I moved to Barcelona, I had benefits, I had Bennys, man. And I went to the dentist and he filled 10 cavities. And I felt a lot better and I thought, money does buy happiness. No, no, no, no, no, no. Money lowers unhappiness when you move out of deprivation. That's it. And so what happens is I made the mental link between feeling, getting money and feeling better. And people do that and they chase that feeling for the rest of their life. Cause you're, you're doing sums in your head of well-being as happiness and unhappiness and all that. You can't tell the difference when you're just, you know, rolling through your life. And early on, you

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  felt a lot better. That's all you know, when you had more money. And so you want that feeling and you chase the feeling. You chase the high. You chase the early hits. It's like drugs, like any other drugs in this way. So that doesn't work. But there are three ways you can buy happiness according to Willens and Norton, my colleagues at HBS. You can buy experiences. This is critically important because what do experiences that, where you buy happiness really have in common? You add money, which is sort of my pleasure, but the really important parts are the people and the memory. People and memory are always part of experiences. Okay. Now, sometimes you want to do things alone, but generally speaking, the greatest happiness comes because it enhances love in your life. The best way

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  to improve love in your life, if you want your love life with your partner to get better, go away together. Go away together. That's always the best way to do. Or stay home together, but turn off the phone. In other words, get an experience with the person that you love. That's a great way to spend money because it will reliably, unless you wasted, do something stupid. Like, I'm gonna have a bender in Vegas and then, you know, get blackout drunk and sit in front of the slot machine. That's not the secret. But, you know, being prudent, you can actually buy happiness through experiences. That's number one. Number two-

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna ask you for personal examples, but yes.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Tim Ferriss?

  I'm serious.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Buy time, buy time, but use the time correctly. If you have the money and you're cutting your lawn and you don't like cutting your lawn, improve GDP, hire a guy. Now, a lot of Americans don't like to do that because they have this kind of this weird reverse classist sense. Well, let me tell you, there's a lot of people who are making more money than you cutting lawns and running a gardening service. Spread the love, give somebody a job, and then use the time correctly. Don't fritter away your time scrolling social media in the house, in the air conditioning. No, no, no, no. Use the time specifically for something, ideally with somebody doing something that you enjoy, and that will truly buy happiness.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  And last but not least, give your money away to somebody who needs it, who deserves it, and a cause that truly inspires you, something you really, really believe in. I've studied philanthropy long before I studied happiness. I was, you know, an academic beavering away in obscurity, writing books on charity and philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. And the reason I initially got into happiness in the first place, besides, you know, wanting to be happy, was that I found that the more people gave, the happier they got.

• 1:15:17Tim Ferriss?

  So we don't have to tread into these waters, but I think it would be very helpful for people, and I'm very curious, I'm happy to reciprocate also. Where have you landed for where to give your own money?

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  I give money to things that I really care about, that I think have an impact on people's lives in a big way. And a lot of what I do is I give to education, to people who are at the margins of society. So I give a lot to primary and secondary education, specifically to Catholic primary and secondary education, because I think it is really, really well done. And it's an option that a lot of people don't have access to because it costs money. So a lot of what I do, probably 75% of what I give away, and I give away 10% of my income.

• 1:15:54Tim Ferriss?

  Good for you.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, you know, it's not that hard to do, you just have to pay attention to it. And then there's structures, you know, so you get a charitable giving account.

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think of that as a tithe?

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do think of it as a tithe, but I really think of it as a privilege. I think of it a lot less as a duty and a lot more as a privilege. My wife and I, we just look forward to it. And then, you know, we have a process in our family of, you know, should we give money to this, we give money to that? Usually we give something, kind of a big bolus. One year and then in the smaller gifts to things that are ongoing sources of support that we really believe in.

• 1:16:23Tim Ferriss?

  How do you decide what to give to?

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Well, we know the people and we do the work. So it's not just anybody. We get a letter in the mail and we respond with a big check. It's like, huh, seems worthy. No, we actually do the work. And part of it is because I teach, one of the classes I teach at Harvard is on nonprofit management. And so I have a kind of a strong background in, you know, whether it's a reputable cause and what to look for into measuring the effectiveness of an organization. So I do the work. I do the background work. I, you know, I see what kind of overhead rates that they're using, how they're using their money. A lot has to do with if I like the mission. Sometimes if it's going to be a substantial amount of money, I get to know the people and the organization. And it has to be something that I think is going to change people's lives for the better. Now, I've actually changed my view on this a little bit because early on, you know, we'd

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  write a lot of little checks, lots and lots and lots of little checks to great organizations. And then I found that you can have a lot more effect on your own well-being, and again, this is kind of selfish, but in your own well-being by concentrating on turning the whole dial in one person's life. And there's an old Talmudic phrase from the book of Sanhedrin that says, "In every man is the whole world." In other words, turn the dial for one person, you've turned the dial for all of humanity because it's really had an impact. And I remember telling my wife about that. It's like, yeah, I've got these data that when you really help one person instead of a little bit for a lot, really anonymously, you can, you can get all these benefits. She's like, this is years ago. This is maybe 20 years ago now.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  And she's like, why don't we adopt a baby? And I'm like, it's only a buck, man. But we did. We actually did. It was totally life-changing. So that's how you give. You've got to do the work and think about it and put your heart into it.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say more about that? How did she come to the adoption?

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  My wife.

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, how did she?

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  She came to it because I was saying, you know, you get a lot more benefits when you turn the whole dial on one person's life as opposed to just, you know, sprinkling just throwing dollar bills at a helicopter.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  So she was like, let's turn this to 11.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's like, no, she's basically like, okay, buddy. You really? Really? I mean, this was like, I know you got this interesting research, you know, fancy social scientist guy, and let's see. Should we put our money where our mouth is? And by the way, she had also been having dreams about a little girl who was abandoned. Dreams and dreams and dreams at night.

• 1:18:43Tim Ferriss?

  If you're able to, can you tell me more about your wife and how you guys met? Because I know a little bit of the background, but how did that happen? Since I'm back on the playing field.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  You're back on the playing field, Tom. One of the things that I teach my students at HBS is that I would never invest in the firm of an entrepreneur who is unwilling to give her or his heart away. Because it's the single most risky entrepreneurial thing that you can do, putting every bit of capital at risk. If you're not willing to give your heart away, I'm not going to put my money in your fund. Now.

• 1:19:18Tim Ferriss?

  And that takes the form of risk, man.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  Loving someone wholeheartedly. Giving your heart away.

• 1:19:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Giving your heart away. So, and the reason I believe this is because, you know, I've always had this sense that part of the journey of life is just like getting in it, getting in it. And, you know, entrepreneurs talk a lot about putting capital at risk and talking about money, how boring. The real capital of the enterprise, the startup of Tim Ferriss's life, because this is the ultimate enterprise. I mean, the enterprise is not the podcast and the books and the company and the, that's not it. Those are manifestations of Tim Ferriss, Inc., of you. The enterprise is you, and the currency of you is not money, it's love and happiness. That's your currency. So, how are you going to put that at risk for explosive, tectonic, inflecting returns? What are you going to do to put it at risk? That's the question, right?

• 1:20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  The answers are really tricky, but the one answer that's not right is don't put it at risk. Don't put it at risk.

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So, I, I'm with you. Now, there are myriad ways that if you were to sort of take off your flak jacket and just walk into oncoming traffic with, like, emotional oncoming traffic with someone who you've been on a dating app, who you meet with in five minutes and they're cuckoo bananas, that could turn out poorly.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Of course, that's just Vegas. That's not entrepreneurship, that's just gambling.

• 1:20:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So, how, well, first I want to hear your story.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, this gets back to the issue at hand. And the reason I did that little prelude is because I don't want anybody to think that my screws are too loose. Right. Not my goal. Yeah. And finally. I'm not, it's insanity. So, okay. Rest my case. Insane, insane man on the podcast. Deeply unbalanced guest joins Tim Ferriss. So, when I was 24 years old, I was on a concert tour and I was making my living as a classical French horn player. I was on a concert tour in the Burgundy region of France. Going from town to town, playing concerts. And I was staying at this school. I don't know, it's just where we were housed during this, you know, we were going out from there. And at the same time, there was a music festival going on.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  And there were musicians from all over Europe that were studying at this music festival. And I was at this concert playing at this very school and playing, you know, playing my horn, looking out at the audience. And there was this girl smiling at me in the front row, beautiful girl smiling at me, just gorgeous. And I'm, you know, and I'm a red-blooded 24-year-old dude. And I'm like, obviously I'm going to make a mental note to go talk to her, you know? So I go to talk to her later and I find out two things. Number one, she's not French, even though I was in France. And number two, that she doesn't speak a single word of English. And it was hard because, you know, I was trying to talk to her in, you know, monosyllabic grunts and fruitless search for cognates. And I said, are you single? I mean, this is like this basic, are you single? And she says, yes, I'm divorced. I'm like, I'm not down with that. But what she meant was, I just broke up with my boyfriend.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  But she couldn't come up with any Latin-based words besides divorce, which actually comes from Latin. To try to get me to understand this point anyway. So it was a, it was a comedy of errors. And we went out to dinner and we went on some dates. And I left after a week and I went home and I called my dad in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle and I was living in New York at the time. I said, Dad, I think I met the girl I'm gonna marry. And where was she? From Barcelona. Barcelona. And he said, great, let's meet her. And I said, I got problems. Problem number one is that she doesn't live in the United States. Problem number two, she doesn't speak a word of English. Problem number three is that she made me aware that she doesn't believe in marriage because she thinks it's an anachronistic institution and she's never going to get married. It's a hell of a. Yeah, it's a. Concept to communicate in Tarzani is. Yeah, yeah, no, no, for sure.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  I mean, we're together for a week and we, you know.

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  You got there.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  We got there and, uh, and I couldn't get out of my head. It was like Our Lady of Guadalupe kinda. And I thought about it. I thought about it. And we exchanged letters and weirdly somehow talked on the phone. She started taking English classes. I started studying Spanish. Who knows when I'll see her. I traveled to Barcelona, saw her. She came to New York and visited me just a little bit here and there. And what I didn't tell her is that I had quit my job in New York and I'd won an audition to be a member of the symphony in Barcelona. Because I wanted to go see if I could close that deal. If I could change her philosophy of marriage. It took me two years, but I closed the deal. And 32 years later, we have three adult kids and one grandson and, and I'm still in love.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  So how did you? How did you end up debate teaming that? I'm just curious, like, how did?

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  I just wore her down.

• 1:23:39Tim Ferriss?

  You just wore her down?

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Wore her down. So, you know, we were, you know, I was living in Barcelona and she was in love with me. And so she's not like, get out. It's not like I was some weird stalker. She really was in love with me.

• 1:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  And, and she wanted to be with me, but you know, she, nobody in her family was married. I mean, this is not what you do in Barcelona.

• 1:23:55Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't realize that.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. It sounds like a big Catholic country. It's a post-Christian country. 3% of the population of Barcelona ever goes to mass. 3%.

• 1:24:03Tim Ferriss?

  I never would have guessed that.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  Denmark, kind of Mediterranean.

• 1:24:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. I had no idea.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody does for sure. I mean, but, but, you know, it has a long tradition. And she comes from a, a hard, red communist atheist family.

• 1:24:15Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  So suffice it to say that our background is a little bit different. I mean, again, she was beautiful and smart and funny and, and I was in love.

• 1:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  And just love will out. Love will out. And it finally, at the end of two years, I just finally I said, I got down on one knee and I said, are you ready to change your mind? She said, yes.

• 1:24:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So, once again, envy has showed its ugly head. And I have to admit, my French horn game, very weak.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Very weak.

• 1:24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Turns out the French horn was the least of it.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Tight pants, tight pants, big guns. In those days, I was six foot two and a hundred and forty-two pounds. My wife said that it was like hugging a tight sack of rocks.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Now she says it's like a loose leather bag of ropes. So, you know, I've made some progress.

• 1:25:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Is that progress?

• 1:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds like progress.

• 1:25:10Tim Ferriss?

  Ropes. Maybe that should be on my dating profile. If you hug me, I feel like, maybe not. That's a little too.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Two babies fighting under a blanket. I don't know.

• 1:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe you're so far removed that this doesn't make sense to ask, but what advice? Also, you're coming from a different orientation with the Catholicism, and I assume, maybe wrongly, but I imagine.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  It was mine, but not hers.

• 1:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right now, she fully aboard the Catholic train?

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  Fully aboard, but that took, that took a long time.

• 1:25:40Tim Ferriss?

  War down.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  Round two.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of prayer.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  As they say, this is one of those problems that requires prayer and fasting.

• 1:25:49Tim Ferriss?

  So you prayed and she fasted and you're like, no food. It will put the rosaries on its wrist.

• 1:25:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thoughts on how to find a partner?

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think about this an awful lot because this is the number one topic in my Science of Happiness class at HBS that they want to know about.

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  It's gotta be.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  It's gotta be. Oh, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. Because, you know, not only is it something that we all want, that everybody wants, it's something that's getting harder.

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, all the traditional scaffolding is gone unless you, perhaps you're part of, say, a Jewish community where.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Tim Ferriss?

  That type of Yenta-like matchmaking is a very esteemed.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but even then, the modern world is encroaching on that. And, you know, if you look at the comparison between in the eighties, when I was in my twenties, or the nineties, when you were in your twenties. Sorry, I didn't mean to shock you with that.

• 1:26:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's okay.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It's much, much, much harder.

• 1:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  I have the ring of Frodo, so I'm not planning on aging anymore from this point forward. Side note, you should look at photos of him now and 20 years ago. They're the same, the actor. Anyway.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, not me, though.

• 1:26:50Tim Ferriss?

  For those conspiracy.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  When I was in the Barcelona Symphony, I had this hair. It was like a great civilization.

• 1:26:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the locks of Samson.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  That was unbelievable. And, and so, you know, then I started going bald and getting more and more bald. And my brother, my older brother, he's very judgmental about me. He's funny. He loves me, but he says, you deserve it because of the life you've led.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Ooh, eat, eat too brutal.

• 1:27:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a lot of DHT, man.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Anyway, so what are the guardrails? What are the mistakes that we make? You know, what's actually making it harder? And there's a lot of things that go into it. You know, there's the fact that we're using tech where we would have used humans is deeply problematic. I mean, the fact that we have so much deal flow is making it harder. The paradox of choice is a real thing. Better, better, better, better, better. I mean, there's a ton of research on this, by the way, Tim. I mean, you've seen some of this research, for example, on car purchases, where, you know, you give two groups, you know, there's the treatment and control social science experiments, two groups, different car buying experiences where the first buys their car and there's no refund and there's no returns. And the other side can return it for any reason in the next six months. And the first group is much happier with their car because they're not thinking about it again and again and again.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  There's no more swiping on their car purchase. And so the same thing is when it's very easy to have a lot of selection, it gets much, much harder to attain satisfaction.

• 1:28:05Tim Ferriss?

  You're also exhausted more easily because of the decision fatigue.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I can, I'll have to take your word for it, but I mean, that's certainly true. That's in the data.

• 1:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm saying not outside of dating.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just in general.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  But the bigger problem actually comes because we're looking for the wrong thing in a partner. The data suggests that what everybody wants in a partner that they can curate carefully because of the online presence, because of the platforms, is they want compatibility. And they look for compatibility with sameness to them. I like this kind of food. You do too. Great. I vote like this. You do too. Great. I'm this religion or I'm no religion. I grew up here. I went to college. Where did you go to college, et cetera?

• 1:28:40Tim Ferriss?

  They're not looking for someone who doesn't speak their language, who...

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  They're looking for a sibling and, you know, and as my adult kids would say, that's not hot.

• 1:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  The truth is, we're way too compatible and we're sorting on compatibility with these technological means. And the biggest problem with dating today is we're less and less attracted to people. We're less and less attracted because they're too much like us. We need more complementarity and less compatibility. That in the old days used to say opposites attract. Not true. But you need a baseline of compatibility. But on top of that, you need difference. Difference is hot. Difference is... Fun. Difference is an adventure and you're just not gonna find it because nobody's gonna swipe on you. Quite frankly, if you're the other party, you know, a lot of people curate on language and culture and race. It's insanity. You know, that's the reason that good old fashioned human people who say they could fall in love.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  When you talk about people who fix you up on a blind date or the old fashioned matchmakers, they're always looking about complementarity. This introvert and this extrovert can fill in the gaps in each other in a kind of a divine and cosmic way. That's how I always kind of felt. I felt like my wife was, you know, I don't believe in magical thinking on this. Magical thinking is a big problem because soulmates don't exist and there's no such thing as love at first sight. But I always do feel like my wife Esther was, she was picked for me. She was really picked for me and because of the difference as much as anything else. I mean, she completes me. She makes me a better man. She knows when I'm going after the idol. She knows she can see it going after the lure. She can see it. She's like, mm, right?

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  And that's 32 years of experience together, but it's also the deep complementarity that came through because I was born in a particular time and I accidentally had this kind of experience and that's what we need. That's number one. This is clear. The second thing is goals. You know, when I ask people, you know, you're gonna meet the person of your dreams or the good enough person or whatever. What do you want to have after five years?

• 1:30:44Tim Ferriss?

  The good enough person.

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  To Paris's guide.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  The good enough wife.

• 1:30:51Tim Ferriss?

  To passable relationships.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Wife me up with someone good enough, man. Anyway, so, yeah. Because by the way.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Step one.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  There aren't.

• 1:31:02Tim Ferriss?

  Record.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  There aren't.

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  Just kidding.

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  I don't know, man.

• 1:31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Who knows?

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Complementarity.

• 1:31:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  It's like you've been in prison and I haven't. We complete each other.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  Clearly whatever I've been trying isn't working. Maybe I'll skip Barcelona and do the prison circuit. All right.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when you ask people, what do you want your relationship to look like in five years? They have kind of this magical notion of an ongoing passion. And that's the wrong goal. The right goal is what is called companionate love. You want to be best friends in five years. Five years to best friends. That's the goal. And if you write it out, and if you actually make it the goal, and then you have interim steps and a strategic plan, you might just get there. But if you're like, and and no, it's like if the magic feels like the magic's gone, obviously, there's something wrong with our love. No. Best friends who are married, they're gonna have plenty of passion, but you can't live like that. Look, the neurophysiological cascade of the experience of falling in love is unbelievably intense. It's 4th of July in your head. The bolus of testosterone and

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  estrogen at the very beginning of the relationship, massive increases in norepinephrine and dopamine that give you euphoria and concentration and focus on the other person. The deep dip in serotonin, your serotonin dips. Why? Because you want to ruminate on that person using the good old ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's the reason that falling in love is an awful lot like being clinically depressed. So you're both addicted to meth and depressed at the same time. That's what falling in love is like. And then you're gonna get that big dose of oxytocin, which is the neuropeptide that links you to the other person in this almost magical, confusing way. Man, that's just too much. You don't want that for the rest of your life.

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a lot.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Well, you'll be institutionalized.

• 1:32:45Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's pause there for a second.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  That was a lot.

• 1:32:48Tim Ferriss?

  It was a lot. I want to go, I want to go, I want to go from falling in love as meth and depression to the lightness of death.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  And we haven't even talked about meaning yet, Matt.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, we're gonna get there.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  We'll get there by the ninth hour.

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm keeping track. Hour nine, I have it bookmarked. Also, I have a promise I made to listeners that I have not fulfilled, which is your personal examples for using money, for experiences, time, whatever comes to mind. So we'll get to that. But before that, death meditation.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Tim Ferriss?

  Could, could you please describe your death meditation and why you have a death meditation?

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  Most people watching us are not afraid of death. Not pathologically afraid of death. And only about 20% of the population is pathologically afraid of death. And I bet you that it's less than 1% of Tim Ferriss followers. Because people watching this are in control of their lives, and they understand the contours of their lives, and they're looking at the truth of their lives. But they have a death fear. The death fear isn't physical death. And this is a problem. For some people, it's irrelevance. For some people, it's being forgotten. For a lot of your listeners, it's failure. Just straight on failure. Because they're strivers. They're achievers. Everybody has a death fear. And what is it? It's an ego threat. It's a threat to who you see as yourself. If Tim Ferriss's Tim Ferriss-ness is threatened,

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  that will provoke a panic in you. Because that's the ultimate death of who you see yourself. The way to get over that, and by the way, you have to get over that. We all have to get over that, or we won't be fully alive until we actually face the death that really matters to us. This is an insight that actually comes from the Theravada Buddhists across the southern tier of Asia, from Thailand and Myanmar to Vietnam and parts of Malaysia and Sri Lanka in particular. So the Theravada Buddhist monasteries, often you'll go in and you'll see photos of cadavers in different states of decomposition. Super, super macabre. I mean, you're like, what are these dudes all about here? And what they do is that usually there will be nine, nine states of decomposition.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  Photos, bodies, decomposing, falling apart, bones, bloated corpses. And they stand in front of each one and they say, "That is me." And then they move to the next one after contemplating and saying, "And that is me." And what are they doing? They're familiarizing themselves with the truth of their future, such that they can be liberated from any fear of physical death. Only then can they be fully alive. That's an important insight from Theravada Buddhism. That's a meditation called Maranassati. The Maranassati death meditation. Now, when I read that, I thought it was interesting. But I thought, it's a good thing to do. Because, you know, I shouldn't be making all of these decisions about when I'm old

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  and when I'm retired and when I die and what's gonna happen and call the lawyer and all that. I want to be free from all that stuff by understanding that life and death are, in a very real way, an illusion. Particularly because I believe in eternal life. But I have a death fear. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm afraid of? You know my death fear?

• 1:35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Who's gonna take care of your cats?

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  No, I don't know.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  That's good, man. Who's gonna take care of my dog, Choo Choo?

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  No, it's losing my mind. Hmm, on the way there. Yeah, cuz you know, you know what Arthur Brooks is? Gray matter. Look, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I'm not the cleverest guy in the world, but I make my living and I support my family and I understand me in terms of my ideas. Literally, my company is called ACB Ideas. It was very revealing to me when I contemplated the fact that I- Did you say ACB? Yeah, it's my Arthur Charles Brooks. Oh, okay, took me a second.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  I just can't remember the alphabet. Littlest Lexic.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  It's like X, Z, Y. Anyway, so- From Long Island, sorry, guys.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, and my mother was showing signs of dementia in her early 50s. And she was quite demented by the time she was my age, and it runs in families. It's genetic. And it doesn't mean I'm gonna get the bullet. It doesn't mean I'm not being morbid about it. I'm not being fatalistic about it. Probably the odds are in my favor, but I'm just, I'm just terrified of that. And when I recognized that, I realized I need a Maranasati meditation on that. And that's what I contemplate. I'll take two minutes and I'll think, my memory's failing and I don't know why. And then I imagine going to the neurologist, the neurologist saying, "Well, I think you need to come into my office." And then I imagine myself telling my kids, "The future's gonna be rough."

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  And then I imagine my work slipping away. My inability to have this kind of conversation, to write a book, to share an idea, to help somebody with these ideas.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  And then I imagine myself not remembering what I don't remember. And then I imagine being a beloved son of God with no memory at all.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Now, it's heavy, right? Seems like that ending point is important. It's the most important because you end on the truth.

• 1:38:02Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're not religious, you just end up, to use the parlance of the kids these days, just depressed AF? I mean, are you just

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  shit out of luck?

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:38:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  Because at the end of the day, in the Maranisati meditation, you recognize the illusion of the tragedy that was your death in the first place.

• 1:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. New life will emerge. Will it be you? Will it be somebody else? Do you care? See, when you look into the abyss, you can cope with it. You're stronger than that. My students, by the way, at Harvard, graduate students, Harvard Business School, best in the world, so we like to think. They're afraid of failure because they've never failed. They've never failed. I mean, you and I have struggled and, you know, we're older and, you know, I've failed a lot. But my students are deeply afraid of failure. I mean, I basically got kicked out of college when I was 19. It turns out you're not supposed to drop all your required classes and take nothing but Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming. Turns out that's not the secret to academic success.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Kids, you know, make a note of it. So I failed, right? But a lot of my students haven't. And so I asked them to do the Maranisati meditation on their own academic and professional failure. Number one, two minutes. I think I'm falling behind academically and the people around me are getting better grades. Two, I just got put on academic probation. This was my dream to come to this school and I'm not succeeding. Three, the job market is looking bad compared to other people. I can't believe it. Four, I think I need to move home for a while. Five, my parents feel sorry for me. That's when they cry. Right?

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Because all you want is for mom to be proud of you. That's all you want when you're a success addict. That's all you want. And imagine that, look into that, stare into it, stare into it. And they do, and they get over it, and they can master it. That's the Maran Asati death meditation on the self-objectification of the success addict.

• 1:40:10Tim Ferriss?

  See, what do you see in those students? Because they come from all different backgrounds and different orientations, religious or not, or somewhere in between?

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  Some are, some aren't.

• 1:40:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What types of effects? And how frequently do you personally do this type of death meditation?

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  A lot, because I have my own death meditation. I'm not, I mean, I contemplate failure sometimes because I'm afraid of it, but I'm not deathly afraid of it. The truth of the matter is, the great thing about being 46 as opposed to 26 for you, the great thing about being 59 instead of 29 for me, is that bad stuff is gonna happen and it's gonna be okay. Bad stuff's just gonna happen, right? I mean, the truth is that we realize, you and I both realize, that the worst thing that's ever happened in life probably hasn't happened yet.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  And, okay, that's heavy, but it's not that heavy. You know, we're gonna survive, you've survived a lot, and it's actually gonna be okay. I don't wanna fail, you know? I've always got, you know, we have a book coming out, I have a big book coming out a few weeks from when we're taping this episode. And I deeply wanted to be successful, but I can't control that. And so I don't have to do much more than a couple of Maran Asati meditations, you know, the market failure of a book. But I have to do it about losing my mind, because that feels deeply existential to me. I have to do it a lot. I do it at least once a week, actually, because I wanna remember, I need to remember. And if I don't, I'm gonna be walking kind of on eggshells, and just sort of wondering, and having that kind of minor sense of dread. I don't wanna live that way, I don't need to live that way. It's not important for me to live that way.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  On the contrary, it's important for me not to live that way, because I won't be fully alive now. I'll be living prospectively in a future, and that future's dominated by fear, and then I'm really not washing the dishes. I'm really not enjoying that juicy peach. On the contrary, I'm breaking my teeth on the pit, and it's not even a real pit. That's crazy.

• 1:41:57Tim Ferriss?

  So.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Not yet, really yet.

• 1:42:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. This is, I think, is a good tie in to meaning, and I'm going to get there with a self indulgent reference back to Marcus Aurelius. For people who have not read Meditations, read Meditations. It was never intended for publication.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  Truly.

• 1:42:14Tim Ferriss?

  These are effectively the pocket musings of someone deeply conflicted, but also incredibly impressive during war campaigns and otherwise, but lots of thoughts on death. And also, for those interested, there's a, it's considered a Stoic practice. It exists in a lot of different varieties, but Memento Mori, there are these meditations, premeditatio malorum.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:38Tim Ferriss?

  Which.

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  It's the Greek Myrnasati, for all intensive purposes, right?

• 1:42:41Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  Or Roman, right?

• 1:42:44Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And he also thought very deeply on meaning. Let's come to meaning. So we identified two, I guess, of the legs on the.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Stool.

• 1:42:53Tim Ferriss?

  On the stool.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:54Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning. How should we think about meaning?

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  Meaning's a hard one. Meaning's the hard one. I mean, look, I mean, enjoyment's no joke, and satisfaction takes work, but meaning eludes some people their entire lives because they don't know what they're looking for. They're fumbling around for something. They don't know exactly what it is. And a lot of people, they deeply suspect that it doesn't exist, that it doesn't actually exist. You look at a lot of 20th century and 19th century philosophers, and they say it doesn't exist. I mean, there's sort of three schools of thought about meaning. There's the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. It's all kind of based on meaning in the following way. Essence precedes existence. Meaning, you have meaning in life that precedes your actual life, and

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  your job is to find it and live up to it. But it's already out there. You just need to go looking for it. Right? In the 19th and 20th centuries, that was relaxed with two major schools of philosophical thought, nihilism and existentialism. Existentialism, you know, Sartre, and even to a certain extent, Kierkegaard would say that existence precedes essence. In other words, you're born, and there is no meaning until you create it.

• 1:44:05Tim Ferriss?

  Tabula rasa. Good luck, kid.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, good luck. Go, go make it. And if it's no good, it's on you, man. And by the way, Sartre, he has a very empowering, a very muscular philosophy, because he says, you have to live up to the responsibility of creating your essence and living according to it. It's sort of Freudian in its way. And then, of course, there's Nietzsche, our old pal Friedrich. You know, a lot of young men love Nietzsche because, by the way, it's unbelievably beautiful prose. Gorgeous writer, including in English. You don't have to go, like, learn German to read it. But, you know, The Gay Science, which is one of his most famous texts where he said, "God is dead, and we killed him." It lands, right? But his whole point is existence is real, but essence is a figment of your imagination. So don't even try to find it. That's nihilism.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  We're struggling with these schools of thought. And we all suspect, it doesn't matter how religious you are, you know, it doesn't matter what your wiring actually happens to be, you kind of wonder if maybe Nietzsche and Sartre were right. So you go in search of it. And it turns out, I want to go find the meaning of life, is too big a question. You'll never find it by, you know, sitting at the mouth of the guru's cave or with the ayahuasca shaman saying, "I just want to find meaning in life." You need to boil it down to really sub-questions, which are all about coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? I need to believe something about why things happen the way they do. It doesn't have to be religious. It can be completely secular. It might even be nihilistic. You need a purpose. You need to answer a purpose question, which is, what's the purpose of my life? And what direction am I going?

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  What's the goal of my life? What's the endpoint of my life? And the last is significance, which is, why does it matter that I'm alive? Now, I have a test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis in their life. It's really just two questions. And to pass the test, you need incredibly true, honest, and compelling answers. There's no right answers. There's only wrong answers or no answers. So you want to take the test? Sure, why not? It's go time.

• 1:46:08Speaker 02

  Question number one. Punish me for all the ayahuasca I've done. Go for it. I didn't say there's something wrong with it. I'm just saying this. It's, uh, it's, uh, what do we say? It's necessary but not sufficient. I'm like, cat and I, I'm like, an opus de myself.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  I left it back at the hotel. Yeah. Damn.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Why are you alive? Do you have an answer to the question of why you're alive?

• 1:46:35Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I have a very clinical answer for it.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Tell me. Well, I mean, there's the physical answer, but metaphysically, why are you alive? Which can be two, one of two things. Either who created you, or what you're put on earth to do? You can answer that in one of two ways. Do you have a strong belief?

• 1:46:52Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  In why you're alive?

• 1:46:54Tim Ferriss?

  I have a strong driver for taking advantage of the fact that I am alive, but I don't have a story of a creator, or something along those lines.

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  Or a strong purpose. You know, it can be a creator or a purpose.

• 1:47:08Tim Ferriss?

  I do feel like I have a strong purpose, but it doesn't relate to my birth.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  That's okay. It's, you know, the why of your life. Our mutual friend Simon Sinek talks about this. You know, start with why, and the why of your life can be because of a creation, or it can be because I exist to, you know, lift other people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, which by the way, is the why of my life.

• 1:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  So, that's number one.

• 1:47:30Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  If it's there, but it's in coate, it's not quite clear enough, find out the answer to that and write it down, and then perfect it over a six-month period.

• 1:47:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would say that for me, I mean, it's looking at and experiencing things in unorthodox ways so that I can teach.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  And why do you want to teach?

• 1:47:48Tim Ferriss?

  Mostly to alleviate suffering.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Yes. In other words, you want to lighten the load for other people.

• 1:47:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  And so, in other words, you want to serve your sisters and brothers. Is that fair?

• 1:47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Okay. That's a great why. That's a great why. That's a great answer to the first question, why are you alive?

• 1:48:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't feel conflicted about that.

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  Okay, so the second one's harder. For what would you be willing to die today?

• 1:48:06Tim Ferriss?

  I don't have a ready answer.

• 1:48:09Speaker 02

  It's a hard one. It's a hard one.

• 1:48:11Tim Ferriss?

  What's your answer?

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  A lot of people don't. For my faith, for my family, for my country, and for you. I am willing to die for others. That's the answer. I mean, I probably won't be called to it, but I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually willing to do it. And here's how I, I learned this from my son. I learned this actually from my son. I mean, I have theoretical answers that are politically correct in the Catholic sphere. I would die for the Catholic Church. I would die for my faith. These things are true, by the way. I really would, but it's too pat. Here's how I learned this from my son. I have three kids, 25, 23, and 20. And my middle son is named Carlos. And Carlos is, he's a kinetic boy.

• 1:48:52Speaker 02

  He's a fan of yours. You know, he's probably watching us right now going, oh, Dad's gonna talk about me right now. Sorry, Carlos. Sorry, Carlos. And, you know, Carlos was having a good old time in high school, you know, like we had substantial grade problems and academic issues. And, you know, my wife's like, at least we know he's not cheating. Yeah. But the problem was, he wasn't really having fun. I think it was a meaning problem. And in search of the answers to the questions after high school, he really became an entrepreneur with his life. And, you know, we have, I asked my kids to do a business plan when they're in high school, because they're entrepreneurs, and I'm VC. I'm an investor. I deserve a business plan. And when they're not, when they weren't original, I'd send them back for revisions. Bank of Dad.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  And it's really fun to be with my son, you can imagine. So, um, Carlos's business plan for his life was, by the time it went through several rounds of revisions, was appropriately in Orthodox. He was gonna go work on a farm by himself and find the answers to the questions. Work hard. And so he actually got a job on a wheat farm in Idaho, a real job, not some sort of, you know, hobby farm. No, no, no. It was an 8,000 acre working wheat farm. He lived in the farmer's basement for the first year. He picked rocks out of the soil. He started at the bottom, made minimum wage, fixed fences, cut down dead trees, ran a combine by himself 16 hours a day. Why did he choose this? How would he explain it?

• 1:50:21Speaker 02

  Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks, away from his family, away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were in COAT. They were like, why am I alive? I don't know. Maybe I'll find it in the cap of a combine. Maybe I'll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil. Maybe I'll find it by doing something hard with my hands. Then he joined the military. He was 19 years old. He joined the Marine Corps. And boot camp is no walk in the park for the US Marine Corps, as we've all heard. But then it got harder from there. He did infantry training battalion, and then the in-doc for the scout sniper platoon, which is a branch of the special forces and the, and the Marines. Today, he's Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines 35 Scout Sniper Platoon. And he's got answers.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  Now, that's a scary job for me and his mom. He goes on field trips, right?

• 1:51:10Tim Ferriss?

  Field trips.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  And thank God, nothing's happened to him. He's getting out of the military in December of this year. But he's got answers.

• 1:51:17Tim Ferriss?

  What types of answers? I mean, I don't want you to-

• 1:51:19Speaker 02

  Here's his answers. I'll tell you his answers. Carlos, why are you alive? Because God made me. For what are you willing to die?

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  For my faith, and for my family, and for my friends, and for the United States of America. Boom! These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give. But these are super solid answers. I'm super proud of my son. Because he earned the answers to his meaning questions. That everybody watching us has got to earn it. Everybody who's watching us has got to go on a quest, a vision quest for the answers to the meaning questions. There's no other way to do it. Your dad can't tell you. Your priest can't tell you. The holy books can give you inklings. They can give you shadows on the cave wall, to get back to the old platonic metaphor. You need to live, and to try things, and to go through a process of discernment.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  And the way to do that is to do hard things. Is to challenge yourself. And to say to yourself, I will not stop until I have answers to these questions to my own satisfaction.

• 1:52:24Tim Ferriss?

  So, hearing you describe Carlos's experience. Hi, Carlos. And congratulations on the trajectory.

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, my dad embarrassed me, but Tim Ferriss just said hi to me on this podcast, so it's all good.

• 1:52:37Tim Ferriss?

  It was not easy. I have some friends who are formerly Marine Force Recon. That is not-

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  The recon guys are-

• 1:52:43Tim Ferriss?

  That is not an easy path.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  No, it isn't.

• 1:52:45Tim Ferriss?

  None of that is easy.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Tim Ferriss?

  I think I was over processing the "for what would you be willing to die tomorrow?" I think it was the tomorrow piece-

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:55Tim Ferriss?

  -that I fixated on. So, family-

• 1:52:57Speaker 02

  Right. You would die for your family. You just would.

• 1:52:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, family and close friends. I can give that answer.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:53:01Tim Ferriss?

  I was thinking of it more hypothetically as a "for what happening in the world, would you be willing to basically off yourself tomorrow?"

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  Is there an idea for which you'd be willing to die? Is there a truth? Because this is really where it gets super intense.

• 1:53:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's where it gets intense.

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, when Carlos says, "I am willing to die for my faith. I am willing to die for the United States of America." Which, for him, is an ideal of liberty. He's, by the way, for those of you outside the United States, he's willing to die for our allies, too.

• 1:53:30Speaker 02

  Dying for an idea, that's super heavy. I mean, that's like- Pure grade meaning, because people are gonna say, are you kidding me? Are you nuts? This is not, I'm willing to kill for an idea. That's, that's like, you know, that's kindergarten stuff. That's kindergarten stuff. No, I'm willing to die for something. I'm willing to give my own life. I'm, I'm willing to take yours. Yeah, you and every other half-baked, dark triad malignant narcissist, cancel culture trait psychopath.

• 1:54:00Tim Ferriss?

  I thought you were talking to me for a second.

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:54:03Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, how'd we get here all of a sudden?

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  Arthur Brooks got really abusive on my pocket. No, no, no, no, Tim, I love you.

• 1:54:09Tim Ferriss?

  Those were one of your high negative moments?

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  That you're a beautiful man. But, but I mean, I mean, come on. I mean, it's everybody around the world is willing to, you know, kill for, you know, what they think or cancel or hurt people what they think. But the real question is, are you willing to sacrifice what you have for an idea? And that's, that's really hard.

• 1:54:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm not sure. That's a tough one for me to answer. I think also, thinking about what you're willing to die for, let me personalize it. Thinking about what I'm willing to die for, I also want to be very aware if there are things I would be willing to die for that could be manipulated to make me do things that I might not currently be morally aligned with.

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  Totally, totally, for sure.

• 1:54:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think the allegiance.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 1:54:51Tim Ferriss?

  It needs to be very, or for me, I want to be aware if there are things, like for instance, faith has been manipulated by politicians.

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  So has patriotism.

• 1:54:59Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  My goodness.

• 1:55:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  I mean, a lot of people listening say, you die for the United States of America? You're crazy?

• 1:55:03Tim Ferriss?

  Which is not to say that it's wrong. It's just very context dependent.

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  Very context dependent and it requires a lot of updating and serious thought. And it's not good enough to just be sort of rah rah rah and taking it to face value. It takes serious discernment.

• 1:55:21Tim Ferriss?

  So we have the, why were you born or for what?

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  Why are you alive?

• 1:55:27Tim Ferriss?

  Are you alive? What would you be willing to die for?

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Tim Ferriss?

  Got any more?

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  Those are the ones. I mean, what those do is that they really kind of wrap up coherence, purpose and significance into two kind of handy dandy questions. And, and the point is really this. I mean, it's, it's easy for me to frame that up is, you know, once you find those, you're all good to go. All right. But the truth is you're going to go through the rest of your life contemplating these things. And these are the questions to ask on your birthday. Are these still the things that I believe? Have I updated my knowledge? Do I have a, a better sense of who I am? Have I gone backwards a little bit? Have I lost this sense of what I'm willing to die for? Do I need to go a little deeper at this point? And, and touching up on those questions turns out to be a really good, it's, it's sort of the same thing. When you go to the doctor and they do the same test again and again and again and again. I have a series of tests that I do, or these questions that I ask myself like that.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  You know, about the reverse bucket list and the meaning questions and am I pursuing my pleasures socially? And, and making memory with my prefrontal cortex? I also have, by the way, a, a spreadsheet of 19 micronutrients that feed into my macronutrients. And I grade myself on tenths of one percent on a one to 10 scale weighted with respect to what I've, what my best estimate of my well-being. And when I'm going backwards on those things, I set a strategic plan for my year. So I'm, you know, I know, and I'm getting crazier by the minute, right?

• 1:56:45Tim Ferriss?

  I, I'm into it. I encourage it. I want to pour gasoline on the fire.

• 1:56:48Speaker 02

  Let's do it, man.

• 1:56:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I, so we already talked about death meditation. We talked about your experience in Mexico. And in Build a Life You Want, obviously, we're not going to go into all the micronutrients of each of the legs on the stool per se. But I'm curious whether it's meaning or one of the others, maybe meaning, but doesn't have to be. Could you give some examples of some of those? I don't want to say antecedents, but micronutrients, the cast of characters and ingredients that are important for sort of healthy functioning?

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  For sure, for sure. And, you know, you can break them up in as variated a ways you want. You could make 20,000 of them, but really there's four that we should be thinking about. So there's four fundamental micronutrients and I make it more varied than that. I've got 19 because, because they're really about love and relationships. That's really what. What it's all about. And the big four are your search for the divine, or your spiritual journey, or your philosophical, you know, your faith, whatever that happens to be, religious or not, your love for something bigger than you, so you can stand in awe. It's your family relationships. This is the most mystical kinds of love that we get because we didn't choose the loves that were chosen for us. And sometimes we're like, yeah, I wouldn't have chosen that. Friendship, you know, and friendship, when I'm talking about that, I talk a lot about loneliness,

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  because especially strivers, hardworking people, a lot of people watching us there, they have a lot of people around them, but what they have is deal friends, but not real friends? Your deal friends are super useful to you. Your real friends are useless, cosmically, beautifully useless. And so I go into a lot of detail with my students about how to build useless friendships. Not worthless, that's different. I've got those too. And last but not least, it's loving everybody is expressed through your work. And that means serving others with your work. Your work should be a service profession, no matter what you're doing. And so faith, family, friends and work. And then there's, you know, we branch out from there, you know, and I'm talking about family, I'm talking about different branches of family that I'm trying to make sure I'm working on. And I'm talking about, you know, my marriage is critically important. It gets one of the

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  absolute highest scores in importance. Not always in terms of quality, because I'm not the best husband, but in terms of importance for sure. And that's because that's the apex of two of those columns, both family and friendship. My best friend and also the adopted member of my family is my wife. And so therefore, my marriage is really at the top of those two pillars. And so I'm thinking about that a lot. So I break it up into subcategories, but they all go into those silos of faith, family, friends and work. Work that serves, work that's meaningful, right? Earn my success. And then I say, okay, well, you know, what does it mean to earn my success? What does it mean to serve others? How do I know? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I start, you know, getting down to brass tacks. I start putting numbers on it. And if the numbers aren't, if I'm going backwards in a particular year, I do it my birthday and my off birthday, by the way. Your off birthday?

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, my six month birthday, November 21st. Got it. My birthday is May 21st. Yeah, that's convenient. You got Thanksgiving week. Yeah, I've got Thanksgiving week. And so it gives me, you know, a chance to actually think about these things in some detail, to be sure. And then I've got it, you know, I've got the data going back to. About the year 1999, I've got it going forward and the system has gotten better along the way and changed.

• 1:59:53Tim Ferriss?

  What are the most important changes you've made to the system, would you say?

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, the most important change, the single most important change I made to the system was the recognition that I knew a lot about happiness, but wasn't happy because I was studying it, but I wasn't doing it. The biggest change to the system was using my knowledge to change my habits. That was number one, far and away, right? It's one thing, I was giving people all this, all this advice about friendships and about any good marriage and all that, like, I was looking at my life and I wasn't living these things. I was just like everybody else, you know, waking up going, sure hope I feel happy today. It was pathetic. It was pathetic. It was like, it was like a, a drug and alcohol counselor getting up and, you know, taking a bunch of bong hits and having a six pack. It was craziness. And by the way, it was my wife who finally clued me.

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  She's like, you have a PhD, right? What are you using it for? Exactly.

• 2:00:45Tim Ferriss?

  And you're like, your English is going a long way.

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  You're killing me sweetheart, you're killing me. But, you know, I'm writing academic journal articles that 14 people read so I can get promotion and tenure. It was ridiculous.

• 2:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  So how did you, I imagine, even if you're not necessarily walking the walk as much as you would like, you believe in what you are sharing. So it wasn't necessarily conviction issue.

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you then translate it to action? Are you just like, you know what? If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. Let me commit to things that I block out so that they are unavoidable in a sense.

• 2:01:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Tim Ferriss?

  How did you convert it?

• 2:01:18Speaker 02

  Well, I started by doing habits and practices that were very, very specific. I mean, extremely specific, as specific as the stuff in the, you know, the four hour body specific. And I was writing stuff down, I held whole notebooks of protocols and things that I was trying. I was trying things on myself based on science and when it worked, I would keep it and I would write it down and would practice it. Turns out that wasn't good enough, you know, because that was too hacky, you know, that wasn't really habits. To engrain a habit, you got to do one more step, which is that you got to teach it.

• 2:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:01:48Speaker 02

  The reason I'm a happiness professor is because I want to lash myself to the mast and I want to be completely committed. Because, look, I mean, if I'm doing something that's clearly at odds with what I'm teaching. I'm gonna hear about it. I'm gonna hear about it for my students. I'm gonna hear about it for my family. I'm gonna hear about it. Good Lord, I'm gonna hear about it on, on social media. Not that I'm paying that much attention to that because I, I wanna be happy. And it's really, really important. So basically, there's a protocol in my life, which is number one, understand. Number two, practice. Number three, share. And that's the protocol that works for everybody when it comes to happiness. You gotta take those three steps. You gotta do the work and understand. It's, it's funny because I've done all this work over the years with the Dalai Lama. And he always says the same thing. If you wanna be a spiritual adept, think more, feel less.

• 2:02:33Speaker 02

  Think more, feel less.

• 2:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  I would not expect.

• 2:02:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:02:36Tim Ferriss?

  That to be the framing. Okay, what is that?

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  Well, he wakes up. Well, he first wakes up in the morning in the first two hours of his meditation. He gets up at three or three thirty in the morning. The first thing that he does after a little bit on his exercise bike and hanging out with his cat. The first thing that he does is two hours of analytical meditation, which Catholics call mental prayer. That means you take a couple of lines of sacred scripture and you analyze it and you think about it. Most learning doesn't happen when the professor talks about something. If you understand everything the professor says, it's not a hard enough class. And you don't have a very good professor. He has to blow your mind with something and you gotta go away and think about it. And then you learn it through your own thinking. That's analytical meditation or mental prayer.

• 2:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  And is the Dalai Lama using scripture in this sense?

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tibetan Buddhist scripture. So he's contemplating something, you know, words of the Buddha or, or Shanti Deva or any of the, the ancient.

• 2:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  Tactical question, is he choosing it or is it flip open the book and, which would not denigrate it? I'm just wondering.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  Drop the needle?

• 2:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  I know. He's, I mean, he's, it's extraordinary. I mean, the, the holy scriptures for Tibetan Buddhists are vast. There's a library in Dharamsala that's just stack after stack after stack after stack. It's not a Bible. It's not like a collection of books in a little library called the Bible. It's just, it's enormous. And, and the monks are going through the scriptures again and again and again. So he has, I'm sure, he hasn't explained it to me, but I'm sure that he has actually a regular rotation that he's going through to do his, and, and that's what we need to do.

• 2:03:58Tim Ferriss?

  He's got the equivalent of these ten exercises when you go to the gym, skip the bench press. Like he's got his.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, kinda.

• 2:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  His greatest hits.

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  No doubt. Yeah, no doubt. And so that's really important to do in the science. of happiness is to look at what you know the best protocols you know what does it mean to stand up to your negativity bias by actually practicing gratitude when what you're feeling is resentment how do you do that how do you actually achieve a state of metacognition awareness of your own feelings such that you can choose reactions in the face of emotions how can you get into the state of the I self which is the state in which you're observing the world as opposed to observing yourself well it starts with knowledge of what these concepts are and then you put it into practices real exercises I have a column in the Atlantic that comes out every Thursday morning that's next on my list of questions

• 2:04:44Speaker 02

  the third part of every column is do these three things is taking the science and then applying to your life in these three ways and so it's application and change of habits and a commitment to that and the best way to cement in those ideas and by lashing yourself to the mast and that's by teaching these things to everybody else and everybody look I have a lab at Harvard called the leadership and happiness lab the whole point of the lab is not bench science and pouring stuff into test tubes or doing new experiments it's learning how we can all be happiness teachers how can Tim Ferriss be a happiness teacher we already are by working on it and there's no reason that you have to be happy to be a happiness teacher this is not like playing basketball thank God yeah totally I mean on the contrary the people are struggles for the best I'm not as miserable as some you're fine I mean the point is that you're

• 2:05:29Speaker 02

  but I do have struggles I mean I do have challenges of course you do so do I you're self-aware you're self-aware and part of your commitment because I know your work part of your commitment to lifting other people up is sharing your journey this is what it comes down to so you joke about yeah but the truth of the matter is we're all ah we all are and sharing that is actually part of the way that you're practicing these protocols you're not hacking anything you're actually trying to build these habits and then the teaching role you're a teacher by the way because this is a teaching podcast we're not shooting the breeze and saying what'd you see on TV and uh went to a restaurant no we're talking about heavy stuff because we actually want to teach these ideas and lift other people up so that's the secret man learn more think more I feel learn think second

• 2:06:13Speaker 02

  Turn this into habits and practice this as habits. Third, share with others and commit to other people through your teaching. That's the secret to happiness.

• 2:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Commit, commit in what sense? Just energetically taking the magnifying glass off of yourself?

• 2:06:30Speaker 02

  And committing to actually these practices in your own life.

• 2:06:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:06:33Speaker 02

  You know, and this can often be, I've been doing this thing wrong and I don't want to keep doing this thing wrong. And me telling you is making yourself accountable to another person, like all 12 step programs work this way, right?

• 2:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  Honestly, 12 step programs, AA, some of the most important and impressive decentralized organizations I've ever seen.

• 2:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I've never participated, but I'm so impressed.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  But they require accountability.

• 2:06:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  Because basically what 12 step programs do is knowledge of what's wrong with me, committing to new habits and sharing it with others. That's why AA works is because of those three steps as well.

• 2:07:05Tim Ferriss?

  They do sneak some God in there.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, the higher power for sure, the higher power.

• 2:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  Which is helpful.

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm not going to deny it. One facet that I really appreciate of your work and your writing is that you straddle the very old and the very new. And you mentioned Aquinas earlier. Again, everybody read a few pages at least on Wikipedia about Aquinas. And then Aristotle. And one of your popular columns is about Aristotle's 10 secrets to happiness. I wonder if any, I do have them in front of me.

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I can't remember them.

• 2:07:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was just going to say.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  It's a problem making weekly copy, you know?

• 2:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, let me, how about this? How about I read through?

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Tim Ferriss?

  And then I would love for you to pick out one or two perhaps that have been particularly impactful for you or for your readers.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07:55Tim Ferriss?

  Here we go. Name your fears and face them. Two, know your appetites and control them. Three, be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift. Four, give as generously as you can. Five, focus more on the transcendent, disregard the trivial. Six, true strength is a controlled temper. Seven, never lie, especially to yourself. Eight, stop struggling for your fair share. Nine, forgive others and forbear their weaknesses. 10, define your morality, live up to it even in private. And I want to take one off the table.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:08:29Tim Ferriss?

  Which is the last one because there's a, there's a recency bias here since we've been talking, I think, fairly extensively about that. But.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38Tim Ferriss?

  Those are.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  There we go. So. Start with number seven. All right. Never lie. Be impeccable with your word, especially with you. Now, I know a lot of people who are pretty honest. Frankly, the reason my wife fell in love with me is not my, you know, my stunning good looks and, you know, my, my lousy accent. And the gray hair at the time. Gray hair. No, great hair. Great hair, I know. I mean, it was spectacular if I do say so myself, but the, um, the reason she told me later is because I was the first man that never lied to her. I never lied. Now, that's part of my upbringing and, you know, that's, has to do with your family, et cetera. That was a really super important value in my home.

• 2:09:21Speaker 02

  You had to be honest. The only really, you know, dramatic and scary consequences with my parents are from lying. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. And so the result is it was kind of, in a way, easier for me because of the way that I was raised, but I was the first guy she'd ever met that didn't lie. She's like, what's up with this dude? He doesn't lie. And, and I've procured, you know, when my, when my oldest son, both of my sons, 25 and 23, they're both married. And when my 25-year-old. 25 and 23, both married. They're both married, yeah. Wow, I need to get relationship from, advice from your son. Well, my older son, he's a piece of work. I mean, he's, I learned a lot from him. He's literally one of the brightest Native Intelligence people that I've ever met, but he's also has this, this super

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  adroit moral instinct to him. And he asked me, he said, tell me one thing that I should never do, because I'm in love with this girl, that I should never do. He asked, you know, good questions like that. And I thought about it. I said, it's actually pretty easy. Never lie to her ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, until you go to the grave. Never lie to her and ask her never to lie to you, no matter what the consequences. That's the secret to the pure oxygen of a true companionate love, the mystical love of.

• 2:10:37Speaker 02

  The romance where you feel truly chosen for each other has to be based on honesty. It has to be. And a lot of people are like, yeah, yeah, good luck with that. Right. But and there are lots of things. That doesn't mean you have to say, by the way, sweetheart, your butt looks fat in that.

• 2:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  Just gonna ask.

• 2:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, no, it doesn't mean you have to volunteer every single thing that you're thinking because you're not insane. But when, when there's a direct question, there's a direct answer. So I'm going to tell you, okay, that's fine. But that's, you say in Spanish, that's primer curso. That's, that's, you know, that's.

• 2:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Table stakes.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  Table stakes, man. You want to really be in the game? Never lie to yourself. And we're doing it all the time. We're doing it all the time. We don't want to face up to the truth. We don't want to look really in the mirror and not so that we can, you know, think how great our hair looks or whatever, but so that we can actually see the good and the bad. And to say, I'm a true human being. That's a hard thing to do. And people lie to themselves constantly. And Aristotle talked about that and Aquinas and, and the Buddha. And, you know, one of the things that they all have in common is that they have this impeccable idea of self honesty, which is that's taking a draft of the purest liquor of life. It's like, yeah, I can drink that. I'm gonna drink that. Really?

• 2:11:51Speaker 02

  You tough enough to drink that? And once you start doing that, I mean, it's just, it's hard. It's really hard. But it's life changing.

• 2:11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So I have a question about that. And it also makes me think about some of the scientists I respect most, like Richard Feynman.

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Tim Ferriss?

  Who says, you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool.

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  Well, for sure. And a lot of people say, because I'm religious, that I'm fooling myself. Right?

• 2:12:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this leads not to a religion specific question, but rather just to a fine slicing, which is sometimes, and I'm going off the cuff, so this isn't going to be polished, but we lie to ourselves in the sense that we have a story about ourselves or the world that we know isn't quite true, but we repeat it enough because we want it to be true. Then there are times when we lie to ourselves, but we are in the delusion. It is because we have a lack of awareness or. Who knows, there are any number of factors that have fed into this belief, which is simply not accurate for whatever reason. So how do you catch, how do you catch yourself? Could you give examples, hypothetical or otherwise of?

• 2:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  Cause I think most people say, I don't want to lie to myself.

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:12:57Tim Ferriss?

  But when it comes down to actually catching those self lies, that self deception in the butterfly net. So you can do something with that. How do you do that?

• 2:13:07Speaker 02

  Well, you commit yourself to being uncomfortable for one thing. So there's a couple of different ways to do that. Number one is you seek outside counsel. You ask people who really know you well. You ask them to be committed to telling you the absolute truth. And then you ask them incredibly hard questions about yourself. Right? And you should have friends that can do that for you. This is one of the ways that you can do it. Your friends really have to be able to tell you. Being a good friend usually means telling you convenient lies. That's not the right criterion for your closest friends. Your real friends, your real friends who should be like, buddy, I don't think you're being straightforward with that right now. See, this is I'm making, I'm doing a fake Atlanta accent. Cause my, my best friend is a guy named Frank and he lives in Atlanta and he, and we are committed to telling each other the truth. And boy, does he ever give it to me both barrels.

• 2:13:52Speaker 02

  When he thinks I'm being full of it, buddy.

• 2:13:55Speaker 02

  I don't know. I know you're saying that thing, but let's drill down on that a little bit, shall we? I talk to him every week and that's super important.

• 2:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  Every week.

• 2:14:03Speaker 02

  Sure. I talk to you because he's a real friend and that takes work.

• 2:14:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right, no, I understand. But is that like you have a standing?

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  No, but he's somebody where we're committed to when the call comes in and says, Frank, I take the call, even if it's during work time, I take the call. But otherwise you, you know, you can't take every single call that comes in. There are certain colleagues, certain family members and Frank.

• 2:14:26Tim Ferriss?

  And have you guys explicitly made some type of mutual commitment? And the reason I ask is there are environments also that I suppose I could join, but I haven't up to this point. For instance, YPO forums, these small groups.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Those are quite good.

• 2:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  They are very good.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  Six, seven, eight guys.

• 2:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I know people who have benefited from it tremendously. And there, as I understand it, based on my friend's stories, that there are many hot seat moments where you get your beliefs and. Stories and approaches and strategies interrogated.

• 2:14:56Speaker 02

  And you were committed in a IPO forum to have your BS called out.

• 2:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  So if you're saying something I know is not true about you.

• 2:15:03Tim Ferriss?

  There are some great rules. People can study it also if you wanted to try to mimic or replicate it. I guess for a lot of folks, I hate to say it, but I think especially men, they may not have sort of a codified setting like that.

• 2:15:17Speaker 02

  Men, especially successful men, tend to get lonelier and lonelier as they get older.

• 2:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Speaker 02

  Women tend to get less and less lonely, but men tend to get lonelier and lonelier. So about 60% of 60-year-old men say their best friend is their wife. About 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. This is a sad story of unrequited friendship, unrequited companion to love at home, for sure. But you know what that means is that a lot of women have very, very close friends that they've cultivated usually through family life and community life. And guys, you know, it's like, hey, man, I worked so hard over the years and hanging out with my friends is stealing from my family. I'm not going to go golfing for five hours on Saturday, you know, when the kids are little. It'll be terrible at home. I'll get yelled at and yada, yada, yada, yada, all kinds of excuses and pretty soon they're lonely.

• 2:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  So we can, and we might come back to this, put the, I mean, loneliness is a big, big topic.

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  And the bonding and, and this, these types of communal relationships. But as far as cultivating a relationship with the friends that you have that unvarnished feedback and interrogation. Might you have any suggestion for how to approach that?

• 2:16:23Speaker 02

  Well, there's two ways to do it. There's the organic way and there's the manual way. The organic way is that you don't lose those true friends that you've had usually since you were a young adult. And a lot of people do. I mean, we move around a lot and we're really ambitious and our friends wind up being our deal friends. And our real friends, you know, people will say, I mean, I'll do an exercise where I'll say, tell me the 10 people that are closest to you. Write them down real quick.

• 2:16:47Tim Ferriss?

  I can do it easily.

• 2:16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:48Tim Ferriss?

  I literally have it in a spreadsheet.

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  That's great. And then put real or deal after each one of those names, based on the fact that, and for you it's all real, right? Because you have close friends, right?

• 2:16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do. A lot of them, a high percentage from a long time ago.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  And you travel with them and you do stuff with them, right?

• 2:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  I put a lot of energy and time into ensuring that we spend time together, which gets harder as people have wives and kids and everything else.

• 2:17:08Speaker 02

  And children, you know, for sure. Family life tends to get in the way of that, but you have to do, it's like anything else, you gotta do the work.

• 2:17:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm unfettered by direct family life.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  But, you know, the data say that in 10 years, you'll most likely be married.

• 2:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  And have kids. And it's gonna be harder, but you'll have to put in anything.

• 2:17:29Speaker 02

  Folks, let's work on this, shall we?

• 2:17:32Speaker 02

  Write in the comments, your best.

• 2:17:35Tim Ferriss?

  So there's the organic way.

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's the organic way, which is, you know, is make sure that you don't lose track of your real friends and you have a commitment with your real friends to hold you to a standard of honesty in the friendship and with yourself. Because that's what true friendship really entails. The manual way is the YPO forum way, where there's a bunch of guys that you know that are usually deal friends, and you make a deal to make them into real friends. You make a deal, you know, it's an arrangement. Where part of the friendship is actually gonna be to go deeper, to hold each other's secrets, to be honest with each other. And that can actually be incredibly effective, because you've actually decided to do that. And people will up to those particular promises. Psychological safety is really important in that too, right? Because it's one thing to say, I want you to be completely honest with me and say, yeah,

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  you're a jerk. It's like, not that honest. Or, you know, don't express it in that particular way. You have to have enough psychological safety where the rules of the road are clear. That honesty is always wielded as a gift and never as a weapon. That's also true in marriages, by the way, Tim. The best marriages are completely honest, but the honesty is a gift and never a weapon.

• 2:18:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. You know, one of the mantras at Facebook before it was Meta was Face- uh, Facebook is a gift. Maybe. Feedback is a gift. Feedback is a gift. Feedback is a gift. It was repeated over and over again. It was put all over the place to cultivate a culture of feedback.

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I've thought about that. Just grabbing these little snippets, make yourself small. I mean, these very pithy reminders that will have some stickiness in the mind. And also doubling down on having your friends act as the best mirrors available. Very brief side note, just to give people a Scooby snack. Mirrors, reflections. What are your thoughts?

• 2:19:20Speaker 02

  Get rid of them.

• 2:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, tell them. Tell me more.

• 2:19:23Speaker 02

  So I work with a guy. He's fantastic. He actually is. He's really, really helpful for me. I've recommended him to you because he does incredible body work. Physical therapy is fantastic. And, uh, you know, he was a fitness model. There's almost nothing you can do that's unhealthier, worse for your mental health than being a fitness model or a fitness influencer. Why? Because you're just looking in the mirror all day long and your physical appearance is that on which you will be judged is very emotionally warping. And he hated it. He hated it. He hated. He was unhappy. He never ate what he wanted for 10 years. And the truth of the matter is, as we all know, you look great if your body fat is under 10%, but you feel crummy and you want everybody in the world to die. It can be really, really hard on you.

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  And he said, after a while, you know, there's a reason that 35% of people who lose a lot of weight, when they get to their goal, they keep going and a quarter of them develop an eating disorder. The reason is because you can't stop when you're looking in the mirror all the time. You can't stop. You can't stop. You don't know how to stop. So he had the presence of mind. He's an adept. He's a spiritual adept. He got rid of all of his mirrors and showered in the dark for a year. He got rid of all of the mirrors in his house.

• 2:20:33Tim Ferriss?

  The showering in the dark, I need.

• 2:20:35Speaker 02

  Well, because you can't see your abs.

• 2:20:38Tim Ferriss?

  I don't have that problem. But I mean, but yeah, I get it.

• 2:20:41Speaker 02

  You got washboard abs and you're looking at it and you're going, yeah, man, yeah. But and bye bye.

• 2:20:47Tim Ferriss?

  Watching the water cascade off your 12th back like rocks in a waterfall.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  I know. And the truth of the matter is that.

• 2:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  I hate when that happens.

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  Extreme.

• 2:20:56Tim Ferriss?

  But yes, I get it.

• 2:20:57Speaker 02

  Physical attractiveness ordinarily is something that you do because you want to become more lovable. And you make that judgment on the basis of what you're seeing in the mirror and not the relationship that you're projecting to others in real life. It's really weird. You know, you talk to dudes who are trying to get to, you know, 6% body fat and get super jacked and the whole thing. And they have this, they imagine that women are going to be just super attracted to them. And the only people who even say anything are dudes.

• 2:21:23Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's always dudes. It's like, it's, I have friends who've, single guys and they have incredible beard game. Or like mustache game. And nonstop, it's just dudes coming up and complimenting them. I mean, I'm sure there are women like it too, but it's mostly guys.

• 2:21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. You know, and you know, no woman has ever said, nice car. I mean, it's just, no, it's other guys is the whole thing. And what that is, is the other guys are just a mirror. They're just a mirror. The other guys are saying the thing that you think, but it's profoundly unsatisfying. Right? If you're actually in the heterosexual dating market to have other guys saying, how'd you get those abs? Who cares?

• 2:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  Now, to provide a counter example also, and this is just something I've seen on dating apps. If you could talk about, but I have yet to meet a single guy I like and respect who's like, I love super intense lip fillers and all of this, you know, Franken botox situation. I've not met a single one.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  I know. And have you ever said, I've never said to my wife one time, that's such a cute little dress. Is it new? I've never said that. All her friends say that. And she's always like, I have a cute little dress and everybody noticed it, but you didn't.

• 2:22:36Tim Ferriss?

  For the record, I'm into cute little dresses.

• 2:22:40Tim Ferriss?

  I don't want people to mix up voices here.

• 2:22:42Speaker 02

  The show notes just went.

• 2:22:46Tim Ferriss?

  So why did you write this book? And how did it come to be? I know you have this long history with thinking about these catalyzing events and tracking and I don't want to say pursuing, but analyzing, thinking deeply about happiness. So why, why now? And what do you hope that it will accomplish?

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  So this new book is the most bread and butter book I've ever written about the science of happiness. It's two parts. Part one is how to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. Part two is, once you've got that down, now you can actually build your life and not be distracted and frittering away your time with stupid things. Those are the two parts of the book. And it's as deep a dive as I've ever actually written publicly about neuroscience. It was actually vetted by my colleague at Harvard, Josh Green, is one of the most distinguished neuroscientists in the world, just to make sure, because I'm a social scientist, so I gotta be careful, you know, getting into the biology side of this thing, you know? I know enough to be dangerous, to be sure, but I have to be very careful about that. So I realized, and by the way, this was, this project was instigated to do a bread and butter owner's manual on you and your happiness. That's what it is.

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  It's an owner's manual on your happiness. It wasn't my idea. It was Oprah Winfrey's idea.

• 2:23:56Tim Ferriss?

  So you occupy some rarefied air. So Dalai Lama, how does, does, you just bump into her on the subway?

• 2:24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, his holiness Dalai Lama and her holiness Oprah Winfrey, right?

• 2:24:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, when Oprah Winfrey calls, it's like.

• 2:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, but I'm guessing she didn't get your phone number on Zoom info. Like, how did this happen?

• 2:24:15Speaker 02

  She calls, I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman. No, really? Who is this? No.

• 2:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hi, it's Oprah calling again. Your company has been verified by Dun & Bradstreet. Oh, wait a minute. Anyway.

• 2:24:26Speaker 02

  So we got connected because she is a regular reader of my column in The Atlantic, and she was during the coronavirus epidemic, when, you know, people were trying to use the time to learn new things, et cetera. And she was actually a serious reader of the column, and she's a serious reader.

• 2:24:40Tim Ferriss?

  She is a serious reader.

• 2:24:41Speaker 02

  When she has a book on her podcast, she reads the book. It's just amazing how exhaustive her knowledge is. And then when my book came out from Strength of Strength in February 2022, she got it literally in the first week. She read it and that's when she called and she said, would you come on my podcast? Her Super Soul, which is this book podcast, phenomenal. And we were like a house on fire from the very beginning because. It's funny because you've met a lot of famous people and I've met some famous people and they're usually not exactly like they appear in public, right? She's like she appears in public. I mean, she's calm, she's smart, she's nice, she's funny, she's awesome. She's actually what people think she is. She's truly an authentic person.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  And so, we really got along and we have this synchronicity of mission, which is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. But we have different platforms for doing it. I'm teaching this class on the science of happiness at Harvard University and writing in The Atlantic. She has been in mass media forever and whenever she weighs in, she has millions and millions and millions of people around the world that trust her and want to hear what she has to say. And so, her suggestion was, "Let's take that class that you teach at Harvard and that you're writing about in The Atlantic, let's present that to a big audience." "You want a big audience?" I said, "Yeah." "Yes, Oprah, can I have a big audience, please?" And she says, "Let's write a book together and we'll present this book together." And so, we did.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  And we got together at her home and we framed it up. We framed up the book over a three or four day period last year in her tea house in Montecito, California. And I was looking around going, "I'm just like this small-town college professor who fell off the turnip truck in front of Oprah's Tea House." You never know. It's like, "God bless America, you never know what's gonna happen." And it was super fun and it was super interesting.

• 2:26:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's the best country for people who want to work hard.

• 2:26:29Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. And she's the best case study in American success and working hard and believing in others and paying it forward possible. And then, we went and we started working on our respective parts of the book and passing them back and forth. And I took a house in San Clemente in California for six weeks in the winter, largely to look at the Pacific Ocean to write the book. And she was writing her parts. And then, we got to this impasse at one point, not between us, but because the title didn't fit. The title now is "How to Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier." And it was called "Fully Alive" and it wasn't fitting and I didn't know. And finally, Oprah calls me and she says, "Got the wrong title." She's a genius. We got the wrong title. This is a how-to book. This is an owner's manual book.

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  This is really a how-to book on your own happiness. This should be called "How to Build a Life You Want." And ka-ching, the whole thing fell into place, because that's what happens, as you know, in the course of writing a book. You think you have it, but you don't. And then when the title actually completes the book and allows you to finish the book and make it all coherent. Then we finished it up, and it was this amazing collaborative experience, a joy, actually. It was the most fun. It was the most positive experience I've ever had, writing a book, because I got to write it with her, and she's enriched my life.

• 2:27:44Tim Ferriss?

  What a wild, incredible experience.

• 2:27:47Speaker 02

  It's nuts.

• 2:27:49Speaker 02

  It's nuts, man. You know, I told you my death fear is losing my mind. It's actually possible that I am, and that's just a hallucination.

• 2:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  So then we had tea, and we had crumpets.

• 2:28:02Speaker 02

  And we played bridge. And we had tea in her tea house and all that. It's like, but Tim, I know I want the pure truth, but if that's not true, don't tell me.

• 2:28:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let me keep that one. Let me keep that one.

• 2:28:11Speaker 02

  Lie to me, baby.

• 2:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  So, in this book, are there areas, because I know in my book, I can point to specific chapters where I'm like, "Man, I really wish people had paid more attention to X." Like, maybe it didn't quite get the emphasis, so I can own that responsibility, but maybe they, for whatever reason, didn't pay enough attention to this one component.

• 2:28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:33Tim Ferriss?

  Is there something that comes to mind?

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  I don't know yet, because it hasn't come out.

• 2:28:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I know, but I'm just saying.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  So what do I suspect?

• 2:28:38Tim Ferriss?

  What would hurt you the most if people missed?

• 2:28:40Speaker 02

  So I think what would bother me the most is the amount that Oprah and I emphasize the role of unhappiness in living a full life. See, one of the biggest mistakes that people make, as we talked about before, is that people say, "I want to be happy," but, and then they talk about some source of unhappiness in their life that they think blocks their unhappiness. And that's the wrong way of thinking, because you can get happier even if you're unhappy. Absolutely, 100% all day long, because these are existing in different parts of your brain, number one. But number two, happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy. Getting happier is the goal. You know, Oprah coined this term in the book. She said, "We gotta stop talking about happiness because that's actually not the goal." The goal is happier-ness. That's really what we're going for is happier-ness.

• 2:29:23Speaker 02

  And to get happier-ness, you need unhappiness in your life. Look, you need negative emotions to keep you alive. But you also need the deferral of gratification to get your satisfaction. And you need to understand the nature of the frustration that comes such that you can start to manage your wants. You need like serious, full-on suffering to find the answers to the questions of meaning that we talked about. You do. My son need a boot camp. You and I need substantial problems with mood, to put it euphemistically. We need, no, look. We need sadness. Jung, Freud's greatest student, Carl Jung, so much greater in so many ways. Said that you don't really understand happiness until you've experienced unhappiness because of the contrast.

• 2:30:03Speaker 02

  But more to the point, you've not been fully alive because unhappiness is what actually, the suffering is what helps you understand what you're made of and what you can bear. And only then will you find the answers to the "Why am I alive and for what I'd be willing to die?" questions. You don't find the meaning questions, the answers at that week at the beach in Ibiza. Uh-uh. You find it in the depths, when somebody you love dies, when you're afraid of what your future holds, when you feel hopeless. That's when those moments become real and that suffering turns out to be an integral part in your journey to happiness. So the number one thing that Oprah and I will be very disappointed about is that people don't actually become more fully alive through the transcendent passage of both happier-ness

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  and the unhappiness that is a part of what it means to be a real person.

• 2:30:54Tim Ferriss?

  It is a diverse and ever-changing tapestry. That is for sure.

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  It is, and you know, I think about it, one of the biggest mistakes that I think that my students make, by the way, right now. If I were to go back to 1968 or 1969, Woodstock, you know, and the hippies said, "If it feels good, do it." I remember my dad heard that for the first time and he's like, "That's the end of America." He was kinda right. Anyway, if we had a Woodstock today, it might be, "If it feels bad, make it stop. If I'm suffering, treat it."

• 2:31:26Speaker 02

  If there's pain, it's evidence that I'm defective, that I'm broken. Something's gotta change. That's wrong. That's wrong thinking. Look, the Tim Ferriss I'm talking to right now had to suffer. I mean, these messages that you're giving are dramatically different than what you were writing 15 and 20 years ago. They're dramatically different. Doesn't mean it was wrong 15 and 20 years ago, but it was incomplete. It wasn't deep in the same way. And the depth actually comes from the, not just from the good, it also comes from the bad. This is, you know, Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon. Have you read that book?

• 2:31:58Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 2:31:58Speaker 02

  It's the best book I've ever read about anxiety and depression. You know, Andrew Solomon is a phenomenal writer.

• 2:32:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So what is the title again?

• 2:32:06Speaker 02

  The Noonday Demon, which was an ancient way of talking about depression, which comes over you like a noonday demon.

• 2:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the black dog.

• 2:32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like Winston Churchill's black dog, for sure. The Noonday Demon, in the end, it's an incredible book. It's a total page turner for anybody who's actually had anything close to.

• 2:32:23Tim Ferriss?

  That face value does not sound like a page turner.

• 2:32:25Speaker 02

  It's phenomenal, though. It's so interesting. It's just beautiful writing. But in the end, he said, "In the sum and final balance, I have to conclude that I love my depression because it's part of who I am as a person, and it's allowed me to learn what my life is all about. I don't wish it on anybody. I don't want it to come back. But it is who I am, and so therefore I have no choice but to love it." I'm paraphrasing, but it's, you know, his words are more beautiful than anything I could remember. But it's really an important thing for us to remember. And anybody who's watching you and who follows you and who admires you and gets a lot of sustenance from the knowledge that you bring to this podcast, what they have to realize is that they are beneficiaries of Tim Ferriss's

• 2:33:08Speaker 02

  suffering. And if they want to lift up the world, they have to suffer too.

• 2:33:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's food for thought. Yep, food for thought. May not be candy bars, might be high fiber, but it is important food for thought.

• 2:33:22Speaker 02

  It's a philosophical Cliff bar.

• 2:33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:26Speaker 02

  And, you know.

• 2:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, people love those. I don't mean, not to cast aspersions. My friend's a Cliff. But I have thought about this very deliberately, and, you know, I don't wish suffering upon anyone, but I had someone give me very good advice at one point, and the words can be substituted, of course, but she said to me, maybe after I'd gone through, very gifted therapist with a lot of experience, a lot of...

• 2:33:54Tim Ferriss?

  Mileage with different types of patients, including some very tragic and difficult cases. And she said, take your pain, make it part of your medicine. And I was like, okay. Meaning the medicine, in my case, the way I think of that is what I can teach or provide, or just the perspective through which I can speak and explore, given that I have the history that I have.

• 2:34:18Speaker 02

  Right. Understand, this is what the best therapists do. They teach you about yourself. They help you to learn and grow from your pain and they help you to treat yourself and serve others. That's what the great therapists do. The worst therapist is like, yeah, I'll help you take care of that. We'll make that problem go away. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to learn. I want to grow and I want to serve.

• 2:34:43Tim Ferriss?

  Surf part has been a very critical to the tether of meaning that has given the suffering.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  Meaning.

• 2:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Meaning made it, I don't want to say irrelevant, but like the greater the potency of the meaning, the less the suffering incapacitates you.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  Let me ask you, is it possible you're not afraid to suffer more now? Because you said, you know, pleasure and, and, you know, as a defense, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't feel like I'm sitting with somebody who's afraid of suffering.

• 2:35:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's certainly less than it was. I also think that they're just pleasurable things that I really like.

• 2:35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:25Tim Ferriss?

  There's that.

• 2:35:26Speaker 02

  Weird.

• 2:35:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:28Speaker 02

  A bizarre.

• 2:35:29Tim Ferriss?

  There is that.

• 2:35:30Speaker 02

  I remember reading about one of your, you know, a sexual experience in the, you know, in the four hour body where he's like, to get more testosterone and then I ate a single Brazil nut.

• 2:35:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, it was lots of Brazil nuts, cholesterol loading. I did lots of crazy stuff in the four hour body.

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  But it was, it was somebody who knew how to have fun.

• 2:35:47Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that chapter.

• 2:35:48Speaker 02

  How old were you, what, 34 or something when you were on there?

• 2:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  30, yeah, early 30s.

• 2:35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, no, I respect the fact that you like to have fun and you like to feel good. I get that. But I don't sense fear from you.

• 2:35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would also say what I have done is I've built in to my life, a lot of.

• 2:36:08Tim Ferriss?

  Premeditated deliberate discomfort to inoculate myself against the fear of unpredictable discomfort. And it's not a cure all, but I have found that.

• 2:36:19Speaker 02

  It's exposure therapy.

• 2:36:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's exposure therapy, also just like wading into some of the deep waters psychologically and psychoemotionally that I would be prone to fearing. Learning how to take swimming lessons in some of those deep waters, I would say, is also an approach. So it resembles exposure therapy, but there's also a skill development piece on top of that, which is combined with the exposure, I would say, which I know is a bit nebulous.

• 2:36:48Speaker 02

  No, no, but it makes perfect sense. And there's actually a way that we can all get better at that, because I know a lot of people are watching this like, yeah, yeah, how do we get better at that? Here's one way to do that, that actually is a very practical way to do it. Start each day with a statement of fact and then an aspiration. The statement of fact is, I don't know what's going to happen this day. I don't know. I learned this from a pediatric oncologist, by the way, somebody who has, you know, bad cancer diagnoses to kids. He says, he tells the parents to every day, start the day saying, I don't know what's going to happen in my future, but I do know I am alive this day and I am deeply grateful for everything that happens, for good and for bad. It takes cojones, man.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  It's hard because you're like, you catch your breath a little bit, right? Because what Mother Nature wants you to do is to look for the good feelings and to avoid the bad feelings, because that's the evolutionary imperative, to avoid the disgust and the anger and the sadness and the grief and the loneliness and to avoid those things, not to embrace those things to, you know, to say, it's inevitable, bring it on. But if you can actually do that, to steel yourself, to steel, as they say in Isaiah, I steel my face like flint.

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  And that's how to do it. Look, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen today. But I do want to know, I'm alive right now. I'm not gonna waste this day. And the way I don't waste this day is by being grateful for every single thing that happens, good and bad. Bring it on. Here we go.

• 2:38:15Tim Ferriss?

  I have a gift I received quite a while ago, but a actually steal my face like Flint. It is a piece of, I think it is steel and it's engraved with a quote from, I think it is Neil Donald Walsh. I may be getting that off. Someone can fact check, but the quote is, "The struggle ends when the gratitude begins."

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:38Tim Ferriss?

  And it's such good advice.

• 2:38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  And you don't have to be grateful only for the obviously good things.

• 2:38:46Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. On the contrary, and that's really, that's what separates, you know, first course gratitude from PhD level stuff. And by the way, here's a practical way to do that, to be grateful for bad things. A very practical way to do it. I asked my students to make a failure journal. And so what that is, is every time bad thing happens, something bad happens frequently. And you're 28 years old, you know, somebody breaks your heart today and tomorrow you're gonna be on a test. And the next day after that, you know, you don't get the interview for that job you hoped for. And it's just a constant string of disappointments and thrills. So every time something happens that really frustrates and disappoints you, or you screw up, or whatever, you take out your failure journal and you write in your failure journal, what happened? And then you leave two lines open behind it and you put reminders on your phone.

• 2:39:31Speaker 02

  Ding, one month from now, you gotta go back. And six months from now. One month from now, you gotta go back and say what you learned from that thing that you would forget otherwise. And six months from now, you gotta go back and say a good thing that happened because of that thing. And there's always entries, always, always, always. And so it's like, I went into my performance review and my, I thought I was doing a really good job. My boss basically told me that I'm a B player at best. This happens constantly. That bums me out. I just wanna put it behind me. I wanna go hang out with my friends and have a couple of beers and complain about my boss and move on, right? No, no, no, no, no. Write it on your failure journal. One month from now, remember it and go back. Huh. You know what I learned from that?

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  Is I thought I was gonna be super bummed about that for a long time and it bothered me for like a week. That's interesting. Now that's homeostasis. There's a lot of brain science in that. Six months later, you come back and you say, When I thought about that, I realized that that probably wasn't the perfect fit for my career. And I went on the market. And I have a better job now. I think that the job I have now is a better fit. And every single thing that happens that you put into your failure journal, you will realize that there's something generative that happens from this in terms of learning and in terms of gratitude. And you will turn that thing into something, sooner or later, when something really bad happens to you, you'll be like, oh, good, I get to put it in the failure journal. It'll really change your perspective on it because failure and disappointment and frustration

• 2:40:57Speaker 02

  and sacrifice and pain will take on their proper perspective, which is part of your full life.

• 2:41:02Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. We shall see. That's great. We shall see. That's terrible.

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  Famous.

• 2:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  We shall see.

• 2:41:09Speaker 02

  We shall see that famous.

• 2:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  We shall see. So true.

• 2:41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Arthur, this has been so much fun. Now, the title of the book is?

• 2:41:17Speaker 02

  Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier.

• 2:41:21Tim Ferriss?

  And by the time this comes out, people will be able to certainly find it and purchase it.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and where all fine books are sold.

• 2:41:27Tim Ferriss?

  We're all.

• 2:41:27Speaker 02

  And also, if people like, Oprah and I will read it to you.

• 2:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  You mean?

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  I'm guessing in audiobook form and not on.

• 2:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's an audiobook.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  Look. No, we'll come to your house. And with the dulcet tones of Oprah's voice, we'll lull you to sleep. No, I mean, we read it.

• 2:41:45Tim Ferriss?

  You could raise a lot of money.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's right. Sorry, Oprah, I kind of committed us to this thing, you know? Let's just say the book tour has taken on new dimensions. Now, but we know, we read the book for Penguin Random House, and I'm really super happy with the way that it turned out, mostly because my voice is interspersed with her beautiful voice, one of the most famous voices in America.

• 2:42:05Tim Ferriss?

  What an incredible experience. Congratulations.

• 2:42:08Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  So people can find the book where all fine books are sold. I just love saying that.

• 2:42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:14Tim Ferriss?

  And is there anything else you'd like to point people to, whether it's a social profile or a request of the audience? And ask of the audience, something you'd like to close with, anything at all that you'd like to add before we?

• 2:42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is really a teaching experience, both for me and Oprah, and just part of my life, which is dedicated to writing, speaking, and teaching about love and happiness, to bring people together in bonds of love, using the science and ideas. That's really my mission statement for the rest of my life. And that really is a teaching mission, just like yours is a teaching mission. So there's a lot of stuff that I'm doing, ancillary to books and columns, etc. I have classes, like video classes and things that people can watch. And my goal in doing those things, some, all on my website, arthurbooks.com, but when people do those things, my goal is training them to be happiness teachers. This is really what it's all about. Because remember, it's understand, change your habits, share with others. And so to learn more about exactly how to do that, we're developing

• 2:43:08Speaker 02

  a lot of resources that make that possible in a, I think, a pretty effective way. And I would love people to do that for the single reason that I want a movement. I want to be part of a movement of people whose hobby is the science of happiness and bringing it to others. You know, there's a lot of people who are broken in this world and who are sad and who are suffering. And if we had people who are warriors for greater happiness for themselves, through others, through real knowledge and a commitment to change, I'm truly convinced that this is the one thing that I can do that could have an impact on the world that needs to be a lot happier.

• 2:43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Arthur, so glad that we were able to find the time, have this conversation. And I admire the work you do. I respect the work you do. I value the work that you put out in the world. It does help people. So I wanted to also just simply thank you for putting out what you put out and spending time on the things you spend time on.

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  Likewise, Tim. I've only met you today in person, but I feel like I've known you for a long time because I've been consuming your work like so many millions of other people, and you've enriched my life a lot. Thank you for that.

• 2:44:14Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. This has really sparked a lot in me. I've taken copious notes. So I have a number of things that I'll be focusing on. Getting Small, Brothers K, Muscular Philosophies, I just love the phrasing, so I wrote it down, Aristotle, Aquinas, all things that can lead you to build the life that you want. And for everybody listening, we will have extensive show notes, links to everything, as usual, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

• 2:44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,

• 2:45:29Tim Ferriss?

  including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole-body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance,

• 2:46:08Tim Ferriss?

  and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The Four Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally-dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I've been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins,

• 2:46:50Tim Ferriss?

  probiotics, and whole-food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral, superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.

• 2:47:31Tim Ferriss?

  That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible, it is not always easy, so part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sport, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

• 2:48:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So, learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam.

• 2:49:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:49:44Tim Ferriss?

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