Harvard Professor: Why marriages fail & the science of happiness w/ Arthur Brooks

Summary

The Unplanned Podcast with Matt & Abby Episode: "Harvard Professor: Why marriages fail & the science of happiness w/ Arthur Brooks" Date: December 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Matt & Abby Howard welcome Dr. Arthur Brooks—a Harvard professor, New York Times best-selling author, and renowned happiness expert. The conversation dives deep into the real science behind happiness, the keys to lasting marriages, the interplay of genetics, upbringing, and faith, effective coping with grief, and how our modern behaviors (and even phone use) impact meaning and joy. Expect practical advice, eye-opening research findings, and honest, relatable moments about love, suffering, spirituality, and family from one of the foremost thinkers in the space.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Dr. Arthur Brooks’ Path to Happiness Research

• Personal Motivation: Arthur explains that his foray into happiness research is deeply personal, describing it as “me search” rather than research. He struggled with happiness himself, despite coming from a supportive and intellectual family.
  • “About half of your natural happiness is genetic. It’s true… what that means is, you need really, really good habits.” — Arthur Brooks [02:46]
• Life-Changing Experience: Arthur’s wife, Esther, inspired his career shift as they walked the Camino de Santiago—a 500 mile pilgrimage route—reflecting on purpose and happiness [03:52–04:42]. His journey underscores the idea that loving partnerships can inspire personal growth and help us find our calling.

The Science of Marriage and Happiness

• Marriage & Happiness:

  • “For the big majority of people, marriage makes you happier. A bad marriage doesn’t.” — Arthur Brooks [01:29, 05:52]
  • Satisfaction in marriage often dips at the five-year mark (not seven), as couples transition from passionate love to “companionate love.” If couples stick together, happiness in the relationship generally increases over time [06:36–07:09].

• What Men & Women Need Most:

  • “Women need to be adored by their husbands… Husbands need admiration from their wives.” — Arthur Brooks [07:34–10:31]
  • Arthur explains these are deep evolutionary needs and that breaking the adoration-admiration cycle typically precipitates marital issues.

• Practical Advice:

  • “You decide to adore her, and you decide to be an admirable man… Be impeccable to your morals, impeccable to your word, impeccable to your work.” — Arthur Brooks [10:34–11:04]
  • Marriages are strengthened not by yielding to feelings, but by committed, intentional action and understanding your partner’s unique needs.

Understanding & Managing Emotions

• Dr. Brooks describes emotions as ancient biological signals, with four main negative emotions: fear, anger, disgust, and sadness [13:04–13:19].
  • “Your feelings are liars. Your limbic system lies to you all the time.” — Arthur Brooks [11:35, 14:46]
• He likens personal growth via marriage to the growth that comes through embracing suffering: “Suffering is your teacher.” [11:35]
• True maturity comes from learning to manage one’s emotions—not the other way around [14:46–15:23].

The Myth of Permanent Happiness and the “Arrival Fallacy”

• The panel discusses the common misconception that happiness is found in accomplishment.
  • “When you hit a goal, you get positive emotions. But positive emotions are not there to give you permanent satisfaction. They're there to say, good, now keep running.” — Arthur Brooks [15:40–16:31]
• Even Olympic athletes face emptiness after achieving their peak, because the brain is designed to keep seeking new goals.

Religion, Transcendence & Happiness

• Faith and a sense of the transcendent (not just traditional religion) are strongly correlated with happiness.
  • “There's a very strong correlation between the belief that it's not just about me and there's something bigger… that can actually stand in awe of something bigger than me.” — Arthur Brooks [22:17–23:14]
  • Dr. Brooks makes the point that the happiness benefit comes from transcending the “psychodrama of me,” whether through religion, nature, art, or philosophy [23:14–24:13].

Technology, Devices, and Meaning

• Device addiction is described as a block to happiness, distracting us from meaning, which is processed in the right hemisphere of the brain [24:23–25:17].
  • “Our devices, they distract us from finding the meaning of our lives.” — Arthur Brooks [24:23]
• The importance of balancing “what/how” (left brain) with “why” (right brain).

Soulmates, Sex, and Relationship Success

• Soulmates: Arthur debunks the idea of a single “twin flame,” arguing that believing in soulmates can undermine resilience in relationships [25:44–27:20].
• Sex & Happiness: Sexual pleasure leads to happiness only when combined with meaningful intimately bonded relationships.
  • “That’s one of the reasons that pornography is so dangerous and leads to so much depression and anxiety... there's no other people involved. It's solitary.” — Arthur Brooks [27:39–29:14]
  • Sex makes us happier when it deepens union, not when it is casual or disconnected from love [29:14–31:08].

Development, Cohabitation, and Marriage Timing

• Cohabitation: Statistically, cohabitation before marriage leads to higher breakup rates; 95% of cohabiting relationships end in dissolution rather than marriage [36:34–37:08].
  • Reasons for moving in together often fundamentally differ between partners, causing instability.
• Best Age Range to Marry: People who marry between ages 28–32 have the highest odds of marital longevity, largely due to greater maturity. But maturity and a sense of purpose can result in successful early marriages, as Matt & Abby exemplify [38:56–39:46].
• Marriage Success: Technically measured as marital longevity, but true success is staying close and growing together, especially post-children (“gray divorce” risk) [40:26–43:08].

Habits That Save (or Doom) Marriages

• Daily Habits: The biggest destroyers are losing eye contact and touch [44:22–47:10].
  • “You could save most marriages by having them… stare at each other and have a conversation in bed… and always be touching.” — Arthur Brooks [45:55–47:10]
  • Eye contact and physical touch create the neurochemical connection (oxytocin, vasopressin) that binds couples together.
• With Children: Never let kids come between parents—present a united front [42:10–43:08].

Grief, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth

• After loss (like Matt & Abby’s miscarriage), allow yourself to feel and learn from negative emotions instead of suppressing them [53:21–56:39].
  • “Evidence that you’re alive is that you’re sad, that you're angry… Negative emotions are not something to eliminate; they're something to understand and grow from.” — Arthur Brooks [58:17–61:38]
  • About 90% of people who endure a significant loss experience “post-traumatic growth” and ultimately look back with gratitude for having grown.

Antidepressants and Mood Management

• SSRIs and other antidepressants have proven utility for clinical depression, but ordinary sadness/anxiety is part of normal life and not always cause for medical intervention [61:47–65:36].
  • “Just because you have low mood and even persistent low mood doesn't mean you have clinical depression. It means you're a human being on earth.” — Arthur Brooks [61:57]

The Role of Fitness & Spirituality

• Exercise and spiritual activity are the two best ways to manage unhappiness. Fitness is strongly correlated with lowering unhappiness, not with happiness per se [66:39–68:28].
• Some people need these tools more; “mad scientist” profiles (high positive & negative emotion) especially benefit from structured habits [68:39–72:12].

The Limits of Happiness and Success

• The most successful people are the second happiest, not the happiest. The “happiest” tend to be less motivated, less likely to see threats [73:53–75:34].
  • “The joy of unmitigated happiness is not the most alive you can be. Life requires difficulty for you to actually be a fully alive human being.” — Arthur Brooks [75:39]

Politics, Fear, and Division

• Modern media/activism manipulates our amygdala (fear/anger center) to short-circuit logic and connection, stoking outrage for personal/political gain [81:04–83:48].
• Be vigilant about not letting political/cultural narratives hijack your capacity for love, reason, and connection.

Conflict in Marriage: Anger vs. Contempt

• Anger, even frequent fights, isn’t correlated with divorce. Contempt is—because it signals disgust and makes a spouse feel worthless [86:11–88:00].
• The antidote: avoid “winning” arguments, apologize quickly, and realize that “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” (winning arguments weakens the marriage) [88:26–89:33].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You decide to adore her, and you decide to be an admirable man. And that means being impeccable to your morals, impeccable to your word, impeccable to your work.” — Arthur Brooks [10:34]
• “Suffering is your teacher… marriages grow through suffering because we all grow through suffering.” — Arthur Brooks [11:35]
• “Your feelings are liars. Your limbic system lies to you all the time.” — Arthur Brooks [11:35, 14:46]
• “The happiness benefit really comes from transcendence… if you’re stuck in the psychodrama of me, me, me, you’re gonna be miserable.” — Arthur Brooks [23:33–24:13]
• “You could save most marriages by having them… stare at each other and have a conversation in bed every night…and always be touching.” — Arthur Brooks [45:55–47:10]
• “Evidence that you’re alive is that you’re sad… Negative emotions are not something to eliminate; they’re something to understand and grow from.” — Arthur Brooks [58:17–61:38]
• “If you win an argument, you lost. And if you had an argument in your marriage, you just weakened your marriage.” — Arthur Brooks [88:26]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 02:16 – Dr. Brooks opens up about his journey to happiness research.
• 05:43 – The science and psychology behind marriage, happiness, and the “five-year itch.”
• 07:34 – What men and women need most in marriage: adoration and admiration.
• 11:31 – How suffering grows marriage and the limitations of feelings.
• 13:04 – Biology of emotions and why feelings are unreliable.
• 15:40 – Why accomplishments don’t provide lasting happiness.
• 18:06 – Religion, transreligious practices, and the happiness-transcendence link.
• 24:23 – The impact of devices and meaning, hemispheric brain functions.
• 25:44 – The dangers of the “soulmate” myth, ethical dating, and relationship resilience.
• 27:36 – The role of sex, pleasure, and bonding in happiness; dangers of pornography and casual sex.
• 36:34 – Science on cohabitation, best age to marry, predictors of lasting marriage.
• 44:22 – Daily habits that save marriages: eye contact and touch.
• 53:21 – Grieving, negative emotions, and post-traumatic growth.
• 61:47 – How antidepressants work, the line between normal sadness and medical depression.
• 66:39 – Fitness, spiritual practices, and managing unhappiness.
• 73:53 – Why you can't be “too happy,” and how happiness relates to success.
• 81:04 – How politics manipulates our emotions and the danger of victimhood thinking.
• 86:11 – Anger vs. contempt in relationships, and healthy conflict resolution.

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Takeaways & Calls to Action

• Habits Over Feelings: “Your feelings are liars.” Prioritize bonding habits—eye contact, touch, and daily connection—over fleeting feelings.
• Grow Through Suffering: Hard times, individually and together, are the soil for growth and future happiness.
• Seek Transcendence: Look for the “bigger than me,” whether through faith, nature, or awe-inspiring experiences.
• Manage Negative Emotions: Don’t suppress sadness, anger, or fear; understand them, grow from them, and use structured habits like exercise and spirituality.
• Don’t Let Politics Hijack Your Brain: Be vigilant about not letting the news or social media turn you against your spouse, family, or neighbors.
• Learn to Fight Well: Apologize quickly; never let contempt enter the relationship. Focus on understanding, not “winning.”
• For More: Take the new "Happiness Scale" quiz at arthurbrooks.com for personalized insights on your happiness and well-being components [69:15, 70:13, 92:05].

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Closing Reflection

Matt & Abby’s warm, authentic chemistry shines in this episode, making even complex neuroscience and relationship theories feel practical and actionable. Dr. Brooks’ blend of deep science, faith, and humor offers hope that happiness is not a destination, but a lifelong process—navigated best together, with intention, humility, and love.

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For more wisdom, follow Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks) and pre-order his upcoming book “The Meaning of Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness” (out March 31, 2026).

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

For the big majority of people, marriage makes you happier. A bad marriage doesn't. A crummy marriage doesn't make you happier. You could save most marriages just by eye contact and touch. Before you go to bed at night, stare at each other and have a conversation every night. Your feelings are liars. Psychology is biology. Emotions. All they are is your most reptilian brain. Women need a lot of things from their husbands, right? But the one big thing that if they don't have, it'll wreck their marriage.

[C]

They need to be Today on Unplanned.

[D]

We sat down with Dr. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, New York Times best selling author and happiness expert. Now this dude's written books with Oprah, so I just knew that we were going to have an amazing conversation with him. And we did. We talk about why the most successful people aren't as happy and what you can do to manage your unhappiness. All on Today's episode.

[C]

What got you so into happiness? I'm just so curious because it makes me think that maybe there was a time in your life where things weren't so good and you got obsessed with happiness and the idea of being happy. Is that true?

[B]

That is completely true. You know, this isn't. I don't do research. I do me search, you know, and anybody in the happiness field, you got to go, mm, right? There's a reason. And I know all the people who specialize in happiness. There's a lot of truth to that. And what happened was that, you know, about half of your natural happiness is genetic. It's true. You know, your mother made you unhappy. Literally.

[A]

Literally.

[B]

And we know this because we have studies of identical twins that were separated at birth and adopted into separate families, which is this unbelievable natural experiment, because in statistically, if they're reunited at age 40 and you look at the similarities and differences between them, you know, part is genetic and what part is environmental, and about half of your natural happiness is genetic. And what that means is you need really, really good habits. And you need to. If you're, if you're behind the eight ball because you come from gloomy stock, you got to do a lot of things right. And the truth is, you know, I have great, wonderful parents, you know, really, really well educated and artistic and intellectual parents, and I'm so grateful. But, you know, they struggled and it looked like my fate, and I struggled with happiness just. And I married a happy person who, you know, and I was bumming her out, and finally she said, when I was retiring from my third career, I was like, what do we do? What do we do? And we were walking the Camino de Santiago. Do you know what that is? That's that hundreds of mile walk across northern Spain. Oh, my goodness. Which Christians have been doing for hundreds of years, more than a thousand years.

[C]

Holy cow.

[B]

To find their calling and to find God's purpose for their life. When I was 55, doing this with my wife, you know, hand in hand, praying, you know, and, you know, guide my path, guide my path, because what's the next career, right? And. And Esther said, you know, you should use your PhD for something truly useful.

[A]

Like, what have I been doing?

[B]

And I said, what? She said, happiness. It's what you need, it's what you want. Why don't you actually understand the science, which I thought I did, but bring it to masses of people and serving other people, I think you'll find it yourself. And so on that long walk, I dedicated the rest of my career to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

[A]

It's clear that you have that mission statement so ingrained in you, and that's really cool also that your wife was able to kind of like, say, hey, like, this is something that'd be good for you and you can use it for good.

[B]

And she's my guru. And that's what we're supposed to do for each other. That's what you're doing for each other. That's why you're on earth. I mean, this is. This is the. We're not supposed to be alone for the most part. I mean, there are people who do really well with a single vocation, to be sure, but most people don't. But why? I mean, what's the why of your marriage? I mean, there's a lot of practical whys, you know, raising children together, it's a good thing and all that, but fundamentally you're put together to. To perfect each other, you know, and how do you perfect each other? By saying, man, Matt, this is what you need. I think this. I'm the person who knows you best. I think this is what you need. I mean, you're growing up together effectively, and sometimes it's, you're making a mistake. And I'm the only one who can tell you, Abby, you're making a mistake. And you get this whole Life together from 2021 until 100, and you get to actually figure it out together. That's the whole point. That's marriage.

[C]

Isn't there a lot of data about marriage and how you live longer if you're married and you're happier? I think if you're married, does marriage make you happier?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does for sure. Now a bad marriage doesn't.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

A crummy marriage doesn't make you happier. So what you find is that for the big majority of people, marriage makes you happier, and for the minority people who are really unhappy and staying married, it makes them much unhappier, is what you find. Yeah, for sure. Because, you know, living with somebody who's driving you completely insane, that's not that great. That's one of the reasons that people figure out that or they decide that they've made a mistake. The five year point in marriages is always the dangerous one. You know, the culture says there's a seven year itch. It's actually a five year itch. And that's when. When dissatisfaction Tends to peak. And if you. And then what. What successful marriages have in common is that they have the peak of dissatisfaction because you're going from passion to companionship.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Which doesn't sound hot. Yeah, I know, right? Like, doesn't. But companionate love has tons of passion in it. And once you actually understand that this is a lifelong, you know, we're walking into the future hand in hand. It's just you and me and you understand each other and you understand the complementarity between men and women that then from five years on, things for most couples tend to get better and better because that companionate love gets deeper and richer.

[A]

Does that include like, like from the start of marriage or like you first met and like started dating? Or is it kind of generally around that mark?

[B]

It's. Well, so that this is measured because there's so much variance in how long people take to get married. This usually measured from the beginning of a marriage because that's something that's really tangible. It's like, boom. Yeah, that, the starting gun. But, but for a lot of couples, I mean, you would, you would measure it from a different point.

[A]

Is there something that you would like, one piece of, like practical advice for a couple hitting that five year mark? Like, what would you would recommend?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what I see is the big reason that they don't make it. I can tell you the real reason they tend not to make it. It's that the husband and wife don't understand the one thing the other one needs. They think that the other one needs the same thing that they do. And that's wrong. We're men and women are different. That's the fun. I mean that's, that's like, that's awesome. Right? That, and that's because we're complementary. We don't substitute for each other, which is why you shouldn't compete with each other. You're complementary to each other. And a lot of what men and women need is based in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which is how we develop to be complementary to each other as men and women. And what you find according to the evolution is that women need one big thing from their husbands. They need a lot of things from their husbands. Right. I mean, they require respect and they require responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. But the one big thing that if they don't have, it'll wreck their marriage. They need to be adored by their husbands. And the evolutionary reason for that is that women, they make a big investment. I mean, being pregnant and you know, and being. And feeding a child, I mean, that's a huge investment. And that requires commitment and protection from the mate. And so the way that that's shown is adoration. Like, baby, I would fight a tiger for you and only you. That's adoration. Right? And if they don't feel it's a huge problem, because that signals a huge lack of commitment. And that's when a marriage really starts to falter. They don't feel the adoration, the unique adoration from the husband. The husband needs admiration from his wife, uniquely from his wife. And that's basically. He'd fight a tiger. But what he needs to hear is that is the biggest gazelle that anybody who's ever dragged into this cave. You are so big and strong. That's going to feed our family for three weeks. You're amazing. That's what he needs to hear, because evolution made him into the hunter, the provider. Now, again, women provide and men take care of kids. Don't get me wrong. I'm not getting into these, like, retrograde gender roles. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But fundamentally, there is a wiring to this kind of thing. And men who don't feel admired by their wives, they stop adoring their wives. And women who stop feeling adored by their husbands stop admiring their husbands. And the cycle goes. No admiration, no adoration, no adm. That peaks at five years, and then it goes down from there. And the couples that really have this together are the ones where, man, she. She really admire. Again, mutual respect and understanding that we live in the modern world. And, you know, and. And my wife has always done all kinds of stuff to support her family as well. And I've done all kinds of things that I. I changed a lot of diapers in my time. I live with my grandkids now. I'm changing diapers still, which is the best, actually, because now I actually enjoy it, you know? But the whole point is, if you break the admiration adoration cycle, you're gonna struggle.

[A]

Wow, that's so good.

[C]

How do you reverse that?

[B]

You reverse that by deciding to be the person you want to be. Now, I give a lot of advice to young dudes, and they say, so what do I do? What do I do to stay in love? And the answer is, number one, adore her. I don't care how you feel. Adore her and be admirable. Because it's hard to admire somebody who's not admirable right now. You have me saying, yeah, but it's really hard to adore. Somebody who's not adorable. True. But you decide to adore her and you decide to be an admirable man. And that means being impeccable to your morals, impeccable to your word, impeccable to your work.

[C]

I love it. Because what you're saying is so countercultural from, I feel like, what we hear in the media, on social media especially, which is, like, if you don't feel this, like, you know, maybe it's time for the relationship to, like, part way. Like, maybe there's nothing a good fit. Like, if you don't, if you don't, like, it's all about your feelings. And if it feels wrong, if it's hard, like, you know, I mean, I loved. I was listening to a podcast and you were talking about how, yeah, it doesn't necessarily feel good when you work out, but it's good for you.

[B]

Yeah, totally.

[C]

So why do we look at marriages and relationships differently?

[B]

Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, marriages grow through suffering because we all grow through suffering. Suffering is your, is your teacher. Suffering is your teacher. You've suffered. I mean, you've talked publicly about your suffering. That's your teacher. If you didn't have any suffering, you wouldn't actually understand many, many important things about life and you wouldn't be able to help anybody else. You'd be terrible parents, be the worst parents ever. It's like, I don't know, lifestyle's been really good for me, so I don't know what's up with you, junior? I mean, it wouldn't be helpful. And so understanding that a great part of your growing up together is the suffering that you have by trying to get along with each other and the difficulties that you actually have that you need this. And so the idea of, like, I'm not feeling it good, that's your opportunity to love each other more deeply. Notwithstanding your feelings, your feelings are liars. Your limbic system lies to you all the time. Feelings, all they are emotions. All they are is our processing of signals that you're perceiving in the exterior from around you. So your most reptilian brain at the, you know, it's more than 40 million years old. You have in common with snakes and lizards, it perceives stuff. It sends data to the newer part of your brain called the limbic system, which is still pre human, and that translates these signals into emotions. All emotions are, are your perception signals of what's going on around you. Below your level of awareness. You have four negative emotions. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Only four. And all of them have been involved to give you signals about different threats.

[C]

Did they come up with those from the movie Inside Out? I'm guessing, like, some psychologist at Harvard was like, hey, Inside Out's a great movie.

[D]

We should base.

[B]

Yeah, everything. It turns out that maybe the movie got it from it. But anyway, either way, that's the first.

[A]

Thing that it tries.

[B]

I know, I know. Yeah. And that was a really useful movie for that, too. And there's some. There's, you know, there's some argument about what the basic emotions are, but generally speaking, the four negative emotions just are what they are. The positive emotions are a little bit more contested. There's a little bit more argument among neuroscientists, but they're generally joy. Right. Of interest and surprise. Most of surprise is like surprise. I mean, there are bad surprises. Like your lawyer's on the phone. I mean, that's. But. But most of the time surprises. Like, all humor is based on surprises. There's a little tiny thing in your. In your limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus. And it's all how you resolve surprise. And it makes you laugh. So all jokes. You flick that parahippocampal gyrus, you hit it too hard, you're like, that's bad taste. You hit it too softly, and you're like, that's a stupid dad joke. You hit it just right and you crack up. And that's all based on surprise. So you see, I mean, it's all. This is all. The psychology is biology. And if we understand the biology, then you understand that all of these negative emotions, that they have a reason for existing, and they're very important. And so what are we trying to do? We're trying to develop emotionally such that we can manage these emotions, grow from these emotions, and they're not managing us. When you say, I don't feel it anymore with somebody I used to love and I'm going to walk away from my marriage because of my feelings, you're basically saying, my limbic system manages me. Whoa. And that's not very evolved.

[C]

That's like saying, I'm a. I'm a reptile. I'm a monkey. Like, I just. I just follow my emotions. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

It's like somebody who decides that their goal in life is pleasure, you know, pleasure. All that's doing is flicking a little part of your. Your limbic system called the. You know, the. What is it called? The ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum. These two little places in your and your limbic system that make you feel. And you can get it from, you know, somebody says, I love you, or you can get it from a bump of cocaine because we have very thrifty brains. But if you're going to live just to try to hit the ventral tag mental area again and again and again and again, you're not going to be happy. You'd be in rehab.

[C]

Recently, I came to this realization where I finally understood there's never going to be like a moment where I look back on my life and I'm like, wow, I made it. I don't know. You accomplish the thing that you always dreamed of, and then after you have that moment of happiness, and then you're like, okay, what's next?

[B]

We're wired for that. Absolutely. And part of the reason is because when you hit a goal, you get positive emotions. But positive emotions are not there to give you permanent satisfaction. They're there to say, good, now, keep running. That's what they're for. I mean, the joy that you get from hitting a goal will wear off immediately and turn into some sort of disappointment for something that's not going right today. And that's because your amygdala does two things. Attention and fear and anger. And so what happens? Your limbic system exists out there for you to perceive stuff, threats and opportunities all day long. And so the result of it is that we think that when we actually make our goals or wonderful things happen, that we're going to get satisfaction. That hangs around wrong. That's not right. That's not right. That's no way to live. That's why Olympic athletes typically suffer from a clinical depression in the months after winning their gold, because they thought it was going to be awesome. But it isn't, because their brain doesn't work that way.

[A]

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[D]

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[A]

Me. I do.

[C]

That's me.

[A]

Every single day.

[C]

I used to not.

[D]

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[A]

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[D]

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[C]

When it comes to social scientists, I heard you on a podcast mention something about social scientists in India tend to be Buddhists and social scientists. And you know, some of your colleagues you said were Jewish and you're a Christian. I'm curious, with like all the different religions, what are the similarities you see across happiness when it comes to religion and the different belief systems? Because I'm sure there's a lot of similarities, but there's also some differences.

[B]

A lot, a lot. And I've studied a lot of comparative religion. I've worked a lot in India actually with religious leaders and religious leaders around the world. I'm really, really interested in this. Now. To begin with, most social scientists are not religious. I'm in the minority. It's less than 20% of PhD behavioral scientists are religious at all.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Now physical scientists are more religious. So you find that more than half of members of the American Academy of Sciences they believe in a higher power. Right? At least. And the younger they are, the more actually religious they actually are. So my father was a biostatistician as a PhD biologist, a statistician, he was a lifelong Christian. And a lot of mathematicians, but probably a majority of mathematicians are actually religious. It's just social scientists. And the reason is because there's this belief in behavioral science that everything is a reaction to or an accommodation of what we find. And so most social scientists say that belief in God is a way that we manage our terror of not understanding non existence. There's a funny thing about, about, about death. Most people are not really afraid of dying. They understand that only 20% of people have a phobia of death. It's called thanatophobia. 20% of people, you're probably neither one of you is like, I mean, I'm gonna die. The problem is that the human brain can't understand, can understand not being physically Alive but can't understand, not existing. Those are two fundamentally different cognitions. And so we have to find some way to resolve dying but not being able to understand non existing. And that creates. That cognitive dissonance creates terror. And so social scientists say the way that we resolve that terror is by create. By inventing God, by inventing heaven. And so they say it's got to be an adaptation. I don't see it that way. I don't see it that way at all. I see it more in terms of a holistic understanding of creator and creation. You know, I have all kinds of data about human behavior and neuroscience, and that's my stock and trade. I mean, looking at experiments and brain scans and data and statistical experiments, but I don't have that data for God. That, for that I have faith and that's. That for me, that's completely consistent. In much the same way that if I were an art historian specializing in Picasso. I need to know two things. I need to know all about Picasso's paintings and I need to know all about Picasso, and I can't find anything about Picasso the man by staring at one of Picasso's paintings. They're two different ways of understanding creator and creation. But you're not a good intellectual unless you understand both. That's my view, and that's how my faith makes my reason better, and my reason makes my faith better. But I'm not trying to use my reason to enhance my faith. Right. I mean, I'm not actually. Actually, what I should say is I'm not trying to use science to find evidence of God because that doesn't work. They're different in the same way as Picasso the man and Picasso the painting. So that's how I see it.

[C]

I'm shocked that you said that most social scientists aren't religious at all, because I just assumed that most were based off of like, you know, learning about you and your colleagues. Tell me about. Do you guys ever, like, get into debates? Do you guys ever, like, how does that work? Like, what does all that look like?

[B]

So not really very many debates. People are pretty nice and people are pretty tolerant. You know, I teach at secular university. I teach at Harvard University, and nobody's like, oh, wow, that's a bastion of, you know, orthodox Christianity. No one ever said that. Right? Oh, all those Catholics. No. And. And I'm sure a lot of social scientists are like, yeah, Brooks has got that, like, hang up. He's got his whole Christian thing going. I'm sure, right? I'm sure. But people are super nice to me. And my students are awesome. And they know, I mean they know that I have a deep Christian belief, but I'm also not, you know, up there pounding the podium saying, you know, repent or die because I want them to find their path.

[C]

I find it interesting because there's been a ton of like new information coming out, at least from my awareness about spirituality and happiness. Yeah, it seems like there's a big correlation.

[B]

Yeah, that was your question before. So, so what's the relationship between, between religion and happiness? And it's really strong. It's really, really strong. Now for happiness probably the correlation is between a sense of the transcendent and happiness. So it's not the specific path that people have. And again, this is not judgment on metaphysical truth. I mean I have a belief on metaphysical truth. I mean, you know, I'm practicing Roman Catholic is what I do. It's my gig. Right, but, and so I have a belief that it's awesome and. Right, but, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the difference between well being and religious belief. And there's a very strong correlation between the belief that it's not just about me and there's something bigger than me can actually stand in awe of something bigger than me. And there are many ways to actually get that happiness. That's not just traditional religious beliefs. So a lot of people are watching us who are not religious believers. You can get the same happiness effect through vipassana meditation practice for example, or walking in nature before dawn without devices for an hour every day.

[C]

That's the best.

[B]

Oh yeah. Watching the sun come up.

[C]

We used to live by the mountains and I would take my boys on a bike ride like around sunset and just the, ah, just like the purple. Like here in Arizona we get purple in the sky when the sun sets. And I would just be like, holy crap. I just believe this is real.

[B]

That's the best. That's because you're having a transcendent experience.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Then the transcendent experience is what really, it gets you out of the me self into observing things that are bigger than you. You can get this by studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, or whoever your thing is, but something bigger than yourself and, and, or studying the Stoic philosophers. My friend Ryan Holiday is just, he gets huge transcendence, studying the Stoics and, and for me it's my traditional Christian faith that actually gives me that sense of the transcendent. But if you're Stuck in the psychodrama. Me, me, me, me, me. You're gonna be miserable. That's the bottom line. So that's the connection between happiness and. And religion. And then we can, you know, there's other benefits of religion too, of course, but the happiness benefit really comes from transcendence.

[A]

That's so good, too, because, like, that you're saying, like, the psychodrama of me, me, me, me. I feel like that's everything that, like, our devices often are trying to get us to focus on more.

[B]

Oh, completely. Completely. Our devices, they distract us from finding the meaning of our lives. Right. And there's a reason for that. The. The meaning of your life is only perceived in the right hemisphere of your brain. The right hemisphere of your brain is all the. All the mystery that goes beyond language. That's. That's really a right hemispheric experience that comes from the work of Ian McGilchrist, who's a neuroscientist at Oxford. This is a thing called a fancy word, hemispheric lateralization, which has a simple idea that different halves of your brain do different things. Right. We put, you know, fancy titles on simple ideas. That's how we get tenure.

[C]

I appreciate that you use, like, like, very dumbed down language. So that's just English. Yeah, just basic English. So I can understand. You were. You were using fancy language in a podcast I was listening to, and you were like, I'm literally just talking about the two parts of your brain. And I was like, thank you.

[B]

I was like, I don't know what.

[C]

The fancy words were that you said.

[B]

I know, I know, I know, I know. And it's just that the right side does meaning and mystery and happiness and love, and the left side of your brain does tasks and analysis and efficiency and technology. That's what's going on in the left and right. You need both. You need to be able to get to work, but you also need to know why you're going to go to work. You need to know how to actually figure out how to be a decent human being who can marry your soulmate, but there's a reason you want to. And the two halves of your brain need to work together on the why and the what and how.

[C]

Do you believe in soulmates?

[B]

Well, I believe that there are lots and lots of people who could be your soulmate, and then you have to do the work to make sure the person is.

[C]

That's what I believe.

[B]

That's so cool. I mean, it's like, it's unambiguously True, Yeah. I mean, as far as I'm concerned. Right. I mean, in a lot of the, you know, people say there's actually your twin flame or the whole thing, it doesn't stand up.

[A]

What is the twin flame?

[B]

The twin flame is a phenomenon in which there is a only one person for you in the whole world. And woe be unto you if you don't find her.

[C]

But I feel like that idea is dangerous because if you're in your relationship and something isn't going well for a time being, you're in a season of hardship, let's say, I don't know, you're in a newborn stage with a baby and you're like, how do I, like what am I doing? Right. It's so easy to go into that idea of, oh, clearly I missed my soulmate.

[B]

Clearly.

[C]

And I think that can be a very harmful idea.

[B]

Yeah. That people who have that superstition in their religions are way more likely to have disappointment in their relationships. They're way more likely to engage in ghosting and other kinds of unethical behavior.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

It's like it, it is what it is, man. So they have, they feel, morally, they feel like they have a, a moral space to actually treat people with less respect and love because it wasn't their soulmate to begin with. And so people who have that sort of superstition, they're way unhappier in their relationships. They're less likely to have success, way less likely to have successful relationships. They way more likely not to make it past that five year mark. And they're way more likely when they're dating to engage in an unethical, harmful, and, you know, the kind of behavior that hurts other people.

[C]

Okay, I've got to ask it because I feel like it plays hand in hand with happiness. What's the effect of sex on happiness? Like, how does that tie in? Because obviously we talked about the beginning stages of relationships. There's all that chemistry, you know, it's so exciting.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The passion is there. You know, let's talk about that.

[B]

Yeah. So, you know, human sexuality is an area that a lot of people study. And there's this belief that the sexual act per se is an enormous part of happiness. What it is, it's a form of pleasure. And pleasure actually doesn't lead to happiness. What happens is, with pleasure is that it can be converted into a part of the making life enjoyable, satisfying and meaningful. And so that's what, when, when, when sex is correlated with happiness, it's when it's within the confines of relationship in which it's enjoyable. And that means pleasure plus people plus memory. And so that's one of the reasons that pornography is so dangerous and leads to so much depression and anxiety and unhappiness is because there's no other people involved. It's solitary. And that shears off the sexual experience from this, from the, from the, the way it's supposed to, bonding to another person.

[C]

I was listening to this video about this, like, experiment some scientists did with rats, and they had, like, rats that were just able to drink regular water or water laced with.

[B]

What was it, methamphetamine or something?

[C]

Yes, yes. It wasn't meth, but it was. What was it that you had in the hospital when.

[A]

Fentanyl.

[C]

Fentanyl.

[B]

It was laced with opiate. Yeah.

[C]

And then they. And then so obviously the rat would go to the fentanyl every time. But then when they brought the rats into rat park, where they could, you know, have sex, have community, have friends, you know, yay, they're in community, have fun now. The rats don't care about the fentanyl. They're drinking the water just as much.

[B]

As they're drinking the regular water. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, 25% of active duty military in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, which is one of the reasons the United States was functioning poorly in Vietnam. There's abundant cheap heroin there. And they're like, it's gonna be a huge public health crisis when they all come home. Between 5 and 10%, depending on the estimates that you believe were add after the first day at home. Why? Because they were reunited with their loved ones and that's what their brains wanted. That's the reason that a lot of heroin addicts say that being high on opiates feels like pure love, because it's actually affecting the brain in much the same way. And when you get real love, it's what you actually want. So when you're shearing the rewards off from the actual love, it's a problem. Yeah, that's a problem. So that's number one is you don't get. That's why pornography doesn't lead to enjoyment and therefore is unrelated to happiness. On the contrary, at least to unhappiness. Really bad and dangerous. Really bad and dangerous thing, satisfaction. So sex is related to satisfaction to the point that it's. It's leading you to the goal of going deeper with a person. So it should be something. That's why you should. You should be having sex with somebody you're in love with. Yeah, right. That's the important thing. That's why casual sex is not a good thing. Yeah, it's a bad. Now, when I say not a good, I'm not making a moral point. I'm making a point about happiness. Yeah, that's what I'm coming down to. So it's like people can figure out their own morals, but I'll talk about the science of happiness. And most of all, most importantly, within. With. Within a marriage, at least a meaning. This is a memorialization of the part of the meaning of my life, the depth of my life, as I've made a commitment to have a union, one flesh with one particular person. That's how that comes about. So it's fun, it's pleasurable, but that goes through the enjoyment channel. It actually leads to the goal of my life, which is to be with somebody and make a life with somebody. And that's satisfaction. And it helps me understand who I am as a person, which is fused to this other person, which leads to more meaning. And that's how we need to understand sex.

[C]

We got married when we were 20 and 21. We were very young, very much in love. It was so exciting. I was just, like, obsessed with Abby for three years. Basically. I was like, I'm going to marry this. Like, we. We did everything we possibly could to make the money that we needed to be financially independent from our parents and have our own place. We worked at a pizza restaurant, sharing a car together so that we could.

[B]

Did you live together before you were married?

[C]

We didn't, actually. So, yeah, we waited to live together till we were married. We waited until marriage. Not to be all weird and vulnerable for a second, but. But, you know, it's all right, man. It was really hard. Yeah.

[A]

Wait, I know where he's going with this.

[B]

I'm a little nervous.

[C]

We waited for three years. After, like a year or two, it was like I felt like I was going effing crazy. Cause it's like, I love this person, but we're not.

[B]

And biologically, you have a particular appetite.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And what you're doing here, you're telling me an incredibly important thing here. If you were a dog, you wouldn't have weighed it. And that's because you have nothing more than animal impulses. But you're a man, and that means you also have moral aspirations. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is the. Of purely human part, the executive side, it's only 250,000 years old. It allows you to defy your animal impulses and live in your moral aspirations. Your happiness comes from getting into your moral aspirations and not giving in to animal impulses. That's why this works. That's what you're telling me.

[C]

And look, I don't want to toot my own horn here because I'm not perfect. Like we. It's not. I'm not like we waited till marriage. Like we weren't like, completely perfect. Like we didn't just hold hands the whole time that we were dating.

[D]

But I guess.

[B]

I guess my question is I'm made of stone.

[A]

Direct eye contact.

[C]

I'm just like, what do you. Cuz, like we have kids now and we're going to have these conversations with them. And from like a scientific standpoint, what makes sense? Because people are saying, oh, your brain's not developed to 26 if you're a dude, 24. When you're. If you're a girl.

[B]

21.

[C]

Actually, what is it?

[B]

21. Women. Women are. Well, it's the connection between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex so that you can manage your emotions and you're not managed by your emotions.

[C]

Okay?

[B]

Some people are worse at that, and some people never actually get that connection complete. But when you're a kid, you absolutely don't have those connections, which is why your little kids, my grandkids, they freak out all the time. They're freaking out all the time. Like, stop screaming. You're killing me. Why are you screaming all the time? And that's because their limbic system is in charge. Yeah, right. And. And that's why teenagers do really, really irresponsible things. It's because their limbic systems are giving these super heavy emotions and their prefrontal cortex is not managing those emotions. And so they're being managed by their emotions and doing crazy things like driving at 90 miles an hour or, or, or, you know, taking drugs or whatever it happens to be. That's why adolescent behavior is so irresponsible and can be so dangerous. It's because you can't have the limbic system in charge. That's why you need parents. Right? And rules. And again, we all make mistakes. Don't get me wrong. And what I'm talking about, like, what we're talking about with like, sex or whatever. Yes, these are the ideal states, you know, and the truth is that nobody actually very, very few people live the ideal. And it's a mistake to think that if you don't hit the ideal, you're gonna have a crummy life that's wrong. What you want to do is to be the do the best you can. And then always trying to be doing better. That's the goal in life, is to do your best and try to be better and recognize that, yeah, you know, it's like, I shouldn't have eaten the whole pizza so tomorrow I'm not going to eat a whole pizza. That's progress. Yeah, that's progress. And when it comes to your sex life or whatever happens to be, you're just trying to be better.

[A]

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[C]

I guess I have two questions that I think I can concisely narrow down. One is from a scientific standpoint, how long should you wait? According to Science to have sex in a relationship. And then number two, according to science, like, when is the. Like, how long should you wait to get married?

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because we technically got married before our brains were fully developed.

[B]

Right? Yeah. So those are two different. Those are two. And the first question, there's no answer to that because it's not. There's not like good science on that, how long you should wait. There is pretty compelling work that shows that living together isn't great. And for the longest time, people thought you got to live together because you practice your marriage. And the reason that tends not to be great is that typically the reasons for living together are different between the woman and the man. And there's a bunch of estimates that suggest that up to 95% of cohabiting relationships end in disillusion, not in marriage.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

95%. Okay, so 95. Yeah, yeah. So 19 out of 20 couples wind up not getting married, and one of the 20 gets married. And that's. That's what I've seen. And again, this is all over the map because this is not the kind. This is not like settled science like this. But there's a reason why it tends to be a mistake when a couple lives. Moves in together in their mid-20s, for example, typically. And again, everybody's results may vary. I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm just looking at the broad patterns. The woman thinks it's a step toward marriage, and the man thinks it's a bulwark against breakup. And that difference is really, really dangerous. So they're like, we're going to move in together because otherwise I'm going to get an ultimatum from her. And I don't want the ultimatum from her, like marriage or bye bye. And he doesn't want to break up because he loves her. And she thinks that this is actually a step toward marriage. And if he's doing it to not break up, that's not a step toward marriage. It isn't. And so that's a misunderstanding. And now we're living together, and that can go on for a really, really long time and lead to some big problems. You know, you live together for six or seven or eight years, and she's like, so when are we getting married? When are we getting married? When are we getting married? And he's like, like, at least we're not breaking up. That's not the basis of a stable relationship at all. So that's one of the reasons that for a lot of couples is better not to live together. You also find that your likelihood of actually having a successful marriage go down after having lived with more than one person. In other words, you don't get better at it. Things actually tend to get worse. A lot of this is from the work of Brad Wilcox, who's a sociologist at the University of Virginia, and he runs this great program called the Institute for Family Studies. Pure social science. No moral judgment, just the patterns. Now, to your question, though, we do know the. The age range where people are most likely to stay married. Okay. And that's when they get married. Between 28 and 32.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

I know. Way older than you and way older than my kids.

[C]

Yeah. We're both not even.

[B]

I know you're not even. And, you know, my kids, I have three kids. They're 22, 25 and 27. My 25 and 27 year old, they got married at 22 and 23, respectively. Wow. And they started having their kids at 23 and 24. So they're 27 and 25 and they have four kids between them. Right. And it's. And they married, you know, young like you. I mean, they more or less like you a little bit. Little. A year older than you. Fantastic. And so the reason for those data is not. They're not prescriptive. It's not that 28 to 32 is the magic zone. It's just that culturally, that's where most people, they feel like they have a mature attitude toward marriage. You can be completely different because you can have a much more mature attitude toward marriage much younger if you decide to do so.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I think the bigger problem in our society today is marrying too late, not marrying too early. Now, if you'd gotten married at 16, I'd be like, I don't know. It's like, you know, running off to, you know, some state where it's legal. I don't know. That's not that it's like. Or, you know, like, her dad. Her dad is behind you with a shotgun or something. You know, it's like. But, you know, 21, 22, if you've got your act together and you're understanding what this is all about and you have a supernatural understanding in particular of what this union really is, that's not too young.

[A]

I've heard you say a couple times, like, successful marriage. And it has me questioning, like, what? How do you measure a successful marriage?

[B]

So a successful marriage, I mean, technically, it means it's. You're staying married.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's kind of a 0:1 deal where 0 is not married and 1 is married. So successful Marriage. You look at my marriage, I've been married. Yesterday was my 34th wedding anniversary. And so, you know, congratulations. That's obviously successful marriage because it's like, there's no chance that I'm going to be like, honey, it's been great, but let's face facts. I mean, there's like, no way that that's actually going to happen. I mean, it's going to be till death do us part. Now, that said, there's an explosion in my field and what's called gray divorce. Gray divorce is when you break up after 25 years. That's been going through the roof in the last 10 years. Really? Yeah, yeah. And. And there's tons of speculation and it's just really, really early days. And the research on why people are breaking up later and later and later. Later than they had been before, you know, there's. It's probably because it's more and more socially acceptable for people to call it quits and say, I never liked you anyway, or whatever it is. It's like, enough is enough. You know, that kind of thing actually increasing. But the truth is, the longer you're married, the, the higher the likelihood is that you're going to stay married until one of you dies. Right.

[A]

Maybe it's the empty nester phase.

[B]

There is a lot of that. And actually this is what I see in a lot of great divorces. And this is the danger, and this is what you need to be paying attention to as a couple. That more and more and more that what you have in common is the kids. And the one thing you talk about is the kids. And even when you're alone at dinner, you talk about the kids. You got to have more than the kids because when the kids grow up and leave, you're going to be going blind. Blink, blink, blink. And so we got nothing in common. We grew apart. Now, good. You're working together. That's good, right? I mean, that's a. I mean, it can be good. I mean, not, not every couple should work together either. But you, you have to have. You got to be a unit.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And couples that struggle with this are couples where the kids can get between the parents a lot. Never let your kids get between you. If she's wrong, she's right. If he's wrong, he's right. The kids are wrong. It's you against them. Them.

[C]

We've said that before. We've been like, it's us against them totally.

[B]

And you're gonna have more. You're gonna have more. And it's like. And they're gonna outnumber you. You better have. You better have complete self.

[A]

Down the hatches.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And my. My wife and I, we've never, never had disagreements about this. I mean, we've been. It's like, we. We understand perfectly that we're a team as team. Team parents and team kids. They're not a very good team. They don't work together very well. We work together great. They can't beat us.

[C]

They can't beat us.

[A]

Our kids try. Like, we will put one of them, like, you taking a break right now, and they'll yell for the other one. They'll go, brother. And they think that their brother can get them out of town.

[B]

Yeah. No way.

[A]

I don't understand.

[B]

I mean, I like this. I like the intuition that they've got there, but, you know, they're just. They're gonna lose every time.

[C]

There's something to this, though, because we.

[A]

Hug each other and we're like. We love each other. So, like, I'll. I'll be like, mommy loves Daddy. Daddy loves Mommy. And then they'll go hug each other, and they'll go like, I love Augie. And then they'll, like, hug.

[C]

And then I told my 3 year old that my wife was my crush. I was like, yeah, Mama's my crush. He's like, oh, Auggie's my crush.

[B]

Okay, well, fine. It's weird.

[A]

Like, hugging or kissing. They want to hug or kiss each other.

[B]

I know.

[C]

Just be careful to not slap your butt in front of the kids because they've started doing.

[B]

It's like. It's not. Yeah, there's some. There's some fences on this whole thing.

[A]

He did tell him this morning. He's like, that's not.

[C]

I was like, that's just for Daddy. It's Griffy.

[B]

That's right. They'll figure that out. Fortunately, there's a lot of evolutionary psychology that will help them along the way. Right. That's a. You know, and they're not just social taboos, you know, you're not. You're not interested romantically in your blood relatives for a reason. You know, we're built to be like. Yeah, yeah. Right. For a reason.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And so they. They do. You know. By the way, one of my kids is adopted. Same deal. You know, it's like. It's just, you know, if you're growing up together, your. Your. Your brain is wired to not think that way about your kin, which is. This is why we think it's so abnormal when people do weird things like that, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So anyway, that's obviously not something to worry about about as you grow older as a couple. Here's a key thing to keep in mind. There are two really bad habits that people get into. They stop looking at each other in the eyes when they talk, and they stop touching. So that's super important. Why? Because you need a connection. There's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that women have three times as much as men. And there's another one called vasopressin that men have more than women. You both have vasopressin. You both have oxytocin. Oxytocin is a. Is a binding molecule. It's a molecule of. That makes you bound to each other as kin. That's the connection. The love molecule, as it were. People often call it that. And then vasopressin is one especially where men feel, like, loyalty and defense for the family. Like, I'm gonna take care of her, right? I'm gonna take care of her. I'm gonna take care of these people. But especially my wife. You get that through eye contact and touch. And so you could save most marriages by having them. Like, before you go to bed at night, stare at each other and have a conversation in the bed. And with, like, looking each other in the eyes every night and every time you're talking, always be looking at each other. Not, like, doing other stuff and cleaning up the catch in. And no, no. Talk to each other and look at each other. Because you're saying, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine. Your brain is registering that. And you, when you were in those first three years where you're obsessed with Abby, I like every time you looked at her, like, right now and then. And then you do less. I mean, you're busy is the whole thing. And what that's doing is that's attenuating the relationship neurobiologically.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

The second thing is touch. When you're together, you're touching. Always be touching abt. Always be touching. That's the rule. When you're walking, you're holding hands. When Esther and I, we look at that.

[C]

Okay. I like holding your hand. When we're on the podcast, sometimes people will comment like that. That's so weird. Why is he holding your hand?

[B]

It's like, I don't know, maybe she's my wife's wife. And that's a normal thing to do with your spouse for Pete's sake. I mean, I was just. Esther and I were together in Mexico City yesterday because we were doing some talks in Mexico City and, and we're doing them together and we're doing more and more talks about love and relationships and marriage together. She's, she, her studies are in philosophy and theology and mine are in science. And so we go back and forth and we talk about it in that particular way. And when we're together, we're always touching, touching. And we go to, we go for a 30 to 40 minute walk every night after dinner when I'm home, which is. I'm home about half the time, and, and always touching. Always touching. I was touching. I was touching. You can save so many marriages just by eye contact and touch. And that's what they lose. And when you lose those two things, you're, you're changing your brains and you're disconnecting your brains from each other. You know, people think about like sort of the physical connection of one flesh. The one flesh is the flesh above your neck. It's all that stuff inside your cranium. That's one flesh. And that's how you stay connected.

[C]

Isn't there something about like six or seven second kisses as well?

[B]

Yeah, it's 22 second hugs is actually what the research is kind of. Yeah.

[C]

22 second.

[B]

Yeah. You maximize oxytocin at a 22 second hug. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And so here's setting a timer.

[B]

I know, I know. You counted like, you like, stop. I got stuff to do.

[A]

Stopping me.

[B]

Here's, here's kind of the rule with your kids though, because you get tons of oxytocin with your kids. Never be the one who releases the hug.

[A]

Wait, that's a Disney rule? Have you heard that the characters aren't allowed to, like, if a kid hugs them? They're not supposed to break it. The kid has to break it first.

[B]

Okay, well, I didn't, I didn't. I don't mean to plagiarize from Disney, but. But that's always what we've said. Because, you know, the, the research is clear that you're never going to get the, the optimal length hug from your kids, especially as they become adolescents. Oh, to make them, they, they do the break. I mean, they're not gonna hold on to them. You're gonna freak them out. Let's go with me dad struggling.

[A]

You know, you gotta take 22 seconds, which is kind of long.

[B]

That's a long hug.

[C]

I feel like I could do that though, make them laugh because we like to wrestle a lot.

[B]

Like, we.

[C]

We just went to Disneyland and got lightsabers, and we have bat. They call it battle. So we'll battle each other. But. But, yeah, the wrestling is really fun.

[B]

Wrestling's great. I mean, when you're wrestling with your. And, you know, I wrestle with my. With my oldest grandson, who now he lives with me, and he's 20. He's two and a half. His parents and his. Their family are on the bottom floor of the house. We're on the top floor of the house.

[C]

No way. You guys all live together?

[B]

Yeah. We actually made a decision to move to the same place, all of us, because we had a big family. Because the data. The data. You know, I'm a social scientist. I got to go with the data. Go with my data. Right. I got to eat my own cook. Cooking. And it's very clear that it's way, way better for grandchildren to live near the grandparents and have a real relationship with their grandparents. And grandparents live longer and are happier when they have a serious relationship with their grandchildren. And so we talked about with our kids. I was like, where do you want to raise your kids? They had been raised in the D.C. region because I was running that think tank in D.C. for 11 years in D.C. and that's right. They went to these great Catholic schools that they want to send their kids to. That's the goal. And they said, okay. So we all packed up and moved there. One from when one of my sons got out of the Marine Corps. They moved from California with his wife and their baby, and one. The other who lived in Boston near us when we were living in Boston. And we just packed up the same moving van and moved down there to. My daughter graduated from college. Now she's in the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, which is not that far away. She'll be going back and forth during deployments and where she's posted, but at the end of the day, she'll come probably back to the D.C. region as well. Why? Because we're all going to live together. And. And it's even more convenient when we. Some of us. At least some of us live in the same house. Oh, it's like 1940s Catholic family and, you know, but. But based on research.

[C]

Yeah, no, it's. It's cool. We. We actually did that for a time, and that was, like. That was really fun.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And now, like, we have a lot of family near us. Like, My brother lives 10 minutes away.

[A]

Yeah. Everyone's close now.

[C]

Abby's parents two minutes away. My Sister in law, brother in law. I think that. Are they five minutes away? Like, everyone's so close and it's great. Like at first we used to live in Ariz. Yeah. We were in Hawaii for a little bit and I fell in love with surfing RIP. But now there's a surf park in Arizona, which is awesome. I've go there.

[B]

God bless capitalism.

[C]

Let's go capitalism. I love America, but like, it's, it's just. I was like, we wouldn't like, live by our family. No. Like what. And, but it's been amazing. Like, it's, it's so good having, having that connection, that community.

[A]

Because I was so close to my grandparents and still am.

[B]

Sort of depends on the family too. I mean, there's some. I would have struggled living with my parents. I would have struggled living with my in laws. I mean, it would have, it wouldn't have been like, you know, we wind up on the news, that kind of thing. But, but it would have been. It wouldn't have been happening.

[C]

I didn't realize you were so funny. When did you start cracking jokes like this? I haven't heard it anymore.

[A]

He just knows what's happening in your brain.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Because of you. You're bringing out the best in me right here. You're ruining my career. Thank you very much. No, no, it's, it's, it's, it's phenomenal. I mean, it's like, you know, in the morning when I'm there and you know, Joseph, my little grandson, he comes upstairs and he knows. He's like the king of the mambo. And it's gonna be. We call him Prince J. And he's. And he's, he's all about it. It's just fantastic. They had a new baby last. The week before last, as a matter of fact.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So Prince, Prince H. Prince entered the mix in my house. And then the others live, you know, 12 miles up the street and they have two and they want lots. You know, we're repopulating the earth with Brooks's.

[A]

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[D]

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[A]

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[D]

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[A]

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[D]

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[C]

Like an hour ago, it, you asked us how many kids we had.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I don't know why, but I just like my brain was like, we have three kids. And then Abby was like, no, well, we, we just miscarry. We lost her daughter at.

[B]

Because you do have three kids.

[C]

Yeah, we do. And, and it's been awful. And it's like, it's still something like we, you know, Abby and I are figuring that out, going to lots of therapy, grieving, like it's, it sucked. But like I, I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is since we're on the subject of happiness and that's something that we're trying to rediscover again after.

[B]

And you're being very public about it because you want to help other people. Yeah, because a lot of the people who are watching this, they're your age and they're not married yet, but they're going to be married married. And it's. That's gonna happen. Yeah, that's gonna happen. And the more that that's familiarized, demysticized, the better off they're gonna be. This is how you're turning something that happened that was really, really rough and that you had, you didn't actually think about probably before into a way to serve other people. And so doing. It's healing for you. Yeah. And it's protective for them.

[A]

How do you find happiness again after grief?

[B]

Let's get a little scientific. Because, because psychology is biology. You know, we have brains for a reason. Your limbic system, the console of emotion in your brain, it processes your negative emotions using different parts of that system. And they all exist for a reason. Sadness. Loss. The sense of loss is largely, it largely involves a little thing called the. Again, sorry to, you know, for the, for the technical term, the dorsal anterior cingulate cord. Cortex.

[C]

What is that?

[B]

It's a little thing about the size of the end of your index finger. And it just like lights up like a Christmas tree when you're, when you're feeling socially excluded or losing something or someone that you love. It's the really. I mean, there are other parts of your brain that involve sadness, but that's that thing that they always identify. The bad breakup, the loss, the death of a loved one, the loss of your child. This, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. And the reason that you have this. I mean, people say, I want to live without sadness. No, you don't. If you, if you live, had no fear of the pain of sadness, you'd say everything inside your head and you'd be like divorced, friendless and fired in like a week. You know, you need to be afraid of loss. We are a kin based hierarchical species. 250,000 years ago, until about 10,000 years, we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals. And it was. If you, if you had lost social loss, if you lost your relationships, you'd walk the frozen tundra and die alone. You'd be in a panther's meal and like 10 minutes by yourself. You need to not be alone.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And so that's why a part of your brain says, don't be alone. Don't be alone. Don't face rejection, don't face loss. Don't face loss. But you're gonna. And when it, when you do, that part of the brain and other parts of the brain are really, really, really affected by that. Grief is one in which you can't resolve it through going back to the person by reconciling with your clan. You know, you say something and you're socially rejected and you feel really sad and hurt and then you reconcile with the people. This is the reason you' reconcile with each other all the time. Because you, I mean, I'm sure you argue and fight and disagree and they're like, I'm sorry. It's like, I'm married to a Spaniard. It's like every day 10,000 fights. Our, you know, our memoir will be called 10,000 fights, right?

[A]

That's actually good.

[B]

Oh yeah, totally. And, and by the way, anger and divorce are uncorrelated. Anger and divorce are uncorrelated. Anger is a hot emotion that says, I care what you think and I want it to change. Contempt and divorce are correlated where you add disgust into the anger and make it ice cold. Saying what you're saying and who you are is worthless to me. That's eye rolling, sarcasm, derision, dismissal. We can talk about that, that leads to divorce. But the whole point is that when you've got this grief because you can't reconcile, because you can't reconcile when your father dies. It's no reconciliation. That's a loss of an actual person from your life or when you have a miscarriage, any of these things are real grief. And then you need to actually heal. And what happens is that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the parts of the brain involved, they become, as you learn, you start to find the meaning in it, that the activity in these parts of the brain start to lessen. You maintain the memory, but you feel less pain. You start to put it into context. There will always be some pain because there is a sense of loss, but it's not going to be debilitating, very debilitating. In the very beginning, people say I'm going to be sad forever. And the reason is because evolution said, I want you to think you're going to be sad forever so that you'll reconcile to go find the person. Right? But you can't be debilitated that way. So you aren't. And so as you find a sense of meaning, there's lots of ways to find sense of meaning. One of the best ways to find sense of meaning after a bad breakup, a nasty breakup, believe it or not, is to listen to sad songs. And you think it'd make you more sad, but what it does is it puts into perspective. It helps you understand that your feelings are not your unique and that this is a normal part of life. And that normal part of life says that there's meaning to the experience. That's why people listen to sad songs.

[C]

That's cracking me up because I was, I was 15 years old. I'd crushed on this girl since like third grade. And I'd like asked a friend to ask one of like to ask her like if she liked me and she said no. And I was like, devastate. Listening to sad Music in the car. We were on vacation with my family, and I, like, just. I remember, like, listening to all these sad songs, and they're like, matt. They're like, come on, Matt. Stop being, like, down.

[B]

I know. So just let's listen to, like, a marching band or something. No, no, no, no. Because the marching band will give you no sense of meaning. Like these bummer songs. It's like, she done me wrong. And, you know, it's like. And all this is, you know, basically. It's funny because, you know, when you talk about the neurobiology of emotion, it eviscerates all of the romantic content of every love song or every country and western song ever written. You know, it's like, she done my limbic system wrong, man. It's like, that doesn't sound great, right? But that's kind of literally what's going on. Yeah. So. So what you want is actually to find is to look for meaning in it. And the meaning in it is the depth, the spiritual depth that actually comes from the connection and what it actually means to be alive. So what it means for you to be alive, what it means for you to be parents of the children that you didn't lose, what it means for you to serve the world, what it means for you to have time on this earth that's not about you do. You're jarred out of your psychodrama. When you have a loss and you look at bigger, deeper, more metaphysical things, which you need to understand what your life is actually really all about. And in this way, 90% of people who have a devastating loss, they look back on it with a sense of gratitude. 90%. That's called post traumatic growth. Yeah. I was talking about post traumatic stress. Yeah. Post traumatic gruff. Both. 90% of the cases. More. Because you look back on and say, I learned a lot about my life when I saw. When I saw a terrific loss in that life. That's how I understood it. That's why in the sort of the therapy industrial complex that we're living through in America and around the world today, the idea of eliminating negative emotions is so unbelievably dangerous. So dangerous. You got to lean into it, man. You got to turn around and look at it. You got to be alive, you know, to be fully alive. Now, it could be exaggerated and become a mood disorder, and it can be dysregulated. I got it. Yeah, I completely got it. I mean, I've had, you know, thank God for psychiatric care in my own family. My mother would have, you know, wouldn't have had a life, you know, had it not been for that because of so many mood disorders that were debilitating. But for ordinary people, evidence that you're alive is that you're sad. It's evidence that you're angry, that you're afraid, that you're disgusted. That's, you know, that's just negative. Emotions are not something to eliminate. There's something to understand and grow from. And the ordinary person, every 18 months or so, this is according to Bruce Filer who does work on, on, on stages in life. Every 18 months you have a big transition, mostly unwelcome, and every five years you have a catastrophe. Catastrophe. The, the miscarriage that you suffer was a catastrophe. Right. It's going to be every five years for the rest of your life. Life. Buckle up, Buckle up. Right. And you're not going to expect it generally because you can't. And you're not going to like it. And you're going to learn and grow from it and you're going to love each other more because of it. And you're going to love your kids more if you let yourself find the meaning in that loss.

[A]

Wow, that's so good. I also have a follow up question. I wonder what. Can I call you a happiness scientist?

[B]

I guess I sort of am at this point. There's not a happiness science because it's across so many different fields. But sure, yeah, people call me that a lot for sure.

[A]

What like your perspective is on antidepressants?

[B]

Yeah. So most antidepressants, they fall into different categories chemically, but the most common form are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, the sort of the, the Prozac family, as it were. And what that does it. It's all based on, on the research that shows that people who have ruminative sadness, they tend to have very low levels of serotonin in the synapse in the brain. And if they can do something chemically to raise the level of serotonin in the synapse, either by increasing the amount of serotonin or keeping it in the synapse longer so it doesn't get reabsorbed that those people, they tend to have less ruminative sadness. And it's pretty reliable at about something like 30% of people who take these SSRIs, they get significant relief as a result of that. Now there are other chemical things that are going on with clinical depression. There's sort of three big categories of physical manifestations of clinical depression. One is that ruminant sadness. The second is anhedonia, which is the inability to feel pleasure. And the third is called psychomotor retardation, which is you're physically inhibited, you walk slower, you mumble, is what they actually find. And different chemistry actually affects those things in different ways. So if you have anhedonia, inability to feel pleasure, typically what they'll do is they'll raise your dopamine levels, and so you'll have an anti. You'll have rewards and anticipation of rewards. So you get really low dopamine in a lot of cases of clinical depression. So even things that you used to like, you don't look forward to them anymore and you don't like them. Right. And this is actually one of the reasons that GLP1 drugs can be hard on people and actually lead to depression in some people. Oh, really? Yeah, because what they do is they inhibit the dopamine from your rewards. And people who, you know, had trouble with eating a lot of junk food, for example, a lot of their rewards and anticipation of rewards and little rewards from day to day were like Twinkies or something, and you don't get that anymore. And you're like, huh, life's gray. And so they have to kind of migrate to different kinds of rewards and they feel this anhedonia. And that's why some people actually feel depressed when they're on GLP1 drugs. And that can be, you know, equilibrated neurochemically with, you know, with a good psychiatrist. And the last is when they have this gait problem when they're, you know, they walk slowly or mumble or something. Those usually. Well, they, they are, that'll. That works on the norepinephrine receptors. And so noradrenaline, which is from the adrenal glands, that they'll, they'll find some way to make sure that, that, that there's sufficient amount of that so it's not affecting you physically. So the first thing with clinical depression is understanding the physical manifestation and then experimenting to see whether drugs work. Now, that said, just because you have low mood and even persistent low mood doesn't mean you have clinical depression. It means you're a human being on earth. And when you go through difficult times in your life, you're going to feel sadness. You are, you're going to feel like the things that used to like, you don't like as much. These are normal things. They're signals to you that these are times for you to learn. These are periods between the equilibria in your life that you're in a transition, that you've experienced the loss. For a lot of people, this is. This is evidence that your limbic system is working properly. And if anytime you feel sadness or anxiety and you go to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, we got to get rid of that, what they're saying is, I need to make you a little less normal. In a lot of cases, again, you know, it can be exaggerated or dysregulated, in which case you actually need medical care. But for most people, that's not the case. I tell my students, I mean, they're studying at Harvard. I say you're. You're Harvard students. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy, because man is a hard thing that you've chosen to do.

[C]

Why do you say that?

[B]

Because it's scary and hard.

[A]

Hard?

[B]

Yeah, it's a scary and hard thing. I mean, you're going to one of the finest universities in the world, and it's hard, and it's a competitive environment, and you have high expectations for yourself. My son, when he was in boot camp as an enlisted marine, I mean, it wasn't like it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. And now he looks back on it and go, man, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I wouldn't do it again, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. And it got harder from there because it became a special operations Marine, became a scout sniper diaper, and it got harder and harder and harder and harder. And every single thing helped him understand who he is. And that's the truth. For most of us, your sadness and anxiety are boot camp. They're your teacher. And if we don't ask. Okay, okay, what am I supposed to learn from this? How am I growing from this? How am I learning to manage myself from this? We're missing the boat. And if we let people who are older than us. When people your age let people my age tell you that you better eliminate your sadness and anxiety or you're going to be stunted for life. You're getting better advice. You're, generally speaking, getting bad advice.

[C]

I can't help but notice I. I have a feeling that you lift weights. I'm. See, I'm seeing a vein on. On the bicep.

[B]

You got a vein on the bicep that. Either that or I just don't eat.

[C]

Okay, so I'm. I'm guess. I'm guessing you. You stay active. I'm guessing that with happiness, there's probably a correlation with being physically active, you know, going to the gym, running, something like that.

[B]

Sort of, sort of, sort of, sort of. So happiness and, and, and fitness don't have a direct relationship. Fitness has a direct relationship with unhappiness. So happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. Right. Because you have different parts of the limbic system giving you different aversive and positive emotions.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

And you need unhappiness to find all the things that we've talked about here. But you need to manage unhappiness. Right? And the best way. There are terrible ways to manage unhappiness, like drugs and alcohol. Terrible way. Workaholism, Awful. Unmanaged Internet use. Terrible way. Staying distracted. Terrible way to manage, unfortunately, unhappiness. The best ways to manage unhappiness are spiritual activity and picking up heavy things and running around. No way. The best way to manage unhappiness. And so if so people who don't have unhappiness issues and half the population is below average in unhappiness. Right. Makes sense. Has to be those people have trouble staying in the gym. They have trouble staying in the gym because they don't feel like they're getting any well being. Benefit from their, from their weightlifting or yoga or whatever is. They don't feel better. They don't feel better because they don't. They're not. There's no problem they need to solve with their, with their fitness. Fitness goals. Me, on the other hand, like, I'm not naturally happy. So I work out for an hour a day, seven days a week, and I have for decades. And that's how I manage my negative affect, as we social scientists like to say. Or just my grumpiness and unhappiness, as ordinary people say is by picking up heavy things and running around every single day, every single day.

[A]

To the gym.

[B]

Because you're a happy person, Abby. You're happy. I mean, look, you glow as a happy person.

[A]

But I go to the gym a lot.

[B]

No, that means you manage your unhappiness. I'm your blush. Yeah.

[A]

I'm more the black cat.

[B]

But the other thing is that half the people, I mean a quarter of the population is both above average happiness and above average unhappiness. Oh, that's called a mad scientist affect profile. And that's probably you.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

That is somebody who feels a lots of emotions very intensely.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And that's who above average intensity of positive and negative emotions. These are people where you don't. The happiness stuff you can do that stuff and that's great. But what you really need to work on is keeping the happiness high and then managing the unhappiness so it doesn't interfere with your life. And that's why fitness and spirituality are going to be really, really important in your life.

[A]

After listening to a lot of your stuff, I was like, I need to take that quiz because I'm sure that's.

[B]

Probably where that's a new quiz that we're just putting up now. Because, you know, for a long time I've used a lot of other people's surveys on affect profiles and well being levels. And finally we've actually created one that's really, really statistically valid that measures your well being with respect to the rest of the population. Where you on the macronutrients of your well being. So you know what to work on. Whether you have an enjoyment issue, a satisfaction issue or a meaning issue. And then whether happiness or unhappiness is your bigger challenge. It's a sort of 40 question thing. You get this like report on you and what you actually need to work on because all those things need to be separated out. It's called the happiness scale. We just float.

[A]

You need to link it. And also how long does it take you to take it?

[B]

Because between five and ten minutes.

[A]

I'm doing this today.

[B]

Between. Between five and ten minutes we should both take it.

[A]

I know. I want to ask you also, I.

[B]

Would actually predict that on the happiness, I would predict that you're a mad scientist.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I'll predict that you're a cheerleader, which is to say that you have intense positive emotions and very normal negative emotionality. I would say that you're not like crazy negative emotionality. And that's one that's correlated with the highest level of well being. But it actually, I mean everybody's got their. It's a strength and weakness no matter what. Right. It makes it harder to be a CEO that can actually give criticism. And you don't like to get bad news. You know, it's one of the things. But it's a happy way to live. For sure. I would predict that. But I can't know because we've only been talking for an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

He's a golden retriever, as people say.

[B]

Ah, the golden retriever is, you know, the cheerleader profile is sort of the golden retriever profile profile. The profiles that are, that can be the hardest one is the poet, which is high negative and low positive. Is low positive emotionality and high Negative emotionality. So the reason it's called a poet is because when I talked about ruminative sadness with which is one of the symptoms of clinical depression that involves a part of the brain called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, it makes you ruminate, right? You ruminate on sadness, but you also ruminate when you're falling in love on another person, which is why it's super active. Why the brain of somebody falling in love looks like somebody who's deeply clinically depressed because of the activity in that part of the brain.

[C]

No way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And it's also really creative. People have a lot of activity. That's why poets, they tend to be creative, romantic and depressed because the same part of the brain, right? And so, and so that's what the poetic. Now that's the big strength of the poet, the big weaknesses like high negative affect. The big strength is romance and creativity. And so what they need to do is to have really, really good hygiene in their lives for managing their high level of negative effect. That's why every poet I meet, I'm like time. You need a personal trainer. You need to get your, you need to eat more protein. You need to get your sleep hours on point. You need to actually optimize your caffeine consumption. There's like I have a whole set of protocols that actually do for people who have high negative affect.

[A]

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How many?

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We have like 10 or 12. We have so many.

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[A]

Can you be too happy?

[B]

No. No. And I've never, at least I've never met anybody who is actually. I've never met somebody who's actually too happy. I say, interesting. That's a question that some psychologists have answered to look at the the most successful people in life. So people who are most successful are the second happiest people. So if you have like five categories, super happy, happy, normal, kind of unhappy, miserable, that's called a likert scale of 5. Anyway, okay, 4 is happy, not super happy. Those are the people who make the most money and have the best careers. Right? And the reason is because the people at the very top, it's like the grasshopper and the ant. They're the grasshoppers. They're having a great time in college. They have all the friends and they're going to all the parties and they're not studying that much. And the second happiest people, they have a lot of good mood. So they're able to perform at a really high level. But they also can see threats better. They can see threats better than the happiest people actually can. So when it comes to success, the answer is yes. But when it comes to quality of life, the answer is don't.

[A]

So then I guess you have to ask yourself the question, what's more important?

[C]

Wait, sorry, I got a little lost there. So you're saying like the happiest people are not the most successful because when you're at the top, it's like, like.

[B]

It'S a party times part. Life's a big party.

[C]

Okay?

[B]

Life's a huge party.

[A]

He's saying the top of happiness.

[B]

The top of happiness.

[C]

The top of happiness.

[B]

The top category of self evaluated life satisfaction are not the people who make the most money and have the best careers.

[C]

Got it.

[B]

It's the second highest.

[C]

Okay. I want to be that guy.

[B]

Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, part of it is that. That is a good ambition, by the way, because the idea of having unmitigated joy is not a good ambition.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Because unmitigated joy is not. Doesn't have the. It's not being fully alive.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

It's not the most. I mean, it's just. Life requires difficulty.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

For you to actually be a fully alive human being. Now, I'm not casting aspersions on all the people because I'm just jealous, but I am. I'm like. I'm jealous about a lot of things. I'm jealous people have hair. I'm jealous of you right now. I'm thinking, look at that hair. It's beautiful. What's that?

[C]

I just got a hair transplant.

[B]

I've got.

[C]

I have, like, a comb over right now, but I got, like, these baby hairs coming in. Did I literally.

[B]

You were losing your hair.

[C]

I went to Turkey. I'm not even kidding.

[A]

You never know. You never know.

[B]

It looks phenomenal. The problem is I can't do that. Can you imagine if I did that? And it's like, I got a lot of people who know my work for a long time, and I suddenly show up with hair. It'd be like a complete object of derision. You're doing it right. You're just making. Just not going bald as opposed to. You know, I go to Turkey and I come back and people are like, that's not normal. You know, I don't think I trust Arthur anymore. You know, you just have it one day. But I will admit to, like, real jealousy. It looks just great. What do they take? Where? They take the hairs from the sides. I was gonna say they take it from your arms or something.

[C]

I can show you. Afterwards, I had, like. I was, like, all bloody around the side of my head. Yeah. It actually. I'm not gonna lie, it hurt, but it was one of those things where it's like. Yeah, it's painful, but I. I'm gonna look good eventually. So it works.

[A]

You'll see his full results. You'll have to see us again six months from now.

[B]

Yeah. Great. Yeah. I got a new book coming out on the meaning of life. Life.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

That's coming out on March 31st. So let's make a date.

[A]

No, seriously.

[B]

It's called the Meaning of Life. Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness that talks about how the brain is getting Screwed up by the misuse of technology and making it impossible find to find the meaning of life. And then the six things that people have to do to. To live like the old days, even in the new days, because you're not going to get rid of your phone. That they actually can find the meaning of life. So it's a solutions manual. It's a guidebook to actually finding life meaning. That's coming out March 31st. So we should have a conversation about that then. Most importantly, I get to see, you know, Matt's complete results book.

[A]

Sounds fantastic though, because I feel like there's like, there's so many aspects like that just speaks to. I feel like so many people are desiring in our age. We're like, how do we find some of those traditional values and elements of life but in this modern age. Because you can't. Can't go back like you said.

[B]

No, no. And to find why when the whole world is pushing you to how and what the whole world is pushing you to, you know, fritter away your time, distract yourself, work harder, achieve these things, get this device, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what it's doing is it's blocking this right hemisphere of your brain where mystery and meaning are processed.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And when you turn off that right hemisphere of the brain, it's interesting because now the whole. Everybody's talking about AI, Right. AI is great. I mean, AI is going to do all kinds of things, but it's an adjunct to the left side of your brain. Brain. If you use it to try to meet your. Your right brain needs, if you're trying to make it your therapist or your friend or your girlfriend, you're doomed, man. Because your brain knows it can fool you into thinking it's a real person for a minute, but your brain knows you're going to get more depressed and more anxious and more lonely because you're using a left brain solution for a right brain problem. So that's what this book is all about. How do you live differently? And in a few short months you can actually know the meaning of your life. But you gotta live like great granddad who never came home and said he had a boring job and a hard life, but he never came home and said, you know, I had a panic attack behind the mule today because it wasn't a thing.

[A]

That's so true.

[B]

Yeah. There's a reason I really liked the.

[C]

Way you put it when you were talking about the book you wrote with Oprah. Oprah, which seems. Seems similar. Seems like a similar. Some Similarities there between that book and this new book, which I'm really excited to read. But you were talking about how rather than, like, changing, it'd be stupid to try to change everything around you to fit your needs, rather than just, like, looking inward and saying, hey, how can I change myself to adapt to the environment I'm in? Can you speak more about that and maybe tell the story that you gave, like, an example about, like, a road and in, like, a car? I thought that was kind of cool.

[B]

Well, yeah. So, you know, I don't want to get a flat tire in my car, obviously. So I need to make tires that are never going to go flat. And the right material for that is probably cement. I should have cement tires, but, you know, I can't drive on a cement road with cement tires. Yeah, that would be catastrophe. So the obvious thing for me to do is to bulletproof myself with cement tires. But then I got to create a whole world that's got nothing but rubber roads, which is, of course, absurd. That doesn't make sense. You do it the other way, which is that you have cement roads, which are nice and cheap and really durable, and you have rubber tires on your car, which sometimes go flat. But you deal with that. And that's what you do, is you deal with the thing that you can deal with living in real life, saying, sometimes I'm going to get flats and I'm going to work on building a life where I have the durability and I have the emotional fortitude to deal with flat tires and then be smart about it, like, my tires are bald. Change the tires in advance and kind of take care of myself. Change the things in your life that you need to change, and don't try to change the outside world. And, you know, one of the biggest reasons that there's so much depression and anxiety today is because we're being told by, you know, baby boomer activists that are trying to conscript people your age into a culture war that that the reason that you're suffering and there's really high rates of depression anxiety is because the whole outside world is against you, and the whole outside world is screwed up. And that's just nothing more than a political play by people my age to activate you to our political purposes. It's like, I want you really, really mad and sad and angry and afraid.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I want you to be afraid and saying, I can't live a good life until the world looks different. And so I gotta vote for this guy or buy this product or follow this person on social media or read this newspaper or watch this channel. And I'm a victim. And so the world has to become a particular way. So I'm not a victim anymore anymore. That's completely dangerous and incorrect thinking. And it's a cynical ploy to activate your generation for different political agendas, right and left. By the way, it scared me.

[C]

I mean, with the, with the last election I was noticing on both sides, people basically saying, hey, it's the end of the world if, if our candidate doesn't get elected.

[B]

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, man. Means you're a bad citizen.

[C]

It's so, it's freaky because I'm like, I, I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. And even that like, like brought up this fear in me. Like, oh my gosh, like, you know, it's like, this is really important. I don't want the world to end. I don't want like. And it just, it almost like takes away all logic and reason and, and intellectual thinking about, hey, let's slow down, think about actually what the best foot forward is rather than just like jumping into fear.

[B]

So this amygdala activate activation is actually what's biologically happening when, when you have activists, politicians and media, they're trying to fire you up, they're trying to make you feel angry and afraid. Because the amygdala, when it's activated, it clears the decks, man. In terms of evolutionary biology, you want fear to erase everything. You hear a little snap of a twig behind you and you're walking across the Savannah 200,000 years ago. You don't want anybody to say, huh, I bet that's one of my friends coming up to say hi. You want to be like, run to climb a tree and ask questions later, later. And that's why we have this amygdala, this part of our, this little almond shaped things on either side of our brains in the limbic system that they activate, they'll turn on and like, if you see a car in your peripheral vision when you're in a crosswalk coming toward you, that will register as a, as a large predator. Because your, your brain can't say, that's a Mercedes. Your brain says, that's something big that's going to hurt me, kill me and eat me. That's a lion or something. That's what your brain is telling you. And in 74 milliseconds, your brain, your heart will be pounding and you'll be sweating and you'll have flipped off the driver and jumped out of the way way before you know what's going to happen. And your amygdala saved your life. So what happens is if you're a demagogic leader, somebody in the press or somebody in politics or somebody on social media or somebody who's just trying to make you mad on a college campus, they're trying to activate your amygdala so you'll act in panic. That's what they want you to do. Because then you're putty in their hands. Then they can use you. If they can wipe out love for somebody you disagree with, if they can wipe out negative emotion, positive emotions, if they can just activate that, they own you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's what they're trying to do. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, talks about that on your podcast. It was really good.

[C]

How do you manage that? Say if like any of those fear, you know, fight orf flight responses come up in a marriage, you know, like, like circling back to kind of like what we talked about before, you're meant, you were talking about anger and contempt and how, how. Which it surprised me. You said that anger is actually not a predictor of divorce. But contempt is.

[B]

Anger's no fun, but it's not a predictor of divorce. It's when you actually allow disgust to mix with anger, creating a complex emotion. Complex emotion. Basic emotions are singular. Complex emotions are mixes of different emotions. And so, you know, experts in, in, in the biology of emotion, we'll talk about, you know, there's like 43 different emotions with like cocktails of different emotions that we mix together. Right. And you know, you have fear plus joy, you know, what is that? You know, and that's going to be the roller coaster effect, you know, that kind of thing. So. But contempt is fear plus disgust. Disgust is your natural reaction using a part of the brain called the insula or the insular cortex that makes you feel disgust toward a pathogen. So you feel it naturally when something smells off some in the fridge, when something looks rotten, when something is dead. And the reason is because we're evolved to know where bacteria and germs come from. And something that's a carrier, a common carrier, bacteria and germs will make us feel disgusted. If you don't have, if you have natural antibiotics in your saliva, like the dog, then you're not going to be disgusted by licking the floor. But if you're a person, you're going to tell your kid, don't lick the floor. It's disgusting. And they'll learn that it's Disgusting, because it actually is more likely to make you sick than Fido. So that's kind of how all that whole thing. The same thing works when you make somebody disgusted about other people. So demagogic leaders, dictators like the. In Rwanda and the genocide in the 1990s, they had a word. The Hutus had a word for the Tutsis, which meant cockroaches. Why? Because they wanted to stimulate the insular cortex and the brains of these particular people so they would be capable of unspeakable savagery of barbarity. And you do that by stimulating this really kind of all encompassing negative emotionality. You turn them into a pathogen that might actually kill them. The Nazis referred to Jews as rats to try to stimulate the insular cortex. That's how, you know, press and politicians are actually talking about people with whom we disagree politically today.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

They say they're disgusting. When they say the word disgusting, what they're trying to do is they want the. They want the amygdala fired up for anger, and they want to mix it with the insular cortex activity, which is disgusting. That creates contempt, which is the worthlessness of another person. Okay. That's bad. And poisonous politics. It's fatal for a marriage. It's absolutely fatal for a marriage. When you express contempt, even if you don't feel it, the other person will absorb then the complex negative emotion of contempt from the other person, which is actually hatred. Yeah. So the person you love the most is actually expressing hatred toward you. Yeah, that's. That breaks up marriages. It really does. And that just means. And the way you avoid it is learning how to fight. You don't notice fight. I mean, couples that don't fight don't stay married because they don't have. There's no passion.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And. And some couples fight a lot, like me and Esther. I mean, like little kids or cats and dogs or. You know, it's been like that the whole. Because she's super high emotional salience. And. And me too. And so we're like. We're. We're very much alike in terms of character. And so it's like. It's daggers drawn a lot. And. But we get it. We know what's going on. Neither one of us thinks this is the end of the world. And we're always apologizing. There's constant apologies going on. Anything like. It's like that. It's a life of apologies, to be sure. The problem is when you don't realize that you're expressing mutual contempt for each other. Absorbing hatred. When you feel love, that extinguishes the love in a marriage, and that requires that you fight in a different way and you understand your own emotions.

[C]

So being married 30, 34 years, you guys. You guys still fight. How do you fight in a way. Way to where contempt doesn't creep in?

[B]

Well, sometimes it does, but then you have to recognize it and apologize. It's just like it's a life of, Of. Of recognizing your own frailty.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, it's like this is, you know, I'm sorry, and we're better, you know, bend. The, you know, fights would go on for a couple of days. Back in the old days, it was like, you know, the Cold War, but, you know, and now it's just like a couple of hours or sometimes. Usually a couple of minutes is kind of how it goes on. It's like, yeah, I'm sorry I reacted that way. I was thinking this and I, I missed. I. I didn't. I misperceived the thing that you said.

[C]

Are you both pretty good about not. Not like, trying to, like, win the argument?

[B]

Right?

[C]

Because if someone wins, there's no winning.

[B]

Right. Yeah. I mean, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. That's from how to Win Friends and Influence People by the Carnegie.

[C]

Wait, say that again. I love that.

[B]

A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Wow. If you win an argument, you lost. Yeah. And if you had an argument in your marriage, you just weakened your marriage. Yeah. Is the whole point you don't try to win. You do try to persuade. But the whole point is that, you know, persuasion is a win win because it's like, huh, yeah, you're right. We did need that couch. Right. Or something like that. Right. Because that's, you know, it's a common thing. It's like I used to come in and, you know, years ago, and I'd come home and I'd be like. Every day I'd be like, what's that? That, you know, I'd come home, it's furniture. She'd say. It's like. And, and. And I didn't even know because, you know, I'm a man. And so I would be living on lawn furniture, and it would be an unheated garage sitting on lawn furniture because, you know, and. And we do need stuff. But, but the whole point is that, that you. You learn about this with each other, and you, you learn to, To. To persuade each other in important ways.

[C]

And Abby, it's, It's funny because Like, I. I would say probably Abby spends more often than I do, but when I spend, I probably buy bigger budget items. Like, one example of this is recently I built a half pipe in her backyard. And she's like, how much is this half pipe?

[B]

Are you a skateboarder?

[A]

Oh, what a great question.

[C]

So I grew up.

[B]

I'm actually creating a problem.

[C]

No, I grew up. So I grew up skateboarding. I wanted to be. I wanted to, like, go pro, but, like, obviously that never worked out, but, you know, it's been a dream. I wanted to be a pro skateboarder when I was like, 10.

[B]

That's so cool.

[C]

Yeah, but I mean, it's. What is cool now, though, is because of, like, the. The platform we have and stuff. I have friends that are pro skateboarders, and I've invited them to come skate my half pipe with me, and I think. I think it'll be a freaking blast. So.

[B]

That's right. And you're like, this is my backyard. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, there's a couple things I'm curious about.

[B]

You're like, I was like, I'm married to a 14 year old. I have a couple of.

[A]

You know, the last person that the guy dropping off all the lumber for this was like, yeah. The last person I delivered this to is a professional skateboarder. I was like, Matt, we've been together almost a decade. I've seen him skateboard handful of times.

[B]

Yeah, I get it.

[A]

It'll be great. It'll be great. Our boys will love it.

[B]

Your boys probably will love it. And, you know, you can always get rid of the hat fight.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, once the next thing enters your head, you know, I know.

[A]

That's the thing.

[C]

Yeah. Maybe it costs $5,000, but, you know. Yeah, just get rid of the half.

[A]

You approach the biggest questions people ask themselves and the biggest pursuits you have in your life. The meaning of life. How do I find happiness? Like, like all these things, but in such a conversational way that also has all this research into it. Like, it's. I feel like I just like, I don't re. Listen to our podcast. This is one I will be re listening to. And I'm like, I need to take notes and, like, really absorb this because there is just so much wisdom packed into, like, such a short amount of time. Really?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And I have so many takeaways from this that are very tangible for me.

[B]

Well, thank you. And you two are a case study in doing so many things right. And that's really important. You're super curious. You love each other. You're building a life together. You're trying to be an example to other people. It's just very beautiful to see. And there's wonderful times ahead that you're gonna share with other people as well. I'm really privileged to be a small part of your journey today. Thank you.

[C]

That's so, so kind.

[B]

Thanks.

[C]

Well, Dr. Arkansas Brooks, thank you so much, guys. Follow him on Instagram, tick tock, YouTube, all the socials. Check out the new book coming out in March.

[B]

March 31st.

[C]

Yes, March 31st. So again, thank you so much. Pre order now and take the quiz.

[A]

I want to take it, too.

[B]

Yeah, the happiness scale. That'[e-mail]. that's, that'll, that'll be fun. Sweet.

[A]

Okay, we'll let you know.

[B]

Thanks a lot.

[C]

Thank you.