No. 1 Happiness Expert: If Your Friends Get Divorced So Will You! Single Friends Will Keep You Single! Obesity Is Contagious

Everyone is constantly looking for happiness, but maybe real happiness can be found where we least expect it. Arthur C. Brooks is a bestselling author of 13 books and Harvard professor where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He is the columnist of the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic. In this interview, Steven and Arthur discuss everything from why Arthur studies the science of happiness, the crucial importance of meaning and agency, why society is wrong at saying what causes happiness and why happiness is infectious. You can purchase Arthur’s most recent book, ‘Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier’, here: https://amzn.to/3O89WXf Follow Arthur: Twitter - https://bit.ly/3HnHLje Instagram - https://bit.ly/47CYaeq Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I take the same test year by year and I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because I finally cracked the code. Okay, so.

• 0:07Steven Bartlett?

  Arthur Brooks, the world-renowned social scientist. Harvard professor. Best-selling author. Who teaches people how to live a better, happier life.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I've studied the science of happiness and I found that most of what society tells us is wrong. And we will go into all of this. For example, they found that happiness is about 50% genetic. Introverts tend to have more long-term happiness. And happiness is a mind virus. It will transmit from one person to another person to another person. Really? Yeah. They were looking at the trajectory of people's lives, measuring everything for many years, and they found obesity is contagious. When your friends get divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. But also, when your friends get happy, you're more likely to get happy. The problem is, happiness has been in decline since about 1990. One of the reasons is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek. But we know that, for example, 95% of diets fail is the most unsuccessful industry in the world.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Because the arrival fallacy that want to actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going to have a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. You actually get more satisfaction from the progress.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so if not a weight number or a financial number, what's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success to being happier?

• 1:16Speaker 00

  There are goals that actually do lead to the happiest life, and the more you have, the better off you are. The four goals that really matter are.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  Arthur.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Steve.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  What do you do?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  I am dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together using the science and ideas around human happiness.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  Where do you teach?

• 1:46Speaker 00

  I teach at Harvard University.

• 1:48Steven Bartlett?

  Are you a professor of happiness?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm a professor of leadership technically at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. But my area is leadership and happiness. So I've studied the the science of happiness, which is a huge growing field, multi-dimensional field across social psychology and neuroscience, behavioral economics, philosophy for a long time. And what I try to do is I bring it to future leaders and politics and policy, and especially business, and help them understand themselves as happiness teachers so that they can be happier and they can be more successful and bring more happiness to the people they lead.

• 2:25Steven Bartlett?

  What is the state of happiness? Can you can we quantify that where we are in terms of are we getting happier as a people or more unhappy as a people?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  We can, we can't. So the United Nations and a lot of other places try to see the happiest country. You've seen those data a lot, the happiest countries. It's always Denmark. It's always the Nordic countries. You can't do that. And that's like, the way that that happens is they go to 100 countries and they they survey 1,000 people in each of 100 countries and say, how do you evaluate your life? That's like asking people in every country how much you like the music in your country. And on the basis of the highest rankings internally, you say, who has the best music? It doesn't really make sense. It's, you know, it's bad methodology. You can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience. So I inside countries, inside communities, over time, I'm I'm willing to look at that.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  And that shows that in most of the OECD countries, including the United States and UK, our countries, happiness has been in decline since about 1990.

• 3:28Steven Bartlett?

  Since about 1990?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is that when you were born?

• 3:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, 92.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  It's not you. It's us.

• 3:38Steven Bartlett?

  What is, I always think when people commit their lives largely to a topic, that that must have very personal roots with that individual.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 3:46Steven Bartlett?

  What are your personal roots with the subject of happiness?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  It's hard for me. It's hard for me. I'm not a naturally happy person. I'm way below average in happiness. And At least 50% of that is genetic, by the way. So there's a lot of research looking at identical twins. There's a whole database of identical twins born between the mid 1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at birth, then reunited as adults. This was not an experiment that was cooked up by some, you know, diabolical Harvard, you know, social scientist like me. It was, it happened naturally, just sort of over the course of events. And when they were reunited, they were given personality tests. You can see some of these meetings where they were reunited on YouTube and they're, they're wonderful, they're joyful and funny.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  You find that you have an identical twin you didn't know about and say, finding all these commonalities. But of course, there's always a bunch of social scientists, you know, with, with clipboards, you know, annoying them like me, you know, taking data. And so the personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your personality is genetic and the rest is environmental and experiential and circumstantial. But 80%, up to 80%, that's a lot. And that means your openness to experience, your conscientiousness as a person, your extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and happiness is about 50% genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy, Steve.

• 5:11Steven Bartlett?

  I'm, I'm-

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Or happy, your results may vary.

• 5:13Steven Bartlett?

  Was your household a happy place?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  It was a complicated place, but it wasn't terrible because my parents were good parents and they loved each other and they loved us. But my relationship by the time I was a young adult was cordial because they were busy with their issues. And, you know, this is one of the things that I talk about with a lot of people. Nobody has a perfect childhood and a lot of people are troubled by their childhood and they feel doomed to repeat the circumstances of their childhoods, but they're not. You can rewrite your own past history by looking back at what happened and deciding to change certain variables in the way that you're going to live your adult life. So Steve, you're gonna get married and you're gonna have children and then you need to look at your own childhood and say, what are the things that I want to be the same? And what are the things that I want to be different?

• 6:03Speaker 00

  I'm designing my life right now on the, not just on the basis of the things that went right, but on the basis of the things that went wrong. You know, I wasn't close to my parents. They never lived close to me. My children, who are now grown up, never had a, an intense experience of a relationship with any of their grandparents. Their one side lived in Barcelona, the other side lived in Seattle. We were, you know, in- New York and Washington DC and so now, no, you know, I'm gonna live near my kids and I'm a grandfather now. All three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime, whether they want to or not. I see my grandson as much as I can. Next week, I turn down a whole bunch of work because I get to babysit my grandson.

• 6:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any research that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival, whether it's when they're suffering with illnesses? Or I often think about this sort of stereotype that when someone retires, or when they stop working, or when their partner dies in old age, they might be, both of them might be 90 years old. When one of the partners dies, it seems that the remaining, the surviving partner has months left sometimes.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  That's mostly true. The one that's not true, here's, this is depressing how, you know, that statistic, which is that if the husband dies, the wife is gonna be fine.

• 7:23Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Widows are way happier than widowers. I told that to my wife and she's like, huh.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Widowers do really poorly, generally. Men do very poorly. And part of the reason is because these data are disputed, but more or less, they're directionally correct. 60% of 60-year-old men say their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Women have more relationships. They have closer, deeper love relationships with non-related kin and with the adult children typically than the husband does. The husband's most intense companion in a relationship typically is with the wife. And that's why that's an asymmetric stat. And that's what the data say. But yeah, for sure. I mean, back to the main point, hope is super critical.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  On illness?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  On everything. I mean, hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes. And we know that when people lose hope, they give up. And when they give up, they don't take care of themselves. They don't do what they need to do. They don't exercise like they should. They don't, they're not as active. They're not talking to other people. Their minds are not stimulated. They don't eat right. They might use substances in ways that they shouldn't. And all of those things compound. And so just at the physiological level, you'd see that you'd have degradation when there is no hope. And when you're 90, you can't afford it. Actually, I'm 59. I can't afford it either. And neither can you at 31. We all need hope. This is huge. To the extent that you can actually bring hope to people

• 8:53Speaker 00

  by showing them they can do something as an agent in their own future, that's just giving them a longer, better, more successful life. That's, that's what I want to do with my work. You know, because I've seen so much. I mean, since, since I've actually dedicated myself to this, I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being. And I don't game the numbers. I mean, I have, there, there's macronutrients to your happiness. You have to take the different elements. It's not a single measure thing. And there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up to it. And I follow this very carefully, month by month by month, semester by semester, year by year. And I take the same tests as my students do every year.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work.

• 9:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because of the work that you've done on yourself or because of your work, Kaz?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Both, because here's the deal. If you want to be happier, you need to understand the science. You need to apply it to your life. You need to share it with others. Because you won't remember it and hold yourself accountable unless you're teaching it. That's why I teach people to be happiness teachers.

• 9:57Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, so my guess is, how long have you been in the podcast? Two years?

• 10:03Steven Bartlett?

  We launched on YouTube three years ago.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, uh, it's probably having a big effect on your life.

• 10:08Steven Bartlett?

  Huge.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Because you're talking about these ideas. And my guess is that you're, in your private life, you're talking about the ideas that you learned with other people. And every time you share these ideas, you imprint them. Not just sort of, they're not just limbic phantasms. They become, you use them with the executive centers of your brain. The more that you learn, the more you talk about what you learned, the better off you get. You're only talking about things that empower people and lift them up and make their lives better. These are the topics of what you do, right? Because you want people to be happier and more successful. That's the point of the show, right? And that's how you're getting happier and more successful.

• 10:44Steven Bartlett?

  Is there research that shows this point of agency correlates to happiness and survival?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:50Steven Bartlett?

  Like longevity?

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:51Steven Bartlett?

  And so, agency essentially means that the belief that you have control over your life and your future, in essence.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that you're, there are things that you can do so that you're not helpless. Helplessness is the problem. This, this gets back to the work of Marty Seligman in the, in the late 60s, 19, early 1970s. He's the father of positive psychology. He created the whole field of positive psychology. He's a great mentor and hero to me. He's done so much for me and intellectually and in my career and as, as a friend and just as a person. And when he was doing his early work, he was doing animal studies and work on human beings to take away their agency. So he would do things like people would be, you know, putting nickels into a slot machine and they would figure out along the way that it didn't matter if they pulled the handle or not, that they were getting the same outcomes. That he took away just little tiny bits of agency. He had dogs in boxes where the, they would shock the floors of the boxes.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  This is hard to get through internal review boards now, but they would, because it seems cruel. It wasn't big shocks, but the whole point was that the dogs would, you know, step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them. But when they couldn't do that anymore, they would just like lie down and whimper on the shocking floor. They would give up. This is called learned helplessness. People will learn their helplessness when they realize that, when they, when they, or they figure out, or they conclude, or they're told by politicians and media and activists and everybody else, that there's nothing that they can do and they're a victim. When you take on the identity of victim, you learn your helplessness. And that will degrade your quality of life, make you less successful, less happy. And a lot of studies say that you'll, you won't even live as long.

• 12:25Steven Bartlett?

  This point of agency is so interesting. I, I had someone on the show, at the very beginning of the show, and he said that he basically crowdsources his book, a guy called Mo Gordan, you might know the guy. Says he crowdsources his book and he gets 500 people to reread, to read his book before it comes out. And he goes, when we got down to the part in my book about personal responsibility, he goes, 8% of people drop off the Google document.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:46Steven Bartlett?

  Because they don't want to read it.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yeah, no, that's a spinach. This is, and it's interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday morning in The Atlantic, 12 or 1300 words on the science of happiness. And about once every two or three months, I have a spinach column, which says, you want to be happy? Be humble. You want to be happy? Change your mind. You want to be happy? Don't tell somebody if they disagree with you that they're stupid and evil. Listen, listen more than you talk. You know, just what your grandmother told you, right? About how to be a successful person. But it's all about humanity, about humility. But these are hard things in a society where all of our biases are I'm right, you're wrong. I don't want to listen, la, la, la, la, la.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  If it goes against my, my whatever ideological biases that I happen to have. And I'll write a spinach column and those are the ones that get way less, way fewer readers.

• 13:38Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what's interesting? As you're speaking, I was thinking that nobody thinks they're a victim. They can spot victimhood in other people very successfully. But there's no one listening to this right now that would say, I am a victim. So how does one know if they're a victim?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, a lot of people will say, I am a victim of these institutional biases. A lot of people will, a lot of people really will say that. I mean, they, they will say that I'm a victim of capitalism or I'm a victim of powerful people. I'm a victim of, of conspiracies that are happening, the, the deep state, whatever happens to be. A lot of people really will talk about it in that particular way. And that's sort of the problem. Now, of course, we're all victims of something, but we all have tons of power. And the really interesting thing in life is to show people the levels of power that they have, the levers of power that they have, that don't start with trying to change the outside world, that start with the inside of their heads. That's what I'm dedicated to doing is showing people that the hope that they should have

• 14:37Speaker 00

  comes from the, the leverage they have over their circumstances, which starts with what they thought they had the least control over. Their emotions, their happiness, their wellbeing, the love that they experience because the commitments that they make. If you really want to have power, start with managing yourself, not trying to manage the outside world.

• 14:58Steven Bartlett?

  Is happiness a choice?

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Happiness is unattainable because it's a direction, not a destination.

• 15:05Steven Bartlett?

  Is being happier a choice?

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Yes. Being happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment that you are going to make in your life and in your relationships, in the way that you manage yourself. Absolutely.

• 15:15Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there is a starting point to being happier?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it actually starts with recognizing that most of what society tells us about happiness is wrong.

• 15:24Steven Bartlett?

  What's wrong?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  It's not a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling. On my first day of class, I have, you know, two sections of 90 MBA students at the Harvard Business School, and they're taking this happiness, Science of Happiness seminar. I've got 400 on the waiting list. There's an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about, right? It's the happiness class. It's super fun. I love it. I love my students. They're terrific. And I cold called them on the first day by saying, you know, what's happiness? And I pick one, two, three, 10. What's happiness? And they always say, it's the feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love, or it's how I feel when I'm doing what I enjoy. Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings. I say, wrong. The biggest barrier to actually getting happier is believing that happiness is a feeling. It's not.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  It's happiness is evidence, or feelings are evidence of happiness, like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. That's how to understand feelings. Now, feelings are really, really important. Your affect, your mood is critically important, but happiness is something a lot more tangible. You start getting happier, the beginning of happiness, of getting happier, because true happiness is not the goal, because you have to have negative emotions. Negative emotions keep you alive. Negative experiences make you learn and grow. So you don't want pure happiness, the sight of heaven. Dangerous. You'd be dead quickly without a lot of unhappiness. But getting happier starts with this understanding that really what it is, is the pursuit of three things.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. So you and I are nutrition nerds, right? And what we all know, and I've heard people say on your show, is that most people get insufficient protein. And when you come to America, everybody eats way too many highly glycemic carbohydrates, right? Happiness is the same thing. We get the macronutrient profile wrong. We need more enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We have to know how to get them. In efficient and healthy ways, and we need them in balance.

• 17:24Steven Bartlett?

  Can you define enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning for me?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. See, this is the problem because a lot of people think they know what these things are, but they aren't. But this is the adventure because once you kind of get into the details of this, then you've got real strategies for getting happier. The definition provides strategies. So let's start with enjoyment.

• 17:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Most people think it's the same as pleasure, but that's wrong. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Now, of course, you know this because you've had, you've had plenty of guests who've talked about the limbic system of the brain. That's the console of tissue deep inside the brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years. It takes signals from the brain stem and other parts, rudimentary structures in the brain. It takes those signals about what's going on in the outside. In the limbic system, it translates them into information. All your emotions are is information. There's no such thing as good and bad feelings. Bad feelings, good feelings. No, they're all good. They might be maladapted, but, but the point is positive and negative emotions keep you alive. You need, especially the negative emotions.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  I talk about negative emotions all the time because the survival is critical. And so anger and sadness and fear and disgust, which are the big four negative emotions, these have kept you alive thousands and thousands and thousands of times. Really important. That information then is relayed on to the neocortex of the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead, where you can figure out what are these emotions? What do they mean and how am I going to react according to them? Now, a lot of times these signals are all goofed up and, and we're very reactive, which means that we're not letting our prefrontal cortex catch up with our limbic system. And that's a lot of the work that I do. But back to enjoyment. Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure because pleasure is limbic.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  It's nothing more than a signal where the ventral striatum, the reward center of your brain is getting tapped in the limbic system, saying that thing is going to be good for survival and passing on your genes. That's why it feels good. Go do it.

• 19:20Steven Bartlett?

  Sex and sugar.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Sex and sugar, sex and sugar and a lot and gambling, which social media has a lot in common with slot machines and all these little things that get back to your primordial evolutionary past. I know you love the evolutionary biology and psychology because this gives us so much information about who we are today. Look at the place to see and see yourself, kind of. And, and all of these things that give us pleasure, it's because they, they went back to survival and propagation of the species. So importantly, all those pleasure filled things, if you pursue them, you're just sitting in your limbic system and modern technology and society will engorge these things into incredibly unhealthy practices. So you get, you know, we have natural endorphins that make us feel good and, and help us when we

• 20:04Speaker 00

  actually get hurt so that we can get back to our cave. And of course, we've chemically altered them into fentanyl, which feels great until you die.

• 20:12Steven Bartlett?

  Fentanyl is not a big thing in the UK, but it's a huge thing here.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Huge. I mean, we have a hundred thousand drug overdose deaths every year in the United States, mostly because of fentanyl. It's unbelievable. But that, but we have other versions of that. You know, we can have stochastic experiences, you know, things that, that, that happen occasionally and give us a reward when we, when something happens, um, not in predictably, but unpredictably. Um, and so we make slot machines and they give us all this that, you know, tap into that, that brain chemistry, or we want to propagate the species. And so we turn it into pornography, which is unbelievably powerful and dangerous for the brain because it captures the brain and destroys relationships along the way. It's just fentanyl in its way. But all of these things are just pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Anything that can be addictive, which pleasure filled things typically can, if you, if you do them compulsively over and over and over again, it will make you less happy. But here's the, when people ask me, so does that mean I should never drink alcohol? I should never gamble? No, no, no. You need to add two things to turn them into enjoyment. You need to add people in memory. Because if you add people in memory to something, then you're moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex. That's when it's fully human. That's when it's not an animal experience. It's a human experience. And that is a very important part of your happiness. And so the big question is if something's addictive, if you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.

• 21:38Steven Bartlett?

  What about sex?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  That's pornography and masturbation is alone. And that's not good for you, is the whole point. That's, I mean, again, reasonable people disagree and some people will be like, what's this guy talking about? But the whole point is that the data on pornography or that it captures the brain and ultimately it doesn't, on average, lead to happier lives. Because it truncates the reproductive experience at the level of pleasure and doesn't take it all the way to enjoyment.

• 22:06Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:08Steven Bartlett?

  Have you, have you studied porn much as a subject?

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Sort of everybody in my field winds up there. It's not something that I focus that much on because, you know, it's focusing on the research on pornography makes you look a little creepy at age 59.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  It's not a good look. It's like, so, so what do you study? It's like, yeah.

• 22:28Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So people in memory turn pleasure into?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Enjoyment.

• 22:33Steven Bartlett?

  To enjoyment.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  That's right. So alcohol add people in memory. You know, the Anheuser-Busch Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of, you know, a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. That's how a lot of people use the product. But that's, everybody knows that's an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism. What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends, you know, clinking bottles together, having a great time. That is pleasure, alcohol, plus people, plus memory equals enjoyment and at least happiness, because they want to join their brand to happiness, not just to pure pleasure and certainly not to addiction.

• 23:09Steven Bartlett?

  Same with like Coca-Cola. All the Coca-Cola ads are like the World Cup with your friends and in summer with your friends and outside.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's actually less addictive. I mean, there are certain, you know, the sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive, but they don't have the same properties of, of brain capture in the same way for sure, because they don't, they don't stimulate as much dopamine as, as, you know, something like alcohol does. And, and so they're less likely to make you really addicted. But the whole point is that they're, it, it does give you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment and you only get that when you're doing it with people.

• 23:41Steven Bartlett?

  Satisfaction.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You're an entrepreneur, you understand this one really well. You're good at deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs are good, successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification. Which means I'm gonna do this hard thing and it's gonna get a big payoff and that payoff is gonna be sweet. That's satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek. And that's a really important part of our happiness. So you find that people who are better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction and they're happier. There's a lot of, remember, you've heard about the marshmallow experiment?

• 24:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  And people have debunked it, but they actually haven't. So the marshmallow experiment was taken place, it took place in the late 60s where Walter Michel was a psychologist at Stanford out in Palo Alto. He had a little laboratory setup where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table. And it was a kid on the other side of the table, between four and eight years old. And in front of the kid was a marshmallow. And so he says to the kid, "You want the marshmallow?" The kid's like, "Yeah." He says, "I'll tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back here. But when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you another one. Can you wait?" Every kid's like, "Yeah, totally, totally, totally worth it." He comes back five minutes later or so, 80% of the kids had eaten the marshmallow. 20% of the kids hadn't.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Now, that's a lot, 80% of the kids could not defer their gratification. So the real question is, who's the 20%? It's Steve Bartlett. That, these are the people that went on to do distinguished things. They did better in school, they got better grades, they went on to have more job success, they had better relationships. That's what they found, that the most successful kids, now, what people fight about now is why? Whether it's nature or nurture, it's probably 50/50. Like everything else in life, it's both nature and nurture. But the bigger point is, good things come to those who wait. And when you wait, you suffer and you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Now, the bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother Nature has a big lie at the end of it. Mother Nature says, "If you get it, you're gonna love it forever." And that's not true. See, the brain, the brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline physiologically and emotionally. Because you can't stay in a, in a, in an unusual physiological state. Unusual states are a reaction. You need to be ready to react. And so, you know, you step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated. Your heart goes back to where it was, so you're not dead in a week. The same thing is true for you emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  You think it's gonna last forever, so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing. But it doesn't last forever, does it? That's the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it's gonna be really great. And the first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her or himself is, "I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis." And that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill. More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. So that's the great conundrum of the striver. Is that there's never enough, never enough, never enough. I deal with people all day long. I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful, but not happy. And a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation

• 27:12Speaker 00

  that both explains that, but also gives you the solution. Which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have. So have more is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want. Haves divided by wants. Successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their haves. They need to want less. And that's a whole kettle of fish. That's spirituality, that's discipline, that's fitness, that's diet. That's a whole lot of things that go into that. And that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction.

• 27:51Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like a contradiction though, doesn't it? It sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is gonna make me happy, but I should want less.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. What people actually who crack this code, and a lot of, you know, eastern traditions actually get into this. Is not that striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it. That the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not arrival. What you wanted was progress. And then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There's a funny thing in the research on dieting. We all know that it's the most expensive unsuccessful industry in the world, right? Ninety-five percent of diets fail, which means within a year, people have gained back all the weight that they've lost. But there's a successful insofar as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here's the thing about diets.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Every day, you're willing to forego the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down. When you hit your goal, it's gonna be so great. It's gonna be so great. You know what the reward is, Dave? You never again get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations.

• 28:57Steven Bartlett?

  Once you've got there.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  That's why you fail. And the arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it's gonna be sweet when I get to the goal. It isn't. What you're gonna have is homeostasis when you get to your goal, frustration and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less, you need to think about less about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey. That's really what it comes down to. And people who crack that code over the course of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management, they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama, I've been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years. And I asked him this question. How can I get lasting satisfaction?

• 29:42Speaker 00

  And he said, you need to want what you have, not to have what you want. That's what it comes down to. It's the management of my wants, not my haves.

• 29:58Steven Bartlett?

  On that point, we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that there. So for those people that are approaching that moment and that, you know, they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things. What is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success?

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homeostatically return us to the baseline, that won't throw us onto this hedonic treadmill over and over and over again. Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life. And the more you have, the better off you are, or more actually is better. But they don't fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure and fame, which are the typical kind of goals that we get, or related goals like weight loss or, you know, whatever it happens to be. The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have. Now, there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  There's nothing wrong with those things, but only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life. I'm not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily. Better family relationships, which are very mystical, poorly understood even in neuroscience in a lot of ways. Friendship, deep friendship, which is hard for a lot of people, especially successful people, and work that where you earn your success and serve other people. That's what it comes down to. So those are the right New Year's goals that we need. You know, this year, what am I going to do? How am I going to grow closer to the divine? How am I going to do that? This year, what am I going to do to draw closer to my family? And to have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  And how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people? How am I going to do that?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  We haven't gotten to meaning yet.

• 31:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, we haven't got to meaning yet. You said the word there, but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal, because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go, listen, I get it, love it, I believe it.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:07Steven Bartlett?

  But I hate this belly fat.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got it.

• 32:09Steven Bartlett?

  And this belly fat yo-yos every year.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  No, I get it. So those are intermediate goals. And there's nothing wrong with those things. The problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the final goal. Because by the time you get there, you think, why? Why? That wasn't as meaningful as I thought. That wasn't as good as I thought. That's the arrival fallacy, that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. The reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and see your, and dandily your 11 grandchildren on your knee. That's the reason you want to do this, because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason, as opposed to an extrinsic reason having to do with, people will love me more. I mean, it's amazing to me, because I, you know, I do a lot of wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community, because I have sort of the happiness console, the science of the happiness console that I put into those things. And so I meet a lot of people that are really into the fitness part. And what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these fitness goals. Like, I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year, and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing. And if they stick to it, by September or October, what they're finding is that,

• 33:24Speaker 00

  you know, they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women. But a lot of dudes are going, looking good, dude. And they're like, that's not what I wanted.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  And part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what will actually come from the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals. These aren't the right final goals. You've got to have the right final goals and then set some intermediate goals along the way. But not, let's not kid ourselves. And when you think carefully about that, that losing your last five pounds of belly fat, so you can see your lower abs. Which, by the way, is not necessarily that healthy,

• 34:03Speaker 00

  is going to materially improve your life and your relationships. It's not. It just isn't.

• 34:07Steven Bartlett?

  What's a better end goal then, as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health?

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It's something that's actually sustainable and having to do with health, also with happiness is the way that this works. So I work out 60 minutes a day. It's not because I'm vain. Look, I've got a face for radio, Steve.

• 34:23Steven Bartlett?

  You look good. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  I know, but it's age adjusted. I look good.

• 34:27Steven Bartlett?

  I think you look good, period. And I'm not, you know, I've got a girlfriend, but credit where credit's due.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. But you made my week. See, this was my goal.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  The reason that I do this is because I find that for me, that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can. Right? Yeah. And practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it, when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient. Eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day. And so the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life. And I'm a much happier guy. Look, it lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high. I'm a very anxious person. And I understand anxiety. I understand the cortisol production. I understand how to manage it.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  And this is one of my management techniques. Thing about fitness to understand is when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn't. It lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness largely, the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they're produced in different parts of the limbic system. So you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that that I put my students through. You're probably somebody who experiences both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We've only met, but my guess is that you're a mad scientist. That's the profile. And so what that means is you've got two strategies. You want to keep your positive affect high

• 36:03Speaker 00

  and you want to manage your negative affect. And one of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous physical exercise. Today, today for me was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now.

• 36:17Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, that makes sense. I've got an answer there that I that I'm super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal. And the real key here is consistency.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:35Steven Bartlett?

  I this was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing because I was that person, which will be 90% of people listening now, that made the goal every year that I was going to go to, you know, change my life every year. Never worked.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:46Steven Bartlett?

  Because I was aiming at getting a six pack for summer. So when I arrived with the six pack.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  And it worked.

• 36:52Steven Bartlett?

  Awesome. It was great. I looked great. I got I actually got, I think I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished or the six pack arrived, I could not find for the life of me the motivation.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 37:04Steven Bartlett?

  So I'd go into winter and I'd become.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  There's no willpower that can that can like you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life.

• 37:11Steven Bartlett?

  Consistency, making my goal consistency and so.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Habits.

• 37:15Steven Bartlett?

  Was the big unlock for me.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 37:17Steven Bartlett?

  Because then, okay, the goal becomes if I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I'm going to be healthier, happier, better at my job. Fucking is there anything more important? Is that less important than a six pack? And that mindset shift changed my life.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 37:33Steven Bartlett?

  Meaning then, meaning was the last of the three.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. This is really, really hard. So meaning is really a combination of three things. It's coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. And so meaning in your life means you got to have a theory about why things happen. Like it's one damn thing after another. I mean, you got to have some concept of why things happen. Purpose is my life has direction and has goals. That's what purpose really is. I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. And the last, but not least is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't here. I'm significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people's lives, according to,

• 38:20Speaker 00

  you know, philosophers and social psychologists. So there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompasses these three ideas. So you can remember them into two questions. And you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe. And there's no right answers. You've got to have your answers. You want to play?

• 38:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Here's the quiz. Question number one. Why are you alive?

• 38:46Speaker 00

  You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on earth to do.

• 38:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Okay. So why am I alive? That's something that I get to answer every single day. I get to define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  What was it?

• 39:00Steven Bartlett?

  I went to the gym. I was on the running machine because I know I'm not going to be able to today. And then I came here and had this conversation with you.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. But why are you, why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve?

• 39:11Steven Bartlett?

  The Ikigai theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is it's incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation. And I know that it pays, pays it forward to other people who are going to, going to learn from it as well. And that makes it feel worthwhile.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  So you said two things, fun and service.

• 39:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Right? Which is more important to you?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Transcendentally, which is more important to you?

• 39:35Steven Bartlett?

  It's the service part.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, good. We're getting someplace.

• 39:38Steven Bartlett?

  That gives me all my, yeah, worth.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  But the more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So now thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, does it serve? Is that guest going to serve? Is this question going to serve? Is this show going to serve? Is this sponsor going to serve the people who are watching this podcast? Then suddenly meaning starts to go, starts to really sprout out of the soil because you, we got to that. If it's like, is it fun? Yeah, good. So look, my, my whole, I have a company and that, that, that rides alongside what I do academically. And everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations. And the order of operations are these are the four goals, but they have to be in this order.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That's what you basically said. It's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure. That's probably an intellectual adventure, right? But the order of operations has to be right. If you're having fun more than you're serving other people, you're not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question. So you see, you see where we're going with that, right? So the second question is harder. For what are you willing to die today?

• 40:52Steven Bartlett?

  There's a couple of people in my life that I'd die for. I'd die for my romantic partner. I'd die for my brothers and sisters, any of them.

• 41:01Steven Bartlett?

  Interestingly, I don't know if I'd die for my parents, which is interesting.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Would you die for an idea?

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Do you die for your country?

• 41:11Steven Bartlett?

  I would die. When you say for my country, do you mean to save the country?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous, even if you thought it were ridiculous, would you die? Because you love your country.

• 41:27Steven Bartlett?

  It depends what you mean by that. What's the cost if I die? What's the cost if I stay alive?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  No, I know. And it's, everything is context specific to a certain extent. But really, what I'm trying to see is what's your, what's your kind of reaction is to this? You know, to see what the, there are good things in there. You are willing to die for your girlfriend.

• 41:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  You are willing to die for your brothers and sisters.

• 41:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Mom and dad, that's like, Jerry's kind of like, is your mom listening to this podcast?

• 41:53Steven Bartlett?

  They do, but I'm just being honest because I think, I think, I don't know why I said that, but I just, I don't.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  No, no, for sure. This is good. This is really important, right? This is worth thinking about, right now. The worst answer is, I don't know, or nothing. Those are the worst answers. And that doesn't mean it's a problem. On the contrary, it's a huge opportunity, huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions. Because you don't have to go to, you know, get your PhD in philosophy. You don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with a guru someplace in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions. That's it. That's the quest. That's the vision quest. So, and when you see somebody find these things, like, a lot of young adults have, they're nowhere near you, where you are in your journey. You're solid, Steve. I mean, this is good stuff.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  But I meet a lot of people like, why am I alive? Because an egg met a sperm.

• 42:47Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what are you willing to die for? Nothing really, or I don't know. Right? A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don't have a why, is what it comes down to.

• 42:57Steven Bartlett?

  Repeat the questions again.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die this very day?

• 43:04Speaker 00

  There's no wrong answers.

• 43:07Steven Bartlett?

  I have so many young kids, in particular, messaging me on Instagram with the same question, which is, I think society, Instagram quotes, all of that stuff, has told them that they need to find their purpose. And it seems that they're in hunt of their purpose, like it's some Easter egg. And you think about that phrase itself, find your purpose, it comes loaded with two assumptions, find, which means you've got to go search for it, and purpose, which is a singular word, means there's one of them somewhere. And the unhappiness that I sense because they were unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they've been searching for, causes them to feel all kinds of inadequacy. What do you say to that?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, part of it is because that's the, what we call in, in business, the go find a rock theory of leadership, where the, the CEO says to an employee, go give me a rock. Like, what? Go give me a rock. Okay. So you go outside and you bring a rock back in. The boss says, wrong rock. That's not helpful, right? That's go find your purpose. That's the go find a rock theory of leadership. It's like, what rock? Where do I look? The world is full of rocks. That's why you need to be a lot more specific in figuring out deeply why you believe you're walking the earth, why you actually are alive. Besides just the mechanical, you know, explanation for what we understand in 10th grade biology,

• 44:28Speaker 00

  the real why, the deep why you're alive. And, and think, really, I mean, with push came to shove, I would die for this. I actually would die for this thing. That's when you understand what your deepest values are. That's when you can actually write your mission statement. That's what it comes down to. And that's where how people actually find, as opposed to just platitudes on the internet of go find your purpose, as if, I mean, I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala, in, in the Himalayan foothills, is where the Dalai Lama lives, in, in, in northern India. And when I'm in, in Dharamsala was a little village until the Dalai Lama went there about 1960, when he was exiled from China, when kicked out of Tibet.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  And now it's not a metropolis, but there's tons of people there and there's, I meet a lot of Westerners there. They're seekers. I'm a seeker, man.

• 45:17Steven Bartlett?

  Mmm, gosh, yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm a seeker. And so I'm going to go to a place where I feel like there's a lot of positive spiritual energy. And don't get me wrong. I mean, I've, you know, I've studied meditation with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhist monks. I mean, it's like, I'm a much better Catholic on the basis of this. I feel like I'm a, I'm a deeper Christian on the basis of this. But the idea of just going someplace and randomly looking, hoping that your purpose just hunts you down, is misguided. You have to have a much better, more specific sense of what you're looking for. And these things, coherence, significance and purpose as part of meaning are the way to do it. And those two questions are a good way, at least to get started.

• 46:01Steven Bartlett?

  There's going to be a huge, you know, group of people that are listening to this and thinking, do you know what? I don't have anything that I would die for and I don't really know why I'm alive.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:10Steven Bartlett?

  And that's just made me feel like-

• 46:11Speaker 00

  That's hugely good news. It's incredibly good news because that's the basis of your adventure is to find those things. Cause in point of fact, there are things out there. You just don't know them yet and you haven't been looking for them. You've been, who knows what you've been looking for? Like maybe you've been looking for what I like, right?

• 46:28Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that wrong?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  There's nothing wrong, but it's just not going to find, it's not going to be the secret of finding your meaning. You know, what I enjoy is a different pillar of happiness. A lot of people will say, if I figure out what I enjoy, then I'll find my meaning. No, those are different, it's different, you're over on that branch of the tree. You're trying to get over on this branch of the tree, different questions.

• 46:45Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm that person, say I'm that person now and I don't have answers to either. You tell me it's, that's a great place to be because it means the start of my adventure.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:52Steven Bartlett?

  What do I do? Put my shoes on and leave the house?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Joe, so there's a lot of different protocols you can actually start depending on where you are in your life. One of the things that I actually recommend is reading more, not reading garbage and dumb stuff, and not even reading the news. I put people on a protocol of 15 minutes a day of real reading. Actually, there's a three-part plan. You want to hear the three-part plan to actually start figuring out the answers to these questions? You don't have to answer the questions directly, but number one is start thinking to yourself, what do I think is right and wrong? What are my moral principles? What are my moral non-negotiables? That's the moral basis of living. It's the foundation of actually figuring out the answers to your questions.

• 47:35Steven Bartlett?

  So for me, that might be, I think, like free speech is important, for example.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Treating people with dignity.

• 47:41Steven Bartlett?

  Equality, cool, right?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  And this is going to change over the course of your life, too. So, you know, you're 28 years younger than me. When you're my age, it's going to be different. And saying to yourself, that's good. I want to change. I want to change. I want to change. And that means that one of your non-negotiables is moral flexibility, perhaps. Really important that you're able to evolve, right? The world doesn't want you to evolve. The world wants you to be rigid because you're a better soldier in the culture war, when you're not able to say, huh, what I thought actually probably isn't right. Huh, weird, right? Okay, so that's number one, is the moral foundations and thinking about that. You know, I ask my students to take out a piece of paper and write, start writing things down that they think. Here are the things that I actually think are right and wrong. Here are the basis of the way that I want to live.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Now, this is a very Jungian idea. Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe and acting according to it, living according to it. That the basis of unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals. In other words, I believe these things are right and wrong, and I'm systematically violating them. It's so incredibly empowering when I talk to a young woman or man. And I say, for example, What do you think is a decent way to treat a member of the opposite sex? When you're on a date and they'll tell me and I say, are you acting according to that? And like, no, I said, that's why you're unhappy. According to Carl Jung, but also according to common sense. Once you know what that is and say, I'm going to start acting and living according to my own principles. Your life starts to change.

• 49:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that? So say someone right now is, for example, cheating on their partner, but they know.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  And they're against cheating.

• 49:17Steven Bartlett?

  They're against cheating. They know it's.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Cause everybody's against cheating, by the way.

• 49:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Betraying of somebody you love. Everybody's against betraying somebody you love.

• 49:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Right? That's actually natural law. If you believe there's any natural law.

• 49:27Steven Bartlett?

  Why is, why, why is that making them unhappy?

• 49:29Speaker 00

  That's making them unhappy because that's doing violence to their own sense of propriety. You're hurting yourself. You know, the most ancient wisdom traditions and religious traditions, when they talk about sin, you know, Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and name the religion. There's a concept of sin, right? Sin in almost every religious tradition is not offending God. It's hurting yourself. It's self-destructive behavior. You're doing something not in accord with the way that you want to live. And in so doing, you're weakening yourself. You're making it harder for you to understand, understand yourself as a good person, as a person of integrity, as an upright person, which we actually need. And again, there's a lot of, go back to the social psychology research on this.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  We need to see ourselves as good people.

• 50:16Steven Bartlett?

  It goes back to your point as well about helplessness and agency. Because if I know that that is bad, but I can't seem to stop myself doing it.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:24Steven Bartlett?

  I'm telling myself that I'm low agency and I'm helpless.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  I'm a victim of my own sin.

• 50:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  I'm a victim of my own weakness. I'm a victim of my own impulses. And so this is one of the reasons that people will be like, I hate how I eat. What are they actually saying? They're not saying that I, I hate, you know, I mean, like I, I'm a sugar fiend. I love, I just can't get enough of it. I don't drink alcohol, but I drink, I eat tons of sugar. I eat lots of sugar. I shouldn't do it now. It doesn't offend my sense of propriety, to be sure. Right? But I could get to the point where I'm so unhealthy that I hate that about myself because I'm actually hurting myself, but I'm being controlled by my impulses. This getting in line with your own views and making a plan. And this is where the new year's resolutions about taking off the weight actually. Makes sense because it's not about the ab veins.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  It's about being morally consistent with your own view of the person that you want to be. Is what this comes down, but you can't do it till you lay it out. Until you actually put it in black and white, write down your moral philosophy. I don't care how dumb it is. Write down your moral philosophy and say, make a plan to start living according to it. That's the base of the pyramid. There's two other parts. Okay. The second part is a contemplative tradition. Is contemplation. You need more contemplation so that you can experience transcendence. Now, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. Right. This is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation. That's all that is, is basically is sitting still without your phone. And focusing on being alive.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  So there are a lot of ways to do it. There's informal ways to do it. My colleague Ellen Langer, if you had her on the show.

• 52:02Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Super interesting person. She actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about 30 years ago. She wrote a book called mindfulness. She's a, she was the first woman tenured in the psychology department at Harvard. She's phenomenal and she's just absolutely first rate. And, and she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you're sitting on the train by putting away your phone, putting your hands in your lap and looking out the window.

• 52:24Steven Bartlett?

  Can they listen to this podcast while they do that? Because.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  No. You should listen to the podcast, but not during those periods. And start with five minutes of a, of just simple contemplation of life. Now, there are other ways to do it. Prayer is a really good way to do it, too. Religious traditions are excellent at doing it, but people in a distracted world don't do that at all. You need to be in your head. You need to stop distracting yourself and systematically stop distracting yourself. Because in your default mode network, you'll actually start to think about things that actually matter, including the things that are in the fundamental moral basis that you've, that you've started to formulate. You need contemplation.

• 53:02Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about this last night. I don't know why I was thinking about this, but this is how weird I am. I was thinking about why I don't pray anymore. Because I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about 18.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  Are you still Christian?

• 53:14Steven Bartlett?

  No. And every time we had dinner for my whole childhood, family sit around the table. One of us would, would pray and we'd just basically give thanks for things we're grateful for.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:25Steven Bartlett?

  And I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith. But but I was thinking last night, it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer, which is just an exercise in gratitude to be thankful for the nature of my life. And that would serve if and I don't have to pray to something. I can just pray for gratitude.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Well, you can contemplate. You can contemplate the source of your gratitude. So gratitude listing is really important way for you to focus on the the we're resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias. We have a tendency to pay attention to the negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival. You know, you know, you pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner, not the best thing that happened to the dinner for a reason. I mean, we've evolved to the snap of the twig behind you does not make you think, oh, that's my friend.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  So that's just how we're evolved. And the way to not that let that become maladapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude, which are incredibly abundant. Now, the reason you stop praying is because you don't believe there's anybody on the other end of the line.

• 54:24Steven Bartlett?

  Listening, yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you think that you're it's like the ghost phone in Japan. After the after the tsunami, the earthquake and tsunami, a guy set up a telephone booth that's not connected, where the phone is not connected and 30,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talked to their dead relatives.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  That's the ghost phone. And that's not satisfying for you with respect to your prayer because your kid version of religion was the reason you're doing that is because you're talking to God. You've got a direct transmission mechanism to God. And now you don't think that's actually the case, so you stop doing the contemplation. Right now, it's probably worth think rethinking an adult version of your faith as opposed to being put off by the a lot of people are really put off by the kid version of their faith. It's like, really?

• 55:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, like the burning fire.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  It doesn't make like, it doesn't make sense. But most likely, according to the data, you're going to start becoming interested in your Christian faith again as you get older. It doesn't mean you're going to have the same faith that you had. On the contrary, you probably won't. But you'll start being like, you know, there's certain things I miss about that. And and life actually is messy. And there is suffering that's hard to explain, but there's lots of things in life that are hard to explain. And maybe there's something in there that I didn't understand before. So openness to that, I'm not saying for sure, but I'm saying just be open to it. And then the very top is wisdom and that requires reading or or, you know. The accumulation of knowledge. Not everybody's a big reader and there's so many different ways to get good information at this point.

• 55:57Steven Bartlett?

  Podcasts.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Podcasts, for example, but the whole point is, is reading or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition. So, you know, read the Stoic philosophers. Read the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Read the Quran. Read the Bible. Read, read, read. And start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading, which can go years, saying, I wish I read it and you don't. Right? It's crazy. We'll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we can spend just 15 minutes a day reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Letters of Seneca. And it's incredibly enriching, right? It's like, wow, boom, starting at 15 minutes a day. So do the work.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  What do I believe? Spend some time in contemplation and do the reading. Your life's about to change. That's the protocol. That's the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for actually finding, starting to find meaning in your life. But I've prescribed this to others and I've done it myself and this really works. It helps you find on the path to the answers to those questions.

• 57:04Steven Bartlett?

  Build the life you want.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  It's a book.

• 57:08Steven Bartlett?

  It's a book sat in front of me here that has your name on it. And who's this? Oprah Winfrey.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  I like to give young authors a leg up.

• 57:17Steven Bartlett?

  How did you, so you co-wrote this book with Oprah?

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:21Steven Bartlett?

  How did you meet Oprah?

• 57:23Speaker 00

  She called me. Turns out she's a, I know. It's, she said, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, not Batman. I mean, it was Oprah Winfrey. It's the voice. She's iconic all over the world, for sure. And it turns out that she was a regular reader of my column in The Atlantic on Thursday mornings, How to Build a Life, which is a different area of the science of happiness every week that I cover. And she read my last book, which is called From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. Right? So that was a book she read on the first day it came out and then went on her Super Soul podcast and we were thick as thieves just immediately because we have the same goals as lift people up and bring them together in the spirit of happiness and love. She does it differently because she's not an academic.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  She has incredible platform. I've never seen a platform like she has where, you know, she says one thing and people are like, oh, that's a good thing to do. But she's always looking for, it's interesting because she has the money and power and fame and she uses them, she's cracked the code. She uses them in service of other people. And that's her whole goal. From the very beginning, she's never said anything to disabuse me of the idea that that's how she lives. And we started doing some things together and some podcasts together. And she called up, she said, you know, if I had my show, still, she, for 25 years, she had this iconic show on television in the United States called The Oprah Winfrey Show. And millions and millions of people watched it every day. It went off the air

• 58:50Speaker 00

  in about 2014 or something. She says, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times. And then you'd have your show. She said, but I don't have the show anymore. So let's do kind of a version of that. And let me host a book. And, and so we wrote the book together all over the last winter and the winter of 2022, 2023, I went away to, she lives in Montecito, California. I went and got a house in San Clemente, California. And we, we structured the thing and, you know, at her place. And we went back and forth on the, and it was just blast. It was about, you know, how to manage yourself. And once you're able to manage your own feelings and emotions like a pro, then you'll no longer be distracted and you can focus on the things that actually matter for your life. And that's how you build your life.

• 59:33Steven Bartlett?

  And you, you called me a mad scientist earlier.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  I'd have to take the test.

• 59:39Steven Bartlett?

  I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Most likely, yeah.

• 59:45Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, which appears in your book in the, the section about the unique, sort of unique mix of happiness and happiness. And you talk about this PANNAS score system. What are these categories? And why did you call me a mad scientist?

• 59:56Speaker 00

  So the PANNAS test is in the book and it's actually on the website at arthurbrooks.com where anybody can take it for free. It's a, it's a personality test based on the intensity of your positive and negative affect, AKA mood. Everybody's got more or less the same emotions. Everybody feels joy and interest and surprise and anger and sadness and disgust and fear. But we have them in different intensities depending on who we are. And there's really four kinds of people with these different intensities. There's some people that have very high affect, high positive affect. They have high highs and high negative affect, low lows. These are mad scientists. It's a quarter of the population.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Now, by construction is the quarter of the population because it's above average on both. Then there are people who are high highs and low lows. I mean, I should say that they have intense positive emotion, but but weak negative emotion. Right? These are cheerleaders.

• 1:00:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so they have.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  They feel their positive affect very intensely and their negative affect very weakly.

• 1:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, so they're like always happy.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  They're not always happy, but they tend to they tend to be in a better mood and see the brighter side of things. They tend to downgrade threats and think everything is going to be okay.

• 1:01:15Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  That's a quarter of the population. And everybody wants to be that, by the way. But that's not necessarily the best way to be. And they don't make the best CEOs because they're they have a hard time paying attention to threats. They don't want bad news and they have a terrible time giving bad news or giving people bad evaluations. So working for a CEO who's a cheerleader is great for a minute. But then it starts to become very frustrating because you hear him telling the incompetent idiot in the cubicle next to you that that she's doing an unbelievably good job.

• 1:01:42Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Right? And so you I mean, you you got to be realistic to be a good CEO. I mean, you're an entrepreneur, you know, perfectly. There's lots of threats out there. You got to take them seriously.

• 1:01:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  So then there are people who are high negative, low positive. These are poets. These are people who, generally speaking, there's a place in the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. That's the part that makes you a ruminator. Ruminators are people who this part of the brain is this part of the brain is dedicated to making go on problems and negative things and regret and that I can't believe that I said that thing. I feel so stupid for saying that thing. And what does she really think of me, et cetera, et cetera? It's also the part of the brain that you use when you're. Highly creative.

• 1:02:22Steven Bartlett?

  Comedians?

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, for sure, for sure. You know, I pal around with a guy named Rain Wilson. Who was in the American version of The Office. He played Dwight. And Rain told me that comedians tend to be depressed, but the reason is because they find out that they're funny and they can substitute humor for sadness. It's a substitute emotion. It's called a metacognitive technique. We talk a lot about that in the book. So then poets are, they tend to be high ruminators, so high negative affect. They focus a lot of negative things because of this hyper-developed part of their brains. They also tend to be really creative because it's the same part of your brain that when you're working on a business plan or a symphony. And they also tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person. That's kind of the poet profile, right?

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  And then last but not least, there's low, low, people who are low affect people. These are judges. These are people who they're happy and unhappy, but they feel their moods less intensely than other people. And so they don't freak out, you know? These are really good surgeons. These are really good judges. They're very good Secret Service agents. You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh, my God. You don't want your surgeon to be like that. And so there's a a gift and a role for all four of these quadrants. Most great entrepreneurs are mad scientists. Because they, the reason that they're entrepreneurs is because they want to feel things intensely because everything is intense and they do everything intensely. Right? You don't have that many people who are just like super chill.

• 1:03:55Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. That's why, you know, just having a deep conversation with you. I can see that you have a lot of mad scientific characteristics to you. You feel things deeply. Is that fair?

• 1:04:08Steven Bartlett?

  It is fair, yeah. I mean, that's the one I resonate with the most and I do describe myself as being a bit intense. My team knew me. I think I come across as a bit intense.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  What's your girlfriend?

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna say that she is a cheerleader.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  No, I'm married to a cheerleader.

• 1:04:22Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what you find is that cheerleaders, they can, they can have the best of times, but cheerleaders tend to be struggle with the mad scientist.

• 1:04:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Right? It's like, like, quite, like, everything's so great for you. Why are you gloomy? You know, it's like, why can't you look at the bright side of things? Like, why are you grouchy all the time? What's wrong with you, Steve?

• 1:04:42Steven Bartlett?

  There's a spelling mistake on our.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:04:45Steven Bartlett?

  And she's like, why is that bothering you?

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's, that's a classic thing. Everybody can be with everybody else, but the compliments are really important. The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their, their op, they look for their, their doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone. You should look for your compliment.

• 1:05:03Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert, if they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not, you know, hammer and tongs all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people, you know, satisfactory dating experiences. People have more and more and more choice, but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating. It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way. I like this music. I live here. I like these things. I want somebody with these preferences. And they get somebody who's their sibling, which is, as my adult children remind me, is not hot.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Difference is hot.

• 1:05:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's so true, because I never would have said, I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read, and she just believes in it all. And it's funny, because I never would have said that's what I wanted, but I absolutely love it.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Steven Bartlett?

  And that means that actually, she's actually pulled me into her world. She's made me more spiritual. She's made me believe in things I never would have believed before.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:12Steven Bartlett?

  And she's completing me in that regard.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  It's really great. It's really great. I mean, you've cracked the code in that way. And finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a, to a good relationship and not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important, that this is a relationship killer, is that wishing that your partner were more like you is, is just a form of egotism.

• 1:06:33Steven Bartlett?

  Everyone tries to change their partner, though, don't they?

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. It's like, there's, there's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their. Husbands and they can't and and husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change and they do. I don't know.

• 1:06:51Steven Bartlett?

  There is truth in that. Relationships and love, how important is this as a subject for happiness?

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  It's the number one area of interest of my students.

• 1:06:58Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  My average student is 28 years old. So they're MBA students, they're master's students. They've all gone through college, they've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School. You have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree. And this is the number one thing they want to talk about, they want to learn about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates. It means a classic theme. And the last line of the case study is always the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, "I don't know what happened." And so we look at brain scans and say, "This is what happened."

• 1:07:40Steven Bartlett?

  And you can see it in the brain?

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Kind of. I mean, somebody who's really in love has brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict's brain scan. I mean, your brain is, if you're at a certain point in the falling in love process, your brain is captured. So I mean, at the beginning, when people meet, there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen, which are sex hormones, obviously. And when people see somebody who's really attractive, that's why they want to look attractive because that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that, you see a big increase in noradrenaline, aka epinephrine and dopamine levels. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  that's going on when you're falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is really interesting. So serotonin, we think about as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when they feel that it's an imbalance. So people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin. And that's all really controversial still, I mean, because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination? It'll be more active when serotonin is low. And so serotonin will be low, so you start ruminating on the other person.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  That's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in. And then you get to the point of attachment, which is, which is, which involves oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attach to the other person, very profoundly attached to the other person. It's intensely pleasurable. So it's like, and the longer you let it go, the harder it is for your brain not to be really, really captured. You wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say, why did you buy methamphetamine? That's illegal. They'll be like, duh, I'm an addict. I'm a junkie. It's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate.

• 1:09:44Steven Bartlett?

  Are people that are in love and in relationships happier statistically?

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  No, on the contrary, because being in love, especially in the early stages of being in love, is not associated with what we would associate with actual happiness. Because it has jealousy, tons of jealousy, which is, you know, the rumination part. When your serotonin levels are really low, it's hard for you to say, I feel so great. You feel euphoric and you like it in its own way. But if you kept that, if you stayed in that stage, you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable. Because there's jealousy, there's surveillance behaviors are really common. And, you know, there's, there's, nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner, that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes that, but, but people tend to do that because you're, there's, a lot of your brain is basically saying, I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me back to evolution.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Is this somebody who's going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids? Is this somebody who's going to be, when I don't know it, carrying somebody else's baby? Which is how men and women actually, they tend to express their sexual jealousy in those two. Interesting, there's a guy at University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy. The most jealousy provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else. For women, it's an image of their intimate partner saying, I love you to somebody else. And the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily, women have to be worried that their partner is going to take, go take care of somebody else's children. And men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children, which,

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  according to some estimates, is 15% of paternity, which is misattributed worldwide.

• 1:11:22Steven Bartlett?

  Makes sense.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 1:11:25Steven Bartlett?

  That makes sense. So.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Fortunately, my kids look like me. One is adopted. She doesn't look like me.

• 1:11:31Steven Bartlett?

  This idea in chapter four of your book of focusing less on yourself leads to happiness. How can you prove that's the case?

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects. And so one of the classic experiments is these guys at Northwestern, there's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam Waits. I don't know if you've had him on your show before. He's a really impressive and innovative social psychologist. He did an experiment where he took the undergraduate students. You always use the undergraduate pool at your university because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks. And he put them into three groups. One had to do moral deeds, had to do random acts of kindness. One had to do moral thoughts. They had to sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people. And one had to do self-focused, sort of self-care things. Go do something that really makes you feel good. And they looked at their happiness over a series of weeks with these interventions.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  And they found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts and moral thoughts were happier than self-care. That's what they found. In other words, and again, this is basically showing the same thing that, you know, I did research for years and years and years about happiness and charitable giving. If you're lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer. Just this. If you give money away, statistically, you're more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. The reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You're empowered when you're helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That's the bottom line is what it comes down to. And so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  If you put two groups randomly selected of people, one group is playing board games and the other is helping sixth graders with their math. The ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward. I mean, this is just helping other people. Helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside Steve's head. And it makes it so that life actually has a transcendent aspect to it. You get perspective, you get peace, and furthermore, you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be.

• 1:13:34Steven Bartlett?

  Is happiness or negativity contagious?

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Yes, that's emotional contagion. There's a lot of literature on emotional contagion. It's a virus. It's a mind virus.

• 1:13:42Steven Bartlett?

  Negativity is a virus.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Negativity is a virus, but so is positivity, that you can actually, so you find that, you know, when I go into companies, which I do a lot these days, I do a lot of happiness teaching inside, you know, executive teams and corporations. And when I walk into a company, I can, I can, I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around. You know, this is why the mood and emotional wellbeing and emotional self-management of CEOs is so critically important. Because, you know, everyone's like, oh, the boss is, the boss is having a hard time today. Though I think a boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast, or whatever it happens to be, because that they can see it and the result is it tends to, the virus tends to pass around. A this sucks attitude is horrible inside families. And we see it and it will transmit from one person to one person to another person to another person. That's why it's

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  hard to live with a high negative affect person. That's why, because high negative affect people will spread a negativity virus.

• 1:14:34Steven Bartlett?

  Even if you live down the street?

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Well, it depends on how much contact you have with that person. And so, you know, that's why you want your kids to hang out with positive friends. That's why you'll see when you have your kids, and when my kids were little, they would have that one friend who's like happy all the time. You love that kid. You have the one kid who's just bummed out all the time. You're like, I don't want my kid to be around that because that, that infects the attitudes of, of your children.

• 1:14:57Steven Bartlett?

  In the book, you say, living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25% likelier to become happier too.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  If you have contact with that person. Obviously, it is, it's not going to transmit just through the air. It's not, you know, it's not the coronavirus. But, but you have to have contact with the person. But, you know, and the way that they, they measured that, that's called the Framingham Heart Study, which was out in, that's a suburb of Boston. But for many, many, many years, they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives to look at heart, you know, issues. But then they started measuring everything else. And they found, for example, that obesity is highly, is, is, is very easy to catch. When your friends become obese, you become more obese. That when your friends get divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. That when your friends get happy, you're more likely to get happy, is what we see. And, and, and the more proximity that they have to you, measured geographically or in terms of the intimacy of the relationship, the stronger the transmission mechanism.

• 1:15:51Steven Bartlett?

  I think a lot about that and how we take on other people's problems.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Steven Bartlett?

  When we're friends and family.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:56Steven Bartlett?

  What do you say to that? And does it matter that we take on other people's problems?

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, sort of. I mean, there's a big distinction between empathy and compassion. So the best way to be a parent or a partner or a friend is to be compassionate. And that's not the same thing as empathy. Our society overvalues empathy. Empathy is feeling somebody else's pain. That's taking on their problems. The worst parents of teenagers are empathetic or highly empathetic people. It's like, yeah, I feel your pain. Why? Because you're not actually helping. You got to do things that, that, you know, I may feel your pain, but I can't be, I can't be paralyzed by that. On the contrary, I got to do hard things you're not going to like, son. That's what being, that's the reason that we always say, you're not his friend. You're his dad. You know, and that's means be compassionate, don't be empathetic. The same thing is true at the big level. I mean, I would argue that our welfare systems in our countries are, need to be more compassionate.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  As opposed to simply empathetic. And, you know, that's, and that we could actually help people a lot more too. Being compassionate means being hard as steel. And doing the things that people actually need because you love them. Not just because you're actually feeling their pain. So in our families, we need to say, what does this person that I love actually need? Notwithstanding the feelings that they're transmitting to me. And sometimes that means you got to care for your own happiness. Like they say on the plane, put on your own oxygen mask first. Take care of your own happiness so you're not, you're not getting this negativity virus all the time, being paralyzed by somebody else's pain. You're not going to help them enough. No. It's almost never, well, I mean, there are cases when somebody is just a schism. But I only recommend particularly in families, schism when there's abuse. And, you know, somebody being unhappy is not abuse.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Political differences, really not abuse. Those are, that's a, it's like, one in six Americans in this country is not speaking to a family member because of political differences? That's insane. That's simply insane. That does not count as any good reason to do that unless there's actual abuse.

• 1:17:49Steven Bartlett?

  Who's happier, introverts or extroverts?

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Yes, so extroverts is the classic finding. Tons of studies sign find that extroverts have more positive affect. They have higher, they tend to have higher mood, but introverts have special gifts. They have closer relationships. They have deeper emotional connections to other people. And the result of that is that they have long term friendship and marriage partners that sustain them in a way that extroverts don't. Extroverts often get, can get really lonely because they, are you an extrovert?

• 1:18:22Steven Bartlett?

  It's such an interesting question.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  Cause you might not be, even though you're a mad scientist.

• 1:18:25Steven Bartlett?

  I don't think I am.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Do you get, when you're at a party, do you find that you get exhausted?

• 1:18:29Steven Bartlett?

  I looked at Jack, he's known me many, many years, five years. I'm an introvert. I just want to be alone.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  So when you're at a party, do you find that it sucks energy out of you?

• 1:18:35Steven Bartlett?

  I don't go to the party.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  Certainly your baseline is introversion, but you have extroverted characteristics because you're able to do, good entrepreneurs know how to be extroverts when they need to be, which is important. You run a podcast. If you're a true introvert, it's like, I gotta meet Arthur Brooks. What a pain.

• 1:18:50Steven Bartlett?

  No, I like deep conversations. I don't like small talk.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Do you have close friends?

• 1:18:54Steven Bartlett?

  Oh yeah, the same five guys I've known for 10 years.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Same five guys that you've known since college?

• 1:18:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, basically no others, other than this lot here, who I consider friends, but the same five that I've known for 12, 12 years.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  They're real friends, not deal friends.

• 1:19:05Steven Bartlett?

  No, they're real friends. They were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself. Same five guys.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  So that's interesting. And but so extroverts, they tend to get more short term happiness and introverts tend to have more long term happiness. So what you find is that extroverts, they tend to get more enjoyment and, and introverts tend to get more meaning.

• 1:19:23Steven Bartlett?

  Metacognition, you used this word earlier on when we were talking about happiness. It sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness in some respects. What is metacognition? Explain this like I'm a 10 year old.

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So metacognition simply means thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions. That's what metacognition is all about. So. The emotions are produced in the limbic system of the brain, an ancient part of the brain. You react to them and decide what they mean in the prefrontal cortex, the C suite of your head. That takes time. Those are not the same place. You need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain.

• 1:20:00Steven Bartlett?

  Which is the part of the front.

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  The part of the front, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. So, when your kids are little, when your kids are 10, and they're freaking out about something, you don't say, "Don't be so limbic." You say, "Use your words." What you're saying is be metacognitive. Allow yourself to explain this thing that you're feeling, and in so doing, you're using your prefrontal cortex as opposed to relying on the limbic tissue of your brain.

• 1:20:24Steven Bartlett?

  So, write it down would be an example.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  Writing journaling is phenomenal, classic case. So, you're anxious.

• 1:20:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Anxiety is unfocused fear. That's what it is. Fear was adapted in the human species, so that, to be episodic and intense. The way that fear is supposed to work is that something happens, it alarms you, it illuminates the amygdala of your brain, that sends a signal to the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, which then signals the adrenal gland sitting above the kidneys to spit out stress hormones. This happens in 74 milliseconds of the perception of a threat in, you know, the occipital lobe of your brain where your, you know, your visual cortex exists. Boom, this thing happens really, really quick. This is, and saved your life many, many times, thousands of times, you know, because you live in London and you can get run over at any given second. It's crazy. Well, actually, because I'm looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic, that's my problem there.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  So, so that's how, that's how that works, is the whole point. So, fear is supposed to work that way. Very episodic, very occasional. The problem in modern life is that we have all of these vague threats that are happening that are kind of half-illuminating our amygdala, which is giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time, and that's unfocused and freaking us out. So, the way to actually solve that problem metacognitively is to say, "Okay, okay, I gotta focus it. I got a piece of paper." Number one, number one thing that I'm afraid of right now, that's actually giving me this anxiety, is giving me this discomfort, write it down. Why is it happening? What's the worst thing that can happen? And what would I do if that happened?

• 1:21:59Steven Bartlett?

  And you're literally moving the thing

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  The experience.

• 1:22:02Steven Bartlett?

  From the amygdala, which is the emotional center, to the prefrontal cortex, which is the logical.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  Which is, that's your C suite.

• 1:22:08Steven Bartlett?

  And that should kill the anxiety.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  It will greatly attenuate the anxiety. It will turn it into a logical kind of fear. That's the right reaction to these threats. And it will change your life. So if you do that, if you're experiencing a lot of anxiety, you know, unfocused fear, focus it every day for 10 minutes. Write it down. I have a, I have a, I'm a very anxious person. I have a running list of the things that I'm afraid of. A running list. I have lots and lots of lists. I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critically important. I also have a failure list.

• 1:22:39Steven Bartlett?

  What are you afraid of?

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of failing. I'm a total striver from the very beginning.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  Failing or what's, what does, what failure look like?

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  I know. That's the thing. It's an unfocused fear. And so when I write it down and I focus it, I go, oh, yeah, it's true. You know, that's the, that's the point. So it's that failure is a specter for strivers. It's a kind of a, when you look at it, it goes away.

• 1:23:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  But when you're not looking at it, it's there. And part of the reason is because your self-image is one of somebody who's successful. So you're self-objectifying as a successful person. You're success addicted, meaning the ventral striatum of your brain gets tapped every time somebody says, Steve, you got another seven million downloads or something that is not inherently meaningful in that particular way, because the metric is actually what taps your ventral striatum again and again and again. And so then if that's going in the wrong direction and you're not making progress, then that sort of feels somehow not successful, which means that things are going in the wrong direction. And that's just like this phantasm, right? It's like, and so, okay, focus it. Focus it. Look at it. Poof, right? And it doesn't entirely disappear.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  It turns into what it really is, which is a mouse, not a lion.

• 1:23:50Steven Bartlett?

  Arthur, your book is fantastic. I mean, we could talk for so long because there's so much more in it. There's some of the unbelievable stats that I was reading about around social media and this one stat about a study showing that teens who texted more often than their peers experienced more depression, anxiety and poorer relationships. There are things about laughter and that you can feel 35% happier using some humour therapy. All of these things, gratitude, all of these things that we haven't covered, but they're all in this fantastic, fantastic book, which is so unbelievably accessible for someone that's as smart as you.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  I probably had to okay it.

• 1:24:21Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, right.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And I thank you for that because happiness is a complex thing. And I think there's an industry out there that are trying to simplify it and put it down to three steps to happiness or one secret to happiness.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  One weird trick. Don't eat grapes.

• 1:24:36Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  You know, whatever.

• 1:24:38Steven Bartlett?

  But your approach provides the nuance and the complexity that the subject matter deserves. And I think that offers us a path towards being happier, as you talk about in the book.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Thank you. That's why I wrote it. I wrote it for you.

• 1:24:50Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, well, yeah. It actually reads like you wrote it for me. That's the kind of, but I imagine everyone that reads it's going to feel that way. I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book ASAP. It's a really, really beautiful book as well. It's so beautiful. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. What are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control? What is your opinion on this?

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  The things that we can't control are virtually all outside ourselves. We have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where there are many things that we can't control and focus on the things that we can. How do we deal with things that we can't control? By refocusing our attention on the parts of our life that we actually can, thus giving us agency and giving us a sense of peace and perspective about the truly uncontrollable.

• 1:25:41Steven Bartlett?

  Arthur, thank you so much. So wonderful to meet you. You've energized me this morning. And we started pretty early for me. This is super early.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Yeah, no, I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Steve. It's wonderful to be with you. I've admired you for such a long time. I get to meet you in person. It's been a joy.

• 1:25:55Steven Bartlett?

  That means the world to me. Someone as profound and as smart as you to say that to me means a ton. So thank you so much, Arthur, from the bottom of my heart. Really, really appreciate it.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Thank you. You too.

• 1:26:03Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 1:26:05Steven Bartlett?

  Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.