Happiness Hacks That Actually Work (And What You’re Getting Wrong) with the World’s Leading Happiness Expert: Arthur Brooks : 1219

Being happy is hard. One of the things that I recommend is having a reverse bucket list. Biggest mistake young people listening to us make is thinking they have good and bad feelings. There's no such thing as bad feelings. People who become business leaders, they're not normal. You get more dopamine when you think about something you want to go get than when you actually get the thing your suffering is unbelievably sacred. Pain elimination is a huge mistake.

When I hear a teenager say, I want to be an influencer, it's about the same as saying, I want to be a porn star. What's the recipe for being a happy striver? You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. This is a live episode recorded here at my studios in Austin, Texas. And our guest today is a world leader in happiness. I'm a professor of happiness and neuroscience and business and a bunch of other things. He is going to teach us today what happiness is and what it isn't and what you can do to be happier. And this is a deeply personal episode for me because, you know, in my 20s, I thought making money would make me happy. I was very convinced. So I made $6 million when I was 26. Lost him when I was 28. And I was sitting there on $6 million. I looked at a friend and said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And I tried the fame thing in entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23. Didn't make me happy. Tried getting married in my 20s briefly. Didn't make me happy. I'm like, damn, being happy is hard. In fact, it's really hard. So what would happen if you just studied it and then we got to learn from someone who spent decades looking at this, especially for high performers. And you might have heard of the book co authored with Oprah called build the life you want. Well, their co author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks is here in the studio. Arthur, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave. Longtime follower, first time guest.

Wow. Well, it's my fault that you're. That this is your first time on, because I've been a fan of your work forever.

Thanks. Likewise.

Finally we get to interview you.

Likewise.

This is so fun.

It's kind of an interesting time where academics and practitioners of human performance actually are regularly meeting each other.

Yeah.

A few decades ago would have been impossible, know, writing for academic journals. You would never actually meet the people that are on the ground starting the companies and trying to upgrade the human person. But now we get to work together.

Yeah. It's one of the reasons that I started, like, the biohacking word and in the movement was I wanted to bring in the neuroscientists and the Navy Seals and the bodybuilders, the longevity guys. Like, let's all sit down and, like, swap notes.

Exactly.

And Andrew Huberman was on before he had a podcast. Peter Attia before he had a podcast. So we've been like, finding these interesting people and saying, I don't care if you practice, if you're a high performer who's done something, or if you're an academic. Like, how do we mix and match?

Yeah. And now at this point, people like Huberman or me were fundamentally, we're academics, but at the same time, we're trying to reach out in the spirit of public education so we can share these big ideas with. With people in ordinary life. Now, Huberman and me too, we specialize in strivers. We specialize in the people that are going to watch and listen to this program because they want the best possible life that they can build, and they want their life to extend as long as they can so they can have more adventures. And the interesting thing about the work that I'm trying to do is that you're the expert in how to live a long time. I'm an expert in how to. Why to live a long time. And those are the two questions you really need to answer if you're going to have the best life.

In the the arc of my books, it was how do you get your energy back? That was the bullet I won. And then how do you make your.

Brain work all the way?

Right, next one. And then. Okay, now that you like your life, I surveyed about 400 guests on the show to come up with some common elements that was called game changers.

Sort of like, let's do it.

And then how do I have a lot more, which was longevity and that it's been nuances. And the next one coming up is called heavily meditated.

Oh, I can't wait. When's it coming out?

It comes out in Q1, I think in May. End of April.

May of 25.

Yeah.

Nice. Can't wait.

I'll send you a copy. You have a book coming up as well, right?

The next book's coming out in 2026, in the first quarter of 2026, called the meaning of your life and how to find it before it's too late.

That's a cool name. Why don't you come back on the show when that happens?

I will do that today.

I want to ask you Some questions that maybe you haven't heard before.

Oh, boy. I bet. I bet you will.

I want to make like a seventh grade joke now, and I'm not going to. So you're a classical musician?

Yeah, I was.

You were. And you were trained in that. What's the role of music in happiness and all the rest of the work you do.

So music is interesting because what it does is it connects you to who you are and the emotions that you're experiencing more intensely. So music doesn't make you happier per se. Music can help you understand your emotions and connect you to your limbic system in a very. In a way that's that. That. That goes way beyond what your prefrontal cortex can. Can facilitate on its own. So you find, for example, that if you're sad, you want to listen to sad music. You have a bad breakup, you listen to sad songs. The reason is because that helps you understand the activity that's. That's occurring in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your limbic system. That music will make you put into perspective what's happening below your level of consciousness, and you'll be able to recover more quickly.

Wow. I'm remembering back in high school, I broke up with a girl, or probably she broke up with me. And I called the radio station, by the way, if you're not my age, that's how you used to just go to Spotify and look up the song you had to call.

What is this radio station of which you speak?

Exactly? And I'm like, can you play that Phil Collins song says, I don't care anymore. I don't know its name all over the place.

I don't care anymore. That's what was going on. Yeah, it was going on. You were able to put in perspective these feelings that you're having now. All of our emotions produced in the limbic system of the brain, they're produced in response to signals that we're detecting, our environment. And some of them are, Are. Are. Are signals of threat, some of opportunity. Negative emotions basically say there's something out there that you don't want because bad for you. Sadness says you're being separated from something or someone that you like or love. And. And you should be averse to that. And so the sadness is really, really uncomfortable. Supposed to be, because if you didn't have any sadness, you'd be friendless, fired, alone. You'd be a hermit. A. And there are all kinds of things that would make it hard for you to thrive and survive. So that's what sadness is a defense against aloneness is the way that this works. But you have to get over the grief. And so one of the ways you get over the grief is metacognitively is understanding the nature of the emotion, putting into perspective. And sad music helps you do that. Happy music actually helps you understand the nature of the joy that you're feeling. That's what happy music is. An enhancement for our brain processes below our level of consciousness.

I'm hearing so much of the language of biohacking and then some in. In this world is okay, your body's taking signals from the environment all the time and vibration, which is music and sound.

Right.

It's a signal. Right. Of course it's going to do something to you. And you might not be consciously aware of what it does, or in my case, maybe I was a little bit consciously aware. But when you study it the way you have. Oh, and then you have guys like Stephen Porges, the follower of Poly bagel theory, is a friend who's been on the show a couple times. He's carefully constructing music to radically shift brain states, even out of trauma states. And Rick Rubin's been on the show talking actually also in a similar way to you about the role of music and art in creating emotion. It's supposed to make you feel, not think.

Right.

How do you explain the difference between feeling and thinking to someone who's 20 years old?

Yeah, so I usually try. I mean you've. I've heard you talk about this before too. The theory of the triune brain.

Yeah.

So the triune brain is organized along evolutionary lines. The oldest part of the brain is what we would call the detection system or the reptilian brain. It's mostly the brainstem and the cerebellum, the stuff in the back of your head that detects things that are going on around you way below your level of consciousness. And a snake and lizard can do it as well. That's all about threats and opportunities.

So it works for politicians?

Yeah, all of us, even them. The second level is newer, evolved more than between 2 and 40 million years ago. That's the limbic system. And the detections that you get of threats and opportunities go to the limbic system where they're translated into emotions. That's what emotions are made. Now the biggest mistake young people listening to us make is thinking they have good and bad feelings. There's no such thing as bad feelings. There's positive and negative emotions, which are data telling you what's going on around you. And then that data are sent to the third system, the newest system, the prefrontal cortex, the C suite of your brain, which is about 250,000 years old. And there you take those emotions and say, okay, what does that mean? What happened? What should I do now? That's if things are going right. Reactive people don't make that third link. So when I'm talking to young people, I say, if you want to have managerial control over your life, you have to have managerial control over your feelings. And the way to do that is putting space between what you feel and what you decide to do. And that's a whole bunch of metacognitive techniques like vipassana, meditation and journaling and prayer of petition and all of these different things that humans have developed to put as much space as possible. By the way, counting to 10 when you're angry before you answer is a metacognitive technique. Yeah. And all that is doing is letting the signals have a chance to catch up. So your prefrontal cortex can say, oh, Dave is feeling a little angry right now. Wonder what just happened? How does Dave choose to act according to the stimulus? And you stop feeling like your emotions are inevitably going to affect your actions, and you stop seeing them as good or bad when you can do this. That's how I talk to young people about it, including my kids. And sometimes they listen. Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's go there. Why are kids less likely to listen to their parents?

One of the reasons is that the parents don't have as much credibility as they should because they've seen not just the good wise things, they've also seen the foibles and problems and. And their complete reactivity as well. So, you know, my students never actually see me reacting to my feelings in an unproductive way. But my adult children have. They've seen me lose my temper. They've seen me say things I shouldn't about other people. They've seen me in a. In a profoundly human state.

Wow.

A limbic state. And the result of that is that it shakes their confidence and my ability to be wise all the time.

I've also read some things that say that somewhere around 7 years old, kids feel like you're not infallible.

Right.

And then they feel like you deceived them into believing you were infallible because they believed that even though you didn't tell them you were infallible.

Right.

How much of that sort of. You betrayed me by tricking me that you couldn't make a mistake.

The biggest problem with that is actually the Dislocation between what you say and what they see. So a lot of people ask me, how do I. Here's a classic case. Religious people will ask me, how do I raise my kids? So they will stay in the faith. So religious Jews will ask me this. I'm a Catholic. A lot of my Catholic friends will ask me this. I want my kids to practice the faith. What do I do? I said, it does not matter what you say. All that matters is what they see. So I'll give you an example. This is especially true for boys. Boys are looking at their dads all the time, and their father is the physically most imposing person that they've ever seen. I thought my dad was so strong he could lift the corner of the house. He was a math professor. He could not. And my dad was a proud man. And he never would have bowed the knee to any other person. But my dad was on his knees on Sunday in front of a bigger power. Some majesty that I couldn't quite understand. And so I said, huh, that's what it means. To be a big strong man is to take. Is to bow the knee to no other man. But. But to bow before the Lord. That's what it meant to me. And so the result of that was I always had that picture. I had that image in my mind. Now, the problem comes if my dad does one thing and says another. So my dad says, go to church, but he doesn't. He says, be kind to others, but he's not.

Right.

If he says, don't be a drunk, but he is. That's where the problems really come in. And people lose a lot of respect and confidence in their parents.

One of the biggest. We'll call it parenting hacks, although not everything's a hack that I found is if I really want my kids to hear something, I can go to any of my friends who they also talk to and say, you mind putting a good word in?

Yeah.

And then when they hear it from someone besides me.

Right.

It's like manna from heaven.

Right.

But it's almost like it's invisible.

Yeah. And it must be like that for your kids because your kids. It must be weird being Dave Asprey's kid, by the way.

I. I think it is. And I love my kids. I think they're profoundly normal.

Yeah, but do their friends know who you are?

I think a few of them have Googled me, but I don't think it's a big deal. I've asked them about it. They said, yeah, most people don't really Pay attention to it.

Well, most of your audience is actually strivers who are a little older than your kids, of course, people in their 20s and 30s. 30s a little older.

Yeah, yeah. 24 to, to 54 is where most of it.

But there is, there are pretty interesting studies on the burden of being the child of a highly accomplished individual. That turns out to be tricky because there are really two things that you want. You want especially for young males. Young males, what they want most in life is the pride of their father and the admiration of their partner. Those are the two things they really, really want. I want my dad to be proud of me. I want my wife to admire me. That's what. And that's evolved, of course. That's about, that's like you want your dad to say, that's my boy, he's better than me. Because your son is the only man you've ever met that you want to be superior to you. If you're a good man and you want your partner to say, that is an incredibly big gazelle that you just dragged in that's going to feed our family for like three weeks. You're so strong. We're evolved to want that because that's, you know, we're raised. Homo sapiens is a tropical creature built to live in kin based hierarchies. And some of that we can get away from. We can live in cold climates, but we're not going to get away from kin based hierarchies. And that means that we're going to be looking for these particular signals. So men and women want certain things primevally notwithstanding all these, you know, the, how we talk about society today and the way that we've changed in these ways that we haven't. We haven't. So the result is, it's tricky if you're, you know, you're a kid because you know, you want, you want your dad to honestly be proud of you in a way where you say, wow, I couldn't have done that. There's nothing that feels better for a child than, than your parents saying, you're doing this thing I could never do.

Isn't pride one of the seven deadly sins?

It is. It's funny because pride is, pride is weird because when we talk about pride and you know it's really comes from Dante, right?

Yeah.

This comes from the dawn from Dante's Inferno. And the, the deadliest of the deadly sins is the bottom of Mount Purgatory where he's going down with Virgil for sin, worse sin, worse sin at the very Bottom, the pit of hell, he finds Satan. And Satan is not in a pool of fire with brimstones, Satan is frozen up to his waist in a lake of ice, writhing in pain and keeping the ice frozen, and thus himself immobile by the flapping fruitlessly of his wings to escape. And that represents pride. You know, his pride is he's only thinking about himself and he's only trying to escape, and he's making the ice worse and freezing himself, and he doesn't even notice that Dante and Virgil are looking at him. And that's kind of what it is. And so that's really what it is. It's too much attention to yourself. So being proud of your child doesn't count.

See, this is an important lesson. I think it shapes how people become strivers later in life.

Yeah.

For a long time, I would just tell my kids, I'm grateful, I'm happy, I'm impressed. And I wouldn't say proud, because it has a lot of negative connotations. And the last few years, talking with some parenting experts, I'm like, you know, I am proud of my kids, but I'm not proud because of my ego. I'm just like. I'm just so profoundly impressed with what they're doing. I'm happy to say it because it is what I feel, but it's not like, look what I did. It's like, look what you did.

The key thing is going to be, so your kids are a little younger than mine. Your kids are 15 and 17. Yeah, yeah, my kids are 21, 24, and 26. And they're now doing things I couldn't do. That's so cool. And that's what you got to focus on. So I have, you know, one son who's a data scientist, and he's doing large language models and then using advanced statistical techniques to actually comb through data in companies to find commonalities about job function and contracts and find ways to streamline the corporation so we can do new things we never know we could do before.

You mean like fire half the McKinsey consultants?

No. Maybe. I don't know. But it's amazing. It's actually. So the key thing with HEM is he doesn't need me to say, I'm proud of your son.

Yeah.

He needs me to be authentically amazed, which I am. So I have a son who is a sniper, you know, who is a sniper in the Marine Corps. He's a special operator and got sniper in the Marine Corps. And now he's. He's in civilian Life managing a construction company. He's 24, married as a kid, and last week, I went to his house. He bought his first house at 24. That's impressive.

It is, especially.

Yeah, yeah. And in Northern Virginia, which is expensive. I was at his house, and he's building a porch on his. On his house. I can't build porch. I mean, I can't build a porch. I wish I could build a porch.

I can. It just falls down in a year, but it's amazing. And.

And I was looking at it, I said, carlos, how did you know how to do this? And he said, well, you know, I work for a construction company, dad. You know, and I watched the trades do it all day, and. And I watched four YouTube videos on it, and I know how to do it, and I was authentically amazed. And the thing. I just saw this. The look on his face when he saw that his dad was amazed because he's doing something well that I could never do.

Wow.

And so that's the key if you. If you really want to build your kids up, don't. Don't give them some line. I'm proud of you, son, for being such a hard worker. No. Find what they're incredibly good at and admire it with authentic amazement, and they'll glow.

There's admiration and amazement versus pride. Yeah, that's. That's some powerful stuff. If you could go back to yourself when you were 20.

Yeah.

Give yourself one single piece of advice. Given all the stuff you know now, what would you say?

I would have developed my intellectual life better. More. And part of the reason is because I was a classical musician, all I wanted to do was to be the world's greatest French horn player, which is a pretty esoteric thing. I mean, only in America, right?

Lots of. Lots of big money in that.

Yeah. Yeah. When I was 20, I was not going to the dentist because I didn't have healthcare coverage and I needed to go to the dentist, but I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player. What I didn't realize is that what I wanted was not to be the world's greatest French horn player. What I wanted to do was to learn all about the world and achieve some distinction on the basis of doing something that was generative for the rest of the world. I didn't actually know what I wanted to do. I would have gone back and said, look, that your. Your aperture is too small, man. It's like this little thing about playing the Mozart 4th horn concerto better than any other French horn player in the World that's too little. You need to open that up. You need to learn more things. You need to see the world in all of its majesty. And it took me a long time to figure that out. I didn't wind up going to college until I was in my late 20s. Wow. And. And then I started taking classes and things I didn't know I was interested in. And. And. And my mind was completely blown.

I've come across quite a few studies showing that, you know, breathing affects the nervous system, but specifically playing instruments, brass instruments or wood instruments, the ones you have to regulate your breathing through. Do you think you were regulating your nervous system unconsciously by being so into the French horn?

No doubt. I have no doubt that I was, but. And it's so much that you learn. At some point, I'll write a book called how to Play the French Horn that's not actually not about how to play the French horn. Because everything I learned, I learned about life. I learned about success. I learned about how to regulate myself as a person. Came from becoming a French horn player, from. From the physiology of it just to the discipline that comes with it, where it's again and again and do it again and do it again, slow it down, listen to your tapes, memorize the beginning and the ending when you're going to be most nervous. I mean, this is how I. I mean, I do 150 public speeches a year now on top of my teaching at the university. And, and I, I. When I'm working out a new talk, I work it out with the same mastery that I learned when I was learning how to play the French horn. Plus, I can actually regulate my breath. So no matter how nervous I am in front of whatever audience it is, I know I'm going to be able to perform.

Do you still get nervous and going from an audience?

Not exactly. Not exactly. I was more nervous as a French horn player. I had more stage fright as a French horn player. You know, everything in life is easy when you're not holding a horn.

I wouldn't know.

Yeah, I know. I. Do you. Do you get nervous?

Not in the slightest.

Not at all. Yeah. And part of it is because you actually have mastery over. Over the machine, right?

Yeah, I.

That's not an emotional thing. That's a. That's. That's biological as much as anything else.

It's biological. And I had Asperger's syndrome when I was younger, and when I was about 30, I'm like, oh, man, there's a signal. And all that noise below the neck I guess I'll have to figure out.

What to do with it.

So between neurofeedback from my leadership neurofeedback company, six months of looking at my brain waves and learning how to manipulate them and then learning how to change my heart rate variability, if I was feeling nervous before I went on stage, I would just change my state. And I do this before I go out. And I remember the first time I was going out on Tony Robbins stage. It was 15,000 people in the stadium, which was the biggest audience I'd spoken to at the time. So I. I go out there and they're supposed to play an intro reel for me, and somebody didn't do it. So all of a sudden they're like, here you go. I'm like, okay.

I'm.

Good luck to you.

This is great. I think if I'd have had my aura ring back then, my heart rate wouldn't have even changed. Okay.

Yes.

And. And I was afterwards going like, I just genuinely want to be doing this.

Yeah. Yeah.

It did take me a long time to get there. My first talk in my early 20s about, you know, the Web 1.0 in the very beginnings of the browser. I don't remember what I said. I was terrified. But it's one of those things where it's just my body doing stupid shit. I think it's just advanced metacognition with real time feedback. After a while you just get like, okay, it is what it is.

When you come to understand that psychology is biology, it's incredibly empowering. Now, of course, you have to learn more because you have to learn how to self regulate the biology and some of the things you can't. I mean, if you're throwing up and you have the flu, well, good luck to you. Don't do the gig is what it comes down to. But I think back to before. I knew a lot of what I know now. I mean, I fell off the stage during a speech one time at Carnegie hall when I was 22. And it's because I wasn't a public speaker. I was a French horn player and I was speaking to the audience and my knees were knocking together. I mean, I was playing this incredibly hard repertoire as a French horn player relatively effortlessly. But I had to talk to the audience and that's what freaked me out. Wow. And I wasn't paying attention. I got too close to the edge and I fell six feet off the front of the stage into the audience. It was terrible. It was probably the worst night of my career at that point. It got worse after that.

You didn't just turn into a stage dive and act like you were cool.

Well, actually, that's. It's interesting you say that because that's very adroit of you. Because I remember as I was falling, thinking, because time slows down. There's a whole lot of neuroscience about why time feels like it slows down. Your life flashing before your eyes kind of. And I thought, okay, how am I going to make this not look stupid? And, you know, I hit the ground, everybody gasps, and I jump up and say, I'm okay, folks. I was not okay. I mean, my. My instrument is all wrecked. My elbow is swelling up. I mean, it was not great.

I've had quite a few friends over the years who do get a lot of stage fright.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'll teach them some of the breathing things and whatnot. I can teach them how to upregulate energy production so you have enough energy to overcome the stress. And it. After that, take a beta blocker.

Yeah, no, a beta blocker. The first generation beta blockers like Inderal and. Yeah. Low pressure and all that. Those are incredibly effective.

Yeah.

Incredibly effective for lowering the physical. What it does is just. It's. It slices through the. The epinephrine boost that you're getting. Yeah.

So your adrenaline can't take any action on your body. So your body says you're gonna die.

Yeah.

But the parts of your body that receive the I'm gonna die hormone, they don't hear it. So then you don't get the physiological effects. Then you don't snap out of your prefrontal cortex.

Right.

And you're still in charge. I've never had to use it, but I've seen it radically change some people's lives.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I actually use beta blockers occasionally as a musician, but I've never done it as a public speaker. Part of the reason is I want all the energy and I'm not debilitated by the nerves.

Yeah.

So.

And I've heard the same thing. More musicians use it than speakers. Because if you're on stage and your adrenaline's flat and you get a hostile question, you can't rise up the way you need to.

That's right. That becomes a problem. And when you're playing the violin of the French horn, of the oboe or something, you don't want a dry mouth, and you certainly don't want to be shaking. Oh, God. I mean, that'll just ruin the physical domination you have with your fine motorcycle.

Right.

Because you're trying to hold your diaphragm.

Yeah, that would be totally.

I mean, what'll happen for most people? The only reason that most people would need a beta blocker for speaking is the first 90 seconds. Yeah, but you can actually work through that without the drugs for most people. And the way to do that is by memorizing your first 90 seconds.

Oh, that's smart.

Yeah, just memorize exactly what you're going to say and don't, you know, don't get up there with all the throat clearing and wasting time and I'm so grateful to be here and calling out all your friends. You're just losing the audience when you're doing that. Just have it right out of the can and if you do that, then boom, you're done. You wouldn't be nervous, but after two minutes anyway.

What if there was something you could add to your water to make you perform better, have more energy and protect your cells from damage? Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and the only one that can get deep inside your cells, mitochondria and even your DNA. It fuels energy production, crushes oxidative stress and supports sharper brain function. Hydrogen's a gas, so you can't take it as a pill. So you either have to bridge, breathe it in or infuse it into your water. But your tap bottled or filtered water doesn't have it. That's why I use the Echo Flask. Echo Flask is a hydrogen generator that uses advanced electrolysis and a proprietary proton exchange membrane to infuse your water with pure hydrogen. No chemicals, no ph change, just therapeutic science backed hydrogen. I've noticed more energy, faster recovery, less inflammation and mental clarity that lasts all day. Go to echo.comdave and use code DAVE10 for 10% off your Echo flask. You'll feel the difference in days. Right now your body might be wasting energy on stress instead of healing. That's why your gut feels off, your brain feels dull, and your immune system keeps letting you down. What if you could switch your healing state back on without meds, stimulants or guesswork? Vibrant Blue Oil's parasympathetic essential oil blend is a powerful, non invasive way to activate your nervous system and shift your body into healing mode just through scent. A drop behind your ears can help switch off your stress response, calm inflammation and support digestion, detox and immune function. And it can even help clear up your stubborn brain fog. It's natural, easy to use, and thousands of happy customers already love it. And right now the Human Upgrade podcast. Listeners can grab a full size bottle for over 50% off at vibrantblue oils.com Dave that's vibrantbluels.com Dave don't wait to start feeling like yourself again.

You ever chat with Lieutenant Colonel Grossman?

I haven't.

He's a guy who wrote on combat and on killing.

Oh yeah.

And studied the neurophysiology of first responders, which is exactly what we're talking about here. One of the most fascinating interviews I've done. And he says, well, here's what happens if you're on a SWAT team. Here's what happens if you're a fireman going into the World Trade Centers or something. Right. And he explains how you drop out of your conscious thinking into your training.

Right.

And what you just said there will memorize it. You're going to drop out of your conscious thinking. You're going to do what you memorized. The stress gets done. And then you go into, you run.

The tape and so that introductory tape that freaked you out or could have freaked you out before that Tony Robbins stage that you had, you run your own introductory tape.

I normally do, but they didn't run it.

No, but my point is it's in your head. The first 90 seconds of your talk is your introductory.

I don't even go onto the stage.

Yeah.

I just stand back there and at the end, please welcome Dave. As I come out and I'm just to go.

Yeah, but for people who are less, who are less experienced speakers, make sure you got your bump tape and then. And your. In your mind and you just run that when you get out on stage. That is, it comes outta your mood so good. Yeah.

And I did for years. I've done a lot of speaker training because I gave keynotes for public companies before I became a biohacker. So I was well trained and I used to go through and every slide there's exactly beat points, you know that just that one day I'm like, I know the content so well that I am fully capable of not knowing what I'm going to say going on stage and doing a standing ovation. I still know what I'm going to say on stage because I'm good at what I do. But I, if it was a pinch hit, I know it's in there. And, and I developed this deep trust that I already know and that's what creates the piece.

And, and you got that for reps. And that's. There's actually no substitute for reps. Yeah. So one of the things, yeah, it really helped when I was trying to actually get much better public speaking. I took an engagement with a company and I was giving a relatively technical presentation and they sent me out to the client, said, you want to do some of these things for a thousand dollars? A thousand dollars a speech plus a coach class ticket. I took 50.

Wow.

I took 50 in a year and less than a year. And I was going to, you know, I was going to Duluth, I was going to Albuquerque. I was going to these places, these run outs. But I got reps and reps and reps. And I learned a lot. I mean I learned a lot about public speaking. So for example, you know, and so do I. But most people when they're starting out don't that you can't keep people's attention neurocognitively for more than six or seven minutes. Especially if you're trying to build toward a particular point. You gotta let em off the bike for 90 to 120 seconds every six or seven minutes. And so that's why you have everything modularized in a talk that you're giving. And every six or seven minutes you stop and you have a pretext, you tell a joke, you say, I just saw this study. It's not related, but it's blowing my mind, I gotta share it. Or let me tell you something about one of my kids. And that's 90 to 120 seconds. And you clear their palate a little bit and then they get back on the bike. And that's one of the things that you learn. But you only get that from reps.

I think you're right. And there's probably a way of getting it from fewer reps by increasing neuroplasticity. So you might want to microdose while.

You do your reps. As long as.

You don't over microdose.

Yeah, I know, I've done that. Make sure you know what you're doing.

There's the Austin microdose where people say, I'm like, no, you took a quarter dose. That's was not a microdose. You're, you're at a party.

That's good. You're actually tripping.

Yeah. If you can feel the microdose. It wasn't a microdose, but so, so the 10,000 hour rule, you can probably bend it as long as you increase blood flow and neuroplasticity.

Yeah, yeah. Is in the wrong hands, that could be a problem. The one, the one nice thing is that, is that mastery through reps always works.

It does. And it's good if the reps are with good form. And for me, I realized I sucked at public speaking after I gave my first talk to a thousand people, and I was maybe 24, so I started teaching, and I ran the web and Internet engineering program at the University of California, Santa Cruz for about five years. So I taught three or four nights a week for three hours. And you. You can't have stage fright if you've got that number of hours in front of 50 people. I know. Especially when they're all better educated than you. So that. That solved it for me. And if I had not done that, I wouldn't have learned how to learn, because I had to learn my materials to teach while I was busy.

Right.

And then I had to learn how to took. Take what I learned and do it. And people, how can you explain all these medical. It's because I had to learn how to turbo learn and translate and explain over and over and over.

Yeah. And you're doing it when you were young too, right?

Yeah.

Which is unusual because that's much easier to do when you have high levels of crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to synthesize a lot of information quickly and see patterns. That usually happens after 40. That's when your brain is ideally suited toward it. And it's actually highest in your 50s, 60s, and 70s. Your crystallized intelligence. Yeah. No, it's unbelievable. It's. It's. I didn't believe it until I started experiencing it. I'm a much better teacher than I was when I was 30. Much better. I can lecture now on topics that are pretty new to me, using pretty rich metaphor. And the reason for that is because I have higher levels of crystallized intelligence, which is to say I know a lot more stuff. I can recognize patterns, I can put things, ideas together into a synthesis. That's hard when you're 30 or 35.

Not if you had Asperger's.

One of the gifts.

If you had autism or Asperger's, it means your brain was operating with much less power than normal brains. So it had to force the most efficient algorithms for pattern direction. And it means that your nervous system was all staticky because you couldn't really get good sensory input. But if you restore power and then clean up the nervous system, you still have efficient algorithms. And that's why sometimes I can just see things, because I suffered a lot. You do not want to have any of that stuff. But the gift of it is pattern recognition.

Yeah. I mean, that's so people A lot of this new science, I'm sure you know it better than I do because I had, actually haven't, I'm not on the spectrum at all. But overdeveloped left hemisphere of the brain and a weaker corpus callosum. So there's less, there's less communication between the right and left hemispheres. And so the master hemisphere is the right asking all the questions. The left hemisphere is the analysis. That's the emissary. And the emissary is in charge. And you're not getting signals going back and forth between the two halves. And that's the problem is that, is that comport with your experience.

Well, there isn't a smaller corpus callosum in most autism that I've seen. But my mother actually had her corpus callosum se severed.

That's crazy.

By Stanford, back in the day to help with epilepsy. And it was, it was quite interesting. The first year after that, you know, she would answer the phone with her stomach. For some reason it wasn't fully severed, but I don't think it did good things for her.

Yeah, those were not successful procedures, by and large. No. Yeah.

And what I, what I've seen in bringing people through 40 years of Zen is we're doing Q EEG brain maps. So we're comparing their brains to a set of average brains and we can compare them to other high performing brains. And if they're not communicating between the hemispheres, it's not just like the left isn't talking to the right, it's that this one little area isn't talking to this other area.

Right.

Or it's talking at delta, but it's not talking at beta. So it's almost like there's a concert, Right. That's playing differently in each person's brain. And when you see hot or cold areas of connectivity and you just show the brain that it'll radically shift that. And when you're done and you look at their cue, there's no asymmetry between not just the left and right, but between the front right, the back left or the front right and the back right. And for me, I did not have this brain. I, I, I built it. It was pretty scrambled when I started.

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. And the knowledge was incredibly helpful.

Yeah, most people don't have it actually. I had a lot of fear motivation around that one because I'm like, I wanted to be a cto, I was a cto, at least type of thing. And like I wouldn't hire myself because My brain is just trash. Like, it's not working. And one of Daniel Amen's psychiatrists said, you know, when you saw my brain scan, when I was going to Wharton, he's like, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen.

Wow.

I think a lot of business leaders have camouflage. Yeah, because I had a. I was running technology strategic planning for a publicly traded tech company for Exodus Communications. So, you know, I got to attend board meetings before I was 30. Couldn't speak, but I could listen to. And, like, I'm doing all this badass stuff, but inside I'm like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I. I can't remember anything. And just profound tiredness. How common do you think that is amongst executives today?

A lot. It actually does a lot. I mean, it's people who become business leaders and particularly highly complicated sectors. They're not normal. How should I put it? They're not normal people. Not just that they have extraordinary ability, which many do. They have high cognitive ability, et cetera. Most people don't want to do that. Most people actually don't want to be a striver, per se. And there's a good reason for that. To be a striver, you actually have to make unbelievable amounts of sacrifices, mostly to your happiness.

More than most people will ever understand.

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's. There's an old axiom in the business of the science of happiness, which is, woe be to the man whose dreams come true because inevitably he finds that he had the wrong dreams. We're built to have dreams that are. That come from evolution and actually don't come from truth about happiness. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes and all of your natural impulses toward money and power and pleasure and fame and prestige and admiration. These come from Mother Nature's imperatives for you to pass on your genes and survive, and you've survived through the winter. You want to be happier, you're not going to be happy, because that would require no negative emotion. That's impossible. You want to be happier, and so you say, okay, I've got these impulses, and I want to be happier. So therefore, if I indulge these impulses, I'll be happier. That's wrong. That's a crossed circuit.

Porn doesn't work.

Porn doesn't work. Indulgences. You're not going to. But money doesn't work. I mean, fame doesn't work, power doesn't work.

None of it.

These can be intermediate steps toward the things that actually do bring greater happiness. Like a conscious understanding of the divine, like a relationship with your family, like close real friendships, like serving other people through your work. In other words, love, right, which is what brings happiness at the end of the day. And you can actually facilitate more of that more effectively with these worldly rewards. But if you stop at the worldly rewards, you're not going to get it. And the result of that is that people who are usually good at getting those things, like you, you're going to do that. And when you hit your mark, your money mark, your fame mark, your power mark, and you're not feeling it, you're going to conclude, I guess I needed another billion. I guess I needed more.

It's a terrible addiction. And you see it so much in the ultra wealth. Look, if it didn't work in your first 6 million, it's not going to work in your second 6 million. I'm just happy I not only made it, but I lost it before I was 30. It's like I. I took a taste of it and I really wasn't happier when I had that much money. It was kind of nice, but.

It was kind of nice. The trouble is that, well, I mean, the way that I teach my students about this, because my students are unbelievably talented and they're virtually all going to be well off. I mean, the Harvard Business School, they're getting their MBAs at Harvard, for Pete's sake. They get, I mean, I think the average starting salary is about $210,000 coming out of their master's degree program, which is, you know, good money. I tell them, look, your brain is going to say, you will find satisfaction and it will stay if you have more. The right formula for you to have in your brain is that satisfaction equals your haves divided by your wants, halves divided by wants. Now, we all know enough math to know that one way to increase that number is by working the numerator. But it's not very mathematically efficient. Much more efficient is always to work the denominator if you've got a fraction, decrease the denominator if you want the number to go up and vice versa. And that means a wants management strategy and not just a halves management strategy. Wow. And so we have to think strivers, which is, let's just round it off to 100% of Dave Asprey's. Audience.

There's actually a lot of consciousness explorers in here too.

They're striving in a different place.

You can strive for enlightenment.

Absolutely. So in the end space of different ways you can strive.

Yeah.

And that's one of them. So every single person watching and listening to us right now needs to have a wants management strategy.

Okay.

We do that well. So there's a bunch of different ways to do that. One is to think metaphorically. So your life has been a work of self creation to a very large extent. I mean, you're the sort of, you're the quintessential Emersonian man. I mean, you're like, you're building your life. Right. I mean, you've done it. I mean, I don't know how that works. I'm going to go figure it out and go do that. Right.

Sometimes it was a little bit more desperate than people might know, but yeah, for sure.

But it was, you know, I mean, if your house is falling down, you're going to fix it and so. Exactly. So that's a, that's an important thing for, for, you know, everybody to think, you know, how are you going to, you know, build your own life? But you also have to understand that that's not the only metaphor to be thinking about. So you might think of your life as you're an artist, you're a canvas. You've also got the brushes and paints and you're painting on this canvas. And the work of art gets more and more and more beautiful. The Trouble is at 40 or 45, Dave Asprey's canvas is full, man. One more brushstroke. In terms of money, power, pleasure, fame is not going to make it more beautiful. You need a new metaphor, which is a sculptor. Sculptors make things more beautiful by taking things away.

Oh, wow.

Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip, chip. And the beautiful work of art is in there. And, and that's what should be exposed on your last day. Now, your last day is a long time from now. There's a lot of chipping, we hope. And that's the idea, that's the goal. But there's a lot of chipping that needs to get done.

I don't think I can lose any more body fat.

I know. What are you, what's your percentage?

I'm at 4.8 right now.

That's insane.

I don't know that it's even healthy. I'm trying to go back to six.

If I get under seven, I'm, I'm, I'm. It's hard to be married to me.

I mean, I. I look ridiculous.

Yeah, you're very. You're very vascular at this point. If I get under 10, I don't like my life. Yeah.

I. I don't know how to get fatter at this point, which is weird because I've been fat my whole life. But I finally got my nutrition dial then, and it just works.

But anyway, I'm there by chipping away the. The conceits, the possessions, the relationships that are not generative. Chipping them. Chipping and chipping away. So one of the things that I recommend is. Is having a reverse bucket list where you make an honest assessment of your attachments. We're all conceited. I mean, all of us. Nobody is perfect. I mean, you can find. I mean, Pope Francis has conceits, right? The Dalai Lama. Maybe not the Dalai Lama, but he's a living bodhisattva. But most of us look. I mean, and so make a list. And then. And again, it's okay. I mean, I'm not ashamed of the fact that money is fun. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I want people to buy my books. But I'm not going to be managed by those desires because then if I am, then I'm being managed by my limbic system. Those cravings and desires are limbic in nature. I want my prefrontal cortex to be in charge. So I cross them out saying, easy come, easy go. That's how you. That's how you can live according to a wants management as opposed to a haves management strategy.

I'm going to ask you a question that I'm 99% sure Noah's asked you. And you can say you want to talk about it because you're from a big school. Ejaculation, prolactin, dopamine, testosterone, and motivation.

I don't know that literature. I've heard you talk about it. I've heard you talk about it a month or two ago.

And.

And that's. That's the extent of my extent.

But. Okay, yeah, because it. With everything you're saying there about, you know, you. You want it, you're striving, but then you get it, and then it's not what you think.

Like.

Like that's kind of the will you still respect me in the morning? Or they call post nut clarity. But it's. That's a micro, you know, a microcosm. Much larger cycle that we see where, yeah, you know, you really want to sing. Yeah. But then it's empty.

Yeah, right.

And you get back on the treadmill. And I think that's what's happening with I made my first million dollars. It's fucking great to make your first million dollars, but making your second million isn't as good as the first one. Right. And if you just keep doing it over and over and over, you're like, you know, the coke addict who just keeps, you know, well, you know, I need more, I need more, I need.

More, you know, this or anything else. Look, I mean, you're talking about the hormonal balance that you're actually altering when you're. When you're finding some sort of physical satisfaction.

Yeah.

The neuromodulator activity is really interesting about this too, because we know a lot about dopamine at this point. And people misattribute dopamine. They talk about dopamine as if it were a reward chemical. It's an anticipation chemical. Exactly. It's a neuromodulator that says there's a reward out there. Go and get it. Most of the time, by the way, you get mo more dopamine when you think about something you want to go get than when you actually get the thing. The only reason you get more dopamine is if it was better than you thought it was going to be. And that's the reason that most things are disappointing. And so what will happen is that you'll spend effort, you'll spend your sense of reward satisfaction that you hope you'll get. And this is one of the things you're talking about, the sexual experience. But we can find it in all sorts of experiences in our life. So I think it's a neuromodular, a neuromodulator matter. We have to be very cognizant of this. Now, in the case that you talked about the old jazz musicians, I was talked about that. That was talked about their personal lives, their sexual lives in that particular way. Don't do it, man. No, no, not before the show, man. It's true.

A lot of pro athletes and Taoists, so this is one of those things, especially for younger guys. I've talked to enough of them who are usually way over involved with porn, which creates dopamine.

Oh, it's bad for you. Porn is really, really bad for you. It's bad for your. Mess up your brain. One of the biggest problems, just besides what you're doing to your dopamine system. Have you had Anna Lemke on your show? She wrote Dopamine Nation. Phenomenal. She's Got the best book on this. It's really about this, about. She talks about pornography and about sex and about gambling and about. But because it's all the same system. Exactly. And by the way, for a lot of people watching us, that's how success works. Yes.

Entrepreneurship is still a slot machine.

Totally. And. And you know, the truth is, a lot of people, if they're very successful, very young, life feels gray unless they're putting up numbers. And that's all about I'll have the anticipation reward, and then the reward has to be better than I thought it was going to be. And then I start all over again, such that I can actually feel something in my life that's. But it's all the same thing. It all really comes around as the same thing.

There's an antidote for that I wrote about in my next book. And it's pain.

Yeah, yeah.

A brief exposure to pain for sure will reset your dopamine sensitivity. That's why in biohacking you do cryotherapy or cold pledges. It's three minutes that suck, but then the rest of your day is much better.

Yeah. And also it's not artificially goosing your dopamine over and over and over again. We were ingenious about taking this natural, evolved system of anticipation, of reward so that we'll stay in the hunt. I mean, the reason that you look up at the tree and there's a little yellow piece of fruit up there, and then you get a burst of dopamine that impels you to climb the tree and risk your life because that those calories are going to be so delicious and tasty. That's how the brain is supposed to work. So you'll do stuff and stay alive and pass on your genesis. But we're so good, we're so smart that entrepreneurs have been able to take that experience. And methamphetamine, for example, gives you 10x the dopamine that you're going to get under ordinary circumstances. Pornography. Well, two and a half times as much, something like that. I mean, there's all of these things that will artificially stimulate your dopamine in ways that are way be. They're super physiological and they're bad for you. It messes up your dopamine system such that you get. What's in my profession is called anhedonia. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure. That's because your dopamine is permanently under its baseline unless you keep artificially stimulating it.

Wow.

So what we find is that almost anything that you'll do that feels weirdly good. Anything from highly glycemic carbohydrates in the middle of the afternoon, to looking at Internet pornography, to pulling a slot machine by yourself at 4 o' clock in the morning in Vegas, to taking drugs and alcohol. These are things. And by the way, some of it's innocuous. You and I like coffee. And it has all kinds of good things that, you know, it stimulates catecholamines, all sorts of beautiful things that we like. And it's okay on the dopamine side, but most of it's bad for you.

Yeah.

And you need to fast and you need to be conscious of what's happening in your brain, and you need knowledge to change your habits such that you can master yourself. Otherwise you will be a slave to these processes.

I always think of everything I write, all my books, the show. If only I'd have known that when I was 19, it saved me pain and millions of dollars.

Maybe that's my answer to your question earlier. What I wish I knew at 20. Yeah. But you know what? I was an idiot, so I probably wouldn't have taken my advice. I would have said, sorry, old man.

Well, one of the secrets of. Of why I started biohacking is I ran a longevity nonprofit group near Stanford in my 20s, and no one under 60 would ever come. These old guys were teaching me how to make my brain work. And so what if I rebrand longevity to make it so? I would have listened early on in life. And so now what was longevity became? How do you own your brain? Right? And everyone wants to own their brain. And what I'm looking to get from you in this interview is, you know, we've shared lots of different little things. So let's say, all right, you're, you know, you're in your senior year of college, your early 20s, and this is an overwhelming set of information. Biohacking isn't just this interview. Like, what did I do first? The very first step that someone does who says, all right, I want to do what Arthur's talking about.

Yeah. What's the very first thing to do? Get up before dawn. Get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.

An hour and 36.

I know that's weirdly. I mean, what that is is twice 48. And that's called the Brahma muhurta in ancient Vedic wisdom. It sounds pretty arbitrary. Perhaps it is, but the whole point is start the process right? Get a good start is what it comes down to. You will optimize Your brain chemistry. You will enhance your creativity. You'll be more likely to engage in better habits. Get up before the sun is up. According to the ancient Vedic scholars and the most common neuroscience. So that's the first. I'm talking about a small win, Dave. I mean, obviously. And your work is all about small wins. Sure. It's all a bunch of.

It's going lazy. The small wins that stack up and they're not much work.

They turn into a big win. Yeah, they turn into big ones. You don't start with big wins. But that's actually my point. Okay, maybe it's not get up before dawn. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's, you know, wake up and meditate or say your prayers. Maybe it is call your mother and remind yourself that you love her. Maybe it is. You know, it's basically these basic small winds of hygiene are where you start. And ordinarily, we all kind of know what they are, but we see them as this bolus of habits and things that we all need to do together. Pick one. Pick one and do it.

Do one thing every day that makes you better and it doesn't matter.

And this will lead you to this sort of daisy chain of physiological, mental, psychological, and spiritual wellness of betterness is what it comes down to. Other people. There's one thing that you might do is to stop being. You said something important a minute ago. Most young people today are very afraid of discomfort. They're very afraid of pain. Not just physical pain. They're actually even more afraid of unhappiness. So I'm a happiness specialist.

Right.

I'm really an unhappiness specialist. And what I tell my students is, your suffering is unbelievably sacred. Stop trying to avoid it and eliminate it. That's one of the first things that I recommend to a lot of people is like, your pain is totally normal. If you're a student at Harvard and you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy, you know, and stop pretending as if you.

You.

You could have this life that doesn't have this in it. I mean, come on, man. You. You want to be fully alive. And that means all of it, including the bad parts, because they're not bad.

It's all just a signal.

Yeah.

I mean, I've been awake when they took my bone marrow out.

I watch.

I watched them saw through the bone in my foot and heard the bones all slow down because my bones were too dense to easily cut. Ouch. And that's amazing. Well, that was. My leg was Numbed.

Well, let me ask you a question on that, because, I mean, interrupt you, but I got to ask you this question. Some people say they want to die in their sleep. Do you?

I want to die at a time and by a method of my choosing.

I want to see it. Yeah, totally. I'm curious about it. It's got to. I want to experience that. That's heavy, man. I mean, it's like. That's like I want to be asleep when I jump out of a plane in a parachute. No, the point is the experience. Right. And if I could remember my birth, even better, but I can't, actually. The memories exist.

Why do you say you can't?

You totally can. Well, I don't have access to the memories in a form that I find that. That. That, you know, I know some people.

Could get you there.

Okay.

And that the reason I say that is the very first personal development thing I ever did just happened to be run by the founder of the American Pre and Perinatal Birth Psychology Association.

No kidding.

And she spotted that I had birth trauma just by the way I walked or something.

No kidding.

And she's like, tell me about your birth.

Like, I don't know, like hospitals.

V. You know? Then I. Then she led me through a regression. Not hypnotic, just a breathing thing. And I remembered small details about birth. And I called my parents.

I was like, is this.

What was that? And they're. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was a warming. I don't even know. Warming chamber was. But apparently they put me in the hospital. So I'm like, how did I recall details? It's because.

Yeah, well, you're trying to actually reestablish There's.

Yeah, it's in there.

The pruning that actually occurs within the first 18 months. So you still have the memories that are in the episodic memories stored in the hippocampus, but you just don't have access to them in the same way because of the synaptic pruning that have.

To be an older stage.

But to your point, I mean, you wanted to be awake when they're sawing through your bone because you wanted to see what that was like.

Yeah.

That's how you're supposed to approach life. See, you're an entrepreneur, and you're. What do you have, 13 companies now?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's the least of it. You're.

That's hard, I gotta say. That's too many.

But. But the real entrepreneur, the real enterprise is Dave, Inc. That's the enterprise. And every single One of us is an enterprise and you're the entrepreneur. Treat your life as such.

Wow, that's good advice.

That's super important because, you know, you start, you start, you start, you get married. That's entrepreneurial. You give your heart away. You have a child, you take a new job, you move to a new place. This is just pure entrepreneurship is all. This is so experience that you don't, you know, entrepreneurs are like, yeah, I don't want to know anything about this new company. You're terrible entrepreneur. I mean, I want to know. The general counsel called, we're getting sued. I want to know. Right? Because this is going to be less of an interesting experience, but more importantly, it's going to be less successful. So you need all of this bad stuff in your life. Furthermore, one of the things they always say in Silicon Valley, for all the stupid things that they say, one of the things that they say that's really correct is you learn more from your failure than you do from your success. And that's true in your personal life as well. If you want to add five heartbreaking, terrible, romantic breakups, you're incompetent to get married. Wow.

100% support on that one.

Because you need to learn from that. And you better be awake when that's happening. And you better take it in and, okay, go listen to some sad music.

But let's understand, it feels like you're going to die. If you break up with someone. You won't leave an unhealthy relationship because it feels like you're going to die.

That's right. And that's. And all of that is, once again, the psychology is the biology. And the more that you can then augment, implement that knowledge of the experience with an understanding of the neuroscience, the better off you're going to be. That's what really changed my life, is understanding first as a behavioral scientist, what the emotions are and how they work, but then actually understanding the mechanism of causation. For example, sadness, classic is a part of your limbic system largely dedicated to the experience of sadness and grief. The anterior cingulate cortex, the dorsal part of the anterior single cortex. It's supposed to be highly activated when you're feeling mental pain, especially from exclusion, it exists. So you'll have an aversion to that. Now you can medicate it away. I mean, literally. Acetaminophen, Tylenol will mute the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. You will feel less heartbroken.

I didn't know. Yeah, but you'll ruin your liver.

It's probably, well, if you take more than a thousand milligrams twice a day, or you can use alcohol or you can use opiate drugs. But the whole point is you need to learn from that. And you will suffer less if you understand the nature of your suffering. Knowledge is power.

And if you feel the suffering fully, at least if you believe David Hawkins, it takes about 20 minutes if you have the balls to do it, which few people do. But you can process something in three days or you can process it in 30 years. But the more you resist the pain, the worse it is.

Yeah, there's a lot of research on that. There's a lot of research on pain. Elimination is a huge mistake. Treatment and elimination. Treatment and avoidance are totally different things.

Yeah, the.

The treatment of pain largely involves the acceptance of pain.

Yeah.

That the first step in the treatment of any pain is acceptance of it, whether it's mental or physical. The elimination or avoidance of pain is what way too much therapy is trying to do today and what a lot of people are doing when they treat themselves because they're being fed the lie that pain is abnormal and evidence of pathology.

Yeah, resilience is the ability to handle some pain and let it flow through you and be done with it and move on. And also not do what I would do in my 20s, which was ignore the pain until, you know there's a bone sticking out. That's probably dumb, too.

That's dumb, too. I mean, we have to be realistic about it, of course. And no doubt you have a very, very high pain threshold.

I certainly do now.

Yeah, no, that's right. And actually coming to a healthy relationship with that without. You recognize that it's uncomfortable, but it's absolutely normal and you want to treat it in the best way where you can learn the most and you don't have to live with it forever. I mean, this is common sense to a certain extent, yet there's so much of that is elusive these days.

Your phone screen is aging your skin and wrecking your sleep at the same time. Artificial blue light goes from your phone screen straight into your eyes and deep into your skin. That light messes with your melatonin levels, interrupts your deep sleep, and speeds up skin aging by breaking down collagen. The bodyguard's red light converter fixes this at the source. It's a first of its kind screen protector with real tech that converts blue light into beneficial red light before it hits your face. It turns your scrolling into a skincare routine. It supports healthier skin, reduced eye strain improved sleep quality and fewer screen relationships headaches. Third party testing showed a 50% plus increase in red light exposure within the optimal range of 620-770nm and this comes with zero compromise on your screen. The red light converter preserves your screen's true colors and full touch sensitivity. Beyond its wellness benefits, the red light converter provides ultra thin edge to edge protection for your device and bodyguard stands by their quality. Enjoy peace of mind with lifetime replacements, ensuring your red light converter continues to protect and support your biology for the long haul. Visit bodyguards.com and use code Dave for 25% off. That's bodyguardswithaz.com for 25% off. Is the air you're breathing making you sick? Just because you don't see mold doesn't mean it isn't there. My friend Jason Earle has been on a mission for over two decades to help people understand the hidden role of indoor air in their health. He's one of the world's leading experts on mold and indoor air quality and he created the Got Mold Test Kit to make professional grade air testing simple and accessible. It uses cutting edge air sampling tech that top inspectors trust and it's engineered for you at a fraction of the cost. It takes just minutes to get samples using the patented Biovac air sampling pump and then you send them prepaid to one of the most prestigious microbiology labs in the world. No guesswork, no paperwork and no hidden fees. You get fast results, intuitive reports and great support. And since you keep the pump, you can retest anytime for less. It even comes with a lifetime warranty. Mold may be invisible, but its impact isn't. This kit helps you understand your environment so you can take action for your health. Go to gotmold.com and use code DAVE10 to save 10% and see what's in your air. Because the best biohackers don't guess. They test.

I was on stage at an event a while ago with a Navy SEAL doctor and one of the audience members said, you know, for each of you on the panel, you know, what is the thing you struggle with the most? And I thought about it. I said, I don't believe in struggle. Right. Struggle is resistance. Right. There's things where I fail, there's things that I'm working really hard on. But struggling is like wriggling around when there's something's happening versus just either working on it or not working on it.

Right.

So to me, struggle feels like wasted effort because of pain. Yeah. Instead of, look, I did Everything I could and I absolutely failed. And it hurt. But I didn't struggle is. Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah. No.

What is the role of pain and struggle?

Well, there's a. The Buddhists always talk about non resistance. The whole idea of non resistance and resistance is the biggest problem that we have when we have. When we have a lot of pain. Because when resisting, the pain is actually leads to the struggle and that exacerbates the problem and doesn't actually lead to effective treatment. That's basically what we're talking. It's sort of Western terms. That's more or less what the Buddhists are saying in this idea of non resistance. That doesn't mean that you acquiesce to it. When something is incredibly painful, you don't acquiesce to the pain. On the contrary. But you're not going to resist it. You're not going to say, no, make it stop. And what am I learning? What's happening? How do I treat it? I accept it. And now actually, how am I going to treat it? In other words, the question shouldn't be what do you struggle most with? What's the biggest effort for you to make a gain in your life that's not easy.

Yeah.

What's the hardest thing working on?

What's the most difficult challenge? I'll do that all the time.

All the time. Of course, because that's. Your life is doing hard things. Yeah. Because you're super into hard things. Because you're a striver. For better or for worse. I mean, you could be a happier person if you weren't.

What's the recipe for being a happy striver?

So that's a. That's a. I wrote a whole book on that called From Strength to Strength. And I got interested in this because I had this personal experience that really changed my thinking. I was a CEO at the time. I was running a big. A big nonprofit research organization, a think tank in Washington D.C. called the American Enterprise Institute. Great job, very interesting. High pressure, 80 hours a week. And I started thinking, well, five or six years into that job, what's the end game? Which is what CEOs are always thinking. Because you do it, you do it a little bit better. Life is about progress. Build more buildings, raise more money. And then at some point, what. I mean, you get the shove from the board and go golf. I mean, what.

And then you die about six months.

Later, I don't want to get a deep tan. I don't want to go. I don't want to golf. I don't want to do that. And. But I didn't know what the end game was. I was very, very insecure about that. And one night when I was kind of in the midst of this minor existential crisis, I was on a plane from LA to dc, which is I was on. I've been on the road since I was a kid and so this was pretty typical. Typing away my laptop and I overheard a conversation behind me. It was a couple. It was an elderly couple. I could tell it was a man and a woman and his words were muffled, but her responses were not very penetrating. Coming right from the seats, I'm assuming it's a married couple. Turns out it was. He says, and she says, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And then he says. And she says it's not true that nobody remembers you or loves you anymore. And I'm thinking this poor disappointed old guy, he's in his 80s, he's no Dave Asprey. I mean that's, it's. Or he's no striver. I mean he probably wanted to do stuff but didn't have the. Didn't have the incentive, didn't have the impulse, didn't have the drive, the work effort. And that was too late. Made sense to me when we landed at Dulles an hour later. So I kind of wanted to put a face to it, you know, because this is my lab. I'm a behavioral scientist and my lab is overheard conversations, right? And so I stand up and I turn around and it's one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody that everybody watching and listening to us knows. A real hero for something. Stuff he did a long, long time ago. And. And I thought to myself, either the model of pure striverly success is busted, or this guy's busted. And I started a research project because this is coming. I mean this guy's 20x what I'm ever going to do. But. But I don't want to be having that conversation with my wife in 30 or 40 years on the plane because my adventure ended. So I started a research project to see if this was normal, which it is.

Very normal.

Very normal. And as a matter of fact, the people who are most likely to become unhappier after 70 are the people who have the big. In their careers before 70. That's a big problem for pretty much your whole audience. Unless. Okay, go ahead. Unless you break the mold. Unless you do a few things differently than what people do who are on autopilot for worldly success. And that's what the book is about. What do they actually do? One is understanding your brain. What we've talked about before, getting on the crystallized intelligence curve, where you're not just trying to be an innovator, you're trying to be a synthesizer of information. So if you're a hotshot lawyer at 30, you should be managing partner. 60. That's the teacher version. If you're a startup entrepreneur at 35, you should be a VC at 65. Because then you're the teacher, the coach, a talent spotter. I was doing mathematical, empirical, social science. That was so sophisticated at 35. I can't read the articles today. Now I have an audience of 500,000 readers a week in the Atlantic, and I'm talking about science for non scientists because I'm not using that fluid intelligence of innovation. I'm using the crystallized intelligence of synthetic wisdom and public education. That's super important. The second is the chipping away. The second skill that people who are happy have these drivers when they're. As they get older, is they stop adding and they start learning how to subtract. So they get to their. Their essence. And the third, which is the. Let's say third and fourth. Third, is that they're. They're serious about their relationships. One of the problems the strivers have is they're lonely. Yep, they're lonely. And they think that polishing their leaves and the way to go is know your roots and your roots are intertwined. Get on that. Then last is your spiritual life, you know, or your philosophical life. What do you understand about the transcendent? The things that are bigger than you? What do you understand about. You know, maybe it's like our friend Ryan Holiday.

Yeah.

Lives here in town. He studies the stoics. Great. Maybe you're practicing vipassana meditation. Maybe you're practicing like me, practicing the faith of your youth. You need to be doing something because you need to be talking seriously about the why of your life when you're in your mature years. So these are the big four. Crystallized intelligence, chipping away roots, not leaves. And the transcendent. Those are the big four. People who get happier and happier and happier even though they're strivers. And that's exactly what the guy on the plane was not doing. Wow.

I've had a lot of people ask throughout interviews, what do you want your legacy to be?

Yeah.

And it always starts.

What do you tell them?

Those circumstances. Absurd. I'm like, I don't want a legacy. Like, when I'm dead. I'll be doing something else. Or maybe I'll just be dead. Depends on whatever you believe. I'm a beliefs on that, but it's none of my business. I don't have any expectation anyone's going to know my name 100 years from now. In fact, if you're a president of the US 100 years ago, do you know that was.

What year was that? 1924. Calvin Coolidge.

You actually know, nerd. But the 99%, like, who knows? And what did Coolidge do in his top three things? Unless you studied history, it doesn't fucking matter. So people ask me, like, I would like my kids as long as they're alive to be like, he was a good dad. You know, I like my closest, you know, closest friends to say, you know, he loved, you know, he loved me and he was kind. I don't care. Like, I'm not doing it for that.

Right.

I think the why behind what motivates you. But if you know your definition of success in your old age. Is everyone remembering your word?

Yeah, yeah.

That feels empty.

Have you interviewed Stephen Cave, the philosopher at Cambridge who wrote this really great book called Immortality?

Wow, I have to interview that.

Oh, you'd love him. I don't know him personally, but I've read the book. It's a great book. And he talks about the fact that people think about immortality in different ways. There's also a book called book called the Consolations of Mortality by a philosopher at the University of Toronto. That's also very, very good. That's more, that's newer. That talks about, you know, Kurzweil and how he's trying, you know, the singularity and all this kind of stuff. But the Cave book is more conventional in the way that it deals with philosophy and it talks about how the ancients had a very strong sense of immortality through legacy. And the best example of this is the legend of Achilles. So Achilles is obviously, it's a mythological figure, but he's going. He has a choice of either retiring to his farm and having a happy life, or surely dying in battle and being remembered forever as a hero. And he takes door number two because he wants to live forever. And that's really, really what it meant. We as moderns, individuals, we kind of see our legacy, we see the memory of other people. If we're realistic, it's kind of stopping at the end of our lives. And so we have a different attitude about that now. I think it also takes a lot of humility to recognize the Reality of this, too. You have eight great grandparents. What are the names? Do you know?

Let's see. Nope. Yeah, I met one of them when I was really young.

I know one. Folker Hansen.

Yeah.

Because I've heard about him again and again and again and again and again. I can't name my great grandparents, and my great grandchildren are not going to be able to. They're not even. My great grandchildren are not going to know my name. I mean, except under weird circumstances.

I have a book somewhere.

They do genealogy or something. Or, you know, somebody finds one of my old books and dusts it off and reads it. It's going to be some weird thing like that, but it's not. It's trivial is what that's going to be. And so the result is kind of a healthy humility. What am I doing now? And that's a mindfulness about your own life. You know, for me, I want to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. Right now? Yeah, right now. That's. And I sort of think you want that, too.

Oh, it's. We're very aligned on that. And it's not because I want to be a big deal. I had erased my identity because I'm a computer hacker. I was happily anonymous.

Did you really?

Oh, yeah.

You became.

You couldn't tell what state I lived in. My car was registered through a shell company. Like, I. It was a game. It's like I had anything. But I'm like, I'm a hacker and.

You weren't on the Internet.

I knew I was on the Internet.

You sure are now.

I helped to build the Internet. I was on the Internet, but none of the info about me was accurate. Like, it was. It was fun. It's much harder today because of facial recognition, but it was like a game.

My wife's from Spain, and she thinks that we Americans are all, you know, in our hearts, we're just like frontier cowboys that want to just, like, take off and a man with no name kind of deal. We all secretly want to be in the witness protection program.

Wow. I don't know if I would do that now. There were. There probably are times in my life where I would have said, sure, that sounds like plan. Like, let's just hit reset. But it. It's a weird thing. When I hear, you know, a teenager say, I want to be an influencer. I'm like, why would you want that?

It's because of the biological imperative, of course. This is pure evolution. You want to rise in the hierarchy in your kin group. The, the problem with that is that now we're able to supercharge that into something that's utterly, I mean, as dangerous as fentanyl. It's cracking, you know, fentanyl to natural endorphins. Is the Internet to the natural amount of prestige that we can get inside a 30 person king group? Wow. And it's as dangerous and as bad for you. Fame is terrible.

It is incredibly toxic. And I, I've, I've dealt with that and interview guests about it. And to make it a goal, it seems like it's about the same as saying I want to be a porn star in terms of a career goal. Like if fame emerges from you doing what you love that you think is helping other people.

Cool. Right.

But if you do it for that reason, I think it's incredibly toxic.

Completely. Completely. It's like getting high to be high. And it's the same thing. What you're trying to do is to juice your brain chemistry. And anytime you're actually trying to get physiologically out of the lane of where your brain chemistry is supposed to lie for your health and well being, you're going to get less health and well being.

I have kind of a little trick that listeners, I think are going to appreciate based on something you said before. I said a lot of the most ultra successful, impactful people in the world after 70, they're unhappy because people don't know their work. The reason I'm here today is that in my 20s I had all the diseases of aging, right? So I hung out with people in their 70s and 80s who were reversing their aging. Right. Those are those people. These are people who were the masters of their fields who were so happy to tell me everything for free. And to this day, some of my great friends are in their 70s and 80s and they teach me so much.

Right.

And for listeners, if you're in your 20s and you want to see something amazing, find someone who's written an incredible book 40 years ago that changed the world and look them up and they'll probably just have coffee with you because you know who they are and you're interested in their work and they will tell you lifetimes of knowledge for free.

It's unbelievable, you know, and it's a gift. Oh, it's great. And you, I'll give you an example of this where I think the same way. I remember when my dad died in my 30s and he died pretty young. Yeah. And he was a wonderful man. I loved him, but he wasn't very happy. And I thought, okay, what am I going to do differently?

Right.

Because this is one of the great gifts you can give to your children too. And, and I said, wait a minute. So I started doing a lot of things differently than he did. I didn't, I stopped drinking alcohol, for example, which is. Which people should, pretty much everybody should consider. But I also started exercising seriously and learning about actually how my, how my body and brain and, you know, mood cycles worked and from exercise. And so I started doing resistance training before there was a resistance training revolution.

Good man.

So. So for me, this is, you know, more than 25 years ago. I've been working out an hour a day for 25 years.

Wow.

Yeah.

You ever hear over training?

Well, I'm actually. So what I'm doing is depending on what I have going on. It's a combination of zone 2 cardio and high interval that was intensity interval training and also resistance training that never more than 30 to two days a week, the whole 60 minutes is. So I'm, I'm, I'm careful about it. But here's actually the point. When I first started doing that, I thought to myself, this is. Could be hard on my body. And I know enough to know that could be hard especially in my joints and tendons. So I started going to old iron gyms whenever I was on the road, which is a lot of the time. And I would go find the oldest dude who was still in shape. It'd be like the 75 year old, you know, gym rat, you know, like Bobby Kennedy. Yeah. And he's like, but, except, except not necessarily, you know, on trt, you know, somebody who, because back in those days, that was a lot less normal to actually be using, to be, you know, using androgenic drugs. So it would be a guy who's like all tendons and you know, he's. And I would go up to him and I would ask for advice. The 75 year old guys will give you whatever you need. And I said, I. When I'm 75, I want to be you. Tell me what you did to not get hurt. Tell me what you did to stay strong. So brilliant, right? And just do what they did. I mean, remember that back in the Senate in the old days, Strom thurman was like 94 years old in the Senate and the second oldest guy was Bob Dole because he was only like 88.

Right.

And people used to say to Bob Dole, how do you stay so young and sharp? He says, I follow Strom Thurman. Around and do whatever he does. Strom's eating a carrot. I'm going to eat a carrot. But that's basically. It's not a bad idea because the empirical regularities you see with people who are already successful, maybe through luck, maybe they just happen to do things. Right. Do what they do. I mean, it's just get data.

Spoken like a true professor at Harvard.

Gather data and act according to it. Yeah, exactly.

Wow. The American Enterprise Institute.

Yeah.

You're kind of a champion of individual freedom.

Yep.

Yet a lot of happiness comes from our connection to other humans.

Right.

Which is less individual. How do you reconcile individual. I stand against whatever I'm standing against with. I'm a part of a community and I've got a piece.

Yeah. I'm really all about voluntary community and not forced community. And there's a certain amount of forced community that we need because we actually. I mean, I don't think any of any of us wants zero government. Yeah. The problem is when the state starts to substitute for what we're doing voluntarily as individuals.

Yeah.

And, you know, if we're. If we're. If we are in the witness protection program, it's going to actually be isolating and depressing. I recommend family life. I'm all about kids and marriage and, you know, belonging to civic organizations and churches and all these wonderful things. But I really don't want the government in that. And that's really what it comes down to. What we know is that the people, for example, are happiest when they feel like they're earning their success. And that means you need a free enterprise system. You need a system that's going to reward a guy like you. There's no government program. That said, you know, I think I'm going to lift up Dave Asprey. If we were living in a pure socialist society, you'd have nothing because there's nothing that you're doing that would been a reward. And there would be no signals that could have come from the state.

If we were in a pure socialist society, there would be a smoking rubble of the building I took out and I'd be gone.

Yeah. I mean, it would be.

And there's enough people like me that socialism never works.

You're a threat. I mean, because these individual ideas that are inflecting and weird and that people want to try, that requires an emergent order, that requires a distributed wisdom that can only come from these systems. So I love community. I love people banding together. I love the solidarity that comes from it. I just want it to be voluntary.

Okay, I fully share your perspective there. You can only have one censorship or misinformation.

Misinformation.

I agree. Isn't that interesting?

I mean, thank God we don't have to choose entirely.

If, if misinformation was a thing in the days of Galileo, I think the sun would still be orbiting around the earth.

Yeah, it was, it was misclassified. It was fake news about. Fake news news.

Yeah.

And that's often the case. Yeah, exactly.

So I, I, I support that idea of ability to be stupid and wrong.

Yeah. And what we need to be is discerning individuals. And we have to have the courage to be able to stand up to people and say they're stupid and wrong without them canceling us and taking our jobs away and hurting us.

Sounds almost like all of human society except for the last 15 years.

Well, it's weird because you go back not too long ago and unfortunately, McCarthyism. Yeah, well, even, I mean, most of human society, we would be, I mean, the enlightenment is great because the whole idea of the enlightenment is that coercion to get somebody to think like you is not the best. And bargaining is not always optimal. But persuasion is awesome.

Yeah.

And, and enlightenment is really all about persuasion. And, and, and that's what gets screwed up when we have a, when we have an environment of censorship. And so I believe in free speech.

Is it possible to have happiness without free speech?

We never will have completely free speech. So, for example, I don't recommend that anybody listening to us. You should never, never, never lie to your spouse. But you don't need to say every single thing that's true all the time. And there are certain things, there are certain boundaries on the way that you talk about things. So you should curb the freedom of your own speech strategically in such a way that you can cultivate your love relationships. Happiness is love. And everything else is subservient to that. And that requires a kind of prudential judgment. And there's no legalistic way to get around that. The prudential judgment comes from being a mature individual and living in the world. That's kind of sounds like a hedge, Dave. And I don't mean it to be a hedge. It's just that there's nothing you're saying.

You have free speech, but if you're dumb enough to speak freely, it might cost you your happy relationship.

Yeah, I can do that. Absolutely. I mean, I want free speech to be legal absolutely. But I don't want to use every right that I have in every single situation.

No, most of the rights are.

Are for extremes. Yeah.

You need to protect them.

I mean, there's all kinds of things. It's weird, right, because there are things that are impermissible, but I want them to be legal. I want adultery to be completely legal, and I want it to be totally morally impermissible.

There you go. There's a difference between legal and moral.

Exactly.

Right.

And moral is more important in real life. It is.

Exactly. Yeah. And people, you make your choices and you bear the cost. One of the things that surprisingly helped me with happiness is one of the four agreements, integrity in your word, which is that you don't tell any lies, even the smallest ones. At least you don't do it if you're aware you're doing it.

Right.

So I no longer say I can't pick you up at the airport.

Right.

I'm not going to pick you up at the airport because I could if I blew up my day. I skip my interview with Arthur Brooks and. And, you know, so just being truthful has freed up a huge amount of information. I don't have any internal resistance. I have to track a bunch of. I would have told people. What's the role of truthfulness and happiness?

It's super important. Truthfulness is incredibly important. Now, again, people use truth as a weapon. Yeah. All the time. People say no, like, I just don't lie. You have a fat butt. That. That's. That's unhelpful.

Right. You don't have to say everything.

You don't have to say every truth, true thing all the time. But you shouldn't lie is what it comes down to. And, and that requires skillfulness, and it requires sensitivity, and it requires compassion, relationship skills and everything. But I'll give you an example of how important this is for happiness. A lot of people think that empathy is a wonderful virtue. Empathy is simply feeling somebody else's pain, and it can disable you and make you untruthful toward others. The real virtue that you want is compassion, because compassion is. Is to understand somebody's pain, not be disabled by it. Being truthful and doing what needs to get done, notwithstanding the resistance that you face. That's what compassion is. And that's why great leaders are usually not very empathetic, but they're incredibly compassionate. And that's what we need to be as parents, and that's what we need to be. That's what I need to be as a professor. That's what I need to be as a man walking about this world in my view. And that's an example of this where I am much happier when I'm compassionate. I'm much unhappier when I'm excess excessively empathetic.

Yeah.

And the compassion part is what it does is it layers on the truth into and the integrity to my word, as you put it, in the life that I want to live.

Very, very beautifully said. And you've. You've led such an interesting path. You've changed a lot of lives. Arthur Brooks website is arthur brooks.com thank you for coming on the show. Thank you.

You have my admiration. Thank you for what you're doing to make the world better, Dave. Likewise.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.