E194 - Arthur Brooks: How To Find The Meaning of Your Life

Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist, and three-time New York Times bestselling author whose life's work centers on a single, urgent question: what actually makes a human life feel meaningful? In this conversation, we explore why depression and anxiety have surged since 2008, how technology has hijacked the part of the brain responsible for wonder and meaning, and what it looks like to live, as Arthur puts it, like his great-grandfather Leroy, present, bored at times, and genuinely alive. What moved me most in this conversation is how Arthur bridges the ancient and the scientific without losing either. We get into the three components of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance, as well as the dangers of extrinsic reward, the psychology of calling, and why the formula most of us are running on is just slightly off. His answer to the meaning crisis is not complicated. Use things, love people, worship the divine. But getting there requires honest self-examination, and this conversation is a strong beginning. MUDWTR - Up to 43% off sitewide (and a free frother!) https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself [Code: KNOWTHYSELF] Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself BiOptimizers - Best magnesium to enhance your sleep https://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyself Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off at checkout André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Introduction: Arthur Brooks 01:54 The Modern Meaning Crisis 02:47 Coherence, Purpose, and Significance 06:17 Why Meaning Collapsed After 2008 14:19 The Doom Loop of Technology 20:22 The Death of Boredom 25:13 Ad: Mudwtr 26:34 Living Like Leroy: The Case for Real Life 30:05 Six Practices for the Right Hemisphere 36:22 The Morning Routine and Brahma Mahurta 43:35 Ad: LMNT 44:39 Ad: BiOptimizers 45:47 Breaking Free from Your Phone 49:07 Romantic Love and the Paradox of Choice 54:59 Finding Your Calling 1:01:29 Progress, Arrival Fallacy, and Living Now 1:17:22 Enjoyment, Satisfaction, and Meaning 1:19:36 The External Scoreboard and Love Is Not Earned 1:25:10 The Four Idols 1:29:49 Self-Transcendence and the Divine 1:37:40 Marriage, Adoption, and Walking to Heaven 1:45:03 Suffering, Beauty, and Meaning 1:53:59 Use Things, Love People, Worship the Divine ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's unprecedented what's going on today. Depression tripled since 2008. Anxiety doubled since 2008. The biggest predictor is saying my life feels meaningless. The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. It all feels fake. I get up, check my phone, scroll, social media. I want a big project, but I can't dig in. And it all feels like I'm living in a simulation. No, I won't have it. I want the real thing. I want to suffer. We try to solve life like a complicated problem. But most of the things you care about, you can't solve. Everybody wants their calling. They want to feel complete because of what they do. People who have a calling have two things in common. Earning your success and service to other people.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  I would have loved being a French horn player, which I didn't do it in love. This was my mistake. When I was 55 years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking the Camino de Santiago, praying, Lord, what do you want from me? Who do you believe you fundamentally are? It's an absolute thrill to be an apprentice in the divine purpose that I believe is my life. That's who I am. There is a crisis. It's not your imagination. And so the way that you fix that is by... Wow. You're missing your life.

• 1:19André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is a social scientist, one of the world-leading figures on human happiness, which is a big subject. He's a Harvard professor, a three-time-over New York Times bestselling author, and somebody who's going to help guide us as a maestro in the conversation today around the meaning of your life. Arthur Brooks, thanks for being here.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Andre.

• 1:43André Duqum?

  Could you help us by setting the lay of the land in terms of what the studies and the science is saying for the current meaning crisis? Like, how bad is it compared to, say, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago?

• 1:54Speaker 00

  It's unprecedented, actually, what's going on today. We've, you know, people have been asking, does life feel meaningful or meaningless? Just kind of a throwaway question for the longest time. And a small, a small percentage of people would say, my life feels meaningless. That exploded after 2008. And it was exactly... Coincident with the increases in in clinical depression and generalized anxiety. So there's this big debate going on, you know, why has depression tripled since two thousand and eight? Why has anxiety doubled since two thousand and eight? And there's all kinds of blame going around, you know, the the millennials and Gen Z'ers blame the boomers. And the boomers say you're just a bunch of, you know, delicate flowers. And but it really comes down to this meaning crisis.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  You find that the biggest the biggest predictor of saying I'm depressed and anxious is saying my life feels meaningless. And that didn't exist before. And boy, did it actually pop up after two thousand and eight.

• 2:47André Duqum?

  Can we define the term?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's what's the meaning of meaning?

• 2:50André Duqum?

  Yeah, what's the meaning of meaning?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Oh, that's such a Harvard question. That's such a logic chopping question, and I promise I won't I won't just, you know, wrap around the ax on this. But that's a really smart thing because question, because when if I told you, you know, you will find your bliss in squim. You'd be like, what's squim? You know, is it a meditation technique? It is a is it a nutritional supplement? It turns out it's a it's a small town in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. And but you have to know the meaning of what you're looking for. So if you're going to find the meaning of your life, which is not the meaning of my life, you need to know the meaning of meaning. What are you looking for? And and turns out, there's been a lot of work that's been done on that.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  In in my field of behavioral science and in philosophy, there's kind of an agreement that meaning has three parts. The three big whys. So the meaning of your life is an understanding of the answer to three big why questions. Meaning is always why it's never how to or what. Why question number one is, why do things happen the way they do? That's coherence. Why is the world coherent? You know, some people will answer that, like you and me, because of the mind of the divine. Or I would also answer that because of the laws of nature, because of science. Some people who reject those ways of thinking will say because powerful shadowy figures are doing things behind the scenes.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Conspiracy theories are a struggle to answer the coherence question of why things happen the way that they do, which is why if you have a relative going down the rabbit hole, doing his own research on the internet, don't yell at him and say, "You moron, read these studies." That's a cry for coherence, which is a cry for meaning. The second is, why am I doing what I'm doing every day? That's the purpose. Am I just going in circles? Is it all for nothing? That why question is critically important because you need to be able to make progress in your life. You need to feel like you're doing something that actually makes sense. Like you say, if I asked you, "Why are you doing this podcast?" You're like, "No reason." That would be pretty meaningless. It would mean that you're saying that the podcast doesn't have a whole lot of purpose,

• 4:57Speaker 00

  thus it doesn't have a whole lot of meaning. And then that's why goals and direction are so critically important. When you give like an adolescent just almost a trivial goal, like go from B pluses in this class to A minuses in this class, and they start going after that particular goal, they get much happier because they have this sense of forward progress, which is how Homo sapiens are built. And the last why question is, why does my life matter? That's the significance question. That's really the question of love. Why does my life matter? Because my mom loves me, because God loves me. That's the real sense of your life's significance. And if you believe that you have no essence, that you have no significance, your life's going to feel meaningless. And so when I'm talking to young people or anybody who's in a meaning crisis, I try

• 5:42Speaker 00

  to dig in on which one of those things I need to do work on. Do I need to help them understand who loves them? Do I need to give them goals and direction? Do I need to introduce them to ways to understand the coherence of the universe? But I got to know first.

• 5:58André Duqum?

  So if we take that lens of coherence, purpose and significance and look back historically and we see this decline of meaning, which are, in your definition, constituting of those three things, what would be the predominant reasons and factors for why those three things aren't being met on an individual level, which builds to the collective issue?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  So that's the big science question. You know, I started doing work on this five years ago when I saw this huge crisis. I had, I left academia in 2008 to go run a big, a big nonprofit organization in Washington DC. And I wasn't paying much attention. I came back in 2019, 11 years later, and it was like the bubonic plague had gone through my village. It's, what happened here? You know, it was the happiest place in the world when I left, 2008. When did you go to college? When did you finish college?

• 6:46André Duqum?

  Uh, well, there's an assumption baked in there.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Right, you went to college?

• 6:49André Duqum?

  Then I just finished it. Um, yeah, like 2016, I went up to MSU for like a very short period and then-

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Michigan State Lansing?

• 6:58André Duqum?

  Dropped out, yeah, and then dropped out and came here-

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:01André Duqum?

  And, uh, just did my own thing.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  I did, I took a gap decade too, by the way.

• 7:05André Duqum?

  Right.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  From when I was, when I was 19, I dropped out. I didn't, I didn't drop back in until I was 28.

• 7:09André Duqum?

  Maybe that's my arc.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:11André Duqum?

  Maybe I'll come and take your class.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I, I finished a month before my 30th birthday, as a matter of fact.

• 7:16André Duqum?

  There's still time.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  That gap decade was awesome. It wasn't much fun for my parents. They were a little worried, mostly because they were academics.

• 7:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  But, but, you know, so, so, you know, the whole, wait, no, like, tell me, wind back on the question. I got down the rabbit hole.

• 7:30André Duqum?

  The coherence, significance and purpose.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Oh, why? What happened?

• 7:33André Duqum?

  Yeah, what happened?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  So when I came back to academia in 2019 and I found the, and I found the plague had gone through, something had gone wrong. 2008, when I left, college was happier than non-college. You know, people were falling in love, like every week, and, and people were making their best friends for life and they were experimenting with ideas. I mean, the whole idea, you'd go to college campus and hear crazy ideas and you'd like protest and try to get your professor fired. That's insane. That's just the nuttiest thing ever. You're supposed to be like, that is thrilling that they're telling me everything I learned as a kid might be wrong. That's the whole point, right? It's supposed to be a big adventure, right? It's supposed to be scary and dangerous intellectually.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  But that all changed. When I came back in 2019, it was like cancel culture and safe spaces and the huge amounts of depression, anxiety. On some campuses, 55% of the students were in counseling, which I got nothing against counseling, quite the contrary, but that's a lot. That is an indication that something's really, really up. So I said, all right, what's the deal? And I started interviewing students. I looked at the data, and that's where I found these data on meaninglessness that had exploded. And then I started talking to people, because the way you do forensic social science like I do, is that you see a pattern, you look for data to confirm the pattern, and then you start talking to people so the penny will drop, that will give you clues. Then you can start running experiments

• 8:59Speaker 00

  and do these other approaches. It's kind of like figuring out the source of a virus. That's kind of how it works, is if we're trying to figure out what caused COVID or something. And I started talking to students and young people. My students are in their 20s. I teach master's students, MBA students at the business school. And they would, you know, they would talk about their lives and be like, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what I'm meant to do. I do everything I'm supposed to do, but I don't know what I'm meant to do. And I don't know the meaning of any of these things. I don't know the meaning of these relationships. I don't know the meaning of my experiences. They kept talking about meaning. It's like, wow, this is really deeply philosophical. And so I knew that that was up. They also said something really interesting, though. They would say, it all feels fake. It all feels fake. Like, you know, I get up, check my phone, scroll,

• 9:44Speaker 00

  social media, you know, watch YouTube Shorts. By the way, this is gonna be YouTube Shorts. And then I go to work. I don't go to work. I go into my bedroom and I'm on Zoom screen. And I date on the apps, and I do a lot of gaming. And I want a big project, but I can't dig in. And it all feels like I'm living in a simulation of a real life. And so that's when I'm starting to understand that there's something actually going on with the brain. That's the dead giveaway. You know, as a scientist, that's where you start to get these clues because of these words that people say. And that's when I started looking deeply into the neuroscience of how life changed, especially after 2008, that broke our brains. And the

• 10:26Speaker 00

  truth is, it happened, and it broke our brains in a way that we couldn't even understand or even ask questions of meaning. And that's where we are today.

• 10:37André Duqum?

  And I know that you seem to have quite a proclivity towards studying the eastern side of the diagnosis for these reasons as well. I'm just curious why or how did you come to that exploration for discovering what the solution to that crisis is?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  I have found in my work studying human happiness, which is my main area, the science of happiness, is that you, the one discipline isn't enough. You need to triangulate across multiple disciplines. It's inherently interdisciplinary because happiness is the experience of life. The best questions come from the faith and wisdom and philosophical traditions. That's where you get the questions. You get the structure, the causation, the understanding what's happening largely from biology, from studying neuroscience. You get data about why things are happening and how they work from behavioral science. And then you actually go back into the wisdom and eastern traditions and western traditions to have practices, to use what you've learned to change the situation, to fix the problems, to enhance

• 11:37Speaker 00

  the strategies that you've actually got. So the whole thing requires triangulation across faith or philosophy, neuroscience, behavioral science, and then committing to action. That requires that I'm reading all the traditions and the different angles on these things. Now, when you find there's a discrepancy between Buddhism and western psychology, something's up. Something's up. You know that probably we're coming at it from the wrong direction, often in western psychology, as a matter of fact. But when you find that these are consistent ideas and they're pointing you in the same direction, then you've got some confidence because you'll also be able to develop some tools, deep understanding in tools.

• 12:15André Duqum?

  So for everybody who's listening right now, we have probably a wide spectrum of people at different points in their life, some feeling fulfilled, a lot probably feeling this low grade of numbness in their life.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Malaise.

• 12:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  This feeling like you're in an airport lounge, waiting for a flight that's super delayed, and you're just kind of scrolling or gaming to take the time away.

• 12:36André Duqum?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Waiting for something, something, something, but it doesn't happen. Yep.

• 12:40André Duqum?

  To the other end, where, you know, the deepest end, you know, full crisis, like I can't stand every day. You know, and for all of them, your new book, The Meaning of Your Life, the studies that you've been doing, what you've really devoted the past many decades of your life researching and studying and triangulating on is why that's the case, the solutions, the many different solutions to that. So for everybody who's listening to this conversation that maybe reads your new book and studies your work, what is the promise after having listened to this conversation that they can get more insight on so that we can spend the rest of this conversation fulfilling on?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  And keeping everybody to the end of the show. Listen to the end.

• 13:16André Duqum?

  For tension.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  It's like this is the internet. Number seven will shock you.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  See, I can work the algorithm.

• 13:23André Duqum?

  We're doing it.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. The promise is this, your life does have meaning and you can find it. But you have to know where to look and you have to know how to live differently to do it. That's what this book is about. You know, there is a crisis. It's not your imagination. You're not weak. You're living the same way as everybody else. There's a reason that your brain has changed. You can change it back and live in a new way and your life will never be the same and it will be much, much better.

• 13:51Speaker 02

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• 14:49André Duqum?

  Fantastic. So let's go through some of these. That was well said. The doom loop is an aspect that I think a lot of people can relate to. Obviously through 2008, even before, and especially the past many years, this advent of social media and technology has bared so many incredible fruits and at the same time enabled so much neuroses and dopaminergic solutions to what we used to, you know, have much healthier outlets for. So what is the doom loop? And let's kind of go and I'm curious your thoughts on technology in particular.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm not anti-technology, quite the contrary. I'm a techno-optimist, but I recognize that the technology that we've developed makes promises that it can't keep and it does change our brains. And that's a really big problem. The problem actually isn't technology. The problem is the promise of engineering. You know, it's interesting that if you go back to the Industrial Revolution or even the late 19th century, the promise was that physics and chemistry were going to solve every problem. And science was going to find the solution to every social problem. And so you had Karl Marx promising scientific socialism, which ended pretty poorly. Or even people in countries like the United States promising scientific public administration,

• 16:09Speaker 00

  where we could set up a government that would, where people would work like machines and, you know, everything would be great. And that doesn't work that way. And there's a reason it doesn't work this way, which is that all the things that we care about as human beings, this is the beautiful thing about those of us who are interested in the metaphysics of life, not just the physics of life, is that we are complex adaptive creatures, that we live in a complexity of mystery and meaning. Now, there's a neuroscience behind that. Your brain is hemispherically lateralized. You got a right side, you got a left side. The right side is dedicated to the why questions of mystery and meaning. The left side is dedicated to the complicated questions of how to and what. The engineering approach to life, which is largely emanating from the philosophy of Silicon Valley,

• 16:54Speaker 00

  which is that we can hit the singularity, we can figure all of it out, we can build algorithms that are even better than humans, suggests that we're nothing more than the left hemisphere, that life is nothing more than a series of complicated problems. But we live in the space of mystery and meaning. We live in the space of complexity. Most of the things you care about, you can't solve. I mean, my marriage, I've been married thirty five years. I haven't solved it. I'll never solve my marriage. That's why I love my marriage, because it's different. It's alive. You know, it's funny, we had, I was having a kind of a stressful conversation with my wife as I was driving up here today. And just as I threw my phone away, she texted me, "I love you." That's the complexity of my marriage. No algorithm would predict the dynamics of how that actually worked.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And so the result of it is when we're looking for these complicated solutions to the complex problems of life, we become alienated. We turn off the hemisphere of our brain that we actually need to understand the meaning of our life. That's the problem. And that's a doom loop. Because the more that you distract yourself, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the more miserable you are. The more miserable and meaningless things feel like they are, the more resistant that you are to sit in the, in the stillness of yourself. The less tolerant you are of actually being with yourself. So the more that you scroll, and the more that you swipe, and the more that you shop, and things get worse and worse and worse. It's very much like anything that actually implicates the brain chemistry of, of addiction.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  You know, people are bored or anxious, and so they drink alcohol. Those are the big predictors of alcohol abuse, or boredom and anxiety. And, and that temporarily relieves it, but it makes it worse. And so you do it more and you escalate, and you wind up in alcoholism. And we have the same basic set of problems. That's the doom loop of technology.

• 18:44André Duqum?

  I think as the rise of AI becomes more and more pervasive, we can see how what we really value is competence and predictability and narrowing in on that. And we are inherently unpredictable, complex creatures like you were referring to, you know, and and so when someone's scrolling to their last brain cell fries on social media or TikTok, and they, their life feels devoid of meaning, it can get this, this exist, I'm curious your thoughts on how this existential, this existential angst to find the meaning of our life could be really simply supplemented with a walk in nature.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so you're, you're hitting on the solution of the problem. Now, to begin with, When you have any problem like this, you've got to get clean first. And then you have to live differently. But when, if you said, hey, Arthur, I've got this. I've studied addiction, psychology and medicine for a long time. And when people have a real problem with substance or behavioral addictions, the first thing you need to do is to get really pissed. All right, so you're determined to actually make a change in your life. Then you need to get clean, which means you need to do something to heal your brain. And then you need to do the hard part, which is live differently. Right, to become comfortable with yourself. You know, one interesting thing about alcoholics, they always move. They always think if I get, you know, move to a new place where I don't know anybody

• 20:04Speaker 00

  and I have all those like degenerate friends, things are going to get better. So you move from LA to New York and the first thing that pops out of your suitcase is you. That's the problem. And so, so really the solution to this is we got to get clean. We have to have a better relationship with technology and the engineered life. And there's a lot of stuff in the book about how to do that. There's a lot of science about how to get clean. From, you don't throw your phone in the ocean. I mean, you, look at you, you're a spiritual adept, but you still have a phone. And that's because you're in a proper relationship with your devices. You manage them and they don't manage you. And I talk about how to do that very practically with actual protocols. But then you have to live differently. And the way that you have to live differently is by doing things that stimulate the right hemisphere of your brain that were ordinary.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  You know, my great grandpa Leroy Brooks didn't have to think about this. But I'll tell you something, he didn't come home from work and say, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today because his brain was working right. His brain wasn't, he wasn't flooding his HPA axis. He was using his brain properly. And but, so, so what was ordinary no longer is. And we have to retrain our brains in the old ways. And that's really what this is all about. How are the ways that you can illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain once you're no longer being managed by your technology?

• 21:23André Duqum?

  So to zoom in on that a bit more, what are your thoughts on the death of boredom?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:28André Duqum?

  Because it seems like any single moment we have for silence or stillness, we just have the technology to fill it with something stimulating.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, we don't like boredom because it's boring. And that's uncomfortable. But there's a lot of things that are uncomfortable. I mean, there's, I go to the gym every day because I want to take care of myself and I want to live to, you know. Take care of my family and I want to be able to be at the top of my cognitive game. And so I go to the gym every day. I don't go in thinking, man, this is going to be a feel as good as a massage. It's gonna hurt. Today was leg day. That's really uncomfortable is the whole point, but I'm intolerant of psychic pain. People don't want mental pain. They don't want, they try to, they resist sadness and fear and anger and disgust and boredom. They don't like that. So they think that there's something wrong when they feel those things. That's, that's, that's as wrong as thinking that the pain that you feel when

• 22:20Speaker 00

  you're underneath the bar and when you're doing the bench press, supposed to feel that way. And, and a characteristic of a life where, with a brain that's working properly is that you're bored a lot. You know, that's, there was no way to escape that. You know, great grandpa Leroy was bored all the time. But here's the irony. He was bored, bored from moment to moment, but his life wasn't boring. People today, the average American checks her or his phone 205 times a day. If you're at the supermarket checkout line, everybody's looking at their phones, right? And that's because they're resistant to boredom and they're never bored moment to moment, but their lives are boring. That's the irony.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  We're the opposite of Leroy. And so what we need to do is want to get clean, as I mentioned, but then live like Leroy. I should have just called this book Live Like Leroy.

• 23:13André Duqum?

  Doesn't quite have the same ring.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I know. It doesn't, it sounds like who the heck is Leroy? This is, this is not a best seller, Live Like Leroy. Or maybe it is. I don't know.

• 23:20André Duqum?

  You never know.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So.

• 23:22André Duqum?

  Life becomes boring.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Life becomes boring. And, and so the way that you fix that is by doing the ordinary things in life that, that use your brain properly, that illuminate the mystery and meaning of your life. And, you know, that's, that's a lot of things. That's asking deep, deep questions. But it really starts by giving yourself the space. Okay. So back to boredom itself. There's a lot of studies that laboratory experiments on how much people hate boredom. They're hilarious. I mean, I have this colleague named Dan Gilbert at Harvard. He's a psychologist. He's a great and visionary psychologist. And he's done these experiments where he invites a bunch of undergraduate students into the lab. Because they'll do like anything for 20 bucks. And he'll sit them in a chair in an empty room with nothing to do. 15 minutes, just sit there for 15 minutes, nothing to listen to, nothing to see. And he gives them just a little key fob.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  And if they touch the button, they self administer a painful electric shock. So you know what he's studying? Boredom or pain. A quarter of the women shock themselves. Two thirds of the guys. It's kind of what you need to know about men.

• 24:22André Duqum?

  We're clearly the more intelligent species.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Right, sure. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and like got eliminated from the experiment because clearly he was some sort of a freak who liked it. Like, oh, not that. So, so this is what we do. And we've created these key fobs. They're just called our phones that eliminate boredom. Look, social media is the shock machine. You don't like it. Who's like, I just love Twitter. I just love it so much. I mean, there's somebody out there, but most people are like, it's okay. It's okay. But it's a shock machine fundamentally. And when you're looking at your phone every 13 minutes, and that's on average, if you're sitting behind a light, you're looking at it the whole time.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Like, I wonder if anybody texted me. Or something over there on WhatsApp. I wonder, you mean, right? That's what we're actually doing. And the result of it is that we're keeping our brain in a complicated space, into the space of the wrong kinds of questions, of information, because this is what we're getting is information, information, information. Did you want that information? Not necessarily. You're being flooded by information, information. And that's keeping you away from the mind wandering, the flights of fancy. It keeps you away from the space of deep meaning. You're going to have to suffer blank space if you're going to get to meaning is what it comes down to, which is why I give my students homework to get on a flight and not

• 25:51Speaker 00

  look at their phones, to ride the train and have their hands in their laps, looking out the window and say, huh, a tree, to walk for an hour before dawn without devices, to not look at their phones for the first hour of the day during meals in the last hour before bed, and life changes fast.

• 26:14André Duqum?

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• 26:55André Duqum?

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• 27:35André Duqum?

  I love Jung's phrasing of how pleasure is tension reduction. It makes me think about how that is very much in essence what we're doing. And in all of those moments where we feel some sort of unease within ourselves, and we cope, you know? It's providing us some sort of solace moment to moment. In your book, I heard, I saw you refer to Emerson and his, you know, as his writing son on self-reliance and cultivating this rebellious spirit towards a culture and society that profits off of the vampirification of your attention and your energy. And so I'm curious your thoughts on that, because I feel like it really does take, you

• 28:18André Duqum?

  know, going against the grain when the grain, the culture, is every second of every day of every moment is taking your attention towards this social machine.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, when I was talking to young people and I was doing the interviews to actually figure out what was going on, I was doing my Sherlock Holmes behavioral scientist routine, and they started talking about the simulation. It reminded me... Of a movie that that came out in 1999, it's a long time ago called The Matrix. And if you had Keanu Reeves on your show.

• 28:51André Duqum?

  No, I mean.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  He'd be a great guest. Yeah, he'd be a great guest. He's a very deep guy, I understand. I don't know him. But the whole plot of The Matrix is like far out fantastical, impossible science fiction in 1999. There's an artificial intelligence, a machine intelligence. Okay, so far so good. And back in 1999, it's like, what? And and what it does is it feeds on human energy. And it keeps humans placid enough to take their energy by keeping them in a simulation, by putting them in pods, running a simulation of life that's like sort of good enough. That's pleasant enough. And the rebellion against it comes when Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, like, no, no,

• 29:36Speaker 00

  life is meaningless. I won't have it. I want the real thing. I want to feel it. I want to love it. I want to suffer. I want the real thing. And some people don't. Some people don't. They want the blue pill. But the whole point is this, you're not fully alive under the blue. And in that movie, and you're not fully alive when we're talking, when you're going with the flow, when you're in the matrix, when the artificial intelligence that is just sort of the the culture, the machines, the technology, the over engineered solutions to everything, when you're living in that and saying, good enough, good enough, just take away the, just sand off all the rough edges, take away all the right angles.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Just give me simulated version of my life. For me, it's not enough. And for most people, it isn't either. And there's a side effect to it, which is there's a disease, a psychogenic epidemic that crops up, an unintended secondary consequence called meaninglessness, downstream from which we find depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, self harm. It's no good, man.

• 30:46André Duqum?

  So let's continue to take the red pill in this conversation.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Right. Let's do it. No, no, for sure. Let's do it. Absolutely. Because this is the only way out is is to to live a full life. Live like Leroy.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  How did Leroy live?

• 31:03André Duqum?

  How else did Leroy live outside of the tech side of things?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he didn't have the tech, which means that he had to live in real life. And this is the IRL experience is what it comes down to. What I found in the research is that there are six big, previously ordinary ways of living that dramatically illuminate the right hemisphere of the brain. So I'm going back and forth between philosophy and neuroscience and behavioral science, obviously.

• 31:27André Duqum?

  We've had Ian McGilchrist on.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Oh, he's great.

• 31:29André Duqum?

  We did a deep dive on the differences hemispherically. And so these are more now.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Mainstream.

• 31:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, and then also is it Tolstoy's irrationality?

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Irrational knowledge.

• 31:39André Duqum?

  Right.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  That's Tolstoy's concept of irrational knowledge, which Ian McGilchrist would say is right hemispheric knowledge.

• 31:45André Duqum?

  Right.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Right? Ian McGilchrist is the world's leading expert on hemispheric lateralization. And his ideas have had huge influence over me. And actually, we did an event together at Duke University just a few weeks ago, talking about these ideas. He's a neuroscientist and philosopher. I'm a behavioral scientist. And so we fit together pretty nicely on this, and I'm able to use his work in really useful ways. Right hemispheric experience largely comes from sort of six things. Number one is asking deep why questions that don't have answers, that you must ponder, that lead to wonder, that lead to discomfort.

• 32:18André Duqum?

  This is the poria?

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, a poria.

• 32:20André Duqum?

  A poria.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Exactly right. The Greeks talked about this. So almost every religious and great philosophical tradition is based on unanswerable questions. I like the koans of Zen Buddhism. So I've studied a lot more Tibetan Buddhism, because I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills with the community of the Dalai Lama. And so the Tibetan Buddhism is a different tradition. Zen Buddhism is sort of, is more of an attitude of observation, but it's largely based on these koans, which are riddles. And they're senseless in their way. So I'll give you an example. A young monk, right? An ensui is a junior monk.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  And he finds a jikijitsu, the master monk, walking toward him on a path in the forest. And he asks the master monk, "Where are you going?" And the master monk said, "On a journey." And he says, "What's the destination?" And the master monk says, "I don't know."

• 33:21Speaker 00

  And then junior monk says, why don't you know? And the master monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate form of knowledge. Consider. That's a ponderable question that will illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain because it's not based on information. And that's the key thing. If you can ask Google or ChatGPT, it's not a right hemisphere question. The classic one is, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Which is, that's actually only about 150 year old koan in Zen Buddhism. But it seems senseless. But when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. Which is, the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. It's an illusion of sound.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  And it only becomes a reality when you add a second hand. Your life is incomplete in the absence of others, which is a deep Buddhist concept of emptiness. But that's an example. And doing that, the classic questions in the West would be, why my life? For what would I give my life? Those are deep questions. I defy anybody to put those into ChatGPT.

• 34:29André Duqum?

  It makes me definitely think about some of the current faults with the current structure of the education system. And this sort of top-down versus bottom-up processing, right? Like if we're told what everything is from the external world in this top-down way, then we presume and we walk through the world as if we know. As opposed to experiencing a tree or a bird, not through the name we've learned, but through the bottom-up processing of experiencing it raw in each moment, which allows us to actually meet life more fully and fully alive. And discover things that we otherwise might not have if we just moved through life with our preconceived notions and prejudices of it. Likewise, a dukkha, right? Which is a Latin origin of education, means to evoke from within. And so.

• 35:14André Duqum?

  That it seems like that that Greek term aporia and this like posament of the seeking and searching allows us to discover instead of just take the blue pill and walk through and do what you're told through life.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Right, you know, and the the blue pill of the engineered existence is one in which we're we find more information to be adequate. You want you don't understand something, go get more information.

• 35:39André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  And and no, understanding does not come from more information. It's interesting, there's a quote that's attributed commonly to Einstein. Who knows? Because you know, most quotes on the Internet are completely unattributable, but it's possible. He said, most people will read too many books. Most people and what they're doing is they're they're substituting information for the process of deep understanding. You need to read less and ponder more. And that's that's actually is very sound neuroscience and behavioral science. What you find is that your understanding, that your learning doesn't come because you have such a great teacher who explains something, you say, ah. If you if you're sitting in class and there's something that's very deep, you're learning philosophy or science or something that's very hard and you understand it exactly when

• 36:23Speaker 00

  the professor explains it, probably it's not very good. What you need to say is, I don't get it, I don't get it. Then you need to go home and chew on it. Then you need to go home and work on it. That understanding integrates the hemispheres of your brain between information and understanding, which is the way your brain is supposed to work. The modern information economy is just throwing random information that's pretty easy to understand all the time. Now, that's not your philosophy in this show. Your show is dedicate, I know it, is dedicated to asking people to ponder bigger ideas more deeply. And that means that the big benefit from this is for people to watch this and then

• 37:05Speaker 00

  go on a walk without devices, ideally in a half hour before dawn, as the sun is coming up, and think about the ideas, think about the three or four big ideas that actually they're presented with in your.

• 37:18Speaker 02

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• 38:16Speaker 00

  Perk.

• 38:17André Duqum?

  Amazing. So that was the first of the six.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  That was the first of the six.

• 38:21André Duqum?

  All right, should we?

• 38:22Speaker 00

  That's assignment number one.

• 38:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Is the brahman mahortta to rise before dawn.

• 38:28André Duqum?

  Yeah, so brahman mahortta, talk about that because that's been a big practice of your life, you know, and guarding that secret time in the morning.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, so brahman mahortta is the idea of the creator's time in Sanskrit. And it's an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.

• 38:41André Duqum?

  An hour and 36 minutes before sunrise.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  It's two mahortas, which is 48 minutes each, which has particular significance in ancient Vedic wisdom. And the neuroscience of this doesn't specify. The neuroscience clearly says, however, getting up before dawn. If the sun is already up and warm, by the time you get up each day, you've kind of lost the first battle. And getting up has, before dawn, has special properties for creativity, for the depth of understanding, for focus, and for mood, for mood management. It's just really good for you to get up before dawn. I recommend, when, you know, I get 15 emails a day from people who's like, "Professor, what do I do? You know, I graduated from college. I feel so lost." And the first thing that I'll recommend to everybody who really feels lost is,

• 39:26Speaker 00

  you know, it's not gonna, taking more creatine monohydrate is good, but that's not gonna do it.

• 39:32André Duqum?

  I took 20 grams of it before this conversation.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  You're doing 20?

• 39:37André Duqum?

  Just today. I haven't been doing it every day this week.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  I do 10. I do 10. So, and, and, uh, cause I have this old grizzled adrenal system. It's very inefficient. You, you're young. But anyway, it's good. That stuff's great. But, but the whole thing to think about is not, is not some supplement. The way to do it is to actually awaken your senses and awaken your full brain. Get up in a hour, half an hour or so, get up before dawn and walk for an hour. So ambulation, a pilgrimage every day. There's a reason that every religious tradition has pilgrimage. I've done religious pilgrimages in my life. I very deeply believe in them. There's a, we're, we're a walking species.

• 40:17André Duqum?

  Camino trail?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, Camino trail. I mean, it's just pray and pray and pray and pray and walk and walk. And walk your way into an, an open aperture of spiritual knowledge that will then find you. So go on a camino for an hour without devices before it gets light. And as the light comes up and do that every day for 30 days and then we'll talk again. So I tell young people and they always say the same thing. I didn't find what I was looking for, but it found me.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  And that's what we're looking for is something that we're looking for the thing that's actually looking for us.

• 40:54André Duqum?

  Yeah. Not just what you want of life, but what life wants of you.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, we think we're seekers, but we're actually we're sought.

• 41:02André Duqum?

  That's deep. Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:04André Duqum?

  Yeah. And so that time, that window, providing that space to see what is called of you, what you stumble upon to. If we're, again, consumed by various different stimulus in our life and we don't, we don't give that space, then we're less likely for those things to find us or to be sought in that sense. Just to wrap a bow on that. So your, could you just run through a quick overview of your, like your time in the morning?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I have protocols that I set up. So it's not as if I'm just.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Taking it as it comes, as much as I am fundamentally spiritually based, I do honestly believe that I'm a spiritual being having a physical experience. I mean, I deeply believe in this and I'm my faith is literally the most important thing in my life. But I honestly believe also that the organism per se requires that I use I use it appropriately and that requires healthy protocols such that I can tap into the metaphysics and I'm not stuck in trying to build with willpower and cognitive bandwidth, the you know, the the habits that I need. So I get up at 4:30 and I'm off in jet legs. I'm on the road about 48 weeks a year, three or four nights, not not all week, but that means I'm changing time zones

• 42:21Speaker 00

  a lot. So this is correcting for time zones. Sometimes I get up at 4:30, I lift heavy things and run around for an hour. First thing, I really I wake up my body and I'm fully alive in this way. I work out, you know, and as much as it sounds like kind of a bro culture thing, I'm sure you do too. And this is a great thing. This is to say, I'm still alive. It's so beautiful. And then then is my the time that I actually dedicate to my my religious practice. And so depending on where I am, I either have half an hour of meditative prayer, or I attend a religious service. I'm a Catholic and I'm a daily communicant. So which sounds like your grandma, right? I bet your grandma literally was a

• 43:04Speaker 00

  daily communicant, right? I mean, you're you're Middle Eastern Christian tradition. And so there's a lot. I mean, and those they're badass, by the way, they've got it together that you know, you're raised Orthodox, right? Yeah. That's a cool thing because they've got it together with respect to their religious protocols. I'm Catholic. And the great thing about being Catholic is like Starbucks, you know, it's a it's a highly uniform and high quality product every place, like every place. So generally speaking, I'll go to mass right after I'll get cleaned up and I go to mass for a half hour. If there's not a mass available, I pray my rosary and then I'll go to mass at night, sort of depending on where I am. So either the mass or rosary in the morning. And then what I didn't do at night. And so I begin and end the day

• 43:49Speaker 00

  in that particular way, in the space of relationship with the divine.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Critically important. And I've studied many of the karmic traditions as well. And I've learned much of the technique that I use as a Christian from the karmic traditions. Sitting in meditation with the Tibetan monks, for example, is very, it's helped me very much in the way that I practice my faith. After that, and I have, I don't ingest any calories at this point because I want complete clarity. I'll have, because I'm working out hard, I'll have electrolytes and creatine monohydrate and a few other supplements that I use that I like, that I think are actually really good, but not caloric. I don't want nutrition. By the time I get back from mass, and then I take the first bowl of this psychostimulant, you know, I take, which is just a nerdy way of saying I drink coffee. And I drink a lot. I mean, I drink, but, but in one dose, I'll have between three and 350

• 44:39Speaker 00

  milligrams of caffeine, which is a lot. I mean, but

• 44:41André Duqum?

  But not to wake up, to focus.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  No, no, no. It's nootropic.

• 44:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  I don't use it for, for waking. I use it for focus, which is really critically important. So caffeine blocks the A2A adenosine receptors. And, and there's a lot of evidence that suggests that if you use it to wake up, you're going to get a crash in the afternoon and you've wasted the focusing properties. So I don't drink caffeine for two and a half to three hours until after I get up. And then I take my first nutrition. And when I do it, which is heavy in protein and very low in carbohydrate, and do it with micronutrients that I actually get from nuts and berries, et cetera, but a lot of Greek yogurt with protein powder, et cetera, very clean. And then I get four hours of dopamine in my free frontal cortex. I get the best concentration and focus I can get. I've done body and soul and, and I've taken care of myself in a particular way.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  And, and, and I don't have to think about it. None of this takes cognitive bandwidth or whoopar.

• 45:36André Duqum?

  Hey fam, a quick share from a partner of ours. Caffeine does not actually give you energy. It just mutes the signal that tells you you're tired. The fatigue is still building underneath. You just can't feel it until it wears off and then it hits all at once, which is the crash. What actually produces energy in your body is a process that runs on electrolytes. So if you're depleted, no amount of coffee is fixing that. You're just masking it. This is why I've been really enjoying Element's new lemonade iced tea. It uses a full Black tea extract, not isolated caffeine like most energy drinks. And they also make these stick packs and sparkling 12 ounce cans that I've talked about and love. The lemonade and grapefruit flavors are personal favorites. And they have a chocolate salt, which in hot water is a low key gem.

• 46:21André Duqum?

  If you want to try them out, it's 100% risk free. Order it and if it's not your vibe, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. You don't even have to send it back. Go to drinklmnt.com slash know thyself for a free eight count sample pack with elements. Most popular flavors with any purchase. Links down in the description as always, I hope you enjoy. Hey guys, a quick share. Did you know that your body runs on magnesium? It's involved in over 300 biochemical processes. Everything from how your nervous system regulates itself to how well you sleep and your muscles recover. Yet roughly 80% of people are not getting enough of it. The problem is most magnesium supplements give you one or maybe two forms. And your body does not absorb them well. So you're just basically getting expensive urine.

• 47:06André Duqum?

  Magnesium breakthrough by BiOptimizers is the one I use and recommend to my friends all the time. It has seven forms of magnesium, each one targeting something different. Stress resilience, deep sleep, energy, cognitive function. It's full spectrum and your body will actually absorb it. Since I found out about them a few years ago, I've been taking it ever since. And I genuinely noticed my sleep quality improves when I take it. If you want to try it out, go to bioptimizers.com slash know thyself and use code know thyself to save 15% at checkout. They even have a 365 day money back guarantee. So there's actually no risk. Link in description as always, back to the episode.

• 47:48André Duqum?

  Any quick little tips to help intermittent faster tech and like set herself up for success? I.e. phone out of the bedroom or like, what are some things you've found?

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, the protocols are pretty straightforward and, and very well studied. First hour of the day, because your neurocognitive programming is happening largely when you first get up. So if you're having trouble with a particular habit or, or you know, people who suffer from tics, for example, tics that come and go, like not full on Tourette, but people who suffer from nervous tics. If they can actually not start the day with any tics for the first hour, they can break the tic. But if you you can't do it after the first hour because of this programming that actually occurs. And so think of your phone as a tick, the 205 checks a day, that's a tick, right? And it's much the same way. It affects the brain much the same way. Now, if you're in media, for example, you're going to look at it to see what came in overnight, what's

• 48:39Speaker 00

  on fire, right? But that's just quick information then down, no scrolling, no scrolling, put it away. The second protocol is not during while you eat. I recommend, if you can, not eating alone. Human beings, Homo sapiens, I realize you live alone, so that's a hard, that's that's hard to do. But Homo sapiens were evolved to live in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based, hierarchically arranged individuals. And we get a good deal of the neurochemical reward of that when we eat together and talk. So we sit around a campfire and talk about our day while making eye contact and put pieces of yak meat into our mouths, or gazelle into our mouths. And that's our work. And so never have your phone on the table, never

• 49:22Speaker 00

  have your phone while you eat, even if you're eating alone, never have your phone while you're eating. It's critically important. And the third is the last hour at night before you go to bed and put it away in a closet locked away. Never, and this also requires, given this first and last hour, that you're not sleeping with your phone. My students will be like, how do I wake up? And I said, well, I have this incredible new invention. It's called an alarm clock. It's unbelievable. Five bucks on Amazon.

• 49:49André Duqum?

  Do you still use it if you feel like you've hit in your routine?

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that doesn't matter. So I can use my phone as an alarm clock now, and I won't look at it during the night. Because because I've got the protocols to the point where I've broken the grip. But it takes usually about six weeks. The norm is 42 days on anything like this to break the grip is what is how that works. And then some certain zones, you know, the bedroom is a phone-free zone, classrooms should be phone-free zones. It's insane that there's a single classroom in America from kindergarten through PhD where you can have your phone. That's just nuts. That's child abuse. That's elder abuse, too, because a lot of people are in a way. And then last but not least, you need a fast. You need at least one fast a year. I recommend 96 hours. I go on spiritual retreat every year,

• 50:36Speaker 00

  strongly recommend. It's great. The first day, your brain is screaming for the device. The second day, you're calming down. The third day, you're in bliss. And the fourth day, you just wish it were lasting all year round. Yeah. And so just those protocols, that's simple stuff. Your life will change.

• 50:50André Duqum?

  Fantastic. I love that we're bouncing between the theoretical, the practical.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  I'm a practical guy because, you know, the theory is one thing. But, you know, look, you and I are spiritualists, right? It's not helpful to say I believe theoretically in spiritual practices. You gotta do the practices.

• 51:10André Duqum?

  All right. You want to touch on any of the remaining six? Romance, transcendence, calling, beauty?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  We have five left. Take your pick.

• 51:16André Duqum?

  Oh, boy.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  This is a Whitman sampler. Wish you wish which chocolate you want.

• 51:19André Duqum?

  Little sample platter.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was like, want to talk about romantic love?

• 51:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, sure.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  You gonna do some, you gonna do a little, little, you gonna do some self-disclosure to me here?

• 51:33André Duqum?

  Yeah, is that, did I give something away there?

• 51:37André Duqum?

  People find meaning in the pursuit, even the unsuccessful pursuit of romantic love.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is this true in your life?

• 51:44André Duqum?

  Um, yeah, I did last year celibate and right now I'm not in partnership. No, just no one wanted to hook up with me, dude.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Involuntary.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  It's always the worst kind.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Now you're gonna get a whole lot of proposals, you know, in the, that's right.

• 52:03André Duqum?

  It's all part of the strategy.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Andre's single. I had no idea.

• 52:08André Duqum?

  No, it was intentional to really focus my creative energy.

• 52:12André Duqum?

  But I agree. I mean, falling in love being, you know, and the exploration of that. It's like you're, I feel like everybody can agree you're in, you're alive to a, to a big degree during that. It sounds like the time we live in though, with all the apps and all the different ways, again, incredible on one hand, but then also a detriment to another.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So falling in love is a right hemispheric experience when you do it right. How do you do it wrong? By reducing it to an algorithm, by making it into a left hemispheric, complicated engineering problem. But it's like, I'm gonna find somebody who's just like me. Now, it's a weird thing that you'll find, people who are, oh, were on the apps too much. Some of the apps are actually getting much better by injecting more human experience into the algorithm. And this is a, a truth in life. Look, the, the, the robots are coming. The cyborg experience is coming. But the secret to living well under those circumstances is not by adding more robotics to your human experience, but adding more humanity into the robotics. We need to add more human friction into all levels of what we're actually doing with

• 53:16Speaker 00

  machines. And dating is a perfect example of this. So when you go on the apps and you date, thank God, I mean, it's like I'm old. So it's like I got married in the before times. But what people will do is try to solve the problem of romantic love by setting up a sameness. I want somebody who votes like me. I want somebody who, you know, likes California like I do. I want somebody who likes sriracha. I want somebody who wants to move to Austin. I want, and pretty soon they're dating themselves, which is super not hot. Right? And part of the reason is because we intuitively know, this is a right hemispheric intuition, that we want somebody who completes us, not somebody who copies us.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  You don't want somebody who's just like you. You want somebody who makes you, who, you know, is the perfect amalgam.

• 54:08André Duqum?

  Yeah, strong, not like complementary.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  You want the yin and the yang. This isn't, this is a truism across all philosophies, is things that fit. You know, the pieces of a puzzle are supposed to be different and opposite. And yet we forget that when we try to solve it like a complicated problem. When we live it like a complex problem, it's super risky and it's super scary and it's impossible to understand. I mean, I have an unsolvable marriage. Thirty-five years, man. Unsolvable, unsolvable. That's the point. The point is getting to deeper understanding with somebody who's not like you, with whom you can have best friendship. That's really what's going on. And so when you allow yourself to give your heart away, when you do that risky thing,

• 54:54Speaker 00

  you're stepping into the unknown, it's super scary. It's way beyond the complexity and the mystery of what most people do. And what we've done is engineered it into something that we can clearly understand. And the result of it is that we don't like it. And even though there's more availability of people than there's ever been before because of the technologies, there's less attraction. People are about a third less likely to be in love in their twenties as people were when I was in my twenties. Like, that's all there was to do. That's all I wanted. I mean, it was all about love and because we were more comfortable exploring the mystery and the danger of the right hemisphere of our brains.

• 55:34André Duqum?

  The optionality, too, is like, is wild, you know? You live in Tuscaloosa and you got Kathy and Susan are like your options, you know?

• 55:44Speaker 00

  And that leads to the paradox of choice.

• 55:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  And the paradox of choice is just another manifestation of taking a right hemisphere mystery and turning it into a left hemisphere problem to solve.

• 55:58André Duqum?

  Well, I want to circle back to romance, but I want to jump forward to calling right now because I think a lot of people can, you know, we both live in a time that is more comparative than ever, right? So we're seeing everyone's highlight reels, of course, and we're oftentimes feeling devoid of having, what in the Hindu tradition is Svadharma, which is like this, not just like doing what you're supposed to be doing, but the natural occupation is actually a vehicle for self-realization and it's not just something nice to do, it literally becomes your vehicle for self-actualization and realization.

• 56:41André Duqum?

  And I'm curious how we can just talk about how to zone in on discovering that calling. Or do you refer to, you know, discovery of yours? Because you're somebody that started making pizzas, French horn player, think tank, happiness expert. You've gone through many different iterations and I'm curious how you've arrived.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  A lot of errors.

• 57:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  A lot of people, they're looking for, I mean, everybody wants their calling. They want to feel complete because of what they do. The problem with that is that, once again, we have a tendency to solve it like a complicated problem, as opposed to experiencing our lives, finding our calling by what we do with an integrated approach that allows ourselves to do something that might be way off the beaten path, or do something that's really different than what the best, you know, the engineering department at your university says is actually the best life. Here's the way to think about it. People who have a calling in their work have two things in common.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  These things do not include salary, or position, or title, or mom's deepest dreams, or what your college counselor told you to do. They have the sense that you're earning your success, that you're creating value, that you're rewarded and recognized in some way, shape, or form for something that you're authentically earning. This is why merit-based systems are everything, and like tenure, and, trust me, I'm an academic. Tenure's terrible. It's completely demotivating, because you're not earning your success. They can't fire you. And loyalty-based systems are the worst. You kiss up to the boss, and you're his friend, and you hang around. They're completely demotivating, and they lead people to actually feel depressed and learn their helplessness.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Earn success is the idea that people need me, and that's the second part, which is service to other people. If you earn your success, and you're serving others, then you're in the zone of your calling, and it can change, you can spiral in and out of that eight times. I'm sure that you feel like you're living your calling with this show. I'm sure, I can see it in your eyes. But I bet that there have been other things that, in which, and there will be more things, because you're young, that you're going to be able to manifest. You're a classic spiral, by the way. There's the social science of career trajectories, says there's four kinds of people psychologically in the way they pursue their careers. Some are what they call experts. That's like your grandfather,

• 59:09Speaker 00

  who kind of stayed on the same track. My dad had the same job for forty-two years. Same university, forty-two years, college professor. Got about a two percent raise every year. Came time for tenure, didn't even apply, just showed up in the mail. It was like, super predictable. He had a lot of security. And the reason is because what he wanted was something that was, that led him to have a lifestyle that he wanted and he could count on. That's the, that's the, that's the expert career path. The transitory, people who jump from thing to thing because they don't want to live to work. They want to work to live, right? Then the two among real strivers, really successful people, are linear careers, which is ambition and points on the board. These are not the happiest people.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  These are people who only change jobs, let alone careers, when there's something bigger and better in line for worldly rewards. Money, power, honor, right? The happiest people who are really, really successful strivers are the spiral roles. They have seven to twelve year careers of their own design, and nobody gets up, nobody understands them but themselves. Were you funged of the greatest spiritual gifts from one to the other? Sound like you? Starting to sound like you, right?

• 1:00:17André Duqum?

  Yeah, I can see for sure, like, that naturally transitioning at different points.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  And mom's like, what's going on? But it doesn't matter, because you're actually building that. That's how going from French horn player to doing my PhD and becoming academic, to being a CEO, to building a happiness company, dedicating my life to lifting people up in bonds of love and faith, of hope.

• 1:00:41André Duqum?

  You're spiraling more and more closer towards alignment of what you're here to do, is what you would say?

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  I hope it's heaven. I hope it's heaven. I hope that it's the spiraling upward toward my true home, which is the image always of angels, by the way. They're always in a, always spiral, you know, up toward heaven. But of course, I don't know. But the whole point is that that's the adventure of finding your calling. And it manifests itself in different ways. And the two things to look for, am I earning my success? Am I serving other people? In other words, am I needed? Is how that works. And I don't care. Maybe it's, maybe it is making pizzas for a while. Maybe it's with a really frustrating boss. Maybe it's something you don't want to do. But the truth of the matter is that that's not the point if it's in the spiral trajectory of your calling.

• 1:01:29André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  And that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:01:32André Duqum?

  It reminds me of this quote, which I underlined from the Gita that you quoted in your book. "By performing one's natural occupation, one worships the Creator, from whom all living entities have come into being, and by whom the whole universe is pervaded. By such performance of work, a person easily attains perfection."

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  I know, isn't that beautiful? Isn't it beautiful? Because that's the whole, the whole concept that were made in the image of the divine. The divine is a creative entity. The divine, the God had created the heavens and the earth. And, and our little version of that is us creating the heaven and the earth in our own way. You know, in the, in the Hebrew Bible, we know people talk about the, you know, the unpleasantness of the snake and the, and the, and the tree and the apple and all that. And the penalty for Adam and Eve was they had to go toil in the garden, right? But read it closely. The bliss was working in the garden. The whole point is whether or not it has meaning.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  The whole point is whether or not it's the calling. They were working the garden. They were working the fruits of the beautiful labor, labor of God. And then later they were working by the sweat of their brow. They went from calling to no calling in its own way. And what do we want? We want to live in a particular way of integration, of faith, of hope, of love, that actually makes it so that we're working in the garden before the snake.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

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• 1:03:59André Duqum?

  It reminds me also of, I was very lucky and blessed to stumble upon some teachers early in life. So like at 16, not even necessarily just in person, but you know, through different books and audios. I remember Earl Nightingale saying, you know, "The strangest secret is that man becomes what he thinks about most often." And that success, his definition of success, "The progressive realization of a worthy ideal."

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23André Duqum?

  The progressive.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25André Duqum?

  Over time, realization of a ideal that you deem worthy. Does that resonate with you?

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  Completely. Homo sapiens are dedicated to progress. The biggest mistake that strivers, and by the way, this is a striver show. These are people who want to be better. Nobody's like, "Yeah, I don't want to be better. I don't want, you know, anything like spiritual perfection." No, "Know thyself" is the anthem for the striver. That's good. That's good. All strivers are sort of homo sapiens par excellence in what we truly want, which is progress toward something. The problem for the striver is the belief that once you actually hit the object of your affections, then you'll have a permanently happy mood, that your limbic system will keep you in a state of bliss. That's not how your limbic system works, man.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  I mean, you're not there, I mean, your limbic system isn't there to give you happy days every single day. You'd be eaten by a tiger summarily if you actually didn't have negative emotions. If your bliss were persistent. That's why Mick Jagger's saying, "I can't get no satisfaction." He should have said, "I can't keep no satisfaction, but I try and I try and I try." The first thing that a billionaire says upon earning the first unit. I need another unit because I don't feel it. It isn't what I was gonna feel. And so the point is, Nightingale's point is the progressive unfolding of a goal that's worthy. Progress is everything. And we see this all around us. You know, you can lose weight on any weight loss program practically.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  I mean, there's some stupid, you know, the all pizza diet is probably not gonna do it. But any serious weight loss diet, you're gonna lose weight. And the reason is because you will be rewarded with the goal of a scale going down that's sufficient to keep you from eating things that you like. The problem with hitting your goal weight is that the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations, which is why weight loss programs generally don't work. And that's this whole principle. What we need is a worthy goal that can only be, that really is always on the horizon. And that we're working toward that. Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let me ask you if you see if you'd agree with this. I've actually never talked about this, so I've been thinking about this.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  We believe there's an ultimate cosmic goal. We believe there's something beyond this life. Most people do. Right? I mean, and it's in different traditions, it's described in different ways, right? We want to be happy in this life, but we actually can't be. We can be happier. That's my job. But it's imperfect happiness. But we believe that there's a cosmic bliss. We actually believe that. You and I believe that. That to me, kind of like thirst is evidence of the existence of water. Hunger is proof of the existence of food. That hunger for a perfect bliss is evidence that it exists. There is something beyond the here and now.

• 1:07:30André Duqum?

  Yeah, I keep quoting, "Honestly, man, your book, this book is great." Like, I really loved it, and it reminds me of this section. "Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don't exist would be silly, even dangerous." "We have no reason to believe, either, that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware of and that are as yet undiscovered." And this just makes me think of, okay, this is what you're referring to, is a bit more of a mystical calling, and that there is water that we are thirsty for, union with God, however we want to describe it, that we find in our own, you know, individual ways.

• 1:08:15André Duqum?

  Do you feel that our calling is bestowed upon us by some unseen force? Or that we are co-creators with it, that we are complete generators of it? How do you conceptualize that?

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  So that's, that's a really interesting question, because that is the, in essence, the answer to that question is whether or not you follow the Abrahamic or Karmic traditions. Right? The whole idea of co-creator of what the destiny is, is a more Karmic view. The idea that your essence precedes your existence is more Abrahamic. The essence is the true you, who you're supposed to be. Your existence is being born, in this earthly experience that we're having. And the essence precedes you, meaning that there is a plan, but you have to discover it and live according to it. That's your goal in life, that's what it comes down to. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, of course, I have a view. I follow an Abrahamic religion. I go to mass every day. And so my, my, my natural muscle memory is that essence precedes existence, that my

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  essence is not co-created with my earthly existence. I have to, my, my, my intuition tells me, as well as my religious training, as well as Sunday School, that, that God had a plan for my life that, that existed before I did. And when God created my soul, He said, Be a good and faithful servant, you know, live according to this essence. But at the end of the day, if I'm wrong, that's okay too. That's actually okay too, because I believe that in the, in the, in the ultimate metaphysical sense, probably these two ideas that converge. And the idea of pre-existence of essence and the, and the co-creation of essence,

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  there's no reason that they couldn't be the same thing when the, when, when the continuum of time collapses, which in the deepest metaphysical sense, it almost certainly must.

• 1:10:00André Duqum?

  Yeah. No, absolutely. Well said, man. It reminds me of the, you know, it's better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right. Whatever are the objective truths to the claims we have within our beliefs and religious beliefs, what is the ontological experience of the person who believes it, you know? And does that leave you in a better place where you're contributing more to the world? Well, I'm gonna take that one.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, and, and there's nothing wrong with, with following a particular physics.

• 1:10:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  There's nothing wrong with that. I like my physics. You know, I think it's a really a great way for me to understand, you know, God in my life. And I have no reason for, for, I have no reason to say, because I believe that this is right, that I must condemn everybody else. Right? I mean, I encourage people all the time to, to, to, who grew up as Catholics, for example, or who are curious about it, to do it. It's so great. It's so great. I just love it so much. It's the most important thing in my life. Right? But I'm also just in admiration of people who have that experience, who are my Muslim brothers and sisters, who are, you know, I'm, and I have many Hindu teachers when I go to, I'm not a Hindu. That's not my beliefs. I study with the Dalai Lama. I've been studying with the Dalai Lama for 12 years.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  I love that. I love him. He's greatly enriched my life. And I don't understand how to quite, how to, how to, to, to accept mine is not to reject theirs. And to figure out what that means is something that hasn't quite unfolded for me yet. But I'm, I, I think it's right.

• 1:11:33André Duqum?

  I think one thing that is a pervasive plague is what you referred to earlier, which you also name is the arrival fallacy.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39André Duqum?

  So, you know, even this kind of goes into the positive psychology movement, right, which in its sincere form is a vehicle for self-realization. At a certain point, it can cross into a path of solicism and this unending task to fix a perceived broken self. You know, people that take up the spiritual path much, you know, there's this saying that like enlightenment or meditation is porn for perfectionists, you know? And, and so whether it's building a business or pursuing this path, we have this pervasive and consistent delusion

• 1:12:22André Duqum?

  that our ideal life is someday not present now.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:26André Duqum?

  I was reading this book, The Age of Anxiety, from Alan Watts.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great book.

• 1:12:30André Duqum?

  It's great.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31André Duqum?

  I started putting together a new book list for our community.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  And that, and he was such a deeply troubled individual, which by the way, is characteristic of everybody in this business.

• 1:12:42André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  No, totally. It's all me search, not research. And, you know, you don't find somebody who studies, who's looking for, to understand bliss, who, who has it.

• 1:12:52André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  You know, I don't study air because it's plentiful. But if it wasn't plentiful, I'd be pretty darn interested in it, right? Almost everybody I know in my business of the science of happiness lacks it and finds it hard. You know, in a weird way, it sounds off-brand, but it's actually perfectly on-brand, isn't it?

• 1:13:11André Duqum?

  Went into the field for a reason, you know? One quote from that book that stood out was, "To plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future, which, when it comes to me, will find me absent, looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face." They fail to live because they're always preparing to.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, that's, that's the whole idea of the miracle of mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh. He starts off that book describing the experience of washing the dishes. He said, "When you're washing the dishes, you should be fully alive while washing the dishes. You should be paying attention to washing the dishes. Because if you're not paying attention to washing the dishes, when you're washing the dishes, you're someplace else and you're missing your life." And that's important because, you know, we have this uncanny ability with this incredibly developed prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer of the brain. This is really distinguishing factor, not the limbic system of emotion, but the 30% of our brain, the suprachiasmatic cortex, that allows us to time travel. Your dog can't time travel.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  It can't, you know, think about the past and learn from its mistakes, except intuitively, except depending on instinct. It can't think about the future and practice future scenarios. The problem is, we're so good at it that we're never here now. And it's incredibly uncomfortable. Now, the father of positive psychology that you just referred to a minute ago is Marty Seligman, my great mentor, Marty Seligman. He's incredible. And he believes that presentism, mindfulness, is actually unnatural to the Homo sapiens. That's why it's so hard. You know, people are like, "Okay, be here now and get into a mindful state." It's super hard because immediately the default mode network in your brain turns on and you start thinking about the future. He says, "We shouldn't be called Homo sapiens.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  We should be called Homo prospectus because we're naturally thinking about the future." The average person spends 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future. The average striver, fellow striver, is 80% of the time. That's a lot, but you're missing your life. You know, here's the thing to remember. Really old people spend more time thinking about the past. Really young people think about the future all the time. Very few people spend very much time right now, but you can only love now.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Love only happens right now. The less you're here, the less you love. And that's God's plan for your life is love. To love and be loved, which requires that you be here now. To quote Ram Dass. Be here now. Why would you want to be here now? Well, let's think about the porn of meditation. The Dalai Lama told me that he discourages Westerners from becoming Buddhist. I said, "Why? Why?" He says, "'Cause they're doing it wrong." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "They want to meditate to feel better." Meditate to feel better. And I said, "So what should they be doing?" He says, "You should meditate so everybody else feels better." The point of your meditation is to lift up the whole world. That's the point of your meditation.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Not so that you will lift yourself up, so you'll feel less anxious. So that you'll become more productive. So that your depression will be alleviated. On the contrary, that's completely secondary to this. And that's the point of understanding that right now, right here, is the only time that we can love. And that's why when we have this conversation, you and I are here right now. We're not thinking about the future. And we're loving this moment. And that's what we're trying to achieve. Because as we love this moment, we get to have this conversation. And we're trying to bless other people. The point is not so that Andre and Arthur feel better. The point is that we're trying to lift up the world. And that's the essence of now, and that's the essence of love.

• 1:16:53André Duqum?

  The act of service, to me, feels like it fills those buckets of coherence and purpose and significance, you know, that we mentioned earlier. And it seems like no matter what the calling is, whether it's flipping pizzas or talking on a podcast, you know, or professing, you know, there's this quality of metta, of wishing for the well-being of others through the unique lens in which life, God, whatever, the Creator, the universe, has given you certain gifts and skills and aptitudes and proclivities. And through that, you're giving to the greater whole.

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  Chop wood, carry water. Once again, that's just another of these Zen Buddhist colons. Where the Ansuie goes to the jiki jitsu.

• 1:17:36André Duqum?

  These are great names.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  I know, I know. And says...

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  I'm ready for my assignment. Master, I'm ready for my assignment. And Jiki Jitsu says, "Your job will be to chop wood and carry water." Okay. He's in the monastery. For years, he chops wood and carries water. He's got chapped hands, it's cold in the winter, he's got sore muscles. Finally, he's attained enough enlightenment, enough knowledge, that he can become a master himself. And he goes to the now aging master and says, "Master, I have attained all of this knowledge. I've done everything asked of me. What is my job now?" He's thinking, "I'm gonna become maybe a contemplative, you know, maybe I'm gonna become a teacher, I'm gonna be able to work inside." And then Master says, "Yes, you have attained enlightenment. Now your job will be to chop wood and carry water."

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Because the whole point is, as Mother Teresa said, "Don't do big things, do little things in love." You know, if I had known what it meant to make pizzas, I wouldn't have resented making pizzas. Look, I would have loved being a French horn player, which I didn't do it in love. This was my mistake. This is the reason that it didn't last. It's because I didn't do it in love. Right? Finally, I mean, better late than never. When I was 55 years old, I retired from a CEO job after walking a long pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, and praying, "Lord, guide my path. What do you want from me? What do you want from me?"

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  And I believe God put the knowledge on my heart that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And I said, "Okay, I get it. Okay, I get it. And now, finally, I can do this in love." I wish I'd done it when I was your age.

• 1:19:31André Duqum?

  I mean, the relatability and the arc of your journey, I feel like, is also what allows you to connect with so many people.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39André Duqum?

  Like, because...

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  This is life.

• 1:19:41André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  This is our lives.

• 1:19:42André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  And, you know, I really specialize in people who have big dreams and a lot of ambition, and who are hard workers, super strivers. I get it. I mean, I know not everybody's like that, but everybody thinks, quite mistakenly, that if they had your success, they would automatically be happy. And you say, "Shoot for happiness and you'll be successful enough." Now, the striver panicked at that last sentence because of the word "enough."

• 1:20:06André Duqum?

  Yeah. Right, because we're under this consistent thought that, like, happiness is the goal. We're supposed to be, like, happy moment to moment. How would you describe your feeling of, like, joy, of fulfillment? Like, what is the better approximation of really what it means to not miss our life?

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  So, happiness per se is a combination of... It's not a feeling, to begin with. Stop chasing feelings. Feelings are liars. Your entire limbic system is dedicated to producing emotions that are nothing more than threats, signals of threats and opportunities. It's a very unsentimental way of understanding emotions, but it's literally true. You have fear, anger, disgust, and sadness to alert you to threats that you perceive below your level of consciousness. You have joy. You have surprise. You have interest to alert you to opportunities that will allow you to, you know, get food and pass on your genes, you know, mating, et cetera. And those are animal impulses, is what it comes down to. That's not the goal, is to actually have a series of feelings.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  And the biggest mistake people make about having happy lives is they chase feelings. Stop chasing feelings. Let feelings occur as they occur. This is the proper functioning of your brain. Look for the three elements of a truly happy life, which is enjoyment, not saying the good pleasure, satisfaction, which is the joy of actually achievement after struggle, and meaning, the biggest one of all, which is what we're talking about here, which is what the new book is about. And that's finding coherence, purpose, and satisfaction. And so, there's a science behind each one of these things. There's a spirituality. There's a theology behind all of these things. And the best part is this, man... It's a complete adventure in each one of these silos.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  And, and God gives us like 80, 90 years to go on these adventures. To figure out, what does it mean to go from pleasure to actual enjoyment of life? What does it mean to, to become comfortable and celebratory of the struggle that goes into achievement and not just the achievement per se? What does it mean to find the meaning of my life through all the pain and suffering? Which is actually part of the experience itself.

• 1:22:15André Duqum?

  Would you say around like your late 50s, when you went on that trail? Was that a time where you really kind of collapsed or stopped misconflating internal worth with external success? I'm sure it's a theme that, you know, still comes up, but like that, that gap and that, that perceived relation between external success and it being enough?

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, the scoreboard. Scoreboard's a killer. And the scoreboard is really the, the bane of the existence of the striver. That's called, those are called extrinsic rewards. And there's a big literature on extrinsic rewards. Like if you, if a kid loves playing with a toy just from the joy of it, and then you give them a cookie to play with a toy, they like the toy less. Paradoxical, right? It seems like you would compound the satisfaction that actually comes from it. It diminishes it because we say, if somebody's paying me to do it, then therefore it must be onerous. And so the joy, the intrinsic joy of something is, is, is lowered by the extrinsic rewarding of that things. And so, and so the, the super striver, the highly motivated, achievement oriented person is all about the external scoreboard.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  That's hard and that's a real problem in my life.

• 1:23:26André Duqum?

  How have you guarded when your passion turns into a business? How do you guard the?

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:23:34André Duqum?

  You know, because it can quickly become this engine and this machine that's running and you become again like a cog in it instead of, you know, we can become disconnected from the original intent.

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  And no doubt you're looking at your viewer numbers. There's no way to avoid that. And that's so deflating, right? And, and on the weeks, I'm hoping that this one will be a million and a half viewers.

• 1:23:56André Duqum?

  YouTube algorithm blesses with a one out of 10. Come on, you can do it.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  But, and we joke, but sort of no joke, right? And so what we're trying to do is we're in the meditation, we're doing the meditation to lift up everybody else. That's the, that really is why we do it, of course. Because, you know, this is not like the most financially rewarding thing that you can do, and I'm not making any money at all, right? But we love it. This is love because it's present here and now. We spoil it by reducing it to these scoreboard effects. I write books. Do you think I don't look at The New York Times Vessellist? I want it to open at number one, baby. That's what I want. But it spoils it. It ruins it. So how do you guard against it? Number one is knowledge. Number one is actually recognizing that that's the case.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  It's actually feeling that that hollowness has, is motivated by the extrinsic rewards. The second is actually having people who love you enough to hold you accountable to it. That's where marriage comes in. You know, that's where you have to, you know, somebody who denies you love except for the extrinsic rewards doesn't love you. Here's a pathology of strippers. They have the same kind of childhood. I write about in the book a little bit. These are people who become workaholics, for example. It starts when they're kids and they get the attention and energy and affection of adults when they do something good. They get a good report card. They make first chair in the orchestra. They, you know, they're the lead in the play.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  And they, their synaptically plastic little brains process this conclusion. Love is earned. Love is earned. Now, that's wrong. Love is a free gift freely given, or it's not love. Anybody who makes you earn her love doesn't love you. That's an important thing in the dating world, right? And people go through life, if they're, if they believe that love is earned, they'll marry people who demand that love be earned. They'll surround themselves with suck up friends where love is earned. They'll believe that God, God's love can be earned. And that's a craziness of life is the way that that works out. When you have the person who completes you, or the one flesh in a good marriage, in a romantic partnership, is the union of the right hemispheres of your brain, which becomes an antenna to God.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  That's what you're looking for. That's not about sex. It's not about... Not being lonely, it's about, it's about, it's about a link to the divine. That's what marriage is supposed to be. That's what best friendship with your spouse is supposed to be, is that antenna to the divine. With this union, the complex spaces of your brain, that's the person who will say, "You can't earn my love." And the wor- what you're doing in the world is deleterious and it's harming you and it's harming us. And that's what I get from my wife. I have a, I have a deeply, deeply mysterious relationship with my wife. My wife is trying to walk me into heaven, side by side. I mean, she's the last person on whom I will lay my eyes as I take my dying breath, I firmly

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  believe. And the next person I'll see is the Lord. That's what I hope. That's what I believe, because that's what I feel with this union of our hemispheres. And she's the one who holds me accountable. To get back to the grubby reality of the extrinsic rewards, when she sees me waiting until 5:10 on Wednesday, which is when the New York Times Bestseller list comes out, she's like, "What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?" That's just gonna lower your sense of love. That's gonna lower your sense of purpose. This is gonna lower who you are. This degrades who you are. And it pisses me off when she says that. She's completely right.

• 1:27:31André Duqum?

  It's interesting, because we both have that side. And then also, when our work is aligned with what we want to see more of in the world, success becomes, at least the story I'm telling myself, a benevolent altruistic thing. The more success means the more positive impact in the world. So it's like both of these balances, right?

• 1:27:51Speaker 00

  No, there's nothing evil about it. This is the thing. The problem is when, when it becomes an ultimate reward.

• 1:27:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  See, here's the thing. So Aquinas, in 1265, writes the Summa Theologiae. He says that people are beguiled by idols. Man is beguiled by idols. Now idols are a substitute for God, right? In his view, we want happiness, which is the same thing as we want the divine. Which I believe, you believe, many people watching us believe, many don't, but that's okay, too. The idols that beguile us are false versions of that. They have divine characteristics, but they're, you know, they're, they're, they're golden calves. What are they? Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four. Very astute social science. Because now, of course, we have all the brain scans that show that the four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. He was right. He was completely right.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Each one of us is beguiled more by one than the other, and we know what our idol is. We have power because we're able to, we're able to avoid falling into the trap, sometimes. Not always, but we'll always be beguiled by that. The problem is, however, that we shouldn't get rid of these things. The whole idea of sell everything, you know, live like a pauper. That's not the right solution necessarily, certainly not for most people. It's recognizing that those are intermediate goals and dangerous goals, but they can refract to the blessing of other people. You can do good things with money. I believe that the free enterprise system has lifted people out of poverty at rates unbeknownst to humanity.

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  But if we make it a religion, if we make capitalism into a religion, then it, then it, then it ruins our happiness, it ruins our bliss. But if we use it to pull people out of poverty, it's great. Your fame, for example, you're well-known. People recognize you in the airport, for sure. But here's the thing, that can't make you happier. What it can do is make you more magnetic and have people seek the source of your power, which is your belief and your bliss, and that will lift them up. And that's how it works. Use what could have been an idol as a way to refract to the greater glory and bliss of other people.

• 1:30:00André Duqum?

  That's a, that's a powerful reminder, because I feel like, you know, I have some friends that are like truly famous and...

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have mutual friends who are truly famous.

• 1:30:08André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, mutual friends. And there's a level of... I mean, it's, I feel like incredibly burdensome from the outside in at times, but also it depends from where it's being received when somebody comes up to you, especially for me in like small pockets where people come up to me if it's like, if it's received from the head or if it's received from the heart, they have two completely different qualities.

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:30:29André Duqum?

  One can be inflationary or deflationary. The other one is just like being appreciative that your, whatever you've done has some sort of semblance of impact on people.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  That's absolutely true. And by the way, that's a very good point. If you're an actor who gets like really, really famous and people yell, "I love you for moving cars because of a character that you played that's not you", that's hugely alienated. That's really, really bad for you, right? I mean, you have to be incredibly well-

• 1:30:54André Duqum?

  I love you for who you're not.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  I know, exactly. And you know, I've been on tour, my last book was with Oprah Winfrey. We co-authored a book and that was an incredible experience. She's one of the five most famous people in the world. She's incredibly well-equilibrated emotionally because she understands who she is. And many people forget who they are because of what other people project onto them. On the other hand, people are gonna come up to you and say, "I really, really love your work and it's helped me in my life." And they love you for the true essence of who you are, which is a great blessing. That's the least obnoxious fame you could possibly ever have.

• 1:31:28André Duqum?

  You know, I love, we just had Joe Hudson on, who do you know? You guys would really like-

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:31:33André Duqum?

  He's an amazing human being who just talked a bit about humility and how it's like honoring your God-given place on the planet, you know? And so even in, you know, the reflection of your bigness or appreciation from somebody who's been impacted by your work, disowning it or not acknowledging who you are and the role that you've had and impacting others is not this altruistic thing that you're telling yourself, you know? It's actually a shadow aspect to not own and accept who you are and the impact you have.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  That's not humility, actually. That's false humility.

• 1:32:08André Duqum?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  Is to, humility is not thinking less of yourself, is thinking of yourself less.

• 1:32:18André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  It's living in the I self. So William James talked about the I self and the me self. The I self is looking outward at the world and blessing the world. The me self is looking in at yourself and saying, what do they think about me? You need to be able to do both. You can't drive if you don't think about others in traffic and what you're doing. The problem is that Mother Nature wants you to stay in the me self all day long, and it creates great misery, and it creates great adultery, and it creates great harm. Living more in the I self to understand who you are perfectly, but to not dwell on it, that's the secret.

• 1:32:52André Duqum?

  What have you learned about self-transcendence from the Dalai Lama?

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Self-transcendence has two aspects to it. One is vertical, and the other is lateral. So vertical self-transcendence is one in which you stand in awe of something greater than yourself, and lateral transcendence is to serve other people selflessly. And both of them gets you into the I self and out of the me self in a way that's actually the best kind of experience because it's blessing the world. It's a blessing to the world, or it's a blessing to the divine. And both of those things are incredibly good for understanding the meaning of your life. Now, neurobiologically, it's because these are right hemispheric experiences. But once again, I believe that the spiritual realm has physical manifestations.

• 1:33:36Speaker 00

  So this does not rule out the metaphysical properties and the ultimate truths that we're talking about here. So he talks about this all the time, that there is a sameness to worshiping the divine and serving others. That in plain fact, you serve the divine when you serve others. You worship the divine when you serve others. And when you serve others, you're worshiping the divine, whether you believe in the divine or not.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code "HACK". Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:34:58André Duqum?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, you could look at it through Spinoza's conception, right? Pantheistic kind of conceptions of God not being two separate things, you know? All the natural world and human beings. I'm curious, do you view all life around you as God or as created by God? Or the same thing? Is it semantic?

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  So all being God and being created by God can be one in the same when God is I am. The great misconception of God, according to Aquinas, and according to, you know, all great, both Abrahamic and even karmic philosophers, is the idea that God is something in the world. You know, that's idolatrousness. That's idolatry. It just is, you know? That God is a guy with a beard in the sky and he's up there, he's mad. He's pissed, man. He's really pissed because, you know, sorry, it's like, he saw what you were doing last night. And that's just, it's just nutty. But when God appears to Moses in the burning bush, he said, and Moses was like, so what's your name? And God is like, I am, right? I am.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  That's important. And that's a really important concept that we can only understand metaphorically. Saint Augustine said, if you think you understand God, you don't, right? And the ancients would say that you need the via negativa to understand the divine, which is not this, not this, not this. And Sanskrit, neti, neti, neti, anatman. The whole concept of what God isn't is the whole thing. And the best metaphor for understanding this, this is my father's metaphor. My father was a great, was a most brilliant man I ever knew. He was a biostatistician and deeply religious.

• 1:36:37André Duqum?

  Biostatistician?

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he was a, you know, he was a scientist, but he was a brilliant scientist, but he was a deeply religious Christian. And he said that if I, he said, if I were a scholar of Picasso, I'd need to know two things, all about Picasso's paintings and all about the man. And I can't get information about the one by looking at the other. I can't find any information about Picasso the man by looking at his paintings because he's not in there. Similarly, if I revel in the creation, it's wonderful, which I do as a scientist. I'm in awe. But you know what? I want to know the Creator too. I want to know the Creator too. You know, that's what I want. I want the painting and I want the painter. That's where it really comes down to.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  That's the fulsome knowledge. That's the, that's holistic in the understanding of what it's all about. That's the ultimate experience that I seek. And that's the reason that my faith and my reason complement each other ultimately.

• 1:37:37André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Speaker 00

  And this gets back to your point about the things unseen. The ultimate thing unseen is the ultimate seer. That's how I understand God is an example of what can't be seen because it's not in the creation. It made the creation.

• 1:37:53André Duqum?

  Yeah. What you referred to about kind of on some level, admitting your own ignorance. I read this book recently, The Unknown Craftsman. It's a Japanese insight into beauty.

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. I haven't read it. I gotta, I have to understand this, yeah.

• 1:38:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:38:07Speaker 00

  Tell me more.

• 1:38:09André Duqum?

  There is one Arabian saying, which it quotes. If a man knows and knows not that he knows, shun him. If a man knows and knows that he knows not, awaken him. If a man knows and knows that he knows, follow him. And it's, it's a beautiful kind of Zen and Buddhist kind of take on the knowledge of ignorance. Like knowing that you don't know is a starting point.

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  Socrates idea that wisdom is, is a true recognition, understanding of your own lack of wisdom. That, that was, the paradox of Socrates was exactly that. To know thyself ultimately is to know that. And, and, or maybe the great sage Donald Rumsfeld got it right. There's known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. The basis of foreign policy.

• 1:39:05André Duqum?

  We've turned into Blue's Clues aura.

• 1:39:09André Duqum?

  Seneca, "Death lies heavily on him who, though to all the world well-known, is a stranger to himself alone."

• 1:39:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the, could have just been the motto of your show. Isn't that what it's all about? Who am I? Who am I? That's a huge mystery, but it's a huge adventure, isn't it? I mean, it's funny because we're being distracted from this question. I mean, the, the problem with engineered culture, the tip of the spear of which is the supercomputer in the pocket, is that, is that it militates against your show. That's the problem. You're being distracted from the one thing that you get to figure out, which is to know yourself. The ultimate mystery, the ultimate adventure, and you're being distracted from it by what? Twitter? Why, why, why would you distract yourself from, for one single second?

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  And the reason is because it's an uncomfortable bit of knowledge. And because it's a hard question, because it's a complex question, and because you have bad habits, and because you're exhausted, and, you know, because you had a bad day at work. Or because the, the thing is blinking and saying that somebody is on your notifications.

• 1:40:19André Duqum?

  It sounds like there's, from the context of this whole conversation, been a few very important aspects to be able to know yourself and discover your calling from these yearly spiritual retreats to the sacred time in the morning where you're not being stimulated by the outside world. Who do you believe you fundamentally are?

• 1:40:46Speaker 00

  I believe I'm a child of God, made in His image, put on earth to love and be loved, and to lift other people up. I believe I am put on earth to glorify God, to edify others. That's why I'm on earth. I do it poorly. I'm bad at my job, but I'm trying to get better.

• 1:41:09André Duqum?

  I disagree.

• 1:41:11Speaker 00

  Thank you. But I get a year or two, or a couple of decades to actually figure out how to get that done, and it's an absolute thrill to be an apprentice in the divine purpose that I believe is my life. That's who I am.

• 1:41:29André Duqum?

  Beautifully said.

• 1:41:30Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:41:31André Duqum?

  Both now and earlier, when you were speaking of your wife, there was this emotion bursting through your eyes and your being.

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  I'm in love. I'm a man in love.

• 1:41:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  This is, this is, there are connections to our divine spirit. And that's what marriage is supposed to be. That's what we're supposed to be looking for. You know, it's like I talk to my students and I have a unit in my class called Falling in Love and Staying in Love. It's the most popular class, the most populous set of lectures that I give every semester because they're super interested in it. But it's very important that people understand what the purpose of this is. Dating is not for entertainment. It's serious business. Because you're looking for the person that can actually walk you into heaven and that you will walk into heaven, whatever heaven means to you. Because this is your divine connection. And again, like, there's a lot of people watching us. But they're, you know, viewers of this show are not like, ah, it's all nonsense. They turned off the show a long time ago. They think that's nonsense.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  And romantic love is, you know, hooking up and, no, no, no, no. The sexual revolution got this all wrong. It's divinity, man. It's really, really deep and beautiful and serious business. And you're trying to find the person that is supposed to become your sherpa in the business of the metaphysical.

• 1:42:53André Duqum?

  It sounds like, from what I, the limited information I have between you and your wife, how you found her, or she found you, or God found you both, whatever, to the journey you went on and saying yes and having children and adopting a child. I'm curious, have you talked much about that time when you guys went and you adopted a girl?

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot. And it's interesting because, so we had two biological sons together. And that was great. But my wife, at one point, started having a dream, a recurring dream, about a little girl abandoned in a park. In China, like, what the heck? Right? And, and, and at the time, I was actually doing research on charitable giving, on charitable behavior. And I found this really weird thing, which is that when people given a particular way, it has, has catalytic impact on their life. So it's very easy to kind of sprinkle dollars out of a helicopter. Right? I mean, but it's fundamentally different in how it affects you and others

• 1:43:58Speaker 00

  when you try to change the whole dial for one person. Right? And, and there's an ancient Talmudic saying from the Book of the Sanhedrin. A man who changes one person's life changes the whole world. Because each of us encapsulates the world, right? That's the, that's the, the union of the one and the all, which is a weird thing. Right? I mean, it's mathematically impossible, and yet spiritually, all things are possible this way. And, um, and, and I kept finding that when people did this, really changed, turned the whole dial for a whole person, uh, that life was different for everybody. And I was telling my wife about this while she's having this dream. She said, you know, I think we should adopt a baby. And I'm like, it's only a book. Like, father of the year. Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  And, uh, and, and so we started the process because she had me dead to rights. Because she's spiritually a druid, and I'm just a guy. And we, we started through an adoption agency in Denver called Chinese Children Adoption International, which is a, you know, it's a, it's a great organization. That, the founder of which wound up becoming one of my students in my nonprofit management class at Harvard, of all things, by weird coincidence. And a great, a great couple that does this. And the Chinese government at the time was doing a lot of these. There was 26,000 foreign adoptions in the year 2004, when we adopted our daughter. And, um, they, they match, the government matches you up. It's like this, like, completely murky.

• 1:45:23Speaker 00

  Nobody knows how this, a numerology or a computer algorithm, nobody knows how. And the, the little girl, they tell you just a little bit about her. She was abandoned at 12 years old, 12 months old, 12, no, 12 hours old. I'm getting, I'm getting it wrong. She was abandoned at 12 hours old in a park in southern China. It was my wife's dream. It was weird. And we went through the process and about a year later, we were, we got to go pick her up. She was 15 months old and my wife couldn't go. Cause she was not a citizen. So she couldn't execute an adoption. We had two little kids at home. Somebody had to stay home with our boys who were at the time, three and five. And so I went by myself and they'd never seen a guy alone, right? It's like, what did your wife die?

• 1:46:07Speaker 00

  No, she's dead to me. And, and, um, and it was, it was, it was the most magical experience. It was like, it was weird because they had, that she was very shy. They said she's a shy baby and she's never been around men. And, and so that's going to scare her and she's going to, she freaks out when somebody takes her away from her nannies. There's nine nannies for a hundred babies. She hadn't been picked up very much. They mostly just sort of spend all day lying in a crib. 15 months old, understimulated, et cetera. They did the best they could. And so I was really, really, really nervous and they bring you into a room. They, they, and they bring the baby over to you and they, my little baby and they, she's like grabs me like a monkey. And she looks up at me with her little eyes, little like coal eyes. And she wouldn't let go.

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  And I had to sign some papers. And so three minutes later, her nanny, we should know, the only person she knew, tried to take her back. She screamed bloody murder. Cause she knew the link was there, the cosmic link was there. And ever since then, it's like, my baby, my baby, it's my baby. She's my baby. Every time she comes home, it's like that first day in the orphanage. She's 22. She's a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps. She's a badass.

• 1:47:17André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 1:47:18Speaker 00

  And she comes home and she's tough as nails, man. Four foot 11. And, and, uh, she's still my baby in the orphanage.

• 1:47:28André Duqum?

  I mean, it's without question what that's done for her and her life. What has that done for you in your life?

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  I try to meditate so I can lift up the rest of the world. You know, the whole point is that what it's done for me is helped me understand that what my life is really all about. Of course, it's been great for me. Of course, it's been great for me, but I didn't do it so I could feel like a good person. I did it because I believe that that this person was placed in my life, was placed in our life, and the knowledge was given to my wife, and I respect that. And it turns out it was this catalytic experience. It really glued our family together, and now we're very close. My kids are all really different from each other, but you know, we live near each other. I live in the same house with one of my sons and his wife and their kids. I live with my grandsons. The others are right up the street. But the whole point

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  is it's been this experience of, of, you know, bringing home this baby and bringing us all together. And through the hard times and through the easy times, love is actually what keeps you together is what it comes down to. But you have to have a physical demonstration of that sometimes. We're dense, right? And, and, and you have to see the model of it. And a lot of us, when we see her, we still see the model of the person that was brought to us that wasn't the product of genetics. It was the product of nothing more than a, than, than a dream and a message from God and a decision. And, and, and all of these things are actually even more important than, than the, than the flesh and the blood and the genetic similarity that we have.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

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• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:49:58André Duqum?

  What has that taught you about the role of suffering in life? Yeah, you write extensively around that, and I think suffering is something we're unknowingly, knowingly avoiding any second of every moment of every day, right? And it changes the script when you turn it on its head and put it into its proper place.

• 1:50:19Speaker 00

  I'm a big fan of suffering. You know, and part of the reason for that is that, I mean, just neurophysiologically, there's a guy at University of Wisconsin, Madison, named Richard Davidson. He's also has worked a lot with the Dalai Lama, actually. Great neuroscientist, and he's found that the right hemisphere of the brain is way more active when you're suffering, when you're experiencing negative emotions, aversive emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. That's when your right brain. And the way that you've, they test this, by the way, is you look at the musculature of the face. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the face, the left side of the body. When you involuntarily, you use muscles in the left side of your face, it means your right side is more active, and that's more common when you're suffering. That's what it comes down to. So we know that.

• 1:51:04Speaker 00

  Now, the right side of the brain is also implicated in understanding meaning, and so not coincidentally, almost certainly, and this is only plausible, there's been no tests of this, but it makes perfect sense, that that's why, when you ask people when they really experience their life's deepest meaning, they always talk about something painful. That they talk about, "My mom died. My business went bankrupt. I got fired. I went to jail." Really, really painful times in their life, and they'll say, "And that's when I had acute understanding of something. I understood meaning in that particular way." The problem is that we have a tendency to want to avoid it because we hate pain. We're aversive to pain because of our evolutionary biology. You know, pain means that there's a threat, and so we avoid it.

• 1:51:49Speaker 00

  We try to avoid pain. This is the, the great insight that the karmic religions have brought to us, is that suffering is not the same thing as pain. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain.

• 1:52:05Speaker 00

  And that means we get two options. You can try to lower your pain, or you can lower your resistance to the pain. When pain is inconvenient and utterly avoidable, you might want to take a Tylenol when your back is hurting. But when pain is unavoidable, like, by the way, most back pain, the way to deal with it is to accept it. That's the best way to live your life, so that even when your pain is high, your suffering isn't. And in that lowering of resistance, you inevitably find more meaning in your life. And that's hard.

• 1:52:35André Duqum?

  How does one lower resistance in that equation?

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  Generally speaking, it has to do with acceptance, understanding and acceptance. And there are many good traditions in Western therapy.

• 1:52:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  Psychotherapy, talk therapy, that do that. Jung talks about that a lot. I mean, there's a lot of therapeutic practices that talk about finding that lowering your resistance to pain by understanding it. Using metacognitive practices to sit with insight into the nature of your suffering without trying to lower it. And that's, that's the way that we do that. You know, every religious tradition talks about non-resistance. Non-resistance, what does it come down to? You mean, the, the Christian religion, my own religion, worships a guy hanging from a device of torture. In the act of physical pain. Why? Because that's a metaphor for life itself, and a metaphor for the ultimate meaning of life in the Christian religion.

• 1:53:31Speaker 00

  It's not coincidental that his suffering on the cross is emblematic of the meaning of life. And that he's God. That's the ultimate solidarity that actually comes to us. The, the paradox of suffering is that when we try to avoid suffering, especially when we try to avoid pain, we accidentally avoid meaning, and that leads to avoiding happiness.

• 1:53:55André Duqum?

  What's the link between that and beauty?

• 1:53:58Speaker 00

  Beauty is another way that you illuminate right hemispheric experiences. So the experience of beauty is beyond, is ineffable, fundamentally ineffable. And that comes in natural beauty, artistic beauty, or moral beauty. They're all ineffable experiences. Anything that's so beautiful that it makes you want to cry and you don't know why, that's because your language centers are not implicated. That means you're having a right hemispheric experience. So you see that. You never look at, you know, somebody that you're attracted to sexually, and they're so beautiful that you want to cry. That's because it's a different kind of beauty. Right? That's not what we're talking about. But you hear, I get really emotional. My favorite composer is Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived. Hugely spiritual guy, by the way. He said that, "Aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification

• 1:54:43Speaker 00

  of God and the enjoyment of the soul." That's what he believed, right? And he would put, "To the glory of God" at the end of every manuscript. Right? And, you know, he had 20 kids. Wow. This is, that guy was productive. And, and Bach, you know, I listen to Bach, man. It's, it's just hugely emotional. When I talk about, when there's certain things that I see in natural beauty, when I, when I see examples of moral beauty, there's a great psychologist named Rhett Deesner, who's the world's leading expert on moral beauty. He'd be good to have on the show, as a matter of fact. He's Rainn Wilson's uncle.

• 1:55:17André Duqum?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:18Speaker 00

  Of all things. Isn't that weird?

• 1:55:19André Duqum?

  We love Rainn, we were just talking about before.

• 1:55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's fantastic. He's a great friend. But, and I just knew his uncle's work. I didn't know he was his uncle. That's weird, isn't it? And he talks about moral elevation, what it makes you feel physiologically. But these are the things to go look for. One of the things that I recommend to almost everybody who's struggling with the meaning of life is to experience more beauty. And he's, go for a hike. I mean, I look out the window of your house. It's like stunningly beautiful California hills and mountains. Incredible. Listen to the work of Bach, or whatever actually does bring you to tears in beauty. Experience the moral beauty of people that are exemplars. Read the life of Mother Teresa, somebody who really is a deep moral exemplar. This will illuminate the right hemisphere.

• 1:56:06Speaker 00

  This will give you the complex experience of life's meaning.

• 1:56:10André Duqum?

  Totally agree. And I think for me, like how viewing myself as like a...

• 1:56:19André Duqum?

  Reflecting in my ability to craft an environment that re-evokes that sense of beauty for me has been one of the most, I think, fundamental aspects of bringing more beauty into myself and in the world.

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:56:30André Duqum?

  It's been absolutely huge.

• 1:56:31Speaker 00

  For sure, for sure. And you've become an integrated person. The technologized life is not beautiful. There are a lot of people whose greatest exposure to nature is what they see through the screen. A picture of Lake Louise is not the same thing as Lake Louise. It affects your brain differently. It's filtered through the left hemispheric concept of a complicated simulacrum for the true thing.

• 1:56:54André Duqum?

  Leroy goes to Lake Louise.

• 1:56:56Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And gets all choked up. And I'm looking at, you know, it was, life is beautiful, but it's got to be real life.

• 1:57:06André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07Speaker 00

  That's what it comes down to. You know, not a fake, you know, tell ChatGPT to give me an example of moral beauty. No. Real person.

• 1:57:17André Duqum?

  Go figure. The real world.

• 1:57:19Speaker 00

  IRL.

• 1:57:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 00

  That's the only place where you're going to find the beauty. I mean, life is strikingly less beautiful. There's some pretty good analysis that suggests that music is getting less beautiful. And the experiences that people have as filtered through the screens are less beautiful. And God knows, on the internet, there's not that much moral beauty out there. Your show is an exception, which is why you do it, right?

• 1:57:46André Duqum?

  Thank you. Thank you, man. Your work is, man, I'm all in perfect timing, but I'm very happy at this moment that we were able to get connected and have you come on.

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  Me too. Thank you.

• 1:57:59André Duqum?

  You know, I live for these kind of conversations. It gives me so much life. And likewise for you, I see you come online and you're so passionate. Do you have any last words on that aspect? How when you, like, there's a level of intelligence and impact that becomes possible, like, the capacity for that becomes possible, when you're in alignment with what you truly love to be doing. Like, there's another gear that kicks into place. You don't get burned out as easily because your fuel, your fuel source is fundamentally different.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:58:30André Duqum?

  Any words there?

• 1:58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about, you know, being needed and by earning your success and serving other people. And that does not depend on the exact activity, even over the course of a single person's life, to be sure. But it also requires that you You be in equilibrium that you have. Let me see if I can put it into a formula, right? I'm kind of about formulas at the end of the day. When you're not feeling it, when things are out of alignment, even if you're successful, it almost always means you're following a particular worldly formula. And, and here's what it is. You are loving things.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  You're using people and you're worshiping yourself. That's the, the dark formula. There's darkness in the world and that's the dark formula. Now, how does darkness work? It takes the light and changes it a little, right? And, and the reason that people fall for this is not because it's so outlandish. There's nothing outlandish about what I said. It sounds a little right. And the reason it sounds a little right is because it's just off, just off. Here's the formula that if we can correct and live according to it, it will bring us the meaning that we seek and thus the happiness that we crave in greater abundance. Use things. It's great. It's a world of abundance. It's so beautiful.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  Use them, enjoy them, right? And like, seriously, I mean, it's great. I mean, people who are trying to be so ascetic all the time and feeling guilty about eating that wonderful dinner or, or, or having a watch that you think is nice and, and, and reading the time off it. Use things with joy, but don't love them.

• 2:00:18André Duqum?

  Don't let them use you.

• 2:00:19Speaker 00

  No, and because love is only designed for people. Love is for people and worship is only for the divine. Use things, love people, worship the divine and all will be well.

• 2:00:34André Duqum?

  Don't love things, use people.

• 2:00:37Speaker 00

  Worship yourself.

• 2:00:38André Duqum?

  No.

• 2:00:40Speaker 00

  Because the best news of the day is you're not God. Great news, you're not God. Because that would be a pretty grim universe, right?

• 2:00:50André Duqum?

  Oh, man. So good, so good. Any last words for the whole context of this, this conversation? If you have like, like one last message to give to our listeners, what comes to mind?

• 2:00:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's funny because, you know, the formula I just gave is sort of is, it's not reductive, but it does reduce things to things that you can actually remember. In, you know, in, it's, in the Bible, the, there's the 10 commandments. And the 10 commandments are summarized in Deuteronomy 6, which in Hebrew is called the Shema. And the Shema is, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your means." Right? And then Jesus is asked in the New Testament to sum that up. He says, I mean, because, you know, the 10 commandments has a lot to remember. It's a lot to remember. He said, "Don't worry about it.

• 2:01:42Speaker 00

  Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself." Right? And that's all you need to remember. Okay, so then St. Augustine, and, you know, three centuries later, it's like, that's kind of a lot to remember. So then he says, "Here's what you remember. Love and do what you will." St. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 in the Summa Theologiae then defines love, "To will the good of the other as other." That's what it comes down to. So if you don't know what to do, right? And you can't remember the formula we talked about a minute ago. Notwithstanding your feelings, because Aquinas says, "It's not a feeling. Love isn't a feeling. It's an act. It's a commitment." Right?

• 2:02:25Speaker 00

  It's not to, Jesus didn't say to like your enemies. He said to love your enemies, notwithstanding your feelings. That's power. Love and do what you will. Love and do what you will. Make the conscious decision to love and do what you will. And that's where you'll find happiness. And that's where you'll find meaning. And that's what to do today, no matter how dark things feel.

• 2:02:46André Duqum?

  Thank you.

• 2:02:47Speaker 00

  Thank you. I appreciate it a lot.

• 2:02:49André Duqum?

  Yeah, we'll leave links down where people can stay connected with you and your work and your book. You're just a fire hose of wisdom and love and passion and I appreciate you and the force you are in the world, my friend.

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  I am really grateful to be with you and really grateful for what you're doing. You're putting something out there in the world that the world really, really needs. And by the way, using the means that are so often misused and using it as a force for good shows that the problem isn't the means. The problem is actually how we use them. Your show is an example of the fact that we can turn anything to love.

• 2:03:21André Duqum?

  Oh, man. Thank you. I appreciate you. It means a lot and yeah, I feel so completely fulfilled after these conversations, man.

• 2:03:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:31André Duqum?

  Walking each other to heaven.

• 2:03:33Speaker 00

  Right on, man.

• 2:03:34André Duqum?

  You, your wife and me.

• 2:03:35Speaker 00

  Let's do it. I'll see you there.

• 2:03:37André Duqum?

  Yeah. Amazing. Thank you.

• 2:03:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:03:41André Duqum?

  Everybody who's been tuning in.

• 2:03:42Speaker 00

  God bless you.

• 2:03:43André Duqum?

  Yeah, God bless.

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  And I love your tea.

• 2:03:45André Duqum?

  Oh, yeah, it's good stuff, eh? All right, till next time, everyone. Be well.