#226 ‒ The science of happiness | Arthur Brooks, Ph.D.

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My guest this week is Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist, Harvard professor, best selling authority, columnist at the Atlantic, and host of the podcast how to Build a Happy Life with Arthur Brooks. He's the author of 12 books, including his most recent book, the New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength. In this episode we sit down and we focus the conversation around happiness and how we define happiness, including talking about enjoyment, sense of purpose and satisfaction. Kind of the trifecta of happiness. We also talk about friendship, companionship and envy and the dangers of having a success addiction, something I can't relate to at all. Just kidding. One thing I'll say before we start is that happiness can be a much harder concept for people to address and to quote, unquote fix than many of the other things we talk about in the podcast, such as poor sleep or high apob or low muscle mass or strength and things like that. However, I think Arthur is so eloquent in how he talks about this complex problem in a way that we can all learn a lot from his words. I certainly have, and I've talked about this elsewhere, that there are three books I've read this year that are not technical books that have had a really profound way of getting me to think about the quality of life. And this is one of them. The other two, I'll hopefully be interviewing the authors of those books as well. But for now, we're going to focus on From Strength to Strength and the work of Arthur Brooks. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Arthur. Well, Arthur, this is a first in that we're doing a repeat podcast, although unfortunately this time we're not in person. The last time we did a wonderful podcast, we were in person and I enjoy that even more. You want to tell everybody what happened?

Yeah, for sure. Hi Peter, nice to see you again. And I wish I were down in Austin where all the cool kids live with you, too. Showing up at your podcast studio last time, we had a great conversation for a couple of hours and then learned afterward that we hadn't turned the sound on, which it turns out you need for podcasting. You know, people can just stare at two bald guys for two hours, looking like they're talking, but that turns out to be not the most interesting programming. So we had a great time together, and now we're doing the part two.

And we did have a great video from that first podcast, and we actually were able to get some people who could sign it. We even contemplated releasing it with subtitles. But in the end we decided, eh, what the heck, let's just do it again, even though it won't look as good because we'll be on video. The good news, I think, for the listener is, though I have a pretty good memory, I have an awful memory for podcasts. So when I record a podcast, if you asked me two months later, what did we talk about? If I remember two things, that's a lot. So it's almost like we're doing this from the beginning, at least for me, because I don't really remember what we talked about, and I hope that that allows us to reproduce what I recall. Gestalt wise or valence wise was a pretty positive discussion and a really enjoyable one.

Yeah, me too. I agree. And I don't remember exactly what we talked about, except that it had to do with happiness and longevity and living a prosperous, flourishing life. I see, by the way, also that when we were together last, you turned me on to Ghia. And you're drinking it right there. And I've been drinking it ever since too, by the way. I've been on a constant diet of it. It's the best.

It's really nice to be able to talk about things where the company has no idea you're promoting it, because I. I'm paying full retail for this stuff, which is enjoyable. And yeah, I make no money off it, have no affiliation with it, but do love it. And I always love when I can get somebody turned on to Ghia. So I think for folks who might not be familiar with you at all to understand the arc of what we want to talk about, which I think there are a lot of things to talk about, but the biggest arc is sort of accepting the transitions that are inevitable in life. I mean, if I were to put my finger on one thing that resonates the most. And by the way, I went back and reread your book. You know, I'd read it months ago when we did the thing and I was like, you know, the best thing for me to do to prepare is.

Just to be reread it.

That was really the part that stood out to me. Especially when we get to the four stages of life that you talk about as I think about personally transitioning from the second to the third. But you've lived many lives, I think for people to understand kind of that first life, which happens to be a life that has a short half life, had you stuck with it indefinitely. So talk a little bit about the background.

As a musician, as a social scientist, you don't usually dig into the background of a guy who teaches behavioral social science and fine classical music. But that's actually where I started and that's where I intended to finish. I intended to be a one act guy and to be. I wanted to be the greatest French horn player in the world. Which is a pretty weird ambition for most of the people listening, I would imagine. But that was also my parents ambition for me for some reason. I started on violin at 4, piano at 5, and I took up the French horn when I was 8. And I was really good at it, or I had a natural ability in it at least. And so I did it a lot. I did it to the exclusion of nearly everything else as a matter of fact. And when it came time to go to college, I had one successful run at a year in college and then went pro because that's really what I wanted to do. So at 19, I dropped out or kicked out splitting hairs out of college and I went on the road as a classical musician. I played chamber music for six years all over the United States, all over the world. Then I went to Barcelona where I was in the symphony orchestra. And then my plan was to become a French horn soloist, playing these great concerti of the greatest composers. And it just didn't work out that way. And so by my late 20s, my mid-20s, I was in decline as a performer. My technique was getting worse. It's not entirely clear why that was happening at this point. But I had to make a plan to exit to do the next thing. And so by my late 20s I was in college by correspondence, which I finished a month before my 30th birthday, then did my master's degree at night, finished up my horn career at 31, started my PhD. And that was the new phase, the next phase, which is becoming a social scientist.

So before we kind of exit that first phase I want to dig into that a little bit because again, as you said, it's very foreign. I certainly can't really appreciate what you're speaking about, and I suspect a lot of people listening can't either. What is the arc of a French horn player and how many exceptional French horn player talents can be consumed by the world? So, for example, we were talking about baseball. There are hundreds of people who can be good enough to make a living. What is it with French horn players?

Well, classical musicians in general. There's about a 95% unemployment or underemployment rate in the classical music industry. It's an absolute superstar industry. Now, that's not like professional sports insofar as that people are not getting rich. The great soloists, the great opera singers, the great conductors are pretty wealthy. But orchestra musicians are earning a middle class, upper middle class income, but they're not really very money motivated. They, they want to do this almost to the exclusion of anything else. And so what you find is that there are a few, let's say, probably about 100 really great orchestras in the world, each one of which has a principal French horn player. And then four other French horn positions in those orchestras. And then a few other people, a handful of other people, are making a serious living and playing chamber music. And there are usually about one or two French horn soloists in the world at any given time. So there are not that many people making a living at it. And there are a lot of people who are trying. So it's weird, you know, most people are listening to us, they like French. What an exotic thing to want to do. And yet there are plenty of people who are trying to do that, who are really motivated by the idea of making that kind of music and are good at it and are taking every audition that they can.

And what kind of commitment was necessary to get to that level? How many hours a day were you practicing as a teenager, for example?

I was all in. I was practicing five, six hours a day plus playing in every ensemble I could possibly find. I was basically doing it to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life. It was like being a gymnast. It was like being an athlete where you practice as much as you can without doing damage to the musculature. So there's not just diminishing returns for athletes, there's negative returns if you overtrain. And that's the same thing that happens in classical music. You can get all kinds of repetitive stress injuries, et cetera, et cetera, if you do that. But then the time that you're not actually actively practicing. You're listening to music, you're learning the repertoire, you're thinking about what your craft actually is. So the result of it is that it's almost every hour of the day is what you're doing. You're thinking about your future, you're thinking about what you want to do. You're trying to get better in your mind as much as in your lips and in your fingers to the craft. So it's very much like a sports career. It's just that it's more fine motor skills as opposed to gross motor skills.

What distinguishes the best French horn player in the world from the hundredth best? I'm guessing I wouldn't be able to distinguish them. But for the discerning ear, what is it that separates those two people?

It largely has to do with accuracy. So the French horn has a problem of physics insofar as that the mouthpiece is smaller than a trumpet mouthpiece, but it has a very long that the tube is as long as the tuba, which is the largest of the brass instrument. So by physics, it should actually play in the low register, but by mouthpiece, it should actually play in the high register. And the result of that is, for anybody who knows the physics of these, of the harmonic structure of these instruments, that the harmonics are very close together, meaning it's very easy to miss notes. That's the reason for who like classical music and they go to the orchestra. The principal French horn, notwithstanding, the fact that she or he is one of the best in the world, is missing a lot of notes. It's just really, really hard to be accurate. The greatest, greatest, greatest, greatest have some uncanny ability. It's sort of like Nolan Ryan who's able to hit a postage stamp at 98 miles an hour with a fastball when he's 40. That's the kind of difference that you get, the freakish microscopic differences. Now, yeah, you probably wouldn't notice the difference if you're not a big classical music buzz, and especially if you're not really into the French horn. But if I went to an orchestra now and I heard the best French horn player in the world versus the hundredth, I would notice the difference in a big hurry.

You mentioned in your mid-20s. If I sort of remember what you said correctly, you felt you were in decline, or at least you'd peaked, and you were now on the way down. Two thoughts on that or two questions. The first is, is that the typical age at which a French horn player peaks? And secondly, what is it you noticed that was changing.

The answer is I was peaking and declining early. Now, I've done this research subsequently as a social scientist, not as a French horn player. I kind of knew casually. Brass players, the classical musicians in general, they tend to peak in terms of their flow, physical qualities, their ability to dominate the instrument in their late 30s. And you start to see a little bit of drop off in their 40s and 50s. The greatest players in the world, you know, the greatest piano soloists will still be touring and playing beautifully in the 70s, but they're not what they once were. I mean, even in rock and roll, the great guitar players can shred at 40 very differently than they can at, you know. Now these days, you know, the great rock and rollers are all like 100 at this point. The Rolling Stones are still on tour, but you heard Mick Jagger sing recently. He's reminding you of what he was doing 57 years ago when I Can't get no Satisfaction was released and was number one on the charts. So it's usually late 30s, early 40s where the peak happens. Then it's a slow decline. I was declining much earlier than that. And it's almost certainly having to do with a microscopic tear in one of the lips, an injury. And that wasn't well known at the time. But there actually are surgeries that brass players will get at this point to repair that. And had I been 25 years younger, I certainly would have had a much longer career in music. And much to my own detriment, because I wound up going on to something that's touching a lot more people, I think, in which I actually have more possibility of doing something positive in the world. So within every. What seems like a tragedy at the time, there's all kinds of opportunity.

Now, I've heard you say in the past that when you started going back to night school for college and ultimately for your bachelor's and then master's degree, you were a little bit ashamed. You were kind of doing this in secret. Why is that?

Classical musicians think nothing else matters. It's a cult. It's not a profession. It's more like a cult. My oldest son went to Princeton, and my younger son is in the Marines. Those are cults, too. And so if you basically say to someone of your friends in the Marines, you know, I'm getting out, but I'm going to re up, but in the Navy, they'll laugh you out. You just wouldn't do that. Well, that's what it's like in classical music. I remember one time I Was hanging around with this group of brass players and I was probably 28 years old or something and it was. I knew the writing was on the wall and I wasn't telling anybody. I was actually studying at night serendipitously. And this woman who hangs out with us, she's also a French horn player. She says, I got an announcement. We're all like, hey, what, what happened? Did you win an audition, man? She says, nah, I decided I'm going to leave the business. I just got a full scholarship at the University of Miami, the medical school. I'm going to become a surgeon. And she leaves. After a little while, we're all sitting around going, see, she didn't have it. It's like, she's going to become a surgeon. That's a big deal. But it wasn't to us. It was just obviously she hadn't had it. So she had to quit her crummy, low paying, French horn playing career to settle for becoming a life saving doctor like you, Peter.

So what did you study for your bachelor's?

Economics. And I didn't intend to do that. I actually intended to get my bachelor's degree in some area of the humanities or maybe even composition. I was a pretty avid composer and I thought that that's what I would do. But I took an economics class and it just opened my eyes. I mean, just statistically based social sciences. It felt like I had a magic wand or some. Actually more like a crystal ball. That's a better metaphor. I mean, I could see things about the. And furthermore, I could actually analyze behavior in ways that I didn't even think was possible. I felt like I was this whole world of information. To be able to generate information was being open to me. I was just. My mind was blown. I was completely hooked and I wound up becoming an economist. So talk about the sublime to the dismal.

Did you go straight from bachelor's to master's? At what point did you formally hang up your French horn and say, I'm going to pursue the PhD? Where did that occur in the timeline?

So I finished my bachelor's degree completely by correspondence. And in those days I was faxing in my assignments and buying course materials over the phone from the bookstores of these universities that offered these correspondence school courses. And I was banking the credits at this state college in New Jersey at the time that I never visited. I never saw the place until I went there. They gave me an honorary doctorate 20 years later, and I went and gave the graduation speech. I mean, what's the Graduation for correspondence school is it like 10 guys around a conference table? It turns out there was 3,000 people in the Trenton ice rink. It was phenomenal. It was wild. I mean it was mostly first generation college graduates, a lot of active military men. I was very proud that day to be among that group of really sort of American life entrepreneurs. It made me very proud. I went on to the state, the local state university and at night did my master's degree, a one year master's degree. And at that point, I mean it was fish or cut bait. And so I left music at that point after that and went away residentially and more traditionally, started my PhD and over the next four years finished my.

PhD and what was the focus of your PhD?

My PhD was in quantitative policy analysis. So I was doing mathematical modeling and applied microeconomics for public policy. I was working at the same time as a military operations research analyst for the RAND Corporation. I was doing theater level combat modeling for the Air Force. So I was doing large scale early artificial intelligence algorithms to link computers up together to simulate battle situations across a lot of scenarios. So I was learning a lot of math modeling and that was a real weakness for me was my mathematics and statistics. So working in that area was critically important for me to beef that up and become a well rounded scholar in the area where I had previously had weakness.

What did you do right after that? You became a professor, if I'm not mistaken, before you went to AEI, right?

No, no, I was 10 years as a professor. I graduated when I was 34 for my PhD and I went to Georgia State University in Atlanta for three years and then I went to. I was able to secure a position at Syracuse, which for public policy is the best school in the country. That was a really great opportunity. I'll always be grateful in that place for giving me that opportunity. And I moved to Syracuse and we spent the next seven years at Syracuse. I did what academics do. I was writing academic journal articles, refereed 14 readers, highly technical, writing papers that were mathematically so complex that now at age 58, I can't read them. I actually don't know what I was talking about at 35, which speaks to a lot of what I do now, which is the changing structure of the prefrontal cortex and our ability to learn and perform at different phases of life. What are we good at then and what are we good at now?

I want to come back to that because of course that's really the important hook here. But I just want to go to this next chapter Because I want to understand when you understood this shift in intelligence. So from Syracuse, you then went to aei. You were the CEO for about a decade, if I'm not mistaken, before leaving to join the faculty at Harvard, where you are today. At what point during this journey did you begin to understand what it is that you've now written about in Strength to Strength?

For those who don't know, the American Enterprise Institute is a think tank in Washington D.C. think tank is like a university without students. It's completely dedicated to high quality academic research, but in the surge service of better public policy. So it's in the middle of Washington D.C. it's one of the oldest think tanks in the world. It started in 1938 during the Great Recession, the Great Depression, to pull the United States and the world they thought out of the Great Depression using the tools of the American free enterprise system. But they had to bring together the greatest economists and later foreign policy experts and health and education experts. So I had 300 employees. I had to raise about $50 million a year in philanthropy. My job was like running for the Senate and never getting elected for 10 years. It was actually kind of a slog. I mean, it was an 80 hour a week CEO job. And I noticed about halfway through that my skills were kind of changing. I was getting worse at certain things and I was getting better at other things. I didn't actually understand why that was. I found that I was getting worse at thinking up brand spanking new clever ideas and I was getting much better at explaining things. I was becoming effectively a better teacher, better instructor, but I was worse as a classic innovator. When I had first come to aei, I was developing new programs. I was coming up with these new big policy and research ideas. And about halfway through I was noticing that what I was really good at was synthesizing everybody else's ideas and putting them together into a relatively compelling argument about how we should do things, which was interesting to me. But it also occurred to me that there was probably more to it than that. I got to work on where this was going to lead in my own life, such that I could exploit my own strengths optimally. And I started looking at the research on different forms of intelligence as people get older. What it led me to conclude, based on the work of a lot of social psychologists that were doing intelligence work in the 1960s and 70s, actually it was older work out of the UK, primarily the work of Raymond Cattell, is that early on we have a fluid intelligence, which is largely our innovative capacity. Based on working memory, where we can do a lot of things alone and come up with brand new ideas based on kind of limited background later on. We're less good at that, but we're much better at synthesizing ideas. We have a vast library, much less working memory, but a much better vocabulary, pattern recognition, and ability to synthesize ideas of other people, which is called crystallized intelligence. Now, what we find is that fluid intelligence tends to peak in the late 30s, which is, by the way, why a lot of classical musicians are peaking in their late 30s, is because fluid intelligence is not just about writing mathematical formulas. It's about doing a lot of things that make you great with your 10,000 hours of practice and your mastery, et cetera, et cetera, and then it declines in your 40s and 50s, but your crystallized intelligence, your teaching capacity, your explaining capacity, your pattern recognition, your management of other people, that those things get better through your 40s and 50s and 60s and stay high in your 70s and 80s. When I saw that, I thought, what am I going to do? What's my plan so that I can exploit that for the rest of my career? And that's actually what led me to quit my CEO job and to do what I do now, which is writing and speaking and teaching, really using my creative capacities to mix ideas together about happiness, which is my main area of focus and research.

Now, these terms, fluid and crystallized intelligence, the first time I ever encountered them, I think, is about four years ago in an Atlantic piece that you wrote. I think it was in the Atlantic. Obviously this was a precursor to the book. Does that sound about right?

Was that about four years ago, July of 2019? When I first wrote that piece, I was doing this research for myself. It was me. Search Peter. Which is what we all do. I mean, it's like people think, ah, Peter Attia, the great longevity. Dr. Well, Peter Attia wants to live a long time with good lifespan and health span and happiness span. And so that's why he's doing this work. And that's exactly why I was doing that work as well. I found that it was so useful to audiences that I wrote it up for the Atlantic. How to go from strength to strength in your life. That article was One of the 50 most read articles of the entire year of all publications in the world. And I thought, huh, Turns out I'm not the only one who's thinking about this. And so I wrote it up in a book over the next couple of years and published it in February of 2022.

Now what I don't recall, though I'm sure you explained it in the article. Are those terms fluid and crystallized terms you came up with, or are those in the literature and you're simply bringing them to our attention?

Those are in the literature. They were coined by Raymond Cattell, the social psychologist I talked about later, and his findings were replicated. And of course the social psychology then expanded the neuroscience literature. This is the way that the world is going. I mean, social psychology was kind of the whole show through the 50s and 60s and 70s, and since about the 90s and especially this century, neuroscience is really getting into the game. So the neuroscientists have started to replicate these two curves and finding the strength and some of the neurophysiological reasons for these strengths that are occurring as well.

In your book, you open, I think you open with this story about being on an airplane sitting in front of an older gentleman who's, well, I'll let you tell the story. I want to hear the story. And I'm also curious where that experience occurred in your personal evolution of this.

I was thinking halfway through my time as a CEO, kind of, where does it go? You run a company, I mean, you know what it means to actually run a business. But sometimes you think I'm going to do my homework and turn it in and things are going to get better and then it's going to stop. Well, when and under what circumstances? And what does that mean? What is the end goal? What is my intention with all of that? And it's very funny. I remember feeling a kind of an existential crisis about that. And I was thinking about it a lot. And around that time I was doing what I always did, which was sit on a plane with my laptop and I was coming back on a long cross country flight from LA to DC. This flight that leaves LA at 5 o' clock in the afternoon, gets in about 1 o' clock in the morning in Dulles. And I took it a lot. And one night I was listening to this guy telling his wife that he might as well be dead. And his wife was consoling. He was very disconsolate. I couldn't quite make out his words, but her words were very penetrating. So I was just hearing the answers. Oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And then it's not true. Nobody remembers you or cares about you or loves you anymore. It was just awful. And I thought, this guy is somebody who's not Peter Attia. I mean, this is somebody who he hasn't lived up to his own personal standards. He hasn't had the opportunities, he hasn't pursued the education and started the business. And now it's kind of near the end. I could tell by their voices that they were elderly. And at the end of the flight I was kind of curious just to get a little look. And the lights went on and we all stood up and I turned around. It was one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who is not controversial, he's not some actor or politician. This is somebody who's justifiably considered a hero by many millions of people for his achievements, his accomplishments in the 1970s, 1980s and before that as well. And he evidently is living a real life of regret because those times are long past. And I got this window onto his soul now. When we were leaving the plane, the pilot's like, thanks for flying United, folks like that was doing. And he looks through me like a pane of glass. I mean, why wouldn't he? He sees the guy behind me and he recognizes him and he says, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turn around and he's beaming with pride and joy. And I thought to myself, which is the real guy? And then I had a selfish thought which is, how can I be not that first guy? How can I structure? I'm not going to be the hero on the plane, Peter, but I'm trying to do a lot with my life. You know, I'm trying to live to the max, to create and have a contribution to achieve a lot which has some pathologies attached to it as well. I write about this in my research now about the success addiction and the workaholism that's attendant to to that and the neuroscience behind those addictions as well. But what can I do so that the rug is not pulled out from under me? And I'm telling my long suffering wife Esther on a plane in 30 years that I might as well be dead. That's what really led to this research project that led to the book let's Define Happiness.

I don't think I understand what it really is. And given that it's your business, effectively, it's what you teach, it's what you write about, it's the thing you think about as much as I think about the longevity component of biology. I'm sure you get asked this question all the time and I'm sure you've got a 30 second answer and I'm sure you've got a three hour answer. Take it in any direction you like.

I've got a semester long answer, which is the class I teach at the Harvard Business School, which is, what is it and how do you get it? The reason for that is that by the time my students reach me, my graduate students at Harvard reach me, a lot of them are realizing that the world's promises are empty. That the money, power, pleasure and fame that are supposed to bring you undying happiness are false promises. They're a bill of goods. They can be instrumental to getting what you want, but they can't intrinsically give you the satisfaction that you desire. So I start on the first day of class. I say, okay, guys, I mean, you spent all your elective points getting into the class because they have a competitive system to get these electives. And the class fills in like nine seconds. It's happiness after all. Free candy, kids. And there's hundreds of people on the waiting list for this class. I say, okay, you made a commitment to getting this class. You must know what happiness is. And so I go around, I cold call them, what's happiness? They'll say, it's that feeling I get on Thanksgiving and you know, yada, yada, yada. Feelings, feelings. Wrong. Happiness is not a feeling any more than your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. The feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness. Now, we measure happiness in all sorts of very complicated and very simple ways. And one of the things that we know is that all of the people who are really happy, who have a lot of happy feelings, but also have a lot of satisfaction and contentment with their lives, they're getting abundance and balance across three dimensions. And so this is the definition of happiness. Now think about this. Like if I were to say, hey, Peter, what is the Thanksgiving dinner? You'd say, well, it's carbohydrates, proteins and fat. You know, you'd say there's the three macronutrients of all food. And you know, we're always trying to get our macros in order. Forget lifespan, let's talk about health Spanish. And I say, let's take it even farther to happiness span. So let's get our literal macronutrients in order for health span. Let's get our happiness span in order with the macronutrients of happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. If you don't have those things in balance and abundance, you will not report being a happy person. Now this is different than unhappiness, which is another entire subject. Believe it or not, happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're different phenomena. So we're just talking about happiness here. To be a truly happy person, you need to enjoy your life. And that requires not pleasure. It's pleasure plus elevation. It's pleasure plus metacognition. You know, Thanksgiving dinner fills your belly and tastes good. That's pleasure. But the experience that you have of consuming the Thanksgiving dinner with other people and having a memory that you can last forever, that's enjoyment. And so it's a much more elevated experience than pleasure. Satisfaction, which is super fleeting and troublesome. And, you know, as Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is, you can't keep no satisfaction. There's an entire research literature on that that I participated in, on the problem with satisfaction. But it's the joy and reward for a job well done and a goal met. You know, that elation from actually meeting a goal. And last but not least is purpose is meaning in life. I talk an awful lot about the coherence, the significance, the direction, the meaning of meaning. And it gets back to a lot of the great philosophy. But we can also measure it. I have a few diagnostic questions that I ask for the clients who come to me, and they lack purpose in their life. The questions I ask are, why were you born? And for what are you willing to die? And if you can't answer one or both of those questions, you have a serious meaning problem. We got to dig in actually, to solve that particular problem. But that's it. I mean, these are the three macronutrients. These are the protein, carbohydrates and fat of happiness or enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose.

There's so much I want to touch on there. I'll start with the latter. I have to be honest with you, and I've thought about this a lot in terms of purpose. I literally can only think of one thing, and I suspect a lot of people will think of this, which is kids. I think that's probably the only thing I would say I have a real purpose for that I would die for in a second and think nothing of, is it bad that I don't have a higher purpose than that?

It sort of depends on what the higher purpose means. One of the things that you find is that one of the habits of the happiest people think of this as the dishes in the happiness meal, as opposed to the macronutrients in the happiness meal. The happiest people, they all have a transcendental understanding of life, which is to say that they have an understanding of life bigger than themselves. The most miserable people, the people who lack happiness and have a lot of unhappiness, they're focusing on me, me, me, me. I mean, the philosophers talk about the I self and the feelings. Me self. And the I self is outward looking. It's observational, it's sort of Zen. The me self is reflective of the outside world. It has a lot to do with social comparison. It has a lot to do with the micro circumstances, you know, like my job, my money, my career, my friends, my house, my mortgage, my commute, me, me. It's just so boring. And a transcendental understanding of life is key to a happy life. Because you need peace, you need perspective, you need to zoom out. When the Dalai Lama says you are 1 in 7 billion, what he's saying is not that you're insignificant or you're the speck. What he's saying is that you need to stop focusing on yourself so you can actually get some relief once in a while. So that might be the higher purpose, but it's just a transcendental purpose, an understanding of something bigger than yourself. So that's another thing. And I know you have that. I know you think about things that are bigger than you and part of that is your family and part of that's your kids. But part of that is an understanding of the universe.

Coming back to the kids thing, I think one of my greatest fears of aging is less about the physical changes of aging and more about kids being out of the house. I think a lot of parents probably feel that way, which is it's so enjoyable to have young kids around, even though it's hard. It's like a two edged sword. But I can't imagine how quiet a house would be without them. And I don't know, sometimes I think, and I'm not really sure how enjoyable life would be when they're gone, because when they're gone, they're gone. You know, recently I posted something on Instagram that I found really depressing, which was a chart of the fraction of time that people spend with others in their life over the course of their life. So it's kind of like the x axis is time and the Y axis is percent spent with each entity and it's various curves. And the one that just depressed the hell out of me was time with your kids, which basically corresponds to once they turn 18, it just plummets. Now you've got kids that are. You have three kids, right?

Yeah, my three kids have grown up youngest is 19 in Spain in college. I know all about how the empty nest works. And there were times, I mean, like, I've been in your house and there's a lot of Legos on the ground, and it's. There's a lot of chaos that comes from little kids. I remember that. And my wife and I, we said, you know, what's it going to be like when actually, you know, they grow up and move out? And it is very different and it's very disconcerting and it's kind of new to us, quite frankly.

And.

But the key is, and this is one of the most important things for a happy life is a partnership with somebody who will be the last person on whom you lay your eyes as you take your dying breath. That's really, really important. A companionate love that is your wife, that turns out to be much more indicative of your happiness than actually getting the developing and having a continuing relationship with your kids, because your kids are turning into different people every single year. I mean, that's super fun and that's super interesting, but that's actually not the key. The people who suffer the most from empty nest syndrome is not the empty nest. It's the fact that they're only with one other bird, and they don't really like that bird very much. That's the real problem is when it comes in. And that's one of the things that I talk about with my students. And by the way, I'm doing lots of executive teaching these days. And it's what I'm talking about with people our age, too, is the goal of your marriage is not passion, it's friendship. This is the goal. You must be close friends, ideally best friends with your spouse, such that your kids, they grow up and they move away, and then you have your grandkids. I'm probably gonna have grandkids within. My oldest son is married. They're gonna have kids quick, I bet. I mean, I don't know, you can tell that I'm projecting and praying about this, but, you know, then I'll have grandkids and it'll be a different experience, but I'm gonna be with my wife Esther, and fill death to us part. So that has to be the juice of the relationship or the love that actually makes true happiness. And love truly is the great secret to happiness.

That's the one saving grace. As I feel very fortunate that my wife and I are. We joke that, like, we're the best roommates in the world. I think we'll have a lot to enjoy in that transition. Is the implication of that, though, Arthur, that. Because I don't think it is. But how do we reconcile then, a person who chooses not to have a partner?

There are some people who do really, really well on their own. You know, introverts who like to live alone, for example. And loneliness is not the same thing as solitude. Isolation and solitude are very, very different phenomena, by the way. They're neurocognitively different phenomena. They affect the brain in different ways. So isolation is always bad, but solitude is not. As a matter of fact, we all need it. We need it at different levels. That's point one, point two. And actually this is based on the harvest and.

Sorry, just to interrupt you for a sec, Arthur, you can be lonely in a relationship and you can be in solitude and not be lonely.

Absolutely. One of the greatest predictors of divorce is partners who are lonely while living together. And this gets back to the big danger of the empty nest syndrome is that the only thing you have in common is your kids. And that one point of commonality disappears and you're sitting across the table blinking at each other during dinner, not talking because you literally don't have anything to talk about. That's metastatically awful for a relationship. And so that's why it's critically important that couples have something in common besides their kids, that they're practicing their religion together, they're practicing interest together, they're reading the same things, they're on the same philosophical journey together. I mean, one of the things that I talk about with couples is that they should develop philosophical interests in common. They're talking about deep things. The gold standard is that your kids are like, ah, mom and dad are talking about Kierkegaard again, or whatever. I mean, it's got to be something that's bigger than, did you change his diaper? That's not going to be something you have in common forever and you're going to be lonely inside your relationship. The second big point, however, is that whereas most of the truly happy people, as they get older, they do have a spousal partner where that's companion in terms of its love, which also has some passion. But the companionate part is ascendant throughout your marriage, whereas the passion part is not as high as it used to be. And that's completely okay. That's healthy, normal, and actually advisable because it's more sustainable over the long run. But some people are very happy and don't have that. What do they have in common? Very, very close personal Lifelong friends. So here's the key. If you don't have a spouse, you need one real friends. These are people who know your secrets, who would take your 2am phone call and that you talk to a lot. Now, that doesn't mean that if you're married, you don't need that. Because when I talk to especially men, men are horrible at real friendships. They're the worst. They got lots of deal friends, but no real friends a lot of the time, especially if they're really successful in business. And so I'll say, okay, name two guys or whoever who are real friends besides your spouse. And they're like, yeah, so and so and so and so. When's the last time you talked to him? He's like, I don't know, four months ago. Not a close friend. That's just the case. And so you got to work on these things for sure, for a lot of reasons besides the fact that it's just healthy and good. You also might at some point be left alone if you're widowed and you don't want to be alone in the world under those circumstances, that's really corrosive. That's one of the reasons that men do so poorly when they lose their wives to death is because a lot of them don't have real friendships to backfill any of this need in their souls.

Why? Well, actually, before I ask you the gender differences there, can you give me a few other characteristics or features that differentiate deal friends from real friends?

Yeah. So this is actually an Aristotelian notion, believe it or not. And we do a lot of this stuff in our mathematical social sciences as well. But all the things that we do in behavioral social sciences, now all we're doing is we're just exposing the ancients to empirical scrutiny. We're just testing whether or not Aristotle was right, which he always is. So Aristotle wrote a lot about friendships, and he talked about these escalating levels of friendship in terms of the satisfaction that they bring and the virtue that they bring to our lives. The lowest level is the friendships of transaction action. So these are friendships where people work together and they're really. You're a shirt manufacturer and you've got a guy who sells you cloth, and you're friends. You probably really are. I mean, you like him, he likes you. You're really friendly with each other, you take care not to offend each other. But if you stop making shirts, you're probably not going to continue that relationship. Above that are relationships of admiration or beauty, where you admire each Other. And that's a really good thing, too. But that's dependent on a particular quality. The perfect friendship, or the friendship of virtue is just inherently satisfying. You'll like being together. Frequently it'll revolve around a third kind of useless thing, like baseball. This is what guys do. It's like, I don't know. What do you guys do together? I don't know. We build birdhouses or whatever it happens to be. And it's that third thing that is the focus. But what you're doing in parallel is developing a very beautiful friendship, a very positive link. And that's what these real friendships have in common. They're intrinsically satisfactory. And they're frequently focused on the cosmic third thing. It doesn't have to be useless, by the way. I mean, I have a very close friend. One of my very closest friends is. He's in Atlanta. And we have the same religion. And we talk about that a lot. Our discussions about that are quite deep. And he also wants to know what's going on with my marriage and my kids. And he knows my secrets, is the bottom line.

You alluded to something that I think most people intuitively would appreciate. But I'm curious as to why. What is it about men that makes it harder for us to have those really deep friendships? Again, if I were to consider my parents, I don't think my father has one such friendship. I think my mother has many, really many. She's rich in friendship. Maybe they're an extreme example. Why do you think that is?

Well, there's some generational differences between men and women. And there are probably some intrinsic differences as well. The generational differences largely have to do with the fact that in conventional family setups. I mean, I'm going to guess that your dad was super hardworking. He probably was busting his pick all the way through your childhood. He put you through college. He did all that stuff. And he knew that he was gone all day. And that if he went out to goof around with his buddies after work, he was stealing from his family. And so he came home. The truth was that his intimate relationships were in his family and his business relationships were at work. And there was a firewall between the two, such that he could afford to spend adequate time or he had adequate time to spend with his family. And so that was a very traditional situation. Meanwhile, your mom was making sure that you kids were properly brought up and you had friends, and she knew your friends, mothers. And the result was that she was reinforcing friendship relationships and therefore getting Better at them. Now the distressing thing is that friendship is a skill that requires practice. It's like a muscle and it will atrophy. You can get worse and worse at friendships. And so I'll meet these 60 year old guys, guys who are a little older than me, and they'll be like, what do you want me to do? Call up some other dude and ask for a play date? I mean, how does one do this? I don't know how to do this. I haven't had a friend, real friends, since I was in college and ever since then, then I got married and had my family and I worked really, really hard and now I'm lonely. And so what do you expect me to do? And the answer is you have to actually learn how to make and maintain friends, real friendships. And that's a skill that a lot of men lose because of our traditional social circumstances.

So what do you say to that guy? So the 60 year old guy comes to you and let's make this a dramatic case. You know, he and his wife have divorced or she's died, kids are grown up. And using the example you said, I mean, this is a guy who hasn't had an intimate friendship with somebody in 40 years. And let's say he's bought into what you're saying, which is a crucial part of his happiness for the remainder of his life is going to be intimacy through friendships. And maybe some of those are not platonic. Maybe he meets another woman, but let's focus on the platonic side of that.

The truth is it's not an easy nut to crack. But you have to do the work like anything else you can. We know that there's enough plasticity in the brain and there's enough emotional plasticity as well that we can learn all kinds of new skills. People can learn lots of skills. They can't be as good playing the cello starting at 70 as if they started at 7. We know that to be a fact. But you can get plenty good at stuff and that includes social skills. But you have to be committed to doing the work. What a lot of guys want is great. It's good advice. Professor. You know, I'm going to go out and get some friends. It's going to take time. It took your wife years and years and years and years to build up her friend group. It's going to take you some time as well, but you actually have to start putting in the work. And that has to do with actually making yourself available and vulnerable to other people. That means actually hanging out with other people and saying, and taking the time, a lot of guys will be like, I don't want to go have dinner with some guy. Well, you got to go have dinner with some guy. And furthermore, you actually have to ask that other guy questions about his kids and be interested in that other person. That sounds so awesome, obvious. But these are skills that a lot of men have lost or never really cultivated over the course of their lives. And so you can go through these basic social skills and they're sort of mystifying to a lot of guys, but once they do it. I've seen case after case because I've been coaching people on this now for a couple of years since this research has started to get some prominence. And I've seen amazing progress from people who are older than me.

Let's go back to the three components of happiness. The one that we didn't really touch on is satisfaction. You've obviously alluded to the Rolling Stones tune, which speaks to how fleeting it is. I wonder then why it's included. Because whenever I think of satisfaction, I echo that sentiment, which is, I'll have some goal. And I can't think of a single goal I've had, including ones that took me years to achieve, where the moment I achieved it, I don't think I'm being facetious to say within five minutes I'm thinking about the next one. And I mean, that's a very depressing thought. So given the fleeting nature of satisfaction, why is it even a component of happiness?

Well, you're not a typical case, Peter. And part of the reason is because you're doing an unusual and an unusually difficult success oriented thing. Not only are you working for your own success, you're working for your client's success. You're an addict for your success and you're an addict for other people's success. Now let me talk about a more typical profile. Most people are not going through life thinking, I'm going to get this great big thing and then running for the next great big thing and next great big thing after that. Most people are not thinking about their achievements in exactly the same way or the same scale as you. Most people have sources of satisfaction, which is a reward for getting to the end of the day, a reward that feels like a real reward to get through the week and to get to Saturday and to be able to relax. And those are real sources of satisfaction. Now you can blow that up, you can burn, bloat that to the point where your version of Saturday is some huge business milestone. Your podcast now has 200,000 weekly downloads. This is just so out of proportion to the ordinary experience. Now, that doesn't mean that the ordinary person can master satisfaction and edit in a reliable way either. We all fall prey to the problem of, I can't get none. Actually, I can't keep none. And there's a reason for this. Now, it is extremely joyful to be rewarded, to achieve a goal, even a little goal. We are made our brains light up like Christmas trees. We all know. I mean, you've talked on your show many times. I'm a regular listener to your show, and I've heard this many times. And I've heard you on Huberman and all the other kind of parallel shows that people listen to in this suite of how can we improve our lives? Podcasts and shows that we all have to understand dopamine these days. And dopamine, of course, is a neuromodulator not of pleasure, but of anticipation, anticipation of reward. And what it does is it says, you're going to get satisfaction if you get this thing, and you're going to get it forever. Dopamine's a liar. Mother Nature's a liar. She's horrible. Mother Nature basically says, that new car smell, it's going to last forever. And you always believe it. Which is why we do what we in social science call get on the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic means feeling. And the treadmill is obviously a metaphor. So we can run and run and run and run, but it moves against us. We think we're going to get satisfaction and we're going to keep it, and we actually don't, so we run for the next one. Now, fortunately, ordinary people get a next Friday and a next Friday and a next Friday. But if you're doing this and your main objective is the next big financial milestone, something out of proportion to the ordinary human experience, then it becomes quite tyrannical. Then it becomes something that you really can't keep up with. Now, there's a reason that Mother Nature does this. I'm bringing Coles to Newcastle by telling Peter Attia about homeostasis. But every biological and even emotional process is subject to homeostasis, in which we go always back to our baseline. You know, if you're on the treadmill this morning for good cardiovascular health, and you want your pulse to be at 135 or 140, you don't want it to be there a week from now because you die homeostasis 15 minutes or 30 minutes after you get off the Treadmill takes you back to your baseline pulse rate. That's for good and proper health. And the same thing happens emotionally. If you get elation from a job well done, it's going to leave so that you can be ready. It's going to go away very quickly so you can be ready for the next set of circumstances. That's why you can't keep. No satisfaction is so that you won't be just staring at the delicious berries on the bush with joy in the Pleistocene, while the saber toothed tiger is sneaking up behind you and you're not aware of it. You need to be ready for the next circumstantial whatever's going on in your life. And that's how homeostasis works. That's why it happens and that's why you can't keep. No satisfaction that notwithstanding, a life without those moments of satisfaction is dull and it's gray. And that's one of the key parts of major depressive disorders called anhedonia. And anhedonia means the inability to get this feeling of satisfaction and the anticipation of the reward. So you need it, but the paradox is you can't keep it. And so one of the things that I talk about is for people like you who have this outsized understanding of what satisfaction is going to be, how you can crack that code, how you can dominate the matrix in a different way. And the answer is basically this, you need to stop managing your haves and start managing your wants. In other words, your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. And you need to manage the denominator of your satisfaction fraction as opposed to the numerator. And serious full on wants management can be a game changer for a guy like you, for anybody for that matter. But it's a less serious issue for a lot of people. But for a guy like you, you need a wants management strategy or you're going to be running from thing to thing to thing. And as your haves go up, your wants will go up by more and paradoxically, your satisfaction will decline, which pulls.

Down your overall happiness a lot to unpack there. So let's start with how much of the want deals with comparison versus intrinsic needs to one up yourself. I'll give you an example. A great source of satisfaction in my life has historically come not anymore, but certainly historically has come through sort of athletic achievement. So when I was a cyclist, it was certain milestones I wanted to be able to hit. When it was a marathon swimmer, it was certain swims I wanted to be able to do believe it or not, there's less comparison to others in some of those things, depending on how you define your metrics. Like, you might say, like, I want to be able to climb Mount Palomar, which is, you know, a long climb, 20 miles or something. I want to be able to climb it in a certain amount of time, or I want to be able to swim across this sliver of the ocean or things like that. Those don't feel like they're heavily dependent on comparison to others. But yet there are a number of other things where I think it's almost exclusively about. You can't ignore what's happening to others. Right. You mentioned income or some other measure of professional success. We've joked about the idea like you could literally be worth a hundred million dollars, but if your peer group is worth a billion, you might actually find yourself feeling poor. Makes no sense to those of us that are miles beneath that. But how do you untangle those two types of objects of satisfaction, One that is purely intrinsic, one that is pure comparator, and yet both of whom could easily put you on a hedonic treadmill. Is there a difference?

There is, but they're kind of in a hierarchy of what will bring you enduring satisfaction. And the one you're talking about where you're comparing Peter with Peter, Peter Time 0 with Peter Time 1, that's still a tyranny. It's just not as bad a tyranny as comparing yourself with somebody else counting your social media followers. Or you're like, I don't care if I have 200,000 downloads as long as I have more than Huberman, that'll never happen.

And to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that the former was less insidious than the latter. I just wonder what the difference is. Because the problem with the former is whether it's playing something on the French horn or swimming. Those tend to rely on going back to fluid intelligence. Well, we've just established that that's probably going to peak in your 30s. So whether it be athletic achievements or whatever, they're probably going to start going down for sure.

Now. The biggest problem with social comparison, however, there's nothing good about social comparison. We do it because we have to. And part of the reason is we have to understand what we're doing. We have to understand who we are and where we're going. And that means. And we're part of a society, so there's a natural fabric of comparisons that are happening all the time. But actually trying to understand your own self worth in Comparison to other people is really the worst. Tyranny that leads to envy. Joe Epstein, who's the great essayist, says that envy is the only deadly sin that's not even fun. I mean, it's just misery. My dad used to. My dad was a really funny guy. He used to joke, it's not enough to win, son. Your friends have to lose too. Right? It's like. It's horrible because it actually tears other people down. You can feel awful about yourself, notwithstanding the fact that you're creating real value. In Dante, down at the bottom of Mount Purgatory, he finds Satan, and Satan, at the worst of the deadly sins, is actually half frozen in a block of ice and twisting in agony in this ice. And he's keeping the ice solid because of the wind from his wings, where he's fruitlessly trying to get away and is in such agony he doesn't even notice the narrator of the Inferno going down to the bottom of Mount Purgatory. This is analogy. It's not envy isn't fire. You're frozen. It's awful. There's two commandments against it. It's so bad, is the whole idea. Okay, so when you're comparing yourself with yourself, that's just looking for progress. Mathematicians will say that all of happiness is in the first derivative progress off the baseline. That's what you want, is progress. And that's really good. The problem is that's insidious too, because that's also on the treadmill. The true master will be getting intrinsic enjoyment from the thing that she or he is doing. That's what the true master actually gets. And that's the goal that we should all be going for. And the way to do that is to have this idea of wants management. There are other ways to put at this. There are other ways to actually get at this as well. I like the metaphor of instead of adding brushstrokes to the canvas of your life, start thinking of your life as a sculpture where you have to chip away until you find the true.

Peter, tell that story. Actually, you wrote about that in the book. I believe you were in the museum. Was it in Taiwan?

Yeah, in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, which is the greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world from the Paleolithic into the present. When you go to a museum, never go by yourself because you'll remember nothing except the snack bar. You gotta go with somebody who will show you 10 things. Get a guy, as they say in the vernacular, and say, I want to understand deeply 10 things that's the way to go to any museum. And so I hired a guy and he was a philosopher and an expert in both Eastern and Western art. And I was looking at this block of jade that was carved, a 2 ton block of jade carved intricately into a village, a village scene. I said, even if I'd never seen any Chinese art in person and I were not in Taiwan, if I were in Dayton right now, I'd know this is Chinese how? He says, oh, it's just that the whole philosophy is different between Western and Eastern art. And I said, what is it? He said, well, Western art uses the metaphor of starting with nothing and then creating something. The Eastern art, the idea is starting with everything there and chipping away until you reveal it. Now, this is true in music too. You'll find in Eastern classical art traditions. I've studied Hindustani classical music, you know, raga, for example. I studied tabla, which is the North Indian classical drumming. The ensemble will be as small as it needs to be, such that nothing is extraneous. Whereas in a Western orchestra, a Symphony Orchestra, there's 85 people cranking in 100 decibels such that in the east they'll say, I can't even hear the music of a symphony orchestra because there's too much going on. It's the same kind of metaphor. Well, your life in the first part is usually a canvas. By the time you're 45, if you're a successful person, that canvas is full. Man, it's like Jackson Pollock, you know, add one more brushstroke and it adds nothing that you can possibly. It probably gets worse. It's just dense and dark at that particular time. You got to move to the metaphor of the block of jade that you chip away until you actually find the beautiful thing that's in you. And the goal for the second half of life, certainly after 45 years old, is each year having less each year. Getting rid of more relationships that are extraneous, more possessions, more ambitions, more experiences. And the way that I do that, I actually have a practical way of doing it. I was a young guy like everybody else. I had a bucket list. I'm a very ambitious guy. I've gone from career to career, tried to do a lot with my life, and I had a bucket list. All the things that I wanted, all. It did make me feel like a loser, you know, it's like all these things that are unfulfilled. And it kept me fired up, to be sure. But now I have a reverse bucket list where I make A list of all of my worldly cravings and ambitions. And I might get them and I might not. What I'm not is I make a conscious metacognitive commitment to not be attached to the things on that reverse bucket list. I'm not attached to my opinions in the same way that I was my political views. I'm not attached to the ambitions that will show me that I'm Mr. Big along the way. It might happen, it might not happen. But when I make a commitment consciously to detach myself from those things, it's like chipping away. And I'm telling you, Peter, it is very, very effective for helping you with a wants management strategy such that you can have a big fulfilling life that's enviable by any outward standard, but at the same time not be chained to it in this insidious kind of success addiction that brings so many successful people so much unhappiness.

Say more about this want management. I mean, I think I intellectually kind of understand. I certainly understand the equation why we want the want in the denominator to go down, which therefore raises the value of the fraction. But what's the practical set of tools? That one? So let's just say I'm sitting here saying, arthur, I just don't think I can be happy until I. And I don't want to use myself as an example because people are sick and tired of hearing about me. So let's just say I'm a normal guy. And until I get this promotion, I gotta get to vp. Until I'm a vp, it's just not. But once I get there, I swear it's gonna be great. You know, I just wanna pay the mortgage off right now. It's a bit of a chain. And once the mortgage is paid off, like we are absolutely gonna be able to take a month off every summer and go anywhere. So there's a list of all of these things that all seem pretty reasonable in terms of aspirations, in terms of career, success, et cetera, et cetera. How would you explain to that guy? Well, let's skip the first part. The first part is you're going to tell him that, by the way, when you get all those things, you're not going to feel that much different for very long. But more importantly, how would you spare him the agony of spending the next five years pursuing that, only to find out he'll be right where he is now?

I have an exercise that I do with my students when they're in their late 20s. My MBA students are on average 27, 28 years old. And it's the same thing that I. Same exercise that I do with people who are my age. I'm 58. And it basically starts like this. Imagine yourself, you're 49 or 50, I can't remember.

49.

Yeah. I'm not trying to give you an extra year, Peter. Imagine yourself in five years, you're 54 years old, okay? Totally imaginable at this point. You're going to be in really good health, you're going to be working really hard, okay? Now imagine that you're happy. And we've talked about what that means, but you know what it means when you're happy. You know how it feels when you're happy. So you don't even have to describe that. Put in order the five things in your life that explain it, why you're most happy in order, and think about it carefully. It's not the stuff that you wish would make you happy, the things that might make you happy, the things that never have but could somewhere. The things you really know really realistically, 54 years old that are making Peter Attia happier than he is today. In order, I guarantee you that 1, 2 and 3 are going to be about your relationships. And only the bottom of the list is going to be about human achievements. That's just the way it's going to be. And then the next thing I'm going to ask you is, what's your strategic plan for aggressively managing 1, 2 and 3 as opposed to leaving them up to chance? How much of your time are you spending on 4 and 5 and even things that are not on the list, as opposed to 1, 2 and 3, what is your strategic plan? Plan for fortifying your friendships, your marriage, your spiritual walk, the relationships with your children, your relationships with your parents, all that stuff. Those are the biggies. And that's how you think about it. You say, okay, you got the promotion, congratulations, you've got extra money. You might say, that's a good way for me to have better relationships because I'll be able to go out of town with my family. Do you really think that that month away is going to be the game changer for you to have the perfect marriage? Or should you be thinking, great, if you get the promotion, more power to you, but do you think you should be thinking more aggressively and strategically about how to improve your marriage today? How can you improve your marriage today? And probably has a lot more to do with paying attention to your wife. It probably has a lot more to do with actually trying to get interested in many of the things that she's interested in. It's not rocket science. We actually know how to do this. But if it turns out to be that mystifying, maybe get some help, but manage the things that really will be what you know will bring you the greatest happiness. Don't leave those things up to chance.

Love that exercise, Arthur. My question, I guess, is what fraction of people do you think have enough? Maybe awareness or introspection is the word, that they could come up with that list? Because I think you're absolutely correct. If you really think about this from the right spot, 1, 2, and 3 have to do with your physical and emotional health. And if your physical and emotional health are out of order, I don't think anything else really matters. Do you get the sense that when you pose this question to your students that all of them are able to arrive at that conclusion?

It sort of depends on how deeply they take or how seriously they take the question. So if you ask it in a kind of a breezy way, a pretty informal way, half the students will have these extremely extrinsic motivations about money, power, pleasure, and fame, and half of them will have intrinsic motivations about relationships and love. But if you ask them to think very, very deeply about it, almost all of them wind up in the intrinsic category of love and relationships. Usually the top, especially for people in their late twenties, is their romantic lives. They want to have that on point. The second is their family and friends is the second big category. And the third is that they want to have children. Most of them really actually want to have children. They don't know when and they don't know how, but that's something that they want. And so we say, okay, well, we need to be focusing strategically on treating your romantic life the way that you would a startup. You know, we need to have the same seriousness. You need to be putting in the time, you need to be putting in the work. And we talk about actually how to do that, what the barriers typically are. And there's a lot of science and there's a lot of good practices behind that. And they tend to, when you ask them to do the work, they will focus in on those three areas. Now, if you say, why weren't you paying attention to those things? They'll say, I don't know how to manage those things. I came to the Harvard Business School to learn how to be successful in my career. I didn't learn how to be successful in dating. So, professor, how do I do that? And it turns out that there are ways to do that, but you have to take it seriously and put it to work.

We spoke about the four idols. What is it? Money, power, pleasure, fame?

Fame is really a funny one, though, because most people listening to us are like, I don't want to be famous. Yeah, but you want to be admired by others, and you want to have some prestige. And that's localized fame. That's to be known and admired by the right people. It's exactly the same phenomenon philosophically and psychologically.

So let's explore those a little bit more. Is it necessarily the case that we are hardwired to have preferences along that spectrum? Well, I suspect it's both nurture and nature. I can imagine that the circumstances by which you grow up would heavily influence that. But how much of that do you think is sort of hardwired versus developed as a result of circumstances?

So there's a lot of research on that. And most of the philosophy would suggest, and even the evolutionary psychologists would suggest that we're hardwired to be looking for money, power, pleasure, and fame, because that makes us most. That gives us fitness in the mating market, who gets mates? Somebody who's got a bigger cave, More flints, more animal skins, more buffalo jerky piled up in the corner. It was actually known by more troglodytes than troglodytes that he or she knows this gives you mating fitness. And so the result is this would become an imperative. It would become a hardwired imperative. And then you have all kinds of evidence of this. You actually find that when people are kind of at their base nature, when they're being distracted, they will go for these particular rewards over much more intrinsic, more satisfying rewards having to do with love. They will go for these types of rewards all day long. We see this in our consumer patterns. We even see some of the really interesting neuroscience research talks about how it will illuminate our brains, how it will stimulate the most dopamine. The most dopamine comes from these not very satisfying rewards, but nonetheless the ones that we're supposed to go for. Now, here's the key thing to keep in mind. Mother nature wants you to pass on your genes. Mother nature wants Peter ATI to have, like, a hundred kids. But of course, you don't want that. You want three. And you want to have a lifelong partnership with one wife. And that means that you can't live the hippie motto of if it feels good, do it. That is the motto of useful idiots, by the way, there's other stupid mottos like, if it feels terrible, treat it and make it go away. Because suffering is really important in a full life, too, it turns out. But the key thing to keep in mind is that Mother Nature, she doesn't care if you're happy. She doesn't care. That's not Mother Nature. We don't select on happiness. We select on biological fitness to mate, to pass on our genes. And so the result is, if you follow, if it feels good, do it. You're going to be chasing a whole lot of very fleeting rewards for what you think is enduring satisfaction. And you're going to have your hedonic treadmill speeding at a terrifying velocity, and you won't even know how to get off it. You need to get in charge of your own life is the bottom line.

You wrote something. God, I want to say it's been in the last couple of months in the Atlantic about happiness and success and noting that the happiest people weren't necessarily the most successful. If I'm remembering that correctly. I think you wrote this in maybe April, it might have been June, but it looked at some data that suggested actually a little bit of sacrifice in happiness led to greater success. Am I remembering that sort of correctly?

Yeah, that's right. And part of the reason is because people who are tremendously successful, in worldly terms, when I'm talking about success, we could define it in different ways, right? Having a lifelong marriage where you're in love with your spouse, that's unbelievably successful. Believing like you have found spiritual transcendence, that's unbelievably successful. Living for the good of other people, tremendously successful. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about worldly success, money, power, fame, the admiration of other people. So that these particular metrics of success, people who are remarkably successful along those worldly metrics, they're making cost benefit calculations systematically that are not in their own happiness favor. Typically, they're making sacrifices to their own happiness for some reason. And this is one of the things that I've looked at in my own research. Why, why, why, why? And I was talking to a woman. One of the things that I do as a social scientist, I'm not just cranking data. I go out and talk to the humans, which I find is a really beneficial thing to do. And I was interviewing this unbelievably successful woman on Wall Street. I mean, billionaire, business starter, epic success after success and very well known. And she was confessing to me that she was missing decisions that people were doubting it. That at the same time that she and her husband were just kind of roommates. That she had a cordial relationship with her adult kids. That she was starting to get bad blood work back from her doctor. She thinks that she was probably drinking too much. She couldn't sleep right? And the whole thing. And she said, what do you do? I said, you don't need a nerd from Harvard to tell you what to do. You told me you're a billionaire. Step back from your company. Take a souvenir in it. Go onto the board, whatever. Get to know your husband. Reestablish a relationship with your kids. Start to take care of your drinking problem. Become a client of Peter Attia. I don't know you know what I'm talking about here. I say, why don't you do these things? She thought about it. She said, I guess I'd prefer to be special than happy. And I thought that is the hallmark of addiction. You know, I used to be a musician. I've met a lot of addicts. I've met a lot of alcoholics in my life. And they will confess that before they got clean and sober. That they preferred to be high than happy. They all said that they knew that they'd be happier. When they were finally beyond this thing. But let's just get high one more time. Just the feel of that pipe on my lips one more time. Just the burning of the alcohol in my throat one more time. Just the. What did William Burroughs call the red. The blood in the hypodermic needle before you actually put down the plunger. And it gives incredible pleasure to people. And they say, just one more time. Just one more time. And that's what that lady was saying to me. That's a success. Addiction that is absolutely implicated in the dopamine system. And that is like any other behavioral addiction. That a lot of very worldly, successful people fall prey to. A lot of people listening to us. And I'm glad they're listening to us right now. Because they want an edge. But you got to ask yourself. Arthur has to ask himself, and Peter has to ask himself. And all the people listening to them. Have to ask themselves, is this a pathology that I'm actually feeding. By actually trying to get this edge? And I hope it's not. And I hope it's not for me. But I know a lot of people where it is. We talk about workaholism. There's a lot of literature on workaholism. Workaholism is an ancillary Addiction to the success addiction. People work really, really hard. The payoff, the cookie that you get, the dopamine is just driving you to. Is the promotion, is the raise, is the dollar, is the compliment, is the adulation on social media. That's where the real addiction is coming in. And those are the people that are going to be sacrificing their own happiness decisions for these success metrics.

Do we have a sense of. This is an unanswerable question. So I'll rephrase it in kind of a more theoretical. What would the world look like today if no one was pursuing being special over being happy? What year would we be living in? Would it be 1842? Right now what I'm really getting at is how much of the modern marvels of this world do we owe to the backs of people who sacrificed their own happiness for the innovation that allows us to be doing what we're doing right now?

It's such a smart question, and I've considered this myself. For me to say you and I should break our success addiction, therefore the world would be better if nobody had a success addiction is the fallacy of composition. It's to basically say, since I get home faster, if I go 100 miles an hour down the freeway, it would be better if everybody drove 100 miles an hour on the freeway. Now, you live in Texas, so you're like, yeah, actually, that would be better. But anyway. But that is really, really relevant because what you find is that many of the greatest innovators, composers, creative intellects, these were people that absolutely sacrificed their happiness that were deeply, deeply unhappy. Look, there's a huge literature that shows the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is stimulated in depressives in a way that makes them highly creative. I mean, we actually have good brain science at this point that shows that people who are suffering from mood disorders, they tend to be disproportionately creative. And they do a lot. Van Gogh was not the outlier. It turns out there's a lot of weird people in Silicon Valley that have a lot of pretty untreated maladies. And they're doing a lot now, you might say in Silicon Valley, a lot of them are doing a lot of harm for society as well. But the point is that it is true that the world has been propelled by a lot of unusual people with unusual goals. And so I don't know if I were the divine, how I would create the universe. I don't know how I would designate people in society. I don't know whether I would make people sacrifice their happiness for the greater good of the whole. I'm just not sure whether there's a kind of a success martyrdom that's going on here.

My two cents, having none of the data and none of the insights that you do, is that we are probably a lot better off for people who have made enormous sacrifices. And I'm not just talking about what we think about in Silicon Valley. I mean, I'm talking about Newton and Gauss and Euler and the great physicists, the great mathematicians. I feel like these people made untold sacrifices in terms of the pain that they endured as a result of their genius.

I think that's actually right. But there's one thing that I want to emphasize, which is that the misery is not inevitable. You can actually, and this is one of the reasons I've done my work. I'm not asking people to not be successful. I'm not asking people to be not ambitious, to not work hard. I'm asking them to dominate it such that you're not playing to your most innate drives, so that you can be successful and happy. And that's a small quadrant of the happy, unhappy, successful, unsuccessful. The successful and happy. Really, really successful and really, really happy. It's a pretty small group of people, but it's not populated. I mean, I write in my book about the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, who died surrounded by the people who loved him and who revered him. And the reason is because he got on his second curve, he dedicated his work to other people. He didn't say, forget it, I'm not going to write any more music. He said, I'm going to write music and I'm just going to detach myself from the ego of having this enormous audience of people who will say that I'm the greatest composer ever and I'm going to do it for humanity and to glorify God and to refresh the soul of other people. And if it's really successful in commercial terms, it is. And if it isn't, that's okay too. In other words, be really ambitious, but detach yourself from the worldly idols and think about how you can use your success in service of other people. And that's the hack, that's the workaround, that's actually the glitch. And the success unhappiness matrix is when you become other focused, you can be a success machine and also happy.

I agree with all of that. I was going to actually make a slightly different point, which was just because that's what got us here today as a civilization doesn't speak to the individual choice that we all have. Have. I'll give you an example in my world is my thinking on cancer screening for an individual is based solely on the individual. If I were in charge of creating a cancer screening program for everyone in the country or in the world, it's a totally different question. Because the former is really all about individual risk, individual cost, and what the risk reward potentially is. When you start to talk about that at a societal trade off level, it's a much more complicated problem. Now you have to look at quality adjusted life years and all these other metrics and you have to balance a budget to basically do this. And so my takeaway from this is that just because everything we said is probably true, it doesn't mean that any one individual doesn't have the potential to make a choice to live in less misery or to be happier.

Absolutely. And part of it is I believe you don't even have to sacrifice the success, but you do have to go against your worldly urges in a very big way. Not against your worldly urge for success, but against your worldly urge to pursue the success for a particularly idolatrous reason. And that's a really big distinction, as it turns out. Now this is the point that's made by philosophers and theologians forever. That when you do things in service of others, to lift other people up, to bring other people together, then you can become unbelievably successful. You can become the Dalai Lama, you can become Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, you can do Albert Schweitzer. What are all those people have in common? They were world famous, but they were doing this in the service of their fellow women and men. And that was the key distinction that allowed them to wiggle their way into the both happy and successful quadrant.

You wrote about this also very recently. You're the only reason I subscribe to the Atlantic. By the way, the Atlantic should know that you wrote about the mortality paradox. We can't conceive of not being here. I have been thinking about this so much, I'll sit there on my bike. I was thinking about it yesterday and I was really sitting there thinking how difficult is it for us to imagine the world with us not in it? Because every experience we have is only through our eyes, only through our senses. Say more about that because I just find this to be such a fascinating topic.

Mortality paradox has to do with the fact that as big brained mammals, we're able to understand that we're going to die intellectually. But what we can't conceive of because our brain isn't that big is the idea of not existing. So I know I'm going to die, but I can't imagine not existing. Those are two different phenomena, the two different cognitions. And one I can really understand, the other that I can't. And the fact that those two things are in tension creates a lot of fear. It creates a lot of uncertainty, real discomfort, real cognitive dissonance and discomfort in people. And so the result is they're trying to work through that their whole lives. Either they'll say, okay, well, I'll just resolve it on the first side. I won't die. Well, good luck with that. You're the longevity guy, and I heard you say, I was listening to you today, and you said, like, the one thing we all know is that we're going to die. So if Peter Atia says, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, okay. Or they try to resolve it on the other side, which is to either understand, to apprehend the concept of not existing, or to say, I will always exist, notwithstanding the fact that I'm going to die. And there's lots of philosophies and religions, and look, I'm a traditional Catholic, and so I've resolved it in a particular way. But the result of all of this is that this is a lot of what leads to people's fears. People talk to me a lot about what they're most afraid of. I ask people about that a lot. And part of the reason is because my main focus of my happiness work is love. And love and fear are opposites. Love and hatred are not opposites. Hatred is downstream from fear. And this is a philosophical principle from Lao Tzu and St. John the Apostle, but it's also a neurocognitive regularity where you find that how the brain works, you tend to find that love neutralizes fear. And fear can turn off love and every other feeling like a switch because of the way that brain is designed. The main focus of my work in happiness is the subject of love. And part of the reason is because love is the nuclear fuel rods of happiness. If you want to know one thing about how to be happy, happiness is love, full stop. And there's a ton of longitudinal data that shows this. There's a ton of data that shows people who are in their 80s and 90s who are really happy. If you look back in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, what they all have in common is strong relationships that they were cultivating and working on. Real love relationships in terms of romance and family and real friends. Not just real friends. Now, the interesting thing is when you're studying love is you also have to study its opposite. And the opposite of love is fear. That's a philosophical truism. You know, Lao Tzu talked about the fact that fear and love are opposite. St. John the Apostle. But also we find this in modern neuroscience in the way that emotions are processed in the human brain. Psychology shows this abundantly, that love and hatred are opposites. Hatred is downstream from fear. So if you want to understand what turns off love in your life, when people come to me and say, I don't have enough love, I'll say, well, tell me about what you're afraid of. And when people come to me and they say they have too much fear in their life, I'll say, well, need more relationships. We need more love to neutralize the fear. So the big fears that I ask people about, one of the things that I find is that everybody has a death fear. This is an interesting thing. Most people say, I'm not afraid of dying, and I'm not afraid of dying. I mean, like Peter, you and I are like, the reaper comes tomorrow. It's like, okay, I lived, right? And I'm actually not afraid of that. But I do have a death fear. Everybody does. And it has to do with the extinction of how you understand yourself. And that gets back to the mortality paradox. The idea of not existing has some manifestation in almost everybody's life. Whether it's, I'm really afraid of becoming irrelevant. I'm really afraid of being forgotten. That's your mortality problem, that's your death fear. You know, for me, it's like, I think about it, the one thing about my health I'm most worried about is dementia. My mother was demented, was in early stage dementia when she was my age. She was mid-50s, she was in early stage dementia. And she lived for another 15 years. Then it was really, really bad. It was really a bad ending. And for me, I mean, my whole living is inside my head. I work on my biceps, but it doesn't matter how strong they are. For me to be able to make a living and support my family and support my employees, et cetera. So that really freaks me out. Well, guess what? That's my death fear. It's the functioning of my brain as my death fear. Everybody has something like this, whether it's really ego related or has to do with skill related. Everybody's got their mortality tarot. This is one of the things that we need to dominate if we want to be happy. And I have an exercise, believe it or not, Peter, that I give my students on how to do that. Number one is you have to figure out what it is. You have to do some serious reflection on what your death fear is. And for most of my students at Harvard, it's fear of failure. These are super high performing. I mean, this was you. I mean, you went to Stanford and then you did all of this fancy college stuff. And so my guess is that you never had any academic failure and you were perhaps pretty afraid of academic failure because you'd never experienced it and because it would have been problematic in your family if you'd started to fail some classes in college. I was going to guess right.

I'm a bit confused because what you spoke about earlier makes a lot of sense as a death failure. Because I see a cognitive decline being tied to physical death because it's an end of life thing. I'm a bit confused about what the students, these 29 year olds are equating failure in life. For example, starting a business and having it fail with actual death.

So it's basically I am a success machine. Most of my students start off as very objectified by their parents where their parents say, you're the special one, you're successful, you always get A's, you're a hard worker, you know, get it done. And they start to see themselves as kind of homo economicus. They see themselves as high performers and they're very bright and they're very hardworking. And the result is they don't experience any failure in school. I mean, for me, these are absurd things. You got to be on an exam, who cares? I've flunked out of college, man. I know failure. But for them, they've never experienced these things. So it feels like a mortal threat because it's a threat to who they think they are, which is a successful person, somebody who never fails and is very foreign territory to them. So whether their death fears failure or cognitive decline or being forgotten or being irrelevant or actually dying, the technique for getting beyond this is really all the same. And it comes from that I found very successful is to do what is called in Theravada Buddhism, the Maranasati meditation. This is the nine part death meditation that Theravada Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Thailand and Vietnam they will undertake in which often they'll contemplate corpses, photos of corpses in various states of decay. And they'll say, that is me. And that is me. And they have a 9. This Maranasadhi is a meditation in which they imagine themselves decaying, dying, and then a rotting, bloated corpse.

And then it's so graphic.

It's super graphic. And that's the point.

And super accurate. Like it really is how a human corpse decays.

It's just unbelievable. And what you're trying to do is what psychologists would call exposure therapy. You're exposing yourself to the inevitable truth. Like I heard you say, peter, I'm gonna die. Okay, fine, fine, fine. Am I gonna. No, think about it, Think about it. Why? Because it loses its terror when it becomes familiar. So what I make my students do is a nine part meditation on their own failure, catastrophic failure by their own terms, which is not necessarily human catastrophic failure. I remember the first time I did this, I put the steps in because they didn't know how to do it. And the first one is, I'm falling behind. My colleagues at school, I graduate, but just barely. I'm not getting the jobs that my friends are getting. And then people thought I was going to get. I'm finding really my career is not what I thought it was going to be. And then I get to this one point, I threw this in just for a little bit of pathos. There's one point I say, I think my parents feel sorry for me. And a student starts crying because that's the nerve, man. That's the nerve. There's always this point in the death meditation. So figure out what death means for you where this mortality paradox, it really has teeth. And then actually put together the exposure therapy of walking yourself through the exposure, the emotional experience of this failure, and you will be free. This is the one thing that I guarantee that you'll be free of that now you can't do it just once. You have to do it again and again and again. Because what your fear is, is deeply rooted in a lot of your experience. But once you're exposing yourself to that again and again, it has an incredible therapeutic impact.

So the exercise is obviously first taking some time to really be thoughtful about what these fears are. And by the way, I'm guessing some people have more than one. I mean, you have the fear of actual death, perhaps the fear of failure along the way. So you might be doing this exercise twice.

We probably all have multiple versions. And they change throughout life. When I was 20 years old, I wasn't afraid of cognitive decline. I'm 58 years old and I want to keep the party going. Is the bottom line. And the party's not going to keep going. I might not be demented. I might be hit by a bus tomorrow. I might be. My mother in law died last month. Talk about a good death. She was 93. She had her marbles to the last minute and she died at home. Not bad. Not bad. You know, chapeau, that's really, really good. But everybody goes. And so you can't keep these things unless you're comfortable with this inevitability, the mortality paradox, this inability to process these two competing ideas. It'll terrorize you, it'll paralyze you. It'll be a problem.

What's the optimal dose of exposure? So if I was an arachnophobic and I came to you and said, we came to the understanding that I need to be exposed to spiders, how often would we need to do this?

That's a good question. And actually there are psychologists and psychotherapists who deal with this with different kinds of phobias. And they find that different people have to be exposed, have to have an exposure that's more or less frequent. And you have to re up it or you don't. Some people are just. They solve the problem. My little girl, she's 19. When she was a baby, we adopted her from China. You know, she had never been held and she was undernourished. And so when she came to live with us, she was afraid of a lot of stuff. And one of the things she was really, really afraid of was dogs. She would see a dog outside, she would scream. And so we wanted to solve this and we did it by getting a dog. But we didn't just like throw the dog in the room with her in the crib. He kept the dog apart. And it turns out there was about three, three days. And after about three days, she was not afraid of the dog anymore. And after about six weeks, she loved all dogs. And that was it forever. She's still crazy about all dogs. She's 19 years old. She has pictures of the dog that was that dog sadly passed away, but lives in blessed memory at this point because it was her cognitive therapy, death meditation dog or something like that. But other people who have lived with these phobias all their lives, including people who have these stresses about their own mortality, it requires, I think, a more strenuous and thorough intervention and one that's more frequent.

How do you suggest somebody go about doing this Exposure? In the case of the monastery, they literally have pictures of nine stages of decaying corpses. I assume that the Monks come there and look at these pictures and meditate.

Yeah. They stand in front of each one of the pictures each day and they say, that is me, while staring at the photograph where they want it to become completely trivial and familiar. That's what they want. So for all of us, again, that's a good one to do, by the way, because we're all going to die and nobody's like, hey, can't wait. But the thing that really is your bugaboo, the thing that really is holding you back, your version of the death meditation. Think about it, contemplate it, write it out and expose yourself to it as much as you need to. You know, when you're getting the benefit.

That could literally just be reading it out every day and thinking about it.

Contemplate each step for two minutes and to do that each day for three weeks. Because one of the things that I found is by the end of three weeks, it's like, yeah, I'm gonna fail.

Wow. So not a big commitment. Look, it's 20 minutes a day for three weeks, basically.

And again, maybe a psychotherapist would be like, you're kidding yourself. If it's a really entrenched problem, it's gonna take a lot longer than that. Plus cognitive behavioral therapy, plus drugs. I know, but one of the things that I've found is that my students are afraid of failure and we can get over it pretty quick.

You visited India. I think you describe yourself as an India file. By the way, when you were here, did I make you curry? I can't remember.

Did. It was delicious. With the tofu and unflavored Greek yogurt that you actually put in it for consistency and thickness.

Talk about the four ashrams. I know they're divided into sort of 25 year chunks. I find this very interesting what those four stages are, especially, I guess, as you pointed out, I'm about to be 50, so I'm really ending the second one, about to enter the third, and it's really the second one. That's the hardest one, I think, to leave, isn't it?

Yeah. These are called ashramas. What it means is the quarters of a perfect life in Vedic philosophy. So really ancient Indian wisdom, these ideas are probably 5,000 years old. I have studied with a lot of these very deep Hindu masters in southern India. When every time I go to India, I try to sit at the feet of one of these masters and they'll say, you're Christian, right? He says, you think all these things that we used to think of 4,000 years ago. But I went to India specifically to study the ashramas with a wonderful guru in a place called Palakkad in southern India, on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which is these two southern states. And his name is Sri Nocher Venkataraman. And I asked him about these ashramas, which are the four quarters of a well balanced and perfect life, ideally 25 years each. Now, the odds of getting to 100 are 1 in 6,000 in the United States today, and a lot lower than that in India. So the point is not to be dogmatic about turning 50, Peter. What we're really talking about is just these chunks of life. The first phase of life is called Brahmacharya, which is the student life. And all that means is not necessarily literally a student. It means the time when you're learning, when you're absorbing, when you are a sponge for human capital and ideas. Then around age 25 is when you enter Grihasta, which is typically when a man, for example, would get married and start a household. And that's called the householder phase. And that's career and marriage and children and success and sexual relationships and all of these kind of worldly rewards of money, power, pleasure and fame. That's when you get addicted to those worldly rewards of money, power, pleasure and fame. And it's fun and it's good and it's hard and it's tiring, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas in the west, we talk about that one hard transition from kid to adult, from Brahmacharya to Grihasta. In India, they talk about the difficulty of the second adolescence, which is passing out of Grihasta in into the third phase, around 50, which is called vanaprastha. That's 50 to 75. And that's a really critical and very interesting phase. It's hard to get into because it requires wanting less, it requires chipping away, it requires a reverse bucket list. What it requires. And Vanaprastha comes from two Sanskrit words, van and prastha. It means to retire into the forest. Obviously metaphoric. I'm not gonna go live in the forest, and neither are you. The whole point is to retire away from a lot of the parts of Grihasta. You're still going to work, you're still going to do your thing, but you're going to have a different focus. You're going to be focused on teaching, you're going to be focused on other people. This is very second curve. This is where it all comes Together. And this is what I try to do with my work, is I take Eastern or Western philosophy and wisdom, I mix it up with neuroscience, with historical regularity, and with modern experimental social science. And it all has to be consistent. If it's not all consistent, and there's one part of that that's not quite right, then I'm onto the wrong comprehensive story. So how this hangs together is you're passing into your second curve, which is also Vanaprastha, as one of the ashramas, retiring into the forest, where you are the teacher, you are becoming less involved in your own success, but more involved in the success of other people. Now, that might carry you to great glory, but that's not primarily for that if you're going to be in the happy, successful quadrant. And here's the twist, there's another goal ahead of you, a big goal, which is the last order, the last ashrama, which is 75 and beyond, which is called sannyasa. Now, a lot of people who studied Eastern philosophy or Hindu thought, they know it as sannyasi. A sannyasi is somebody who's an enlightened one. And in a lot of religious cults, they talk about sannyasis and all that, but basically all that means is somebody in this ashram of sannyasa. And that is where you're really dedicated fully to spiritual enlightenment. And in ancient times, Hindu men of some means, at age 75, would take leave of their families and go to the Himalayas and sit at the foot of their master until death. Now, I'm not suggesting that, right? That doesn't sound so great to me because I want to death do us part with my wife. But the whole point is, once again, not that to take it literally, but rather to say, look, the fruit of my old age requires a lot of training. The intellectual and philosophical and spiritual transcendental root, or fruit of my life, requires this elite training, which is vanaprastha. You can't show up to the Olympics 60 pounds overweight, expect to swim the backstroke, having not swum in months. It can't be done. You have to train for it. It takes, according to this Hindu philosophers, 25 years of elite spiritual and intellectual and transcendental training to get to that point later in life.

Arthur, if you go back in time to that plane ride from LA to DC and let's just imagine you've somehow found yourself alone with this gentleman, once you've figured out who he was and processed all he had to say, what would you say to him?

Well, I wouldn't intrude on his privacy to begin with because I was overhearing a conversation about the most intimate things in his life with his wife, which is one of the reasons I haven't divulged to a single soul the identity of that man on the plane. Because it's not important. It could be anybody, practically under very similar circumstances. But if you were asking me for particular advice, I would talk about the one thing that he's really missing, which he's evidently really missing. And by the way, I've Googled him since then. I've been following him since then. He divorced that woman already, and it's not his first wife. And so the whole point is, what he's been hungering after, panting after, lusting after is what he had in Grihasta, what he had on his first curve, what he had in his idols of money, power, pleasure and honor. That's what he wanted. That's what he wants back. And the fruit of his life should be his enlightenment, based on love, on faith and family and friendship and service to other people. Those are the habits, the happiest people. Those are the people who are maximizing their happy span. I made up that word, and it's awful. But I'm just trying to. You know, I'm talking to Peter and Tia here. So I got a saying in the theme. That's what I would talk about is like, you're going for the wrong thing. Your ambition to go back in time is going to lead you to misery. You need to move forward into the bonds of love. That should be your rightful claim as a person later in life. And I did the research so that I could give the advice to myself and other people on exactly how to do it.

Well, Arthur, I won't even ask if this gentleman is still alive, but if he is, I hope he's listening, as I think we all are. And I think we all benefit from this. It's a lot to think about. I think this is a harder thing to fix than a lot of the things that I talk about, and I'm not sure why. Because you would think, well, gosh, it must be really hard to take somebody who's sleeping six hours a night in a fragmented way and help them get to eight hours a night of great sleep, or someone who's sitting on the couch all day and get them to exercise, or someone who's living on McDonald's and get them to eat happy. All of those things are difficult, but they're not as difficult, I think, as taking somebody who lives on a hedonic treadmill and getting them to adjust that to decrease, wants to make the type of strategic changes that are in keeping with what ultimately will bring them happiness. I guess my final question for you is. Well, first of all, I guess, do you agree with me? But assuming that you would agree that this is very difficult, why do you think it is?

I've contemplated that an awful lot. And I mean, I'll answer that actually, in a weird way. When I was doing work for the RAND Corporation on combat modeling, using huge computer systems to look at unbelievable number of simulations and contingencies, what I found was that all of the easiest problems to solve, which can be very hard, but they're solvable, are what mathematicians call complicated problems. Those are problems that they take a lot of computational horsepower, but once you've solved the problem, you can replicate the solution over and over again with great accuracy, like creating a jet engine where every single jet flies and almost none of them ever crash or fail. That's a complicated problem. Now, it took a long time to do that. We call that the toaster problem problem. It wasn't that long ago that there were no toasters. And I recommend that you don't try to build your own. You probably burn your house down, but now you can get a $20 toaster that'll last you for many, many years, and it makes really great toast. That's a complicated problem. But the bigger problems, the problems that really bedevil us, the problems of human life and the essence of human life are mostly complex problems. Those are the problems where we understand the nature of what winning means very easily. But there's so many inconceivably high number of permutations that they can't be solved. Those are not toaster problems. Those are cat problems. Cats are complex, not complicated. You know what they want? Scratches and warmth and kibble, a box to poop in. But you don't know what they're going to do next, ever. And all of life's really interesting things that make life life. They're complex problems. Love is a complex problem. Love is a cat, not a toaster. The problem that we have in our life today, and the problem with what we're getting from tech, for example, is that they're trying to solve our complex problems of love using complicated engineering solutions. You're lonely. Here's Facebook. That's like saying you want a cat. Here's a toaster. So that's the problem, is that these complex issues, they're insoluble, actually, and so we're looking for a simulacrum for a solution to these particular problems. And when it comes down to saying just love more, it's insufficient. And that's why it's so hard. And so what I'll do when I can't get my cat is I'll just try to be contented with a toaster. It's like, I don't know, I can't find a mate. So I guess I'll buy a boat. I guess I'll try to be more successful. I guess I'll try to make more money. And it doesn't work. And that's what leads to a lot of the heartbreak of ordinary life.

Arthur, I think that's literally one of the most remarkable explanations I've heard for. I mean, certainly I'm familiar with complex and complicated problems, but this application of it is probably one of the most helpful I've heard. So I appreciate that and I appreciate your patience and sitting down with me a second time.

What a pleasure. Are you kidding? I was like, that's great. That's awesome. I get to talk to Peter twice.

Well, we'll do it a third time at some point. It'll be in person and we'll come up with something great to eat as well.

Thank you. Peter. Thank you for what you do. I love your show and all of the things that you do. You make my life a lot better.

Well, I can say the same too. Arthur. Thank you so much.

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