A (2:50)

Then let's jump in a little bit more to some of the specific chapters. Why don't we focus on something that is often in people's thoughts when they're anxious or thinking about the real world and so forth, which is the role of money in happiness?

B (3:03)

Sure.

A (3:04)

And watching this from the outside, the science on this has changed a little bit the understanding of it recently. So what is the Latest?

B (3:12)

Well, about 51%. About 51% of Americans say they're very worried about money almost all of the time. And you might say to yourself, well, yeah, I mean, if you're really hard up, but the truth is that only 10.6% of Americans are below the poverty line. It's a lot more than people in poverty who are worried about money. As a matter of fact, what we find is that a huge proportion of millennials who have more than a million dollars in net wealth already, these people are worried about happiness every single day. And one of the reasons for it is that. That this is something that we can count. And so we can kind of take all of our natural anxiety in life, which is sort of unfocused fear, and put it in a handy dandy suitcase that we can count and call it money problems and pay attention to it. And so that's one of the things that I want to help people diminish.

A (3:59)

And so how do we do that?

B (4:01)

Well, to begin with, we have to understand what money can do and what money can't do. One of the reasons that people are so worried about money all the time is because, well, to begin with, you feel like it's out of your control a lot, and you're worried about the parts that are out of your control. People will look too much at the stock market, for example, and. And one of the things that's worth keeping in mind is when you're investing, you're investing for the long haul. And when you're looking at your stock portfolio every single day and you have a down day, it feels like you lost money. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're looking at your stock portfolio more than once a month, I mean, look, if you're. If you're retiring next week, fine. But if you're a millennial or a Gen X or even a. Like, I'm 61 years old, if I'm looking at my portfolio every day, something's wrong. And the reason is you're trying to kind of gauge your own sense of progress and that's the wrong way to look at it. The second is that a lot of people, they kind of get their sense of self esteem and who they are as a person based on, on their net worth and how well they're doing. And that's because it's an easy scoreboard, but it's a terrible scoreboard for doing that. And that's pretty much the, the, the, the secret to misery is doing that.

A (5:04)

And so what do you look at instead of.

B (5:06)

Well, to begin with, you need to be paying attention to the things that matter. More people are way more likely to be worried about money than they are about their health, which is just craziness when you think about it. People, you know, most people, only about 20% of people get the, the recommended amount of exercise. Most people in America are overweight today. And I get it, it's hard, is the whole thing. But worry more about that and less about money. If you're above the poverty line, especially if you're middle class or above, and you're going to have way, way, way better returns and, and second, be paying attention to your relationships. I'm, I'm giving people advice all the time to be taking inventory of their friendships and inventory of their family relationships and actually setting up a strategic plan to get better at those things. People should be paying more attention to their spiritual lives than they are. I mean, well, people, I mean looking at your tax port or I mean your investment portfolio instead of saying your prayers. Sorry, I don't recommend that. I actually recommend doing the work on that and then paying attention to how well you're doing in your job. Is it your calling? Are you creating value? Do you believe that you're providing a service to other people? Those are the things to be paying attention to. And if you have any time left over, take your leisure seriously as opposed to, and what you'll do is, I'm not going to tell you to stop worrying about money. I'm telling you to crowd out your worry about money by paying attention to other things that matter more.

A (6:24)

And in the book you have some very specific, or you talk about some very specific research about when you hit a certain level, the returns of increasing happiness go down a lot, you get a little bit happier. But what's the latest on that?

B (6:40)

So economists have been arguing about that one for a long time. And two Nobel prize winning economists, actually, one's a psychologist, Daniel Kahneman died last year. And Angus Deaton, an economist, both at Princeton University. They wrote a paper together that found that the satiation point for Wellbeing is about $75,000 a year, obviously adjusting for inflation. And your results may vary depending on whether you live in New York City or you live in Paducah, Kentucky or whatever. But the truth of the matter is what they found is that below, I mean, above a pretty low level, pretty middle class level, that there's not evidence of increasing wellbeing. Now that was contested by another guy named Matt Killingsworth, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania at the, at the Wharton School of Business, who found it was much higher. But it does flatten out. So it's not as if you go from 1 million to 2 million to 3 million a year, you're going to be getting all this extra well being. Now there's actually some nuance behind that that's worth paying attention to because I've done a lot of work behind that on the, on both the neuroscience and beh science of happiness and money. And what we need to understand is that the well being is really complicated. Well being is not just about happiness. It's about happiness and unhappiness. And they're not opposites. Certain things make you happier and certain things make you unhappier. And you can be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person. You can be a very happy, stressed out guy, Henry, and maybe you are. That's called the mad scientist affect profile. Those are people that I study. Most people who are really successful in business, they have really, really high negative and really high positive emotional. And what they need to do is work on ways to lower their negative emotion. And so these are things that I work with those people. And what I do when it comes to money is paying less attention to your self worth with respect to money, paying less attention to buying more stuff, especially positional stuff that makes you look richer and spending your money with abundance and freedom on experiences and time and philanthropy and actually saving it for yourself and future generations. And these are the way, the time honored ways to get happier and less happy at the same unhappy at the same time. Using your money. You literally can buy happiness if you know how to do it.

A (8:48)

Okay. And you have a chapter focused on success and happiness. I think a lot of people assume that one leads to the other. And you say to me very startlingly, yes, one does lead to the other, but it's not the way you think. It's happiness leading to success.

B (9:06)

Yeah, yeah. So success really, as we understand in earthly terms. And this, you know, I teach at The Harvard Business School. So I see this all the time. Success comes in kind of four denominations. This actually is an Aristotelian idea where Aristotle said that there's four idols in life. And Thomas Aquinas talked about this a lot. You know, Thomas Aquinas, of course, who was a monk and a great Catholic philosopher. He said that everybody wants God, but they take idols instead of God because they're more convenient, less one sided conversations and no rules. And the four idols are money, power, pleasure and fame. Those are the worldly idols. And that's how we mark success. Man, it's like how much I got in the bank, how much influence I have over others. This is not to say I'm wielding power like some sort of dictator. But you know who does what I say, how good and comfortable and secure I am, which is pleasure in its way, comfort in its way, and fame, which is the admiration of other people, the prestige in the world. And that's how people, that's what people pursue. And that doesn't lead to happiness. On the contrary, Mother nature tells you it will, but she's lying because she doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature just wants you to pass on your genes and survive another day. So she leads you into this idolatry. And people become miserable for the rest of our lives because they have this crossed circuit. If I do those things, I'll be happy. The truth is, and this makes my students panic. And so I'm going to give you a quiz. I'm going to tell them what I tell my students is true. And there's one word that makes my students panic in this next sentence. The truth is you should pursue happiness and then you'll be successful. Enough. What word is a problem for survivors?

A (10:38)

Enough.

B (10:39)

You got it. You got it. Because they have learned that there's no such thing as enough. And the minute that they accept that there's enough, that means they become slackers. But of course that isn't true either. So I actually play a little game with them called what's my idol? Because when you know what your idol is, when you know it beguiles you, then you can actually make decisions that are. You'll still make mistakes, but then you'll, with your eyes open, start living your life. Everybody has one idol in particular, and this is really good social science. It's not just Aristotelian philosophy. And when you know what your particular idol is, then you'll recognize why you did things that you regret later and you'll be able to Avoid them in the future. And so this game is figuring out what it is. Do you feel like you want to play?

A (11:23)

No, I was going to, I was going to ask you what's your idol? And I think I know what it is because you talk about it in the book. So what's your idol and how did you stop worshiping it?

B (11:32)

Well, so here's how I play out with my students because you didn't volunteer, so that's okay. I mean, you're doing the interview, so it's fair. It's fair to find your idol. You don't just say, okay, money, power, pleasure or fame that's. Or prestige or admiration that is usually doesn't give you an accurate read. What you do is you start eliminating them one by one based on the thing that you care about the least. And the one that's left is the idol. And the ones that you eliminate doesn't mean you don't have it. So if you say, okay, I'm going to eliminate money, that doesn't mean you don't have money or you're poor. It means you have the most average amount in the world, which if it's not an idol, that's fine. And if it is an idol, that's terrible and torture. Right? So. So when you eliminate them and I eliminate them, I think money, power, pleasure, and fame, first thing I would eliminate is power. And I mean, I don't want to have influence over other people. I don't care. I was a CEO for a long time. I hated it when people called me boss. I hate it when people have power over me, which is why I'm a college professor. You know, it's like nobody's got power over a college professor. And so I know that. Good. Second thing I'd probably give away is probably pleasure. You know, I'm. I'm kind of an austerity guy. I get up at 4:30 in the morning and work out every day. And you know, it's like, that's okay. I mean, the average amount of comfort, security and pleasure is perfect for me. Then after that I'd probably get rid of money. And, and it's not because I don't care about it because now these are things I care about more. It's getting hotter in here, right? But money, what I've figured out along the way, I'm 61 years old. It doesn't buy you that interesting stuff, you know, it's, it, it isn't that interesting is the way that it turns out. And I'm not I really don't denominate my wealth, my. My worth as a person on the basis of it. But that now has revealed my idol, which is the. The admiration of other people. You know, I want people to appreciate what I do. I write books, I give speeches, I do a lot of media. And I want people to say, yeah, he's smart. And okay, I mean, everybody wants that, but that's my idol. When that means is that if I'm going to cut a corner with my relationships or something, it's probably because of that. All the things that I regret will be because of that. All the times I missed little league games when my kids were little was probably because of that. And that's important information for me so that I don't make errors in the future when I can avoid them.

A (13:46)

So, you know, you are tremendously successful and successful in a variety of different endeavors. So this, as you describe it as admiration of other people or professional success does seem to still be a big thing for you, and yet you have been able to also balance your life. How do you do that?

B (14:04)

Right. Well, by knowing what my idol is and being conscious about the way that I'm strategically setting up my life is the way that that works. If I were just going according to my visceral urges to my animal instincts. People are funny because people have both animal instincts and they also have moral aspirations. And this is because we have this big prefrontal cortex, this bundle of tissue behind our foreheads, that 30% of our brain by weight only Homo sapiens has this. And it makes it possible for us to make executive decisions that are entirely, well, not independent from, but very often at odds with what our limbic system, our more primordial brain says would be more fun and better. And this is a perfect case in point. You know, the love of my family is one of my moral aspirations. And more success or money or whatever it is is part of my animal instincts, is the way that this works. And when the more information that you have and the more that you. You recognize and are upfront with yourself and other people about this tendency, the more likely you are to make it, make a correct decision. It's the same thing. If you drink too much alcohol and you tell a bunch of your friends, like, I got a problem and I really, really want to stop, that's the first step. It really is, because that information, you've recognized it, you've said it, you've brought other people into it. And so now, you know, when I'm, you know, running around a Little bit too much or I'm kind of starting to be gone on weekends or whatever happens to be, you know, my kids and I set up my life. I live with some of my kids and my grandkids at this point. We have a great big house with multiple generations and the whole thing. And they notice when I'm, you know, I've fallen off the wagon as a success addict.

A (15:38)

That sounds marvelous, by the way. The combined generations, everything.

B (15:41)

It's great. It's great. I mean, it's like first thing in the morning, I hear little, little. There's a great deal of screaming in my house.

A (15:47)

That's terrific. All right, let's go back to what we were just talking about. One of the things in that sentence you gave me about read to the students and enough success and so forth is let's go back to this thing that happiness actually leads to success. That was very startling for me in your book, that it's not the other way around.

B (16:06)

Right? Yeah. So happiness leads to enough success. And part of the reason for that is because you don't do more of these things. Money, power, pleasure, frame then actually will lead you to leading a pretty happy life. And furthermore that those intermediate goals will actually facilitate the things that matter the most. So what matters the most, and these are the habits of the happiest people are faith or life philosophy that is practiced very seriously fast. Family life, friendship and work. That has two characteristics. Number one is earning your success through merit. And the second is serving other people, being needed by other people. And what you find is that all of those worldly idols, they're not bad, they're not evil, but they have to be intermediate to faith, family, friends and work, the things that actually matter. So point toward faith, family, friends and work. And to get those things in abundance, you'll have enough money, power, pleasure and fame.

A (17:00)

And how do we find work that accomplishes that?

B (17:03)

So that's, that's, that's the question of calling. And calling is a really interest, a whole literature on calling. And that is the idea of something that you're meant to do. Now that requires a whole lot of self knowledge. That requires that you understand who you are as a person, what your psychological profile is. And, and there's a whole bunch of ways of getting at it. The Japanese have a very good way of doing. It's called ikigai. No doubt you've heard of ikigai. And that's basically the confluence of four things. What the world wants, what I'm good at, what I love, and what I'm paid to do. Those are the four things. And the confluence of those four things is your calling. And so it's, and it's actually not that complicated a concept, you can go through that. It also requires that you have an understanding of what kind of person that you are. Many people are told, especially really people who are listening to this podcast, they're, I mean they're hard charging strivers, they're ambitious people. That's why they're looking, they're listening to this podcast, they're told that they're kind of linear careers in which you never change unless it's something bigger and better, you know, in their field. And you know, they graduate from college and the first job is 18 months and the second job is three and a half years and the next job is five years and, and they kind of change when they make more money. But most people are what's called spirals, most strivers are called spirals where they have a bunch of mini careers of their own creation, seven to 12 years and sometimes they make more, sometimes they make less. Sometimes they work halftime to raise their kids, sometimes they work for a non profit. Halfway through their career they have a big career change and go teach. That's how most people actually are happiest. And of course fancy colleges and schools which are trying to turn us into ambition machines, they don't tell you that, that that's actually what's going to make you happy. So that's the second thing to understand about calling is what your psychological model is. And then you have to understand how to, how to be able to recognize opportunities that are actually going to serve your calling. And I have a whole set of kind of gut rules for doing that.

A (18:56)

I was going to ask you exactly that. You have a great chapter on trusting your gut and what that means. And you talk about jobs, you talk about marriage, and you have a good framework for thinking about it. What is.

B (19:06)

Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot of information and the older you get, the more wisdom you have, the more data that you've got, but you don't have access to it. A lot of it is stored kind of in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is also kind of known as dark consciousness. The left side of the brain is analysis and efficiency and processes. The right side of the brain is meaning and complexity and mystery and a lot of what you understand about yourself and your calling is in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is hard to articulate, but you know it. So that means you have to use your gut Gut is nothing more than data that you can't quite articulate but that you possess. That's what we mean by gut. So here's the way to understand it. You got tons of information. When you're presented with an opportunity, a new job opportunity or a marriage proposal or an opportunity to move to Dallas or whatever, you gotta listen to your gut. And there's three sensations that you're going to feel if you think about it now. Put away your phone, get up at 4:30 in the morning and go walking for an hour and a half outside. Nice cool air. Hear the, the crunch of the gravel under your feet. No phone, just thinking, just thinking, just thinking, just thinking. And the three sensations that you're gonna feel as you assess the opportunity. And by the way, you don't get this in one day. I recommend doing this every day for a month for a big opportunity. And if you're a religious person, this is even easier. You know, Catholics talk about praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament in church for a month and listening. They're listening to their intuition, which they believe is the word of God talking to them. Okay, you figure out what you think it is. But we have tons of information and the three sensations to be listening for, Number one, excitement about the opportunity. Number two is fear. And number three is deadness. Emptiness. And we all know what that feels like. You know, if somebody has suggested to you that you get married and you're like, I feel dead inside, you know, and you know, or people always call me and say, hey, would you. How would you feel about being the CEO of this company? And I immediately feel deadness. I feel just deadness, right? Because I've done it. But not just because I've done it. Because, you know, this point in my life, I'm like a, the Pied Piper of happiness. I get to travel around giving people happiness advice. It's like the most fun ever. And like, how about running a company and doing quarterly reports and you know, dealing with investors? Like, I just feel completely dead inside. So here's the right and to, to be assessing this. The right combination to make the right decision is 75% excitement, 25% fear and 0% deadness. Now again, circumstances are such that you might not be able to do that because you have an opportunity that's like 75% fear. Cause you've never done it before. And I've had jobs like that. And when I took over a company, it was 75% fear. I'd never been a chief executive, but ordinarily if you have enough information, you can do that. The second thing is making sure it's not all excitement, because that will become boring really quickly. You need fear. And this gets to your point before, the importance of a little fear. Life is boring when you're not afraid at all. And that means you need the non trivial possibility of failure. Now, the fear will get less over time, but if the fear is zero to begin with, in two years you're gonna be on the market again. That's what the data say. So 75% excitement, 25% fear, 0% deadness, or as close to that as you can get, practically speaking.

A (22:29)

So you have a fascinating life, as I talked about earlier and you've talked about in a lot of your essays and the book, some of these transitions that you've had. You also talk about how to avoid a midlife crisis. You also talk about. You have a great essay that's not in the book but is at the Atlantic. I encourage everybody to check out, which is I see all the time, which is something like, your professional decline is coming sooner than you think, but yet there's hope for you. And basically some of the messages mixed into all this is, hey, you hit something approaching the age where we are, except considerably younger than both of us, the things that made you great in your 30s and 40s are going to decline, but there are other things that are going to carry you. So what are those? And talk about again, the fear of that change. Because I think for a lot of us, and I could say personally, you do something for 15, 20 years, you get decent at it, and it's very scary to let it go and do something else.

B (23:29)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And the problem is that you start getting worse at it. And that's when burnout occurs and it happens to almost everybody. And I'm talking about intellectual professions. I mean, not just like college professor professions or media. I'm talking about anything where you primarily use your head. You know, whether you're a surgeon or a lawyer or, you know, a stockbroker or an air traffic controller or an electrician. These are fundamentally thinking professions. And in thinking based professions professions, what you find is that people tend to peak in their abilities around the age of 39, and then they start to decline. And that's really, really early. So you talked about a essay I wrote in the Atlantic about that in 2019. In 2022, I published a book called From Strength to Strength that was based on that. There's the whole argument, you know, finding success, purpose and happiness in the Second half of life. And the way to find that is to recognize that when the natural abilities that got you where you're going in your 20s and 30s start to feel harder, which they will in your 40s and 50s, that there's a second happiness curve, a second success curve behind it. And you have to know what it is and how it works. And so I dug into that a lot by looking at the neuroscience literature on. On. On rel. Sort of the manifestations of intelligence. We have kind of two intelligences. This works. This comes from the work of a British social psychologist in the 60s and 70s who talked about fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is your ability to innovate, to have indefatigable focus, your ability to use your working memory and to work alone to crack problems. So if you're a really, really good, hot lawyer and you get better and better all the way through your 20s and 30s, that's your fluid intelligence. You know, that's what makes it possible for you to write great songs. If you're a songwriter, you know, you're not, like, harvesting everybody else's material. Great songs are. Because that's cool and new, that's innovative, is the way that that works. You find that, you know, the Rolling Stones did their best songs in their 20s, and that's because they had really, really high fluid intelligence that peaks around 39, and then it starts to decline. That's the reason that people burn out, because they find that what used to be easy is now hard. And nobody likes to not make progress. Humans only want to make progress. We don't want to arrive at our goals. We just want to make progress toward our goals. As a matter of fact, arriving at your goals is unbelievably disappointing. And. And so I was like, you know, because satisfaction as Mick Jagger saying, you know, he said, you can't get it, but the truth is you can't keep it. And that's really. That's a really difficult thing. And I've written about that an awful lot, too. Okay? So you put all those two things together and you say, well, it looks like life is getting worse. And that's why people in their mid-40s have midlife crises and they want to quit their jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not the end of the show. What happens is in your 40s and 50s, there's a second kind of intelligence that's coming on strong that you'll literally keep as long as God gives you your marbles. I mean, literally in your 70s and 80s and even your 90s, which is called crystallized intelligence. That's based not on your innovative capacity because your innovation is going to be lower. Your working memory is not as good as it used to be. That's just the way it is. You don't have focus the way that you did. You have wisdom, you have a huge library, you have incredible pattern recognition and you have teaching ability. That's crystallized intelligence. And if you move from the fluid intelligence jobs and careers and abilities to the crystallized intelligence side of whatever your own job is, you win for the rest of your life. And you're way happier is the way that this works. So I'll give you an example. You're a star litigator when you're 30, you should be the managing partner of your law firm when you're 60, because those are mentoring jobs. Those are talent scouting jobs. Those are supervisory jobs. If you're a startup entrepreneur at 30, you should be a VC at 60. If you're a hot shot academic researcher at 30, you should be a master teacher at 60. That's the way it's supposed to work. And everybody's got a version of themselves on the second curve. They're willing to look at it and step onto it.

A (27:31)

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A (29:23)

So you mentioned something else just a second ago that I want to come back to, which is this idea that it's progress that drives us. It's not the end, go goal. But you do say in the book, keep a grand plan in mind. So it does sound like you think we should have an idea, some sense of where we're going and what we're doing every day. Is it progress toward a goal? Should we have goals at all, given the fact that we're not satisfied when we get there? What's. What's that Happiness rubric?

B (29:50)

Yeah, so that's. That's basically how purpose works. Purpose is a subcomponent of meaning. Meaning is a subcomponent of happiness. Happiness has three parts. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. Those are the three things to be paying attention to every day. Meaning has three. And meaning is the most important of all. Meaning is the crisis that we're in in America today. When I look at the explosion of depression and anxiety, it charts back exactly to the inability of people under 35 to. To recognize and to articulate the meaning of their lives. And this has everything to do with the way that we're encouraging people to use their brains. You know, a lot of people are effectively living in a simulation. And I'm talking about a simulated workplace and a simulated social life and a simulated dating environment and a simulated way of. Of playing games. And it's not just tech. It's just simulated. It's a. It's a. It's a third person life. It's the matrix, basically. And that keeps you on the left side of your brain, out of your right, the right side of your brain, where meaning actually comes about. Now, meaning has three parts to it. There's coherence, why things happen the way they do. There's significance, why my life matters. And there's purpose, which is goals and direction. That means you have to know the direction that you're going, which means you have to have an endpoint of things you're trying to do. The problem is getting stuck on the endpoint and assuming that everything in life is going to be great once you hit it, which is wrong. That's the problem. That's called the arrival fallacy. What you want is to have an intention, which is the goal, without attachment, so that you can make progress. And you're holding it loosely. It's a very Buddhist idea. But I talk an awful lot in my work about how to, how to do exactly that. What am I trying to do? Well, you know, for me, I have a goal, which is I want a billion people in the world to be exposed to the happiness science. I want them to understand the happiness science. Why? Because a lot of them, 10 to 12% of them, are going to change their habits and a lot of them are going to become happiness teachers. And that's how the world changes. Okay, well, what does it mean if I don't get a billion? That I'm going to, you know, want to commit suicide or are going to get really hopelessly depressed? No, that's an intention. And I have a, an intentionality. Just like I have a sailing destination. I'm going toward it and I'm blown off course here and I have new opportunities there and I might wind up in the Dominican Republic instead of India like Columbus, I don't know. But the whole point is I can't do anything unless I have that intention.

A (32:11)

And so let's say somebody puts out a report saying you have now reached 900 million people. So you're closing in on that billion. Do you have to look for a whole new mission at that point? Or do you just say 2 million people?

B (32:24)

Yeah, it's like, did I say a billion? I meant 2 billion. So it sort of depends if you're a spiral like we talked about before. One of the great things about being a spiral is that you set new goals. You set new audacious goals for yourself. Early in my life, I was. I wanted to be a great French horn player. I wanted to be a French horn soloist with a, you know, playing with the greatest symphony orchestras in the world. And then later I wanted to be, you know, a distinguished academic doing really cutting edge scientific research in my field. After I got my PhD, then I ran a think tank in D.C. and I wanted it to be the best think tank in the world that was really changing public policy for the better, best in the world. And now I want a billion people to get happier. And so my big, hairy, audacious goals changed with respect to how I'm spiraling at the moment.

A (33:04)

And go back to what you were just talking about a minute ago. Which is that we have this crisis of anxiety and loneliness. And you were saying it's because we all live in a simulation. Just specifically what do you mean? It means that we're staring at our phones all day, we're on Zoo Zoom instead of it with people. Talk more about that.

B (33:19)

So people are unduly using technology in ways all day long for work that's pushing them to the left hemisphere of their brains. And we know this based on the work of Ian McGilchrist, who's a distinguished neuroscientist at Oxford University that focuses us away from any sort of consideration of life's meaning. And we know this from a whole lot of research, but we know this from our personal experience as well. That wouldn't be so bad because that leaves us 14 hours a day left. But then we come home and we have these anti boredom devices that we look at for the rest of our time. And so the result of that is that we spend, you know, the average person, the Average person under 30 spends five hours a day on social media and similar platforms and looks at their phone 205 times a day. You know, and that's simply impossible for you to be living in and using your brain in such a way that's considering issues of meaning in your life. You're going to become increasingly unlikely to form relationships that are mysterious that you don't understand. You're going to be less likely to be to be seeking out spiritual truth. You'll be less likely to be interested in beauty. You'll be more and more intolerant of your own suffering. As opposed to finding meaning in your suffering. You'll find it harder and harder to find calling. Why? Because all of those things are where we find meaning in our life. And all of those things are mediated on the right side of the brain.

A (34:40)

All right, so this nice segue to another thing that you talk about that I found fascinating is there's an essay in the book that is something along the lines of authenticity, maybe hurting happiness idea on social and elsewhere. It's all about being authentic, which a lot of people take to mean ranting at whatever makes you angry. And what you're saying is effectively. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Little bit of self control here, you're going to be happier. Talk about that.

B (35:08)

Yeah, I mean, when people talk about emotional authenticity today, what they're really talking about is not managing their limbic system. And it's important to understand how the brain works. The brain is a set of structures that is largely organized with respect to evolution. The, the least Evolved part of our brain. This is an ancient theory called the triune brain that, that Carl Sagan used to talk about in cosmos all the time. Because you sometimes look at the brain which is super interesting at the least, you know, at the least evolved level, 40 million years old is the, is the reptilian brain, which is your brain stem and spinal column. And that, that generates all these data about what's going on around you below your level of consciousness. And those data are sent to the limbic system of the brain and, which is newer, between 2 and 40 million years old. But it's also known as the paleo mammalian brain because all the mammals have this, all the mammals have emotions more or less like we do. And you take those signals and you turn them into emotions. And some are anger and fear and disgust and sadness. Those are the four negative emotions. And some are joy and interest and surprise. And those are positive things. But all those are, are a universal language to alert you to the fact that you have sensed a threat or an opportunity and so you should approach it or avoid it. That's all your emotions are. Then what's supposed to happen is that those emotions are relayed to the frontal cor cortex. You're the, the brand spanking new part of your brain. It's only 250,000 years old since the beginning of the Pleistocene. That's where you decide what your emotions mean and how you want to act. That's really, really important that that's the person you want to be is deciding on it. And if you're just authentic all the time, it means you've stripped off the prefrontal cortex and you have the emotional regulatory ability of your dog Fido, which I don't recommend. And that's the Internet.

A (36:48)

And it doesn't make you happy.

B (36:50)

No, it's terrible because when you're, when you're being managed by your limbic system, you're going to be in a rage sometimes and you're going to be embarrassed sometimes. You're going to be saying things that you don't actually mean. And, and I want to be a fully self managing person, not somebody who's being managed by a bunch of ancient brain tissue. That's a terrible way to live.

A (37:06)

And this goes to another thing that you talk about in the book, which is hey, smart people, here's a way to become less miserable, share your intelligence and don't use your intelligence to tear other people down. Which if there is an opposite of social media, that would be it.

B (37:24)

Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, and, and we've made a lot of progress, so much progress in our society about the way that we talk about other people. And you know, we don't, we don't discriminate in the way that we act or talk if we're civilized people. And I look back on how my grandparents talked and it's just like, it's awful. I mean they were wonderful people, but it was a different time and they would talk about in ways that would be unacceptable about different groups of people today. But there's one way that we still do that, which is that we sort people with respect to perceived cognitive ability and we think less of people if we think they're not as smart as we are. And that's, that's completely unacceptable. I mean if you're, if you're out someplace and you're being served by somebody in a restaurant, you're like, waiter's so stupid. You don't mean that as in, you know, I really, you know, kind of feel bad for the guy and I'm going to help him out. You're, you're denigrating that person because of what you perceive to be a weakness. Well, what kind of person are you that does that? Well, we allow ourselves to do that. And highly intelligent people that are gifted with high levels of cognitive ability are the worst perpetrators of this. I mean, we live in a class based society on the basis of largely innate characteristics around cognition. And it's not right that we do that. It's a violation of human decency for us to do that.

A (38:37)

And so what does the research say about the tech? For lack of a better way of saying it, Technology's contribution to the division we see right now. I mean, obviously we've got a lot of politics. It is easier to divide than it is to unify and lots of folks are taking advantage of that. But the technology also seems to be exacerbating it.

B (38:58)

It's vast and deleterious and the biggest reason for that is that there are, there's users and there's dark triads out there. Now the users are sort of the media industrial complex that wants likes and clicks. And in the political and media establishment, when you hate on the basis of something that you read on social media, somebody's profiting and it's not you. Some you've been, when you hate for political reasons, you've been productized. That's what we find. And so that's a really important thing to keep in mind. And social media has made that possible. Social media has been incredibly deleterious for mainstream media sources because what it's done is it's pushed them to their worst extremes to try to stay, to try to stay competitive and get as many clicks as possible. And when something is audacious, when, when there's a, you know, people slow down to rubberneck a traffic accident and people will slow down and look at, you know, violent and, and, and hateful content on social media. And a lot of that's being perpetrated by what were once really reputable news sources or reputable people, politicians, for example. That's a problem. The second big problem, and an even bigger problem, is that this draws in individuals who are disproportionately psychopathic. And we know this from a lot of really interesting studies. There's one paper called Trolls Just Want to have Fun that looked at people who had very, had a high, high levels of psychopathic traits and then asked them about their Internet habits. And they're disproportionately likely to be posting to Internet forums, social media, and doing so anonymously. So when somebody is firing of a debate and insulting other people and portraying some sort of mobbing campaign and mocking other people, that person is probably above average in psychopathy. They're probably above average in Machiavellianism. They're probably way above average in narcissism, which is called the dark triad personality constellation. These are not people you want to hang out with. So if you wouldn't let them into your house, you probably should work to not let them into your head.

A (40:55)

And best way to do that is put the phone down.

B (40:58)

Put the phone down. Or at least curate your social media so you're not looking at this stuff is what it comes down to. Look, you're going to get more of what you stare at is what it comes down to. So you know, social media can be phenomenal if you're using it to learn and laugh. Learn and laugh. That's what it comes down to. I mean, on the entertainment side. And then of course on the other side, it's keeping in touch with real life people that you know. So it's communication with real loved ones learning and occasional laughing and nothing besides that.

A (41:29)

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A (42:48)

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there there. We talked a lot about worry and you have in in your book as well and you have a nice essay, how to worry less and be happier. What are the keys to that?

B (43:04)

The key to understanding worry, or for that matter, anxiety, is understanding Anxiety is unfocused fear. Unfocused fear means that you're using the fear response, which has evolved and it makes sense that we would have fear. Fear has kept you alive. I mean, it's like your ancient ancestors passed on their gen because they were suspicious and fearful. They ran and climbed a tree after they heard a twig snap behind them. And the guy that got eaten was the one who said, oh, that sound behind me, that's probably one of my good friends coming up to say hello. And so it was the fear per se, and it was intense and episodic. The problem is, in modern life we don't have these existential threats generally. Not very often, not more than a few times in our whole lifetimes. So we maladapt the fear response to be chronic and constant. Chronic, mild and constant. And the physiological part of that is called stress. Stress is the physiological response to fear using the HPA axis, the adrenal glands, where you get a little drip of stress hormones. You've got an amygdala in the limbic system of your brain that's alert. You're sending signals all the time through your hypothalamus and your pituitary glands and you open up social media, your chest gets tighter, you open up the news and you look to the bad news and you're feeling Stressed out. And that's really, really bad for you. That's a horrible thing for you. So understanding that is the secret to actually starting to manage your anxiety. And a lot of that's worrying less.

A (44:28)

And how do you do that? You have very specific guidelines.

B (44:31)

I have protocols for that. I have my students keep. Keep a fear journal, for example, an anxiety journal, where the things, you know, the unfocused fear means there's something that's just kind of scratching at you and scratching at you. Scratching at you. Take out a piece of paper because that's sitting in the limbic system. You got to move it to your prefrontal cortex, which is where it should reside. It's called metacognition. And you write down the thing you're actually afraid of, which you probably never articulated. He's like, I don't know. Something's bothering me. I don't know. This happens in relationships all the time where one person is being kind of pissy. You know, it's like, what's the problem? And the person will be like, I don't know, actually. So figure it out. If something's bothering you, write it down. And then write down, what am I really afraid of? What's the likelihood it's going to happen? What's most likely gonna happen, which is nothing. Write down the probabilities, and then write down your strategy if the worst thing happened, and then move on to number two and number three and number four and number five. And that's now being managed in the part of the brain that is appropriate for that. And you're gonna sleep well at night.

A (45:30)

Terrific. You have this fascinating anecdote about first impressions. And you go over the science, which is we form these sweeping first impressions of people and situations in an extraordinary small time. And then you talk about how that should apply to us interviewing for jobs and dating. Talk about that piece.

B (45:52)

Yeah. So the problem with first impressions with dating is that. That we're still. We're still cave dwellers. And, and. And this is. This gets back to the work of David Buss, who's the most distinguished social psycho evolutionary psychologist in the world. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. And what he finds is that in. In. In sort of traditional heterosexual mating that. That. That women are a lot more interested in providing fertility cues and men to resource cues. And this has to do with the, you know, the relative investments that females and males have in mating and family formation, et cetera. There's nothing really shocking or surprising. And. And that's not the only thing that matters, of course, but he says that it's really, really important. And so first impression is usually around those things. The problem with couples is when they get together and that's all they pay attention to forever. And so you find that marriages that don't work by the fifth year, the fifth year is when the greatest discontent. It's kind of the five year itch, not the seven year itch. And at the five year itch, the biggest problem that you find is that guys are still just trying to put out resource cues and girls are still trying to put out fertility cues. And that's not all we want, man. We're, you know, you form a family, you need more than that. You need trust, you need positive emotionality, you need spirituality, you need dependability, you need loyalty, you need all these really, really good things. And so first impressions are great, but they're not enough after the first impression.

A (47:14)

And by resource cues, you mean that I'm going to be a great provider and.

B (47:18)

Yeah, you're going to money, ambition, yeah, Creativity, et cetera, et cetera. And, and men care about that in women too. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be a reductionist and all that. I'm just talking about what David Buss says in his research is what people notice first. And which is one of the reasons that really interesting papers show that that females are single, females in their twenties are a thousand times more sensitive to resource cues than males are toward females.

A (47:44)

Another detail that I noticed in here. So you talk about in a job interview where someone is going to make the first impression or you're going to get a first impression instantly. You want a smile, but an honest smile, not a fake smile. You want to put them at ease, you want to be happy. That happiness actually creates a sense of competence and so forth. You say it's the same thing with dating for women, but not for men. Men are not supposed to smile. Why is that?

B (48:11)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it gets back to the caveman people. I mean, it's like we're just, we're such a bunch of troglodytes. This, this whole idea of, you know, a really easy, outgoing smile, it doesn't always indicate what you want it to indicate, particularly when you're trying to show that you're a serious resource provider. That's one of the reasons that guys like to look like tortured artists. And, you know, when I met my wife, I was 24, she was 25. I was on a concert tour in France. I was a professional French horn Player. I was like this tortured, you know, long haired, chain smoking artist. And she's like, he's so interesting. And it's like. And it was so.

A (48:47)

It worked though.

B (48:48)

It totally worked. It totally worked. But if I'm trying to do that now, she'd be like, get out. And, and to begin with, I lost the hair. And that's really, turns out that's what really mattered. But it was, you know, that you can't, you can't ride that forever. That's, that's an initial cue of kind of acquisition. Seriousness is what they find. And that's one of the reasons that, that, you know, women really like. They like guys who are fun, but they want serious guys. They want men who are serious. And, and men value pleasantness more than women do, at least early on in, in, in terms of dating. And by the way, this is not a rule, guys. This is not a rule not to smile on the first date. It just means that you're not just a goofball is what it comes down to.

A (49:30)

Great. All right, so let's bring it back around. You write in the book a lot about work and life, but happiness with respect to work and so forth. Fascinating chapter on basically think twice before you take the top job. Most people who go into organizations who are ambitious think, hey, someday that'll be me. And you have this very clear warning if you are offered that job, actually think about it. Because why?

B (49:57)

Because most people, when they get into the top job, are less happy, not happier. And I have the data now. They can be very successful and they can be very emotionally equilibrated. But being the boss, per se, never made anybody happier, and it made a lot of people unhappier. The two most predominant emotions that people experience in their first two years as chief executives are anger and loneliness, which are not that really correlated very strongly with happiness. And there's a reason for that. I mean, you're by yourself in the corner office, you can get counsel and you still have outside friends, et cetera. But it's a lonely job and anger because you have less power than you thought. You're more manipulated than you thought. You're being used in ways that you never anticipated. And these are common things that we actually find from people. And so, you know, I've. I counsel CEOs and people, really powerful people all the time. And they say, yeah, you know, this is one of the reasons I told you before that when people call me up and say, hey, we got a corner office open here, I'm like, I Feel dead.

A (51:01)

And so I, that comes back to what I see throughout your work with just the constant reminders that we are social animals and that relationships are incredibly important.

B (51:14)

Right, right.

A (51:15)

Is that, I mean, if you, if you're going to summarize, like what is happiness about, summarize it for us. How, how can we be happier here?

B (51:21)

You bet. This is, this is great. I mean, it's like you're bringing this plane in for a landing. Henry so we have a great study at Harvard called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This is an almost 90 year longitudinal study. Started looking at Harvard college sophomores, which is a non representative sample, obviously. But then it, then it opened itself up to guys who didn't go to college, and then it had their spouses and then had their kids and Salis really representative of the American population. And it followed them over their entire lives until they were dying. There's only like a small handful left left of these guys and their wives and. But a lot of their kids are still in the sample. And they looked at what people who wound up healthy and happy, they called it happy. Well, what they all did all throughout the course of their lives. And some of it is like, you know, you can't control, like they had nice parents who were not alcoholic or, you know, that sort of thing. And they weren't, they didn't have depression that ran in their family, et cetera. But a lot of the stuff you can control, like for example, smoking, drinking, diet and exercise, this didn't just lead to greater health, it led to greater happiness. Not smoking, not drinking, by the way, not drinking excessively. Then there was learning and there was self management. So learning. There were learners, people who learned and read and read and read and liked to learn. They were much happier as they got older. People who were really good at managing their feelings, they had a technique they were good at. Maybe they were meditators, maybe they're religious, maybe they were really good at cognitive behavioral therapy. Whatever happened to be. But the most, the one that blew everything out of the water was love. The number seven, the most important thing was love. As a matter of fact, it was so important that the guy who ran the study for 35 years, George Valiant, who's a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, he said five words. Happiness is love, full stop. That's what it is, you know, and so you can't do anything else. It's love of the divine, love of your family, love of your friends, and love toward the whole world through the way that you earn your daily Bread by finding your calling.

A (53:15)

And just to drill in on that. But what does that look like on a daily basis for them? Is it time with people?

B (53:23)

Yeah. Yeah, it really is. Because, you know, the whole thing, quality time, not quantity time. Wrong. No such thing. Quantity, spending time. Now, most of this was before people had smartphones. So, you know, like, I can spend 24 hours a day with the people that I love, and we're all staring at our phones. We're not there. So we have brand new, innovative ways to screw up our lives at this point. Congratulations to all of us. But the truth of the matter is actually showing up in person and being with other people that we love. And love of the divine means faith or a life philosophy. Love of family is pretty self evident. Love of friends means real friends, not deal friends, which is another one. Another reason that CEOs tend to be so unhappy. And then there's love of everybody, where you feel like you're helping the human race when you go out because people need you. And what you do for work is what it comes down to. And that takes time and that takes attention and intentionality and.

A (54:13)

And what about love of the divine when it's not specifically religion?

B (54:18)

It's fine. It turns out that, you know, what we're talking about is just kind of transcending yourself and so transcending yourself by being shared with other people, by paying attention to things that are bigger than you, by having a life philosophy that gives you a sense of wonder about the universe. It just turns out that a religion is really, really helpful for that, but not for everybody.

A (54:36)

Arthur, this is terrific. Thank you.

B (54:38)

Thanks. Congratulations on this show. What a great show. It's a real service to other people. You're being a teacher on your class. Great to have you.

A (54:44)

I'm trying.

B (54:45)

Love it. Thank you.

A (54:46)

Thanks. Solutions is produced by Meghan Cunane. Jim Mackle is our video editor. Our theme music is by Trackademics. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Thanks for listening to Solutions from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm your host, Henry Blodgett. We'll see you soon.