The Science of a Well-Lived Life: How to Create a Life That Feels as Good as It Looks

Arthur C. Brooks believes we are living through an age of emptiness—a time when more people feel distracted, disconnected, and unsure of what will actually make their lives meaningful. In his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author examines why so many of the things we chase in pursuit of happiness can leave us feeling unsatisfied once we get them. In this episode, Emma Grede sits down with Brooks to unpack what is driving our unhappiness and what science actually says about building a meaningful life. Brooks reveals the two questions he gives his Harvard students to diagnose whether they’re experiencing a meaning crisis, why our brains struggle in a world of constant comfort, and how to use social media without letting it drain you. You’ll learn: Why achievement rarely satisfies us for as long as we expectWhat money can—and cannot—do for your happinessThe five-year exercise that reveals whether your priorities match how you spend your timeWhat to do in the first and last hour of the day to protect your attention The step most people skip that makes new practices stickHow to pursue a big goal without becoming emotionally attached to the outcomeThe simple ritual to shift your baseline happiness by 15 percent in 12 weeks

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

• 0:09Emma Grede?

  On Aspire, I want to have honest conversations about things that actually shape our lives. Success, yes, but also power, money, relationships, meaning and parts of being human that don't get talked about enough. Today's guest is Arthur Brooks and this is one of those conversations I think a lot of people need right now, when so many people feel distracted, uncertain, or just waiting for something to change. Arthur is a Harvard professor and a New York Times bestselling author, whose work on happiness has shaped how I think about my own life. This conversation is full of practical ideas to help you think differently, including how to spot the habits that quietly drain our attention and what actually makes life feel more meaningful. I left with so much that I want to put into practice myself. Here's Arthur Brooks.

• 1:00Emma Grede?

  Arthur Brooks, welcome to Aspire.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Thank you, Emma. It's great to be with you.

• 1:03Emma Grede?

  I'm so happy that you're here and for anyone who knows me and anyone who has bothered to watch anything that I've ever said, anything on social, everybody knows that I am such an Arthur Brooks fan. And so having you sit here today and the ability to just question you at my own leisure is just making me so happy. But I know more than anything that the work that you have done has been so impactful in my own life. And what I'm hoping today is that some of the feeling that I had, having read your last book, is going to be what our listeners are left with today, because there's so much in this particular book. And I've read everything that you've ever written. I've read the book that you wrote with Oprah, I read Strength for Strength. I started

• 1:45Emma Grede?

  actually with the column that you had in The Atlantic, which I just always thought was amazing. And that's how I discovered you. But I thought this book, particularly the meaning of your life, was so special. And as you can see, I've marked it so much. I didn't even need

• 1:59Speaker 01

  You're a very good student.

• 2:01Emma Grede?

  Here's the thing, I was a terrible student, but in my old age, I've become a better student. But the reason I marked it up so much is because there was so much to take out. There was so much that I could move into my life and so many things that you mentioned that I am already doing. And yet there were proof points here. And I really thought that what would be interesting, specifically for my listeners, for the listeners of Aspire, was your framing, how you talk so much about ambitious people or strivers. But what was interesting is that the whole book is kind of set on this backdrop of what you call the age of emptiness, which really takes me to my first question, because you've spent decades studying human happiness. And I just wondered,

• 2:43Emma Grede?

  are people actually less happy right now? Or is it just that we know so much? We can know and we see what everybody else is doing?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. The answer to that is that people are less happy than they've been in the past. And we've been keeping data on on average levels of happiness across 150 countries around the world since 1970. Now, some places are doing just fine, but they developed the OECD countries, the United States where we're sitting right now, and your home, the UK, have been declining in happiness almost every year since about 1990. And there's some reasons for that. There's kind of the climate of happiness and there's the weather, which are two different phenomena. And the climate of happiness has to do with the fact that we're ticking down by half a percentage point per year, and the percentage of people say they're very happy about their lives. And that has to do with how the people practice or don't practice any spirituality or faith,

• 3:34Speaker 01

  how family relationships are getting attenuated, people are less likely to get married and have kids. Getting married and having kids, that's like the number one driver of happiness for most people, and it's happening less. People have fewer friendships. And a lot of that has to do with the way that we use technology, of course, this is one of the biggies. And then, of course, there's how we relate to our work. And people are, you know, that working on Zoom is not going to fulfill you in the same way. You need to be around others, right? I mean, it's like, it's like, we're sitting in a studio full of people in person. And that's a good thing.

• 4:04Emma Grede?

  That's because you're here with Emma Grede.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:06Emma Grede?

  But I'll say less about that. What do you say, though, when somebody is completely uncertain and they don't know what's going to make them feel better? As somebody who has really studied this, what's the, what do you tell people?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Well, to begin with, happiness isn't a feeling. And so, and that's really important. I mean, if you know, if you said, like, can't wait for my Thanksgiving dinner, because it's the smell of the turkey. Well, that's not your Thanksgiving dinner. That's evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. And feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. And so people who are looking for a feeling, they're always going to be unsatisfied. They're always going to be frustrated. You're going to go to bed so many nights saying, I sure hope I feel happier tomorrow. And that's no way to live your life. Now, everybody watching this podcast, listening to us, these are strivers. And strivers know that you shouldn't just hope that the world changes around you. The secret of your success is changing the things that you can change, not trying to wait for the rest of the world to change. And so people who are really frustrated about their lives will be like,

• 5:02Speaker 01

  I'll be better when the economy gets better. I'll be better when my partner treats me better. I'll be better when my mental health somehow clears up. The people who are really happy, they say, okay, what can I change? And they change it right now. And so it's very important to understand that feelings occur. That's from an ancient part of your brain called the limbic system. And these are emotions, and they happen in reaction to what's going on. But you can take control, and it's very important to understand that with the many, many parts of your life, including your happiness. You have to enjoy your life, techniques for that, you need to understand what it is and take that into consideration. You need to search for satisfaction, which means you're looking for the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. And you look,

• 5:45Speaker 01

  have to look for the meaning of your life. And so that's where I start with my students. I teach MBA students at the Harvard Business School, and these are the ultimate strivers. And by the way, 70% of my MBA students are women. This is disproportionately interesting material to women. Why? Because you know what women are better at than men typically?

• 6:04Emma Grede?

  Everything.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  The enterprise of life. Women are great entrepreneurs at the enterprise of life, as opposed to just the enterprise of the business. Now, many women entrepreneurs are unbelievably successful in business too. But what women are better at naturally is saying, my life is the enterprise. I'm the founder of my life. And so they, they take my class thinking about that, and they assemble their lives with this entrepreneurial spirit, and that's the most exciting thing.

• 6:30Emma Grede?

  That is so interesting, because I think if you were to just speak to a bunch of women, they wouldn't necessarily feel like that, because as a woman, you naturally feel so inclined to think about everybody else's life. So I'm so surprised that that's what you say. But there's evidence, because I know everything that you say.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But if I talk to you about your business, you, I mean, I've talked to you about your business just a few minutes, and you've talked about how many people are working here, and the attitudes of the people working here. And that's because your entrepreneurial mindset is about the people per se. And when you talk to women or their families, the enterprise is my life and my family. And so I'm talking about the people in my family. I'm loving and being loved. That's the fuel, by the way. So an entrepreneurial venture that's trying to get to IPO, you want the share price to be just right, you want to, you want to be able to count the P and L and have it be favorable with your investors. The enterprise of life is about the extent to which you're loved and being loved. That's the fortune. That's how you become a billionaire in the entrepreneurship of life per se. And women are pretty good at that.

• 7:31Emma Grede?

  God, that's such a great way to think about things, because I think that right now, we're so bombarded, we've got more access to everything than we've ever had before, to convenience, to comfort, to entertainment. So I just wonder why all of that access hasn't made us necessarily feel better?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  So that's, that's a problem with nature. We are, our brains are more or less the same as they were 250,000 years ago. That was called the middle Pleistocene. Human beings, their brains evolved, and brains evolved. But our brains are more or less the same as they were a quarter million years ago. And at that point, all of the human race, all Homo sapiens, lived in hunter gatherer tribes, bands of 30 to 50 individuals. You were kin based, you were hierarchical, you were living in tropical regions, because you couldn't, I mean, you were going to die otherwise, is what it came down to. And so the result of it is all the weird things that we do today are based on the exigencies of living then. And it's so weird. I mean, the way that we mate, you know,

• 8:28Speaker 01

  the way that we have romance, we do these weird things, like, why are women are so jealous about some things and men about other things? Evolutionary biology explains a lot of it. But here's the key point. 250,000 years ago, what were you worried about? You were worried about making it through the winter, getting sufficient calories, defending yourself against beasts and the next tribe over, and passing on your genes. That's what you were really worried about. And so the result is that you had these, the cares that you had were very different than what were going to bring you happiness. Mother Nature isn't saying, isn't saying, I want Emma to be happy. Mother Nature is saying, I want Emma to survive. And what you do to survive are your animal impulses. What you

• 9:09Speaker 01

  do to be happy are your moral aspirations. You've got a brain that can choose, but you've got to choose wisely. So here's the problem. Here's why we feel empty. Here's the answer, right? We do the animal impulse things that we think are going to bring us happiness, and it's wrong. We look for money, we look for power, we look for pleasure, we look for the adoration of strangers, and care what other people think. What brings us happiness? Faith, family, friendship, meaningful work. That's what actually brings us happiness. And so when we go for the wrong thing, we get the wrong reward. And that's why we feel so empty.

• 9:45Emma Grede?

  So do you feel like the pursuit of happiness has actually just become another burden? Like, it's just another thing that people are failing to meet in their lives?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And one of the biggest problems that you find, some of the unhappiest people are people saying, I want to be happy. I want to be happy. I want to be happy. That's like saying, I want to be healthy. I want to be healthy. But you don't know how to get healthy. The healthiest people do things that make them healthier every day. I say, I want to be healthier, that's like putting a pin in some sort of, like a goal. And you know how we run businesses? You and I have business, you've got a big business, I've got a little business, I'm a small business owner. And what do you do?

• 10:19Emma Grede?

  I love a small business.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Oh, it's the best. It's the best. You put a pin in where you want to be, and then you figure out the process to get there. And then you spend all your time thinking about the process. Right? That's the most important thing, because you got to be great at what you do every single day. The same thing is true with respect to your happiness. I want to be happier in a year. I want to be, I want to have a better marriage in a year, for example. Okay, good. Now, think about what will actually get you there and focus on those things.

• 10:45Emma Grede?

  So are we just entirely focused on the wrong thing?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're focused on the goal, the goal, the goal, the goal, the goal. We can't really define the goal, and we're not doing what we need to do to get to the goal.

• 10:55Emma Grede?

  And so today, you're going to teach us exactly what the right thing is.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do my best.

• 10:59Emma Grede?

  I really hope so. So I think so much about comparison, because the culture that we live in now sets us up, like, the first thing in the morning, if you're not reading the news like I usually am, you are comparing yourself against what somebody did last night, what somebody's decided to post. And I wonder if Actually, even being around other successful people makes it harder for you to feel successful.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, a lot. Social comparison is really the thief of joy. And, you know, there's a reason that we do that. There's a reason that we feel envy. There's a reason that we compare ourselves socially because in the tribe of thirty to fifty individuals, you have an incentive to want to rise in the hierarchy of that. You have a natural incentive. You're more likely to get rewards and pass on your genes and get mates, et cetera. The trouble is that the tribe has turned into hundreds of billions of people. And you can't cope with that. Your brain can't cope with that. And so to the extent that you're comparing yourself with other people, and it's always on the internet. This is one of the reasons, by the way, that happiness has tanked so much, not just since nineteen ninety, but since two thousand and eight.

• 12:00Emma Grede?

  But what I loved about your book is there's nothing in there that says or presumes that people should come off of social and not be part of it anymore.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, this is not gonna happen.

• 12:08Emma Grede?

  No, exactly.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  It's not gonna happen.

• 12:10Emma Grede?

  Like, the book is so honest and so real. So what are people expected to do? How do you not feel like?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so to begin with, it's important to, look, people follow you on social media. I follow you on social media.

• 12:22Emma Grede?

  Thank you. I follow you.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so funny. So, and the whole point is that your social media habit should be kind of revolving around using it as a tool and not using it as a way to while away your time or wish for a better future or entertain yourself. What it comes down to is kind of learning, loving, and laughing. Those are the best ways to use social media. Learning about something. People should follow you because they want to learn about what it means to be an entrepreneurial person or some of the skill, the unique skills that you have. Loving. They should follow people that they actually know. And they want to know what's actually going on. So it enhances, it complements the relationships as opposed to substituting for them. And then some laughs. If you're using social media for more than an hour a day, total across all forms of social media, summed across the platforms, it's too much.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And it's going to be capturing too much of the dopamine in your brain.

• 13:10Emma Grede?

  Is that like, again, another data point or something that you've just said, it's an hour?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's an hour is a good rule of thumb because it's, you know, sixty minutes is easy to figure out, but also you can put the timer on your phone. And there's all kinds of apps that can limit it for you. And when you do that, then you're gonna be like, I'm not gonna look at that because that's not one of the three Ls and I've only got sixty minutes.

• 13:28Emma Grede?

  Yeah, you said something so nice earlier that the fittest people, the healthiest people are those that spend a lot of time wanting to be fit and healthy. And happiness is much like that, like you've got to put into it.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Right. And you have to know what you're actually trying to pursue. But actually, we're talking about right now what to not do. This is really important. And all addiction medicine, and all addiction science, which I've looked at a lot, it's a very interesting area, behavioral science, is that one of the things that you find is that to actually get on the right path, it's not a question of doing the right things first, it's stopping the wrong things first.

• 13:57Emma Grede?

  Really?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, so cleaning up your act. Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna, you know, you're not gonna behave alcoholically, the first thing to do is to not drink. It's what it comes down to. So you're not gonna not use the internet. You're not gonna not use your phone. You are. So it's more like, if you want to eat better, you're not gonna stop eating because you'll die. And so the phone is more like food than it is like heroin. And so that's, that's the, the second part is the time limit. And the third part is, is the rules and certain pints of the day. There are certain parts of the day that are too sacred to contaminate with the phone.

• 14:27Emma Grede?

  Like the morning?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  First hour of the day. First hour of the day. Now, you have to look at your phone when you're first wake up because you've got to know if something's on fire in London because your business is international.

• 14:36Emma Grede?

  True.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  But then you can put it down because you can say, okay, nothing on fire. Good. And everybody knows that Emma's not going to be on her phone from, you probably get up at five.

• 14:44Emma Grede?

  You know a lot about me.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I've not, I'm not stocking, I promise.

• 14:47Emma Grede?

  Four forty-five.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  But every, yeah, I get up at four thirty. And every successful person is always before dawn. And part of the reason is because you've learned, whether or not you've actually made this explicit in your mind or not, that if you get up when the sun is already up, you've already lost the first bell of the day. Right? And that's a magic hour. Don't waste it.

• 15:03Emma Grede?

  Magic hour. I mean, I've never thought about it in that way, but to me, it's a magic hour because nobody's asking anything of me. I get to choose how I spend that time. And even though, yes, I do need to check in on business, it's not the first thing. Because that time, I'm like, wait a minute, like, that's my sacred time. Four forty-five to six thirty is like the bit where I get to choose.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Every religion tradition calls it the holy hour.

• 15:26Emma Grede?

  They do?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in India, it's called the Brahman Mahurta, which means the creator's time in Sanskrit.

• 15:31Emma Grede?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Right?

• 15:33Emma Grede?

  The creator's time. It should be called the mom's time.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 15:37Emma Grede?

  I'm telling you, like, moms need that time in the morning.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Mom's holy hour.

• 15:40Emma Grede?

  Oh, yes, you do. Before any child asks something of you, will you start serving everyone?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Z, z, z.

• 15:48Emma Grede?

  Literally, z, it's like zapping. It's like zapping your brain.

• 16:00Emma Grede?

  So what do you do when you're really grateful for the life that you've built, but you still feel behind? And I come back to this comparison point because I feel like it prevails so much in our society that we have to find a way to address it. Because to me, it really is such a thief and takes so much away from your happiness when you're in this constant comparison game and you feel FOMO. And it's really hard for people to get out of doing that.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  It is. And, and once people have a proper relationship with the, with the screen, a lot of that receives. Really a lot. Because you're not looking at these objects of comparison all the time. You're more living inside your own life as opposed to living inside somebody else's life. So number one is getting the hygiene of the phone under control. That will really, really solve a lot of problems. Then the second thing to remember is that that it's very easy to get into the kind of the scoreboard mentality. So a lot of people don't have this problem, by the way. A lot of people that we know, and a lot of people who are watching us right now, they're like, yeah, all my friends I went to high school with, they're actually really happy. And I'm way more successful, but I'm not as happy, right? And the reason is because they've gotten into this, this rat race, this hedonic treadmill

• 17:06Speaker 01

  of always putting points on the board, points on the board. And you know what? Me too. I admire strivers, but they have particular problems that most people don't understand. It's like, you could complain about the fact that things feel empty and it's like the world's smallest violin. Emma Grede is not as happy as she could be. But, but, but it's no joke. I was interviewing a woman, a billionaire, in, on, on Wall Street. She's one of the greatest investors. She's famous. She's rich. And I was interviewing her about her career. And she talked about, you know, I started my first firm when I was in my twenties and, and, and now I have thousands of employees. And I'm like, congratulations. And then she stops me, she says, "Professor, I'm so unhappy." I'm like, "Talk to me, sister. What's going on?" She's my age.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  And she says, "You know, everything that I thought I wanted, I got. But my husband and I are roommates. And, and I have adult kids and we have a cordial relationship. I, I, it's like, I don't know how to do anything except work. I go to the doctor and the doctor's like, "You drink too much, gotta go to the gym," but I don't. And she said, "You know, when I was a little girl, I used to go to church and I loved that. And I always wanted to. And I believe in God. But it's been thirty years. And I just don't even know why." She said, "What do I do?" I said, "You don't need a professor to tell you what to do."

• 18:19Emma Grede?

  I can tell you. Fix it with your husband, dust your kids, and go to the church.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  And she said, she said, "I got it. I know." And I said, "So why not?" And that's the important point, right? Because then she stopped. She thought for a long time. And this is what got me. She said, "You know, I've always chosen to be special rather than happy." And I'm like, boom. And, and I'm like, okay, good. I wrote it down. But it was like, it's me too. It's me too. I mean, I'm telling you, I was a CEO through when my kids were growing up. You know how much I missed in that fourteenth hour in the office before the first hour with my kids? You know, that was just, and you know, they got, they got revenge on me. They grew up. Now, of course, I'm getting the last laugh because I'm a grandfather now and I'm not missing that.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  They can't escape me. But, but the whole point is that, that we, we will, because of our biology, the animal impulse is for specialness. And most people don't have that problem. I mean, most people are like, "Hey, man, if I could have Emma's life, it would be a charmed life. But I can't, so I guess I'm just gonna go, you know, go to the park with my kid." Congratulations, you won.

• 19:20Emma Grede?

  You won.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  You won, right? So therefore, everybody watching us, who's gonna do, who are gonna do great things. I mean, this is like, this, this show is Money in the Bank. This is human capital development. That's really great. But remember that you have to do on purpose, but many people do just over the ordinary course of events.

• 19:41Emma Grede?

  Right.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  You need the skills of being happy and not just special.

• 19:45Emma Grede?

  And the skills of being happy take work like everything else that you're striving for.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  You have to pay attention to what the happiest people do naturally. You have to pay attention to that. That is your faith. That is your family. That is your friendship. That is working in things that don't necessarily compensate you to the max, but that actually create value in the universe with your life.

• 20:06Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And that's the source of meaning.

• 20:08Emma Grede?

  And I want you to talk because the book is so much, and, and the way that you frame this idea of meaning. Will you just talk to me a little bit about that? Because I think there's so many people say, "My life is devoid of meaning. I don't have meaning." And some people don't even know that they should be looking for meaning and how inextricably linked that is with happiness.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  I've been giving a test to my students, my, my twenty-something-year-old students for a long time to see whether or not they have a meaning crisis. And this is really scientifically valid. It's a two-question exam.

• 20:41Emma Grede?

  They're the best. I mean, I have this, it's one of the first things in the book that I was like, "I need to get him to talk those two questions through."

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yes. And the two questions that I ask my students. And the way to pass this test, and everybody watching us, I want everybody watching and listening to us to think about their answers to these questions. And the way you pass the exam is to have answers. And if you don't have answers, good. Now you know what to look for. Don't go looking for the meaning of life. Go looking for the answers to these two questions. Number one, why are you alive? Now, that's like, that's too big, but it could be who created you or for what purpose? And the second is, for what would you give your life right now? Give it all right now, happily walk away from your own life, give your life. You know, for some people, you and me, I know exactly what popped into your head is the four little ones. Right?

• 21:28Emma Grede?

  Of course.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  And for me, it's the four big ones with the five little ones. And you know, it's the, of course, but what else? You know, for your country, for your values, for your faith.

• 21:37Emma Grede?

  And that's what everybody has to do, especially for any woman that's listening in, for anyone that has dependents. You've got to go that one step further because it can't be just that.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Just junior, right? Okay, so when I started giving this exam, 15% of my students would fail and 85% would pass. 15, 85, okay, okay. Started to rise, when? 2008. Now I've got the data, yeah, yeah, what happened in 2008? Like, what did we all get in 2008, 2009?

• 22:04Emma Grede?

  I don't know, what the big crash? Oh, the phone.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  The phone. It was when the iPhones first was delivered at the end of 2007. By 2009, we all had one. Now, most of the world has one, is what you found.

• 22:15Emma Grede?

  We were distracted from figuring out or wanting to find out the meaning of our life?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  But the problem was, we stopped being able to even ask the questions. And that's what this book is about. Number one is, we got a problem. Number two is, what happened to our brains? And number three, most importantly, is how do we fix it? Because that's what we really want to know, is how do we fix this? And what happened to our brains? We started using our brains differently. And, and this is a whole area of neuroscience. It's got a fancy title. It's called hemispheric lateralization. Okay. The left side of your brain does all the technology, does all the, you know, the efficiency, does all the how to and what of life. Running your business requires a lot of left hemisphere. How to and what, how to and what, how to and what? What makes you happy is the right side of your brain, which asks the why.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  The why is because I love my husband, because I love my kids, because I want to understand the divine, because I want to make the world a better place. Why, why? And then how to and what to do that? And that's what your brain's supposed to work. Every time you open up your phone, you move to the left side of your brain, you don't even ask the why questions. That's the crisis. Now, the average American opens up her or his phone 205 times a day.

• 23:27Emma Grede?

  I mean, it's just wild to think about.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And the left, and the left side of the brain is just, right side of the brain is quiet. And that's our problem.

• 23:35Emma Grede?

  And that's why you say that we are in an era of emptiness.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Exactly right. Because the right side of your brain makes you feel full of life. And when it's not on, you feel empty. You feel deadness. It's so funny, because you know, people are using ChatGPT for the best friend experience, for the girlfriend experience, God forbid, for a therapist. And like, I keep getting kind of human-like, you know, conversations, but I feel lonelier and lonelier. Because your brain knows, you can simulate a lot. We're kind of living in the matrix. You know, fake work on the Zoom screen, fake friends who are virtual people on social media we've never met, fake courting on the apps. Now, the apps can be great, but get out in real life fast.

• 24:19Emma Grede?

  Get out.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm actually a scientific advisor to Bumble right now, because they're so dedicated to actually getting out fast in real life. You know, they're dedicated to the real human experience. But you know, the whole fake accomplishment through gaming, it's all fake, fake, fake. It's all, it's the matrix, which is the left hemisphere of the brain. And you can't, you can't simulate meaning.

• 24:39Emma Grede?

  But I'm really interested in this because I think post-COVID, and I'm sure so many people say this to you. Everybody feels like there are parts of retracting and being inside and having a convenient life that somehow feels better for them. Because I've spoken about this very, very openly and had, you know, some backlash as it pertains specifically to work culture and Zoom culture. But I also think, you know, having food delivered to your door and, you know, having to date online and reducing ourselves to these, you know, screen-only relationships is really damaging for us.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  It's an efficiency move. And there's all kinds of efficiency moves that hurt us.

• 25:21Emma Grede?

  But don't people fight against you when you say that? Don't they say, but listen, like, I love that convenience and I love my house and I love my bed and I really enjoy, you know, not having to come into work and have, you know, toxic relationships? Like, isn't that what people kind of hit back at?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. Except they, well, I mean, I, so, so I give a lot of advice to young people. I get a lot of unsolicited, and, and I'm not a professional coach, but you know, look, I can give a lot of advice. And so a lot of young guys will be like, ah, it's like, I graduated from college, but I don't have any opportunities. I'm living with my mom, I'm, I'm smoking a lot of weed in the basement, you know, I can't find a job. I don't know, what do I do, professor? And I'm like, okay, tomorrow morning, get up, make your bed, brush your teeth, go look for a job. Don't look at any pornography. It's horrible for you. And by the way, go to the gym and lift some weights. I'm like, ah, you know, I get pushed back on that too. Why? Because it's not efficient. What's efficient? To not leave the house, to sit on the couch, to not exercise, to eat garbage. You know, there's a reason that you and I started the day today in the gym.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I know you did, so did I.

• 26:23Emma Grede?

  Yes, I did.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I've been starting the day in the gym for 30 years, right? Until like, when I figured out in my early 30s, it's like, this is not going to end well. Get some exercise. But the whole point is, it hurts. I don't do it because it feels good. I do it because it's what I need to do, because I want to be fully alive. And that means doing the hard thing is what it comes down to. And doing the hard thing is getting out in real life with real people. Here's the rule. The little screen, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, it's not the enemy. And it's with us for good. But if it is substituting for in-real-life love, it's hurting you. It's hurting you. If it's a compliment to that, because you're learning, loving and laughing, good.

• 27:03Emma Grede?

  Great.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  But if it's a substitute for dating, if it's a substitute for friendship, if it's a substitute for calling your mom, it's gonna, it's gonna hurt you. It's gonna hurt your life.

• 27:12Emma Grede?

  Really gonna hurt you. Talk to me a little bit about suffering, because I do feel like some of the reluctance to meet people in person, to go out, to do the hard thing, is because people want, you know, they're, they're trying to preserve themselves. They don't want to meet somebody and get rejected. They don't want to make that call and feel like somebody's dodging them. But you talk about suffering in such an additive way in your book. And I want you to explain why suffering is necessary.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, suffering is one of the great right hemispheric experiences. You actually use the right half of your brain, the meaning half of your brain, when you're suffering. That doesn't mean people need to go looking for suffering. My students will be like, professor, you say, you're saying I got to go looking for suffering? I say, don't worry, it will find you.

• 27:54Emma Grede?

  It always does.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  The whole question is, what do you do when it does? So the Buddhists have a formula for understanding suffering. Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain. Pain times resistance, that equals suffering. Pain is going to find you, physical pain and mental pain. Your brain is, is built so you can feel pain. If you didn't, I mean, literally, what will happen if you don't feel physical pain? That's one of the characteristics of leprosy. And where your nerve endings are malfunctioning such that you don't know and you've hurt yourself. That's a big problem. You have pain because it's protective. You have social pain so that you'll avoid being rejected. And, and, and mental pain is no joke. I mean, that your brain is designed for this and, and you'd be dead in a week.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Actually, if you felt no pain at all, you know, no fear, you'd get hit by a car. So, so thank God for actually negative emotions in this way. So it's gonna happen. You don't need to go looking for it unless you're some sort of a weirdo, but it will find you. The question is, what do you do when it does find you? Now, there are certain cases where you try to mitigate the pain. My back hurts right now, and so I took, I took 600 milligrams of ibuprofen, because I want to be on point. I want to be with you completely right now, thinking about, oh, my back, right? Okay, good, I tried to lower the pain. And, and there's some times when, you know, market conditions are such that it's, it's not great for your company. And you want to change the market conditions so the pain to your employees and, and to your investors changes. It goes down, I got it. But you know, a lot of the time, you can't. A lot of the time, you can't.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  I mean, somebody that you love leaves you, somebody that you love dies. What are you gonna do? That's when you work on the resistance side. This is power, now that we're talking about. Your suffering will decline if you lower your resistance to pain that you can't do anything about. Your life will be worse, your life will, your suffering will go up if you try to resist pain that you can't actually avoid. It's what it comes down to. You know, you see this all the time. My, my, my mother-in-law, now, blessed memory, I loved her so much, I loved her like my own mother. I was so close to my mother-in-law in Spain, in Spain, in Barcelona. She died when she was 93. The last three years of her life, she was bedridden. Now, she was an active, active person. But lying in her bed, she was in tremendous physical pain.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And she had this beatific expression, you know, that she was, she loved people, people continuing coming and going and the whole thing. And she was this big inspiration. Why? She was not suffering very much, despite the fact that her pain was high, but because her resistance was low. That's what it comes down, I mean, that's raising kids.

• 30:22Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  A lot is, a lot about lowering your resistance to pain, is what it comes about. And that's how we need to understand it. You want the suffering to be generative and help you find meaning, then say, my life's gonna have pain and I have a choice about how I'm gonna react to that pain.

• 30:46Emma Grede?

  What do you say to someone who is genuinely unhappy because of their circumstances? And it's not something that they can change with mindset or a set of behaviors. It's like, they are unhappy because of their job, because of a personal experience. What's your advice?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  So, we have a tendency, this is called negativity bias. We're so funny as creatures, right? We focus on the negative because focusing on the negative in our lives is what's kept us alive. The trouble is that there's a portfolio of things going on in our life all the time. This is our relationships and our work and our money and our health and all that stuff that has our attention. One of those pixels is going to be blinking negative, is going to be blinking red. There's nobody watching us right now, very few people watching us right now, where they're all blinking red, but probably nobody where it's all blinking green. Somebody's got that one thing and your brain makes you pay attention to that one thing. That's what it comes down to. One of the techniques that you can use to override this, now pay attention, change it.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I mean, to begin with, don't be out of control. Don't pay attention to the things you can't control, pay attention to the things that you can. So gratitude is an overriding mechanism in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. And there's great studies on this. So I, you know, I've actually assigned gratitude lists for years. And the way that you do this is on Sunday, write down the five things, Sunday evening, write down the five things you're most grateful for in your life. I don't care how stupid they are, but you write these things down. You know, my mom and I had a good conversation this week, you know, whatever it happened to be, I saw this beautiful sunset or something really profound like, you know, God loves me, good, write them down. Every day over the course of the week, look at each one of them each night for one minute each and meditate on it. On Sunday, update the list.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  The list might get longer, the list might change, you decide how it works. On average, at the end of 12 weeks, you'll be at least 15% happier.

• 32:38Emma Grede?

  But, and Arthur, I feel like everybody talks about a gratitude practice.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Emma Grede?

  I learned it as a kid from Oprah, like many people of my generation, and I've made it a part of my life forever and ever since. If you're not doing this right now, right, really, if you're sitting there and you're like, I've listened to so many podcasts, I've heard so many experts and they all say, you're really serious that it will make you 15% happier after a couple of months.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It's completely free. Now, the way that you actually get happier, by the way, is not just, you know, you watch a podcast, say, good idea, not good enough.

• 33:09Emma Grede?

  You gotta do it.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  That's the reason that people have a million self-improvement books and don't feel better, because they have the epiphany. What you have to do is you need to understand the science. The science is super interesting, by the way. I just talked about the science. Number two, you need to change your practice. And then here's the killer, you gotta go explain it to somebody else. The minute that you explain it to somebody else, you become in your mind and in their minds accountable to the practice.

• 33:32Emma Grede?

  So before we get into the really big things, talk to me, aside from gratitude, about the daily habits that you have that have the single biggest impact on happiness.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  So the single biggest impact on happiness today is not going to be what it was when I was a kid. And the reason is because the iPhone wasn't in our lives. The single biggest thing that we can actually do is to corral our internet behavior in a healthier way. That's the single, that's the game changer for most, this is the one thing, the little switch, that first hour.

• 34:00Emma Grede?

  For most people, it's a big switch.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. The first hour, the last hour, especially if you live with your beloved.

• 34:05Emma Grede?

  Can I tell you how much I loved your love story and how you met your wife in the book? I mean, the idea, and this is, I mean, you should tell it because it's so beautiful, but I just found it magical that you would see somebody across a room, you're playing in an orchestra and then you tell the rest.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 34:23Emma Grede?

  It's so off the topic, but it just was one of the parts in the book that I was like, oh, I just.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, here's the reason that it's on the topic of meaning, because romantic love is one of the best ways you can illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain. But I was, you know, a 24-year-old kid when I was, I was a professional musician all the way through my twenties. I dropped out of college, I took a gap decade, you know, and I went on the road and I was playing chamber music all over the place and I was on a European concert tour. And I was at a concert and I was playing, it was in France, in Dejounte, in the Burgundy region of France. And as I was playing, there's this girl, this beautiful girl, man, looking at me and I'm like, gosh, I gotta go talk to her afterward. Maybe she speaks English. No, no, not a word.

• 35:05Emma Grede?

  Never so convenient.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  What I figured out through, you know, gesticulations and translation was that she was not French, she was Spanish, cut the line, she was from Barcelona. And so I did the only thing I could do, which is not, you know, a sensible person would walk away, I had a translator ask her out for me. And we went out on like three dates and during that concert tour, I was there for a week, I was in Dejounte for a week. I got home, I'm like, I can't get this girl out of my mind. So I called my dad and I said, Dad, you know what? I think I met the girl I'm gonna marry. And he's like, great, let's meet her. I said, well, I got some problems. She doesn't live in the United States, she doesn't speak English. She told me she doesn't believe in marriage because she's European. And so she has no idea that this is my plan. And he says, so what are you gonna do?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And I said, I, you know, I think I'm gonna move there. And so I hatched this plan and I found a job in the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. And I quit my job in the States and I sold all my stuff and I moved to Barcelona and I moved there, she's like, she's so happy to see me and the whole thing. And I said, yeah, I'm living here now. She's like, that's really weird.

• 36:13Emma Grede?

  Weird.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  It took me two years to close the deal.

• 36:16Emma Grede?

  Wow.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  It did take me two years to close the deal.

• 36:18Emma Grede?

  But you really did happily ever after, you learnt the language and you fell in love and you have three kids together and five grandkids and 35 years later.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and this is really, I mean, it's like, it's, nothing's perfect because, you know, the truth is, anything that exists in the right hemisphere of your brain is super complex, meaning it's, these are problems that you'll understand and live with but never solve. The, your business is a complicated problem, your marriage is a complex problem. You will never solve your marriage. You're gonna be arguing with your husband, not all the time, but you will have arguments and disagreements with him that feel like, oh, when you're 35 years married, like me, and, and when you're, God willing, 65 years married before you, he takes his dying breath as he looks upon his beloved. But, but that's the essence of what it means to be fully alive, to not solve it, but to actually live it. And that's really, really important.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Everybody watched, almost everybody watching us, many of the people watching us and listening to us right now, they, they have that beloved, good. But many of the rest want that beloved. What are you looking at? What is that one flesh? That's not the person who has a certain set of characteristics in your dating profile. That's the person who will complete the right hemisphere of your brain. That's what you're looking for, the deep, deep friendship that you can't quite explain.

• 37:35Emma Grede?

  And obviously, not everybody has a significant other, but so much of what you talk about is human connection, is friendships. And I wonder why friendships become just so much harder when we get older.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  They get harder when we get older, but they get much, much harder in the age of technology, where we're actually trying to mediate our relationships through screens. Your brain knows that it's not a real friend if it's not in person.

• 37:58Emma Grede?

  Right.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  If it's never in person, for example.

• 38:00Emma Grede?

  If it's never in person. So you can have those relationships where, you know, most of my friends are in England, but you have to see those.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  You gotta see them.

• 38:07Emma Grede?

  You have to keep it alive.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I mean, I'll talk to, and guys are, women are way better at friendship than men, by the way. The data on this are completely clear.

• 38:14Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Men are horrible at friendship. I mean, it's, oh, it's, it's, it's sad, actually, the extent to which I'll talk to guys and say, of course I got a best friend. When was the last time you talked to them? Three months ago. No, I mean, my closest friends I talked to a lot.

• 38:28Emma Grede?

  Yeah, you have, you have to, you know, my, my mother-in-law had a beautiful way of saying, you know, all relationships should give birth to something. You need new things, it can't always be about what happened 10 or 20 years ago. And to do that, you have to be together, you have to make new things happen.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  And that's a Schreiber problem too. So all the successful, ambitious, hardworking people, they're like, yeah, I got tons of friends. And all I was asking, yeah, really? Are they real friends or deal friends?

• 38:56Emma Grede?

  Oh.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Real and deal, we all know what that means, right? I mean, deal friends are super useful, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 39:02Emma Grede?

  No, you gotta have some deal friends.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I do business all the time.

• 39:05Emma Grede?

  You really, really gotta have real friends.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  And real friends, you know what they are? They're useless. They're useless. I don't mean that in a bad way.

• 39:11Emma Grede?

  Totally.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Aristotle called them, they're atelic, which means they don't have this utilitarian telos.

• 39:16Emma Grede?

  They have nothing to give you, but I actually think.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Except love.

• 39:19Emma Grede?

  I really understand that because I always think that my realest friendships want nothing from me, absolutely nothing. And that's how I judge my best friendships. I'm like, this person needs nothing from me.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Right, they, you know, they're going to, what they're gonna get from you is a sense of loving and being loved.

• 39:36Emma Grede?

  Yeah, and that's it.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  That's what it comes down to.

• 39:37Emma Grede?

  What do you actually believe about happiness that most people don't wanna hear?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. What most people don't wanna hear is that happiness is not a destination, it's a direction.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  They want to be happy. You know, I say, what do you want? I want to be happy. What do you want for your kids? I want them to be happy. Well, I actually personally believe that you can be completely happy, but not in this life. I believe in this life you can't because there is true happiness that comes next. That's my belief. I'm a traditionally religious person, actually, right? Happiness isn't a place. It's not a destination in this life. Happiness is a direction. When you do the things you're supposed to do, paying attention to the enjoyment in your life and the satisfaction with your accomplishments, the meaning of your life, you'll get happier. So when I worked with Oprah, that you read the book that I wrote with Oprah, and it was such a great experiences. She's one of the few people who's exactly the same when you're having dinner alone

• 40:33Speaker 01

  as when she's in an arena of screaming fans. It's extraordinary.

• 40:36Emma Grede?

  It's an extraordinary.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  It's one of the reasons why she's so happy. So when we were cooking up this book that we wrote together, she said, so, so the goal isn't happiness, it's happier-ness, which is not a word, except now it is.

• 40:49Emma Grede?

  Except now it is.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  It's like Oprah Winfrey. She's so good. She took my whole, what it took me years to do an APH D, she didn't like, you know, forty-five seconds.

• 40:56Emma Grede?

  I got it. Okay, let's roll with that one. But it's an extraordinary way to think about it because so many people that achieve things, especially successful people, they get to the thing and then they immediately begin chasing the next thing. So why doesn't achievement stay with us very long?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is, this is the strivers curse. That and, and the belief that when you finally get that thing, that you'll be cosmically happy, that's called the arrival fallacy. Of course, it has a psychological name to it. And I've worked with Olympic athletes. They, almost inevitably, if they win a gold medal, they suffer a clinical depression afterward.

• 41:29Emma Grede?

  Wow.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Because they've been looking for it and looking for it and looking for it. Here's a really funny thing about something that most people who are watching us have experienced over the course of their life. Dieting is a really funny thing because almost every diet works, but they almost all fail, right? And so about eighty percent of diets fail insofar as people gain back everything they lost within a year. But almost every diet works so that the beginning of it, you lose pounds over the weeks and months. So what's the deal with that? And the answer is, when you're on a diet, you're not eating the things that you like and you're making sacrifices, but you get this reward, which is that the scale goes down. It's really, really satisfying because we're made to make progress and we love the scoreboard, right? The trouble is, when you hit your goal weight, you know what your reward is?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  You're never gonna eat what you like every year for the rest of your life. Congratulations. And it's very unsatisfying. So people are like, ah, it's no good. That's the arrival fallacy, that when I hit my, my goal weight, everything is gonna be so awesome. When I get that billion dollars, I'm gonna feel it. Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction, but I try and I try to, it's actually wrong. If you couldn't get no satisfaction, you wouldn't try because you're an idiot. The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. You believe that when you hit your goal, it'll feel wonderful forever, but it doesn't because you get these positive emotions and those are transient. Those go away. So the first thing a billionaire says when they earn their first billion is, huh, I thought it was gonna be better. Maybe two billion.

• 42:59Emma Grede?

  That's exactly.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  I know. It's like, I thought I'd be so much happier when I had a boat.

• 43:04Emma Grede?

  Yeah. But that's exactly what happens to people. It doesn't matter if it's a promotion, if it's whatever it is, you get there and you're like, oh.

• 43:21Emma Grede?

  I want to talk to you a little bit about money because I think for so long in my life, I was under the belief that the more money I had, the happier I would get. And I really wonder what the, I mean, to some degree, it was like, not, not entirely untrue, but there's a point at which it doesn't work anymore.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  What's the science?

• 43:39Emma Grede?

  I really, I really wanna know, like, what is the science? Does money actually make you happier?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  So here's a funny thing about that. So our, our brains don't know, I mean, there's a big difference between happiness and unhappiness. They're not opposites. They're actually processed in different parts of the brain.

• 43:55Emma Grede?

  Right.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Our happiness, the emotions associated with happiness and unhappiness are in different hemispheres of the brain, as a matter of fact. We know this from all kinds of, you know, brain studies, et cetera. But we can't do the sums in our head. We think that well-being is kind of happiness minus unhappiness. And you notice, because you were raised without nice things, as they say, euphemistically. It was like, you don't wanna say poor, but yeah. And I was raised, you know, it was very austere, right? What money does at low levels is it gets rid of the sources of unhappiness.

• 44:24Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And that's what happened to you.

• 44:25Emma Grede?

  Facts.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Is that you were freer and you were less worried and you had more ability to do a bunch of things that, that you needed to do so that you could avoid misery and you weren't worried about healthcare. I mean, that's what it does. But at a very low level, you satiate that, but you keep looking for that feeling. And people will chase that feeling. Like, ah, man, I mean, when I went from earning twenty-five thousand dollars a year to seventy-five thousand dollars a year, I felt a lot better. So if I go from two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year to seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year, it should be great. And you're like,

• 44:57Emma Grede?

  No, so much.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  I got a kind of bigger apartment, you know? That's good. But the whole point is you chase and chase and chase and chase and chase. Now, there's a loophole. I'll tell you how to buy happiness, no matter how much money you have. It's not buying stuff. What really will bring you happiness is experiences with the people that you love, right? So if you're gonna buy a beach house, only do it as bait for the people that you love to go there, right? Second is buy time and spend it in edifying things, in prayer, in meditation with the people that you love. Number three, give your money away. Give it to things, people and causes that you really care about. Number four, save for a better future.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  That's how you do it, is, is experiences, time, philanthropy and saving. Those are the four things that you can actually do that will reliably bring you more happiness. But your biology is like, no, I'll get more stuff. Get a Ferrari.

• 45:54Emma Grede?

  Get a Ferrari.

• 45:58Emma Grede?

  So true, because the minute you say that, I mean, I've made such a point of going off on these magical summers and that's because I'm so aware, as I approach forty-four, that my family's getting older.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  You're a kid.

• 46:10Emma Grede?

  Time is so precious. A kid. I love that you say that. I'll let you say that. But you know, it's like, for me, that time is so precious. And to your point, experiences are worth it. Me going away with my kids and having a magical summer, that feels worth it. When you talk about time, I love that you say that because one of the biggest privileges of my life is having childcare. Because when you have childcare, it affords you so much time with your kids, where you'd otherwise be running errands and doing things that are less pleasurable. And so I love that idea that experiences and time is a great place to spend your money.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 46:49Emma Grede?

  And it's lasting, right?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And you're doing it right, by the way, because you can buy time and some people will buy time and they'll keep going to the store and have the time that they're buying by hiring somebody to take care of their kids.

• 46:59Emma Grede?

  I know.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  You're doing the opposite. You're doing the opposite. You have to actually devote yourself to edifying things and to relationships. You gotta follow the rules. I mean, don't spend that hour that somebody's cutting your grass scrolling Instagram.

• 47:10Emma Grede?

  No.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Right? That, that's a mistake, but people do that all the time. It's like, ah, yeah, well, somebody's doing that thing for me. Somebody's cleaning my house. I'm gonna go, you know, binge Netflix. That's not an edifying use of your time. I got nothing against binging Netflix, but a little goes a long way when it comes to happiness.

• 47:26Emma Grede?

  I wanna ask you just another money question because there are some ideas thrown around about how much money is enough money. And I was reading something the other day where it's like this kind of seventy-five K figure, like, this is the answer to what will create real happiness. Like, is there a real answer?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, that's, that's like, super contested in the literature. And what happened was is these two economists, actually one psychologist and, and one economist at Princeton, Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman.

• 47:54Emma Grede?

  Do you know them?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, yeah.

• 47:56Emma Grede?

  Daniel, we all read the book, right? Like, he's the thinking fast and slow guy.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  One has passed away sadly, but, and, and they're both, you know, been great. And they both won Nobel Prizes. I mean, these are some greats. And what they found is that there's a satiation point of, of well-being happens around seventy-five thousand dollars. And of course, your results may vary. I mean, you're living in LA.

• 48:15Emma Grede?

  Yeah, depends where you live.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Sorry, so seventy-five thousand dollars in LA and in, in Wichita, those are, it's a different type of fish. But the truth is that what, what their point was that there's a satiation point in, in your earning and it happens earlier than you think. Okay, now, later research says it's much higher, but here's the big point. It gets flat fast. It gets flat fast and it becomes a bad trade-off to, to trade away relationships, to trade away experiences for more money. And it happens earlier than you actually think. And so people shouldn't do that, is what it comes down to. If you have this opportunity to work eighty hours a week instead of fifty hours a week, and so you can make twice as much money, but you're already really well off, and that's gonna make you sacrifice time with your family and you really care about your family, which

• 49:00Speaker 01

  you should, then don't do it. Then don't do it. That's what the happiness specialist says. And I know your brain is gonna be like, yeah, but it's only four years and I'm really, but you know what? Four years is a long time. Four years of love is a lot more valuable than four years of money.

• 49:16Emma Grede?

  But Arthur, you're someone who, to your own point, you said to me when you came in here, it's like, you are a road warrior. You're out there, you've written all of these incredible books. As you said, you're like collecting professorships right now. You've got side hustle professorship. You know, it's like you, you, you do a lot. You are out and about. I'm assuming that you are making money. And I just wonder, like, how do you? Even for yourself, like, how do you say, do you know what? This is an opportunity that is right for me. This is an opportunity that's going to work with my happiness versus this is gonna take away. Because again, you're out and you're working and you're doing great things and you're very, very successful in your field, but I want to understand that decision-making process for everybody else.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  How do I eat my own cooking?

• 50:00Emma Grede?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  How do I actually follow my advice?

• 50:01Emma Grede?

  Come on, are you happy? You must be so happy.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the truth is that I study happiness not because it's easy, but because it's hard for me, because I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. And then I've talked about the fact that it was the 14th hour of the office instead of the first hour with my kids. I've screwed this up and I don't want to do that. One of the reasons I specialize in this is because I want this for my own life. If I had it really coming easy to me, my wife is much happier than me. You know, I'm like a four out of 10 on happiness and she's like, yeah, she's an eight, eight and a half. And so she's like, why do you study happiness? It's so easy. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I'd study air if it were not available. Yeah, and you, you study, you, you pay attention to the thing that you actually need.

• 50:39Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  And my happiness has been, is, is, is much better since I've been actually studying this. Part of it is because when I teach this, I've become, as we mentioned before, I've become accountable to it. I mean, if somebody sees me all grumpy in an airport and they're like, that's the, is that that happiness guy I saw on TV? That's no good. I mean, I actually want to be, I want to be accountable to it. But the other thing is I actually set up protocols in my life. I, I want to do this work. I love my work. I'm so into it. It is a true source of happiness because I get to lift people up and bring them together. That's my mission in life is to bring people to higher levels of happiness and love using science and ideas. That's what I want to do with the rest of my life. But I have to keep in, in just front of mind that I'll, if this goes beyond certain limits,

• 51:24Speaker 01

  it's going to attenuate my ability to live according to my principles. So what does this mean? I do travel 48 weeks out of the year, but not all week. I'm home every weekend. There's probably four weekends a year that I'm not home. And two of those, my wife's with me, right? I go home to my family. I see them. I see my kids. I see my, every day that I'm home, I see my grandchildren because we all live close. We made a point of actually moving everybody to the same area so that we could have this compound, some would say a cult. It's really important. I'm, I'm doing those things. When I'm in Northern Virginia where I live, I don't take dinners out. I don't take dinners out for business. I'm home for dinner every time I'm there.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  And we have to have these protocols in our life and I know you have these protocols too. I mean, you could have somebody else take your kids to school, but we started this today after you took your kids to school. You personally took your kids to school.

• 52:17Emma Grede?

  It's the first day.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  But I mean, I bet it's, even if it's not the first day, I mean, you're doing, it's important to you and it's not, here's the thing, Emma, it's not cost effective. If you look at it on the P and L side and what it actually, how it would, you know, how those minutes would be accounted for, but your heart knows it's right. And that's the important thing. You have to live according to these particular principles. Everybody watching us, they want to, they want to grow up and be you. Got it? That's good. But to grow up and be you is not fundamentally about the success of this business. It's about the startup that you've made of your life.

• 52:52Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  These are the principles that they, they should actually follow. And then the success principles in the business will follow naturally upon those.

• 52:59Emma Grede?

  So then tell me this, what should people start building today that's actually gonna matter 20 years from now?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, so this is a, the, the columnist for the New York Times, my old friend David Brooks, no relation.

• 53:12Emma Grede?

  But we love David Brooks.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he's an old friend of mine. So he talks about eulogy virtues versus, versus resume virtues. And he says, you know, when you're at your funeral, which, you know, who knows? Maybe it's 20 years from me now, I don't know. It's not gonna be 20 years from you. You're gonna be like.

• 53:26Emma Grede?

  It's open. Listen, I reckon we'll all be fine.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever. I mean, whatever God gives you, you know, but you take it. The whole point is that some years from now, what are you building that'll actually make sense? And I, I really honestly hope that my funeral people aren't saying, you know, he had five million miles on Delta.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  It's so dumb. You know, and they're not gonna talk about how much time you spend at the office. Now, it's good to spend time at the office, but, but the point is what you're fundamentally building is the eulogy virtue, not the resume virtue. And so one of the things that I recommend that everybody think about is 20 years from now, what are people actually saying about you that you actually care about? And I know there's gonna be on that list, it's gonna be successful, admirable, you know, doing well in business. I get that. But rank the order of things that you want most to say. And, and I know everybody watching us is they're gonna, people watching us, they're gonna say, I want somebody to be saying, I love her because she's my wife and she's my soulmate. That's what you want them to be saying. That's number one.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  It's a lot more important than her business did, you know? And, and, and so if that's the case, then start investing in that now. Start, and, and investing in that emotionally, investing in your time in that right now. Take it as seriously as you're doing anything else.

• 54:41Emma Grede?

  So how do we make sure that we're building the life that we want and not just a life that makes sense to anybody else that's watching it?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  We have to take an inventory of actually how we're spending our time and energy. We have to be honest with ourselves. It's very easy to not be honest. I mean, people lie all the time to each other, but they lie to themselves the most.

• 54:58Emma Grede?

  I wonder why it's so easy to lie to yourself?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Well, because it's, because it actually, it's more convenient. You know, these convenient lies about, yeah, no, no, I don't, I don't drink that much because I know a bunch of people who drink more, right? You know, that's, it's, it's one of the things that we actually, for sure. I mean, because so, I mean, look, honesty is so inconvenient, but you know what? Honesty with yourself, that's the adventure.

• 55:19Emma Grede?

  Right?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Like all the ugly stuff and you're looking at it, you're like, bring it on, you know? That's, that's tough, but that's so bracing. That's a, that's a cold plunge. But I have an exercise I take my students through to actually make sure that this can actually lead to some sort of a strategy. And, and this comes up a lot with my MBA students because they're the business students. They can do this, you know? They're, they're very organized. I say, okay, imagine you in five years, forget the 20, just five years. So you're not on your deathbed, you're vital and alive. You'll be 49, young.

• 55:53Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  I know this is sounding young to you. Trust me, to me, that sounds young, Emma.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Still a kid. And, and you say to yourself, that's a version of Emma that's 25% happier than now. Just, I mean, what does that mean? You kind of know how that feels, so don't worry about the quantification of that, like 25% happier. And there's three reasons that that version of you, five years from now, not tomorrow, is happier than, 25% happier than now. And the three reasons in order, in order, three changes. What are they? And I've given that test again and again and again to my students. And my average student is 28, so they're gonna be 33 and that freaks them out. I'm gonna be 33 in five years.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Just wait, right? Number one, when they're being honest, is always their relationships. It's always their relationships. I've never had one say, a million dollars a year, never, never. They know they want to love and be loved. That's what they actually say. Number two, generally speaking, number two is something about their metaphysical life. It's something about their spirituality. It's a sense of their relationship to the divine, however they understand that idea. And then number three is their worldly success. And I say, okay, so, okay, what are you spending all your time on? Number three.

• 57:11Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  That's a problem. That's a problem. You can spend so much more organized time.

• 57:16Emma Grede?

  Do you believe that anyone can make themselves happier?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Everybody can do lots and lots of things to be happier tomorrow than they are today and happier in a year than they are right now.

• 57:26Emma Grede?

  Anyone?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Everybody, every single person. That doesn't mean that everybody's gonna be equally happy. And, and, and as we mentioned before, it doesn't mean they'll ever be cosmically happy, but they can be happier. Everybody can make progress. The happiest person in the world can make progress. The most miserable person in the world can make progress. And definitely all the rest of us who are watching this show and you and me in the middle.

• 57:46Emma Grede?

  We can make progress.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 57:47Emma Grede?

  I mean, I'm telling you, when I read this book, I was like, I, there is so much here that I was like, this is how I live. This is who I am. These are the things, there's nothing here that you go, that feels really odd. I had no idea about that, but it is just a reprioritization.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  An all mushroom diet.

• 58:04Emma Grede?

  No, that's not in there. It's like, it's all the stuff that you know, but in a way so simply and so orderly and just a reframing of your priorities, like where are you spending your time?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I try to do with the work is to, is to back it up with enough science that people understand how they tick. I'm kind of the translator between the neuroscientists and the behavioral scientists and the people who are consuming it. But the whole point is that the, the science itself, when it's translated in ordinary terms, is super fascinating. How my brain works and I'm wonderfully made, it's a miracle. But then, okay, then do these five things, right? And then go teach it to somebody else. So if anybody from, just from this conversation, whether they read the book or not, or any of my books, or your books for that matter.

• 58:47Emma Grede?

  But you just have to do it.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  If they, they're gonna learn a bunch of stuff, go back, look at the timestamps and the show notes, listen to this conversation again and write down the things that really strike you, right? And then commit yourself to doing the things that we're talking about, but most importantly, go be the teacher.

• 59:06Emma Grede?

  And Arthur, they just must ask you, because if anybody's listening, they want to become happy right now. They want it like in this moment. Where do you tell them to begin? I hear you. I know the technology piece. I know the phone. If you can come to, to terms with that and say, okay, I'm gonna put some guardrails around this, I'm gonna use my phone responsibly, I'm gonna think about social media in a different way, then what? What is the one place that you begin to become more happy?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  It has to do with the person that you love. You know, it's funny because a lot of your work is importantly talking about what you can do for yourself. And that's really important because your happiness is a gift to everybody else around you. And what you've correctly pointed out so many times is the secret to doing that is by loving someone else. If you've got that free hour, go love someone. What does that mean? You go, you go serve them. You do an unbidden act of kindness. You call somebody that you love. You send five texts saying, I saw that thing and I admired it. And you, you, you give somebody this love. That's what to do. Your day changes. Your life changes.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  That's the hinge point in your life is when you put down the technology, which was hijacking your brain on the left side, and you move into the right hemisphere of deep love with another person that you gave. That's how you use that time.

• 1:00:29Emma Grede?

  And can you not be happy if you don't love someone?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  You can't. Now, there are times when you're less loved. I get it.

• 1:00:37Emma Grede?

  You can't.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  You can't. See, here's the thing. We're made to love and be loved. That's how we're made. You know, people, I was doing a show not long ago, and they had this big philosophical question at the end. What is life? It's like, whoa. I mean, I could talk to you about the sperm and the egg, and the mommy and the daddy, loved each other very much. No, I know the biology. We are made biologically, neuroscientifically, cosmically, spiritually, theologically, philosophically, all of it, to love and be loved. And I've got 100 ways to Sunday to show that with the research, that you won't be happy unless you love others, unless you give people the opportunity to love you. And so therefore, life is love.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  That's the currency of life itself. It's the beating heart of what life actually means. And when we lose that, when we distract ourselves from that by our wonderful specialness, we miss the very reason that we're alive in the first place.

• 1:01:38Emma Grede?

  Life is love.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Full stop.

• 1:01:41Emma Grede?

  Two quick questions, and then I'm gonna let you go. I wanna know, like, if being known as the happiness expert has made it harder for you to express or just to like, admit when you're unhappy?

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no. So, and at the beginning, yeah, but one of the things that I found is that the greatest value that I can create is not talking about how I'm some great expert, but these are the problems that I have too. These are the problems that I actually have too. And what I'm doing is me-search.

• 1:02:08Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Not research.

• 1:02:10Emma Grede?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  And so, no, it actually, it's much better at this point.

• 1:02:12Emma Grede?

  Because we know you're normal.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  A real person, fully alive, is what it comes down to. Because that's the fun. I mean, that's the adventure. You know, I'm not studying something theoretical. On the contrary, I'm studying me and my family, and my loved ones, and my friends, and the people that I get to work with. And that's, that's really, that's really thrilling. What it's raised the stakes on is making sure that I'm, I'm, I'm living up to my own, my own commitments. And that's been really, really good.

• 1:02:36Emma Grede?

  No doubt. Arthur, what do you still aspire to, to do or to become?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  But the truth is that what I fundamentally aspire to are the things that actually will bring me a greater sense of bliss, closer to the time in which I'm edging up toward the ultimate happiness that I seek, which is at the end of my life. And that is being in greater touch with my faith as somebody who's closer to God. I want it, and that means I have to do the work. That has a better relationship with my family, not good enough, a better relationship with my family, who is a better friend. And, and, and no joke, it's hard to be a good friend when you're busy all the time, right? And, and to actually serve other people deeply with my work. My aspiration is to become truly an elite athlete and faithful family, friends, and work that serves.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  And I try to make progress toward that every day.

• 1:03:28Emma Grede?

  What a fucking great answer. That was a really good answer to that question. I'm gonna take you to a quick rapid fire.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Can't wait.

• 1:03:34Emma Grede?

  All right. What is the place that you feel happiest?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  The place that I feel happiest is in the presence of my beloved wife.

• 1:03:39Emma Grede?

  Oh, lovely. So nice. What's your most prized possession?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  My, uh, what's my most prized possession?

• 1:03:48Emma Grede?

  It's hard, that's why.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  I know, I don't.

• 1:03:50Emma Grede?

  What is my most prized possession?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  I just don't care about anything.

• 1:03:53Emma Grede?

  But that says everything.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  If the house burned down, I'm like, is everybody out safe?

• 1:03:57Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Is everybody out safe? Something that I actually own, I'm not a very sentimental or, or, or retrospective person. You know, what's my most prized possession? My most prized possession is the rosary that my mother-in-law gave me before her life ended. I don't know.

• 1:04:16Emma Grede?

  It's a pretty beautiful one, that. Is there an achievement that gave you less satisfaction than you expected?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Almost everything great that's happened to me in my career has given me less satisfaction than I expected. You know, I just like, wow. You know, it's like, number one for a week.

• 1:04:37Emma Grede?

  For a week, exactly.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  And then it was some politician, then we go, oh, you know?

• 1:04:42Emma Grede?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  So those ones, yeah, for sure. And you know how, you know.

• 1:04:45Emma Grede?

  Oh, yeah. I know it.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  And, and everybody watching is like, Emma just said, it doesn't matter. Let me try. Okay, you'll see.

• 1:04:52Emma Grede?

  Go for it. It's so true. What's a book that changed your life?

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  There are a bunch of them, but one book that really, really changed my life a lot, and that I give away tons of copies of, is a book by an anonymous Russian monk from the 19th century. This is really obscure. It's called The Way of a Pilgrim. And I've read a lot of books. I mean, I read lots of books, lots and lots and lots of books. This is a book, and all it is, is this, it's about this pilgrim, this mendicant, this guy without shoes, walking around Siberia, saying one prayer, having adventures. And what it did is it showed me this thing, which is that my life is a pilgrimage, and I'm just this shoeless guy walking around Siberia, and I need to be saying that prayer, whatever the prayer happens to be, whatever that means to me, and it means different things to different people.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  And what it did is it gave me this understanding of intention without attachment. So The Way of a Pilgrim truly changed my life.

• 1:05:46Emma Grede?

  Arthur, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's a delight. It's just really enjoyed it.

• 1:05:50Emma Grede?

  What a delight. Thank you.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:05:53Emma Grede?

  I loved having you.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I loved it, too.

• 1:05:55Emma Grede?

  You're so wonderful. If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Grede is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Grede. Our executive producers are Ashley McShan, Derek Brown, and me. Executive producers from Odyssey are Asha Saluja and Leah Reese Dennis. Producer KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Phil Sweetech and Carla Stelgardo. Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale.

• 1:06:40Emma Grede?

  Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sidney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company, and WME. Josefina Francis, Hillary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson Rose, Tim Meekle, Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Viera. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemmagreed. Grede is spelled G-R-E-D-E. That's aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E, with Emma Grede. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me.