528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks

Speaker 1 Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning? What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly what you see in Jacob Slatter. There's another weird angle on this, though.
I've been trying to think about prayer technically. That's a complicated topic.

Speaker 1 Gratitude is a divine thing, it's managing your effective, evolved state so it doesn't manage you. Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden?

Speaker 1 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks.
Now, I met... Mr.
Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And after that,

Speaker 1 he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the business school at Harvard. And that's where he is currently.
He has a very active public life as well.

Speaker 1 And it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness. And

Speaker 1 so we talked about that. That was the focus of our conversation.
And part of that was a matter of definitional clarification, which is crucially important because

Speaker 1 to understand happiness and to pursue it properly means that it has to be defined correctly. You have to know what it is and what it isn't.

Speaker 1 And it isn't, for example, in Arthur Brooks' conceptualization, reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification in the moment. Right.

Speaker 1 And so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. And,

Speaker 1 well, understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation. So,

Speaker 1 pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment. Now, the problem with that, a problem with that, for example, is that psychopaths can be pleasure-seeking.

Speaker 1 And if pleasure is regarded as a good in and of itself, then psychopathic pleasure-seeking also becomes a good.

Speaker 1 And that's not tenable, not least because psychopaths don't operate in their own best interest because they fail across time and they're terrible socially, familiar from a community perspective.

Speaker 1 They're devastating. And so

Speaker 1 pleasure itself has to be elevated or sanctified. That's another way of thinking about it.
And the terminology that Arthur uses for that is enjoyment.

Speaker 1 And enjoyment is the elevation of pleasure, let's say, to something that's iterable, reciprocal, social, future-oriented, permanent, and stable.

Speaker 1 So you could think about it as the gift that keeps on giving. And that is something that's akin to, what would you say, a combination of wisdom and pleasure.

Speaker 1 So we talked about many elements of happiness other than that, but

Speaker 1 that gives you a flavor of the discussion and hopefully a reason to continue listening. So welcome aboard.
All right, Mr.

Speaker 1 Brooks, I think what we should start with likely likely is just a brief or lengthy, for that matter, walkthrough of let's start with your publishing record.

Speaker 1 Let's get a give everybody a sense of what it is that you're doing and how that came about.

Speaker 1 Thanks. And thanks for having me on the program.
It's a pleasure. I'm delighted.
And

Speaker 1 I write about human happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist by background.
My PhD is largely

Speaker 1 my work was dedicated to behavioral economics, but it moved much more toward the behavioral sciences and the psychological angle, and then later more toward neuroscience, because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our PhDs, just because we recognize that psychology is biology much more than we did in, I guess, the old days in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 1 I came late to what I'm doing right now. However, I've only been writing about human happiness in the way that I am for the past five and a half years since I've been a professor at Harvard.

Speaker 1 I've written two big books

Speaker 1 since I came to Harvard.

Speaker 1 One called From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life for strivers who are trying to understand the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence and

Speaker 1 why they feel like they're burning out in the middle of their careers, how they can actually get stronger and better and happier as they get older.

Speaker 1 And the second book I actually co-authored with Oprah Winfrey called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just the basic, straight-up science of human happiness that I wanted to introduce to large groups of people.

Speaker 1 That was, and

Speaker 1 Oprah Winfrey,

Speaker 1 she hosted the book, much as she would have hosted somebody on her show

Speaker 1 when she had a talk show back in the old days.

Speaker 1 Before I was doing this, teaching at Harvard, and I teach a large seminar at a business school, the Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness that has 180 students,

Speaker 1 something like 450 on the waiting list and an illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of.

Speaker 1 And that's

Speaker 1 before I was doing that, which is fun

Speaker 1 as an academic,

Speaker 1 I was actually the president of a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 I was the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a free market-oriented think tank, which I was the chief executive of for 11 years. Before that, I was a behavioral scientist at Syracuse.

Speaker 1 And before that, I was a professional French horn player. Right.
From when I was 19 until I was 31.

Speaker 1 I went to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s, and then left music and went and got my PhD and became a behavioral scientist. scientist.
Your PhD is,

Speaker 1 what was the focus of your PhD? Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis.
And my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling. And all that was.

Speaker 1 So that's where you moved from into

Speaker 1 behavioral

Speaker 1 psychology. Exactly right.
So I was... Like lots of economists.

Speaker 1 Right. That's happening more frequently, right? Yeah.
I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist.

Speaker 1 I got a great technical toolkit as an economist, but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria. What I'm really interested in is why people do the weird things that they do.
So motivation.

Speaker 1 Exactly right. And I was studying things that don't have typical economic rationale, like why do people give to charity? Why do people admire beauty? Why do people love each other?

Speaker 1 And using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn

Speaker 1 in an economics milieu made it possible for me to study these things. And the tap root of all those things turned out to be human happiness.

Speaker 1 So when I left my think tank and I was trying to figure out what do I want to do for the rest of my life, I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, hundreds of kilometers walking across northern Spain, praying the rosary and every day saying, Lord, guide my path, which is in a process of discernment is important.

Speaker 1 You've talked about this an awful lot in your work and you talk about how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment.

Speaker 1 I found, I thought it was to go back to my behavioral behavioral science roots and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's start with that issue of discernment. So I've been trying to think about prayer technically, let's say.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that's a complicated topic, but you could imagine this. Imagine that

Speaker 1 your decision,

Speaker 1 is to aim up, which is the opposite of iniquity, by the way. I found out the word iniquity means fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at them.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So instead you decide you're going to aim up. Now you can leave that kind of amorphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance.

Speaker 1 You could say, well, I would like things to be as good as they could be. Right.
Say, although I'm not sure what that means and I'm not sure how to do it. But you open the door that way to...

Speaker 1 the beginnings of something approximating fantasy. I mean, part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward, right? And so you can set something like an unspecified uphill goal.

Speaker 1 And that would be like a meditative or prayer practice. And then you could say, well,

Speaker 1 my desire, my aim is to

Speaker 1 flesh out that conceptualization and to specify a way forward, right? Now, then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on a particular project.

Speaker 1 The goal is to walk uphill, whatever that means, to clarify the nature of what uphill is

Speaker 1 and to discern a strategy.

Speaker 1 Okay, and then you said you walk this route, right? And that gives you time for contemplation. Okay, so walk me through that a little bit.

Speaker 1 You said you were praying the rosary and you were concentrating on something like upward aim. Right.
And then you took time to do that. Right.

Speaker 1 So it's like you give your dreams an opportunity to make themselves manifest in a situation like that. And that's part of that clarification.
That's right. So what happened to you when you did that?

Speaker 1 And why did you do it? Well, as a neurocognitive matter, we actually understand what a discernment process does literally through pilgrimage. So you know Ian Negilchrist's work.
It was phenomenal.

Speaker 1 The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, it's a Scottish, you know, he wrote The Master and His Emissary about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the hemispherically lateralized brain, where the right side of the brain asks the big questions.

Speaker 1 but doesn't actually come up with the answers because the biggest questions in life don't have answers. They only have understanding.
Now, the left side actually solves complicated problems.

Speaker 1 The right side deals with complex problems. Complex and complicated are fundamentally different insofar as complicated problems,

Speaker 1 they're hard to find the solutions to. But once you have the solutions,

Speaker 1 you can replicate them with almost effortless ease. Right, right.
You can make them into an algorithm. Exactly right.
Yeah, and the left hemisphere is actually specialized for algorithm production.

Speaker 1 Exactly right. And that's the reason that

Speaker 1 you use the left side of the brain disproportionately when you're looking at social media or using technology. Engineering solutions are left-brain solutions.

Speaker 1 The right brain problems are those that have very easy answers. We won the football game, they lost the football game, she fell in love with me, she didn't fall in love with me.

Speaker 1 I have something I want to do, I don't have something that I want to do, but but you can't answer the questions, you can only have an understanding of the questions.

Speaker 1 And to come to the understanding of those questions, you have to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain.

Speaker 1 And to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain, you have to be undistracted and let your mind water

Speaker 1 to stimulate the default mode network in your brain, which is intensely uncomfortable because we hate boredom. When you were at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, your colleague Dad Gilbert, who's a wonderful

Speaker 1 social psychologist, he did all those experiments about people being bored. So he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except they had a button in front of them.

Speaker 1 You remember these experiments? If they touch the button, they get a painful electric shock. Oh, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And it turned out that 80% of the participants shocked themselves rather than letting their default mode network run free. Even animals will do that.
Yeah. Bored animals will shock themselves.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And one, they had to throw out this particular guy because he was such an outlier, shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes.
We hate boredom. We hate the default mode network.

Speaker 1 But unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain and the default mode network by purposedly just walking and repetitively praying, unless

Speaker 1 you manually stimulate that part of your brain, you are not going to come to understanding about the why of your life.

Speaker 1 You're going to be stuck on the how and what, and you're going to be path dependent. And I knew that.
I knew that. Well, probably part, perhaps part of that discomfort.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Carl Friston, we did some work in this regard too. Carl Friston has associated negative emotion, anxiety more specifically, with high entropy states.

Speaker 1 So, and you could think about a high entropy state as a state of navigation where a very large number of pathways are potentially open to you, right? And so if you open Pandora's box,

Speaker 1 if you move away from a determinate goal and you open Pandora's box, which is what direction should I go, then that is anxiety provoking because there's a multitude of possibilities that beckon.

Speaker 1 Now, there's opportunity in that, but it can easily overwhelm you, especially if you're tilted more strongly towards negative emotion, let's say.

Speaker 1 The problem with opening up a space of contemplation is that open spaces are unprotected and high entropy.

Speaker 1 And so there's negative emotion that, well, that's why we know too that the default emotion associated with right hemisphere activation is negative emotion. It tends to

Speaker 1 be high negative affect. And so you're familiar with the Panis test, the positive affect, negative affect sequence, which is I administer it to all my students at Harvard.

Speaker 1 I make them take this because

Speaker 1 I put them into four categories. The high positive, high negative category.
It's high affect people. That's you and me, which are the mad scientist profile.
The high positive,

Speaker 1 low negative, which everybody wants to be, which is actually not great for a lot of things, which is the cheerleader.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that's the cheerleader. And they make bad bosses too, by the way, because they can't take criticism or hear bad news.

Speaker 1 You have people who are high negative and low positive, which is the poets. And then the people who are low affect, low, low, those are the judges.

Speaker 1 You know, very, very low affect, sober, just

Speaker 1 stolid. They make good surgeons, right? You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh my God.

Speaker 1 That's not what you want. And so I actually categorize people and then talk about the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has.

Speaker 1 Now, the people who are most likely to be able to affect discernment most,

Speaker 1 at least conventionally, by undertaking these techniques are the mad scientists because they have access to very high levels of affect, but they have to understand themselves to do that.

Speaker 1 This was the thing. I had this background as a behavioral scientist, and I wanted to know the why of my life.
And from that, to figure out the direction forward or uphill, as you say. So I used to.

Speaker 1 So that was two questions. Yeah.
The why and the direction. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 Why is that two questions rather than one? Well, the why of life is really the meaning of it all.

Speaker 1 And then once you understand the meaning, then you can figure out what direction you're going in because the direction per se is not meaning. The direction is strategic.
Yeah, okay, fine.

Speaker 1 So in other words, here's the way that you're the difference between strategy and aim.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So

Speaker 1 in sailing, there's a concept called the rum line. Are you familiar with it? No.
R-H-U-M line.

Speaker 1 It's a very important metaphor in Spanish. It's called el rumbo in Spanish.
And that's something you use a lot, the rum line. What it is, it's a direction with the destination.

Speaker 1 And you have to have it if you're doing navigation and sailing. Yeah.
That doesn't mean you're going to go exactly to that point or you're not going to get blown off course.

Speaker 1 You can't actually make any progress unless you have a rum line. And so that's the whole thing.
Yes. The meaning is the rum line.

Speaker 1 And then you can start making progress toward the goal, notwithstanding the fact that it's not perfect. So there's an idea in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God.

Speaker 1 And I think the reason for that is that the aim sets the frame, right? Right.

Speaker 1 So if you start a new endeavor, which you do sequentially during the day, right, because your day is composed of a whole variety of journeys, essentially events towards a destination.

Speaker 1 You set the aim and that sets the frame of perception. And it sets, it actually calibrates your emotions, right?

Speaker 1 Because positive emotion, this is another thing that Fristen established, I think, better than anyone else. This is very cool.
So negative emotion indicates a high entropy state.

Speaker 1 Too many convening rum lines, let's say.

Speaker 1 Positive emotion makes itself manifest when the entropy in relationship to a goal is decreased. So once you establish the goal, right, there's a certain calculated cost to getting there.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's... That cost is going to be indicated in part by anxiety because it indicates, well, what it's going to, the risk for the endeavor.
Okay. When you take a step forward to the location,

Speaker 1 you reduce the entropy because the probability that you'll succeed is now increased. And that decrease in entropy is marked by dopaminergic activation of positive emotion.

Speaker 1 So it's so cool because it means this is so cool. It's one of the things I've been lecturing to people about as I travel.
It's like

Speaker 1 your aim sets your emotional frame. Like there's almost nothing more important to understand than that.

Speaker 1 It's like, because your brain can't compute what's positive until it knows what the direction is and it sees you making progress. So, no aim, first rule there is no aim, no positive emotion.

Speaker 1 And the second rule is progress towards an aim once specified is positive emotion. And then there's a corollary, which is something like,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 it's like steepness of approach. Let's say you make some approach to a goal, but the goal doesn't really matter.
It's like you're not going to get a lot of kick.

Speaker 1 But let's say if you have a really high order goal, that would be one that would be divinely inspired. Let's say, well, then any progress towards that is going to give you a kick.

Speaker 1 Progress is actually what instantiates the liking, the wanting, liking, learning process. That's from dopamine.
Yes. That's what it comes from.
Humans are made for progress, not for arrival. Yes.

Speaker 1 And so the whole process is, okay, discern the rum line. Yeah.
Figure out the instantiation of what that means, practically speaking, and then start making progress toward it. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's what a leader communicates communicates to people. That's exactly right.
That's why people will run through a wall for a great leader, but that's what you must do for yourself.

Speaker 1 So I got something cool to tell you about that psychobiologically. I learned this from a friend of mine.

Speaker 1 I did a podcast with him, and he's a deep biological thinker, and he was very interested in honeybee communication.

Speaker 1 So what honeybees do is they go find a flower patch that's a treasure store, let's say, right? So it's an aim for the honeybees.

Speaker 1 And they go back and they communicate about the direction and the distance. So they communicate about the energy that has to be expended to go to this flower bed.

Speaker 1 But one question the other bees have, so to speak, is, well, is the journey

Speaker 1 worth the effort? And the way the honeybees communicate that is that the more rich the storehouse, the faster they dance.

Speaker 1 It's exactly the same thing that enthusiastic leaders do when they're talking about the goal.

Speaker 1 It's like, so the way people calibrate that is like, if I can see you enthusiastic and energetic about something, I assume that you truly believe that the goal is worth the effort. Right.

Speaker 1 Because otherwise, you wouldn't risk expending that much energy. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's so damn copical that it's stable across like honeybees and people. Oh, yeah.
No, no.

Speaker 1 I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that psychology is biology is they just don't know the biology. They just don't understand the biology, right?

Speaker 1 And so, so, but there's another weird angle on this, though.

Speaker 1 See, this is one of the great paradoxes of this. So, do you, do you want to have progress in your life? Do you you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning?

Speaker 1 Number one, discern. Number two, create a strategy about actually how to arrive at the object of your discernment.
And number three, start making progress toward it. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 This is like one, two, three. This is what I advise.
Behavior therapy 101. And this is what I'm talking to young men.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because the email that I get, all the email that you get is from young people in their 20s. You know, how do I fall in love and stay in love?

Speaker 1 How do I find a job that's actually going to give me fulfillment? How do I have the life that I want to have? Because I have this hollowness in my life, like one, two, three.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is this is what we talk about. Here's the paradox, here's the hell of it.

Speaker 1 If you arrive, it's a problem. Yeah, right.
Because that's the arrival, that's the arrival fallacy that we come up with. So, a lot of people will say, why do all diets fail? Because they basically do.

Speaker 1 95% of diets fail insofar as at one year after the inception of a diet, people weigh more than they did at the beginning of the diet. Right? This is before the GLP-1 drugs, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Why? And the reason is because you will forego all of the food that you like if you see the scale go down because progress is everything.

Speaker 1 Because humans are made for progress. All of our utility, all of our, we get so much dopamine in the wanting, liking, learning process actually from progress.

Speaker 1 The reward for actually hitting your goal is you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations.
Right, right. That's why 30% of

Speaker 1 stringent diets lead to eating disorders because people are like, I want more progress. And so they keep making progress.

Speaker 1 And that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much. So the paradox of all this is you better have a rum line.

Speaker 1 And that rum line better be pinned someplace else. So

Speaker 1 one of the

Speaker 1 I've been studying these ancient stories in the Old Testament a lot. Congratulations on the new book.
Oh, thank you. It's phenomenal.
Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1 So one of the things that I really tried to delve into was Jacob's vision. Yeah.
It's very cool, eh? Because Jacob, when he has the vision of Jacob's ladder, Jacob's a bad guy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's in collusion with his Oedipal mother.

Speaker 1 He's deceived his father. He's betrayed his brother.
He's a mama's boy.

Speaker 1 He's intellectually arrogant. He's a coward.
He's a bad guy. He's a very unlikable character.
Yes, exactly. But then he leaves and he decides that he's going to be good.
He's going to try to be good.

Speaker 1 That's when he has that dream. Now, the thing that's cool about the dream that's relevant to our discussion is that, so you have this Jacob's ladder, which

Speaker 1 what would you say, spirals up into the ineffable, right? You can't see the pinnacle. The pinnacle is wherever God is, but you can't see that.

Speaker 1 And the reason I think that that's relevant and important is because of the paradox that you just described. If you reach your goal, You satiate the system and the motivational framework disappears.

Speaker 1 Right. So that means there's no direction and there's no hope.
That's the problem.

Speaker 1 It's weird because you've attained your goal, but now you're directionless and technically you're hopeless because hope comes in consequence of positive emotion in relationship to a goal.

Speaker 1 So actually what you want, you might think that paradise is the land of milk and honey, so to speak, that it's the land of infinite satiation.

Speaker 1 But the problem with that is satiation destroys the frame and destroys hope. So actually what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's ladder. It's like, so you climb, this is slight, this is different than Sisyphus, right?

Speaker 1 Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill and then it rolls back down the same hill. It's like, no, what you actually want is a mountain.

Speaker 1 And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another mountain. And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another one.
And that never comes to an end.

Speaker 1 So that would be an inexhaustible source of motivation and hope. And it is independent in a way.
It's independent of accomplishment because there is no final goal.

Speaker 1 But you don't want there to be a final goal because then you run into the problem of the paradoxical problem of satiation.

Speaker 1 And it is also strange, and you were touching on this, that one of the really weird things about human beings is that we're far more seeking oriented than satiation-oriented, right?

Speaker 1 Is that we do want the adventure. We want the craving.
We want the desire. The progress.
Yeah, and the progress. Progress.
More than we want the attainment. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 You know, like I had a client once, I had a funny conversation with him.

Speaker 1 He had this dream of retiring when he was like 50, you know, and he had a pretty cut and dried ordinary algorithmic job, you know, and so it was okay, but it wasn't a thrill.

Speaker 1 It wasn't the meaning of his life, you know, and I said, well.

Speaker 1 What's your vision for retirement? And he said, well, I imagine being on a beach in the Caribbean with like a Mai Tai in my hand. And I thought, well, that's a travel poster, not a plan.

Speaker 1 And so I talked to him about it. I said, well, look, you're like a middle-aged white guy.

Speaker 1 You're going to sit on the damn beach for one day and you're going to be so sunburned, you're going to have to hide for two weeks. And then what, look, what are you going to do?

Speaker 1 You're going to drink like five Mai Tais a day or 20 for how long? Right. You're going to be an alcoholic at no time flat.
You've got no orientation or goal. There was nothing to it at all, right?

Speaker 1 Good luck on your divorce. Well, right, right.

Speaker 1 And your cirrhosis. These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years.
So you can make a bunch of money in families, of course.

Speaker 1 And if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go, by 49, you have $400 million.

Speaker 1 And I've seen this again and again and again in the people that I've worked with. I'm privileged to work with.
They retire at 49. Why? Because they don't like their work.

Speaker 1 Their work is backbreaking and they can't see their families and they don't have love in their lives, but they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives.

Speaker 1 And so they retire at 49.

Speaker 1 And then they become very good at golf or tennis and they get a nice dark tan. And pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach.
And then their life really falls apart.

Speaker 1 And here's the thing. Here's the thing, Jordan.
Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true because he will find that he had the wrong dreams.

Speaker 1 Exactly. This is a real problem.
Well, that's also part and parcel of the call to religious humility. It's like,

Speaker 1 I want to get what I want. It's like, what makes you so sure you're right about what you want?

Speaker 1 So I think that notion of, this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot because she really learned this in the last few years is that, so we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal.

Speaker 1 Okay. So that's sort of predicated in part.

Speaker 1 You could think about that as a religious relationship with the unknown. It's sort of predicated on part on your a priori presumption that you don't know finally what's good for you.

Speaker 1 Now, but what you could want is to learn that and discover it, right? But that's like an ongoing relationship.

Speaker 1 And what that does is it provides a solution to the problem of you getting what you want and finding out that it wasn't the right thing. Right.
Because you still want to journey forward.

Speaker 1 You want to sally forth, so to speak. Right.
But you have to do that in ignorance and humility.

Speaker 1 And you have to do that understanding that as you make progress, you're going to shift the goal that you're seeking and that that should happen. Right.

Speaker 1 Because otherwise you run into exactly the paradox that you exactly. And you have to recognize that heaven is not on earth.
Heaven is in heaven.

Speaker 1 It's fine if there's an end to the rum line, as long as it's unattainable in this particular life, because we're not geared toward it. Yeah, well, that's

Speaker 1 a whole observation. Yeah, well, you know, I've thought about that a lot: this notion of

Speaker 1 life abundant in eternity. Like, that's we tend to read that concretized and think about that as something like life after death, but that's not what it is.

Speaker 1 It's, as far as I can tell, it's something like the state that exists when you posit an amorphous, indefinite goal as your ultimate goal, because that imbues everything local with a kind of global significance, right?

Speaker 1 I'm pursuing the best and that's how it's manifesting itself in the moment.

Speaker 1 And that's life eternal because there's an element of it that's timeless. So, you know, in the Sermon on the Mount,

Speaker 1 it's a guide to what you just described. Christ says, it's very specific.
He says, first of all, Focus your attention on

Speaker 1 the highest imaginable. Okay, Whatever that is.
Like you don't know exactly, right? But it's because it's indefinite and it's ineffable and it's beyond you.

Speaker 1 But that's what you want to, that's what you're orienting towards. So you establish your, then pay attention to the moment.
Exactly. And let me put one more twist in this as part of discernment.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So making progress on the wrong line is practically speaking in worldly terms, having more, having more of what?

Speaker 1 More money, power, pleasure, fame, more family relationships, more prestige, whatever it happens to be. But the real twist is not just having more.

Speaker 1 Satisfaction that you can actually count on in life is not more having more of the things that you want. It's wanting less.

Speaker 1 Halves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust.

Speaker 1 And so the goal should be for all of us increasing the numerator, having more with respect to our goals, moving on the rum line and wanting less. Or learning to be okay, so wanting less.

Speaker 1 my my wife just did a talk in salt lake city and what she had focused this talk on was gratitude and she learned this she started to practice being grateful when she was dying it's a very strange time to start practicing being grateful but one of the things that you can think through when you're in dire conditions dire straits this is what happens in the story of job by the way is that well imagine everything falls apart for you right okay now you could ask yourself how could i make this worse

Speaker 1 and the answer to that is, well, I could be resentful and deceitful and arrogant and unhappy and bitter, which, by the way, is our psychological baseline from the Pleistocene, we're evolved toward resentment.

Speaker 1 We're evolved toward anger and fear, because literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative

Speaker 1 negative affect in the limbic system of the brain as opposed to positive affect because

Speaker 1 it keeps you alive. Yeah, yeah.
Well, like it's like you're Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors starting the Pleistocene were resentful.

Speaker 1 And the result of that is that you're evolved to say, you know, first class on the United Airlines has really gone downhill, right? As opposed to, I'm getting there safe and fast.

Speaker 1 And I'm sitting in the front of the plane. I'm going to get out early and they're going to give me something to eat.
It's unbelievable. That's why gratitude, gratitude is

Speaker 1 a divine thing.

Speaker 1 And it's a practice.

Speaker 1 It's standing up. to your limbic system.
It's managing your effective, evolved state so it doesn't manage you. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So you're, you're, well, the presumption would be exactly that, is that

Speaker 1 the default attitude, the default untrained attitude is likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotion and resentful. Right.
Right. But that isn't.
That's not. That isn't fate.

Speaker 1 You can train yourself out of that. And part of the way you do that, and I saw her do this when she was dying, which was really quite something to see.

Speaker 1 She decided as an act of will to focus on what she was grateful for and to become an expert at that, right?

Speaker 1 And that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when they think about expertise, right? Because they think of something like propositional knowledge rather than attitude.

Speaker 1 But it's definitely the case that you can

Speaker 1 what cultivate.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 what traditional people,

Speaker 1 traditional European Christians, for example, knew that you could cultivate virtue. And that's a very specific phrase.
It's that cultivation is practice. Yes, absolutely.
Now, this discernment idea.

Speaker 1 By the way, one thing, by the way,

Speaker 1 when your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference in Salt Lake City, my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness,

Speaker 1 which is also adapted, which is also standing up to

Speaker 1 the list. Right, right, right.
See, our wives, who are godly Catholic women, woe be unto them being married to us. Imagine this.
Yeah, no, I know that. Letting us in the paths of righteousness.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful parallel.
So

Speaker 1 discernment, that's an archaic phraseology, discernment. Yes.
And that wasn't something that I saw a psychologist study when I was in the thick of the research enterprise.

Speaker 1 And so why discernment specifically, like why discernment? Why that terminology? Why happiness?

Speaker 1 Why did those things, and how was that related? How is your pursuit of those as an intellectual enterprise associated with that pilgrimage pilgrimage that you took.

Speaker 1 So discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and essence dichotomy. So philosophically, we've been going back and forth forever.

Speaker 1 What precedes what, essence or existence?

Speaker 1 Of course, in the 19th and 20th century, Sartre and all of the existentialists would say that existence precedes essence. You're born without a meaning.

Speaker 1 Meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it or no, no, until you create it. That's what Sartre said.
The ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning. Right.

Speaker 1 The Christian. That's Nietzsche's presumption as well.
Exactly right. Well, actually, Nietzsche was stronger.
Nietzsche said that there is no essence, so stop looking, for all intents and purposes.

Speaker 1 It's like, stop wasting your time for Pete's sake, because actually trying to create this

Speaker 1 illusion

Speaker 1 of meaning, this illusion of essence, what you're going to be, you're feeding into this global kind of delusion that people have. Now, the ancient Greeks, which of course led to, and

Speaker 1 the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition is that, no, no, no, no, essence precedes existence. And that means your job in life is to discover your essence.
To discern. To discover.

Speaker 1 And that's discernment. Okay.
Okay. That's what I believe.
Okay. That seems to be that in the

Speaker 1 story of, in the Genesis account,

Speaker 1 God basically tells Adam and Eve that they have unlimited freedom in the garden except for one thing. Right.

Speaker 1 And I think it's associated with this idea of discernment because they're not supposed to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which I believe means

Speaker 1 they're not to make the presumption that they can establish the fundamental axioms of the moral order. They have to discern it.
They have to find their way.

Speaker 1 But that way is implicit in being and reflective of its substructure. Something like that.
There is truth.

Speaker 1 There is rightness.

Speaker 1 There are things, there are things that actually exist. It isn't all subjective.

Speaker 1 Edmund Husserl, I mean, in phenomenology, talks about the essence of reality is what you perceive. That's the beginning of the problem.
Right there, that's the beginning of the problem.

Speaker 1 We believe, you and I believe, I think that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality, and the adventure of life is figuring it out. Yes.

Speaker 1 And so that I want to align my perception with reality. That's my goal.
Yeah, well, I think that's also a good definition of

Speaker 1 mental health. Okay, fine.
I understand. Yeah, yeah.
So, well, how did you then

Speaker 1 come to the conclusion that there was an implicit or an implicit order and that the goal was discernment rather than, because the typical intellectual, the typical Luciferian intellectual, is going to make the presumption that there is no moral order, but that it can be imposed, particularly by a powerful intellect.

Speaker 1 And that, well, that is the Luciferian temptation, and it tends to go very badly wrong. But I'm very curious about why it was that you took the alternative pathway.

Speaker 1 Like, what clued you into the fact that,

Speaker 1 well, misery can do it if you're wise, but what clued you into the fact that there was an implicate order and that the goal was discernment? That's a,

Speaker 1 I got lucky. I think I got lucky.
I was, my father was a mathematician. And

Speaker 1 here's the funny thing. You know, there's a lot of social science studies.
People ask me all the time, how do I raise my kids in the church?

Speaker 1 So the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith. The most important thing in my life.
That started when I was a kid. How old?

Speaker 1 Since before I can remember.

Speaker 1 Why was it the most important? Because it was just

Speaker 1 the central thing in my life. And

Speaker 1 here's probably the reason. So what we find when people ask, how do I raise my kids in the faith, right?

Speaker 1 The answer is have them see the most powerful physical person in their life worshiping. It doesn't matter what you say.
You know this about because you're dad, your father, like me.

Speaker 1 It does not matter what you say. All that matters is what they see.

Speaker 1 Because that's how they receive information. And there's lots and lots of things.
Yeah, well, that indicates the status hierarchy

Speaker 1 in a very concrete manner. Exactly right.
And my father, who was a scientist,

Speaker 1 he had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a mathematician by background in what he taught as a university professor.
He was a proud man. He would have been on his knees in front of no other man.

Speaker 1 But on Sundays, he was on his knees. And that had a huge impact on the little guy.
That had a huge impact on me. So you respected your father.

Speaker 1 There was something bigger than my, I mean, I thought my dad was so powerful that he could lift the house. Right, right, right.
He was a math professor. He could not.
Right.

Speaker 1 And I saw my father on his knees. And that had this impact.
Now, maybe, maybe I have the God gene.

Speaker 1 You know, maybe what we'll actually find out with, you know, the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science that there's a God center in the brain that we have particular proclivities for, whatever it happens to be.

Speaker 1 But I don't think so. I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be.
I wanted to be an honorable, admirable man like my father. And my father stood in awe of the Lord.

Speaker 1 That's what I wanted to be. Look, I wake up, Jordan, I wake up many days an atheist.
I wake up, I don't know,

Speaker 1 but then I decide to worship. And I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do.
That's the ultimate rum line of my life.

Speaker 1 And behavioral science notwithstanding, that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious. Well,

Speaker 1 I actually think that we've probably got this relatively well modeled

Speaker 1 on the neuroscientific front. It's not completely compiled yet, but like.

Speaker 1 Proximal goals are nested in distal goals and distal goals are nested in still further distal goals.

Speaker 1 And some of those are explicit, but then they fade off into implicit and they're nested in higher order order implicit goals all the way up to the unspeakable, the ineffable.

Speaker 1 Like one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize conscience, conscience is a very weird phenomenon. I think about it as the voice of negative conscience.

Speaker 1 Conscience. Yeah.
It's like the voice of negative emotion. So conscience is an orienting function that tells you when you've deviated from the path.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 What path? Right. Well, okay, so imagine now that you're pursuing a proximal goal, but in that pursuit, you betray a more distal goal.

Speaker 1 The voice of the more distal goal will appear to you as conscience. Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the distal goal has a more distal goal because these things are nested all the way up, because we have some relationship with what the future and other people and the infinite.

Speaker 1 And so there is a voice of the infinite distal. Yeah.
And that's conscience. This is tomistic.
This is purely themistic.

Speaker 1 Right. I mean, this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until that ultimately there is a creation of the first goal.

Speaker 1 It's the first mover, the first teleological mover. Right.

Speaker 1 Right. Which is also operating constantly.
Yes. I mean, that's so, I mean, the

Speaker 1 operation of the God in Genesis at the beginning of time,

Speaker 1 it's not the beginning, exactly, the beginning of time. It is that, but it's not just that.
It's all beginnings. Right? Including the beginnings that start now.
It's the same process that's operating.

Speaker 1 And it is the voice of that process that makes itself manifest as conscience. I think that's, I think that's literally and neurologically true as well.
I think that's right.

Speaker 1 I think that's right. And I think that we could make a very compelling argument, and people have in our field that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic.

Speaker 1 I think that's a totally legitimate argument. Well, you can imagine too, imagine this: is that

Speaker 1 as our cortex evolved, we moved from immediate local gratification to

Speaker 1 long-term future orientation. Right.
Okay, so the cortex allows for that. And that's what maturation does.
But it's not just the future.

Speaker 1 So now everything that makes itself manifest in the present on the hedonistic front. Right.
So the satiation of immediate motivations has to be construed in relationship to its future consequences.

Speaker 1 Okay. So that puts, and then the futures, well, what time span?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, this is the time travel, which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by way called the prefrontal cortex yeah right exactly that's okay okay many people believe by the way that adam and eve became our ancestors fully became our ancestors with a with a with a knowledge of good and evil because of self-consciousness which we became in the moment that the prefrontal cortex allowed that that's the right right that's apprehension okay well there's a parallel i think as well like i don't think there's any difference between

Speaker 1 inclusion of the future in the purview of your perceptions and inclusion of other people.

Speaker 1 And it's partly because one of the things that I studied psychopaths for a long time and you think of psychopaths as selfish, right? Self-centered.

Speaker 1 But it's weird because psychopaths betray themselves all the time because they don't learn from experience. So they get what they want now, but they fail.

Speaker 1 And so then I thought, oh, well, psychopaths don't care about other people.

Speaker 1 They also don't care about their future selves. And I thought, oh, that's the same thing.
They don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse. They don't.

Speaker 1 Well, they certainly don't have remorse. They're dark dark triads, or you like to talk about dark tetrads, you bring in sadism, of course.
But the characteristic of people above average

Speaker 1 in psychopathy is the lack of remorse. Yeah, well, then.
And a lack of remorse is an inability to learn. Yes.
You hurt somebody. You did something wrong.
It had consequences.

Speaker 1 If you don't feel remorse, that remorse is activating the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain, which is making you feel social pain. Right.

Speaker 1 You don't feel that if you have psychopathic tendencies. Yes.

Speaker 1 And then, well, and if that pain doesn't make itself, like I think that pain is the felt sense of the eradication of a neurological system.

Speaker 1 So like imagine that you, that a system emerges in this Darwinian sense to dominate. So now you're under its sway.
Okay, now it has a goal in mind. And when it makes itself manifest, it fails.

Speaker 1 Okay, the consequence of that failure should be the destruction of that system. I think that felt pain is the psychological consequence of the death of a system that failed to meet its goals.

Speaker 1 Now, it's going to struggle and fight to maintain itself, even in the face of failure, which is why it's hard to get rid of a bad habit, for example. It's a living thing.

Speaker 1 It's not going to give up without a struggle.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the corollary of that would be approximately equivalent to what you just said.

Speaker 1 There's no learning because there's no remorse because there's no difference between remorse and learning. The first stage of learning is, oh,

Speaker 1 I was wrong.

Speaker 1 That has to go. That's a sacrificial offering, right? That part of me has to go.
And it's going, no, no, you know, I want to live. And fair enough.

Speaker 1 And sometimes, like, if you're really poorly oriented in your life and you fail cataclysmically, an awful lot of you has to go. You know,

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 it comes back to your wife talking about gratitude, by the way, because the same thing is the prefrontal cortex saying, no, no, no, no, no. You limbic system evolved to feel resentment.

Speaker 1 that's not that that's not that's maladaptive yes and i have decided to reprogram the limbic system which tends toward resentment and i'm going to reprogram it for it it's the same basic pattern this is

Speaker 1 self this is self-management this is the essence of self-leadership doing what feels good if it feels good do it if it feels bad avoid it is being managed by your ancestors yeah well the problem with that attitude is well in relationship to who and over what time span right and that's a huge problem

Speaker 1 if you have a dominant lobster i did a lot of investigation into crustacean i know um crustacean neurology because it's well it's well mapped out

Speaker 1 if a dominant lobster who ages is defeated in a battle his brain dissolves and reconstitutes as a subordinate brain right

Speaker 1 exactly the same thing happens to us because the neuromodular activity in the limbic system of the lobster brain.

Speaker 1 Because once again, because psychology is biology, the lobster can't do anything about that.

Speaker 1 The big dominant alpha lobster, if there is such a thing, is going to fight to try to maintain that position. Yes.
And if it can face,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 the lobster brain is so simple that it can't be subordinate sometimes and dominant sometimes. So it's either victor or not.
And when it loses.

Speaker 1 The victor brain is no good. So it has to go.
And so it can make decisions. And that's the divine in us.
That's the difference. And

Speaker 1 this is the essence of being fully human, fully alive. St.
Irenaeus said, the glory of God is a man fully alive. What does it mean to be a man fully alive? It is managing your limbic system.

Speaker 1 It is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people.

Speaker 1 It is actually, it is, is getting beyond who you were as a person. It's deciding to worship, even though you don't feel a single milligram of faith on a particular day.

Speaker 1 When everything falls apart for Job,

Speaker 1 his wife says, and we presume she loves him and that she knows he's a good man. She says, there's nothing left for you but to curse God and die.
Right. And she means it.

Speaker 1 And his attitude is,

Speaker 1 no matter what's happening to me right now, no matter the depth of my suffering, I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness and I refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being and becoming itself.

Speaker 1 And that is a decision, right? It's a decision. Right.
Right. Because it's weird because the evidence, and this is what his wife tells him, it's like the evidence is that you're done.

Speaker 1 You've tried really hard. You were a good person.
Everyone knows it, even God. And yet everything's been stripped away from you and you're in the most miserable imaginable position.

Speaker 1 You should curse God and die. That's what you would do if you were acting in accordance with the facts.
If you're purely limbic, there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely absolutely

Speaker 1 a logical decision to commit suicide.

Speaker 1 If they're purely limbic. However, the divine in us, the divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral,

Speaker 1 our less evolved selves

Speaker 1 is the

Speaker 1 bumper of tissue

Speaker 1 behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex, which is the

Speaker 1 What a miracle. My dog Chucho can't do that.
He can't time travel. He can't manage his emotions.
The essence of being fully alive is doing exactly that.

Speaker 1 This is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so desperate. They don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks.

Speaker 1 They don't have to go, you know, suffer through a PhD. They don't have to become behavioral scientists.
They have to learn to manage themselves.

Speaker 1 They have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their limbic systems.

Speaker 1 That's what, and that takes practice and that takes commitment and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because the best indicator of somebody being able to manage in a man, his limbic system is a good partner. Job's wife is the one who says, curse God and die, right?

Speaker 1 Interestingly, chapter 38 of Job is where he puts God in the dock and he says, he says, you know, all right, everybody told me to, you know, curse you and die and all this bad stuff. So what gives?

Speaker 1 I'm a righteous man. What gives? And then God actually turns it around and says, what do you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why are you smart where were you when i created the stars in the sky yeah the the whole story is not all evident to you yeah exactly job accepts that he says look i can take solace in my ignorance exactly right which is very useful uh to take solace because your ignorance is infinite yeah there's a lot of place for solace in that self-management is the essence of well humility requires self-management too we're not evolved to be humble Yes, we are evolved as tribal societies to be humbled, but not to be humble.

Speaker 1 To be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to live our best lives. Right.
That's wisdom. And that's the 30th chapter of Job.
That's the capstone of that thing.

Speaker 1 That's the big point at the end of the day where he is victorious, but still doesn't understand, puts God in the dock, and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's go back. at happiness.
So, because

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 what you could say that the folk understanding of happiness is something is something like the gratification of a toddler's whim. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 A toddler's having a tantrum in a store, and his mother, defeated, gives him the chocolate bar. And so now the child stops squawking and bitching and being subsumed by negative emotions.
Right.

Speaker 1 And maybe smiles. And so you think, well, that's happiness.
Right. Okay.
But that's not the kind of happiness that you're describing. That's gratification.

Speaker 1 Okay. Just gratification.
And that's a feeling. Okay.
So why? Look, if you're hedonistically oriented,

Speaker 1 why not be skeptical about your proposition that it's something other than immediate hedonistic gratification that constitutes happiness? And certainly Epicurus would have been.

Speaker 1 And so the whole Epicurean tradition of trying to maintain positive feelings as much as possible. Yes.

Speaker 1 And again, he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense. He was actually a highly moral character.

Speaker 1 But the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who like you and to have non-disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has as little conflict as possible, which is catastrophically wrong.

Speaker 1 Because unless you have sanctified suffering in your life, you will not become strong, you will not learn, you will not grow, and you'll make no progress on your way.

Speaker 1 Well, you also won't be able to withstand suffering if you're coming. Which it will.
Which is, I mean, it's like my students ask me, so professor, are you saying I need to go look for suffering?

Speaker 1 I say, don't worry. No, don't.
We'll find you. Yeah, right.
You don't need to look for it. Exactly right.
So

Speaker 1 they. Okay, so, but then why conceptualize it exactly? That's happiness.

Speaker 1 Feelings and happiness are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner. You would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey.

Speaker 1 The feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible. So

Speaker 1 we know, I mean, you and I are pretty interested in nutrition, that all food is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

Speaker 1 These are the macronutrients of all food, including your Thanksgiving dinner. The macronutrients of happiness, which have residual smells, just emotions from the limbic system,

Speaker 1 the constituent parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

Speaker 1 These are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that they consider to be the highest levels of well-being. Now, enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure.

Speaker 1 On the contrary, pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum of the brain.

Speaker 1 And you tap it in all sorts of, you can get pleasure from all sorts of things.

Speaker 1 If your girlfriend says, I I love you, or you have a big bump of cocaine, whatever it happens to be, you'll get the same because we have a thrifty brain.

Speaker 1 But that's not enjoyment. Enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
In other words,

Speaker 1 it has pleasure involved, but it adds people and memory, thus making it a permanent experience.

Speaker 1 And that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I teach my students. Right.

Speaker 1 So the problem with immediate gratification, at least in part, is that it lacks the dimension of sustainability.

Speaker 1 and self-management. Because once it's in your prefrontal cortex, you can manage your pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you.

Speaker 1 So, one of the things I'll tell my students is that something that gives you a lot of pleasure and it can be addictive, which most pleasures can be, not all.

Speaker 1 I mean, walking in the woods and saying your prayers, not particularly addictive, but highly glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all that.

Speaker 1 If you're doing any of those things and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong because you're not going to be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and it won't be a source of happiness.

Speaker 1 What mediating role does social engagement

Speaker 1 is that something like a precondition for iteration? Yeah, well, it's such that you

Speaker 1 part of it is that by adding a human dimension to it,

Speaker 1 you're largely mediating the experience using your prefrontal cortex. And that's just as an empirical observation when you take

Speaker 1 it. Because it becomes memorable when you add people into it.
Pleasure is not memorable, but when you add a person.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's think about the difference between pornography and sex with a partner. Right.
Because that's a good comparison. Okay.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 now the thing about sex with a partner is that, especially if you want it to be repeated,

Speaker 1 you need to take the other person into account. So there's a

Speaker 1 there's a

Speaker 1 you could call that a civilizing factor, right that it's much more complicated activity it's a higher level of consciousness you're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about the physical act you're thinking about the the the the mediating human experience that you're having right so okay so you've got dimensional all right so you're you're under the thrall of the sexual impulse right which has a drive-like characteristic and which has a certain set of biological activations

Speaker 1 and pornography would would only be that It strips it of everything except for those biological impulses. Right.
So it reduces it to the lowest possible

Speaker 1 right. Right.
Okay. The question is, why that? Why is that not optimal?

Speaker 1 Right. Because that's what we're trying to get at.
Okay. So now you introduce a partner.
Well, there's novelty in the partner.

Speaker 1 So that's dopaminergic kick because you don't know exactly what the partner is going to do. Right.
And then it

Speaker 1 complexifies it in the positive way because it brings elements of love and relationship

Speaker 1 and mutual caring, which are beyond

Speaker 1 the pure limbic system. Yeah, yeah.
So it's not just a purely limbic activity. So the whole problem is when you, when you that's sanctification in a sense, or sacralization.
It really is, exactly.

Speaker 1 Right. Which is why it's placed in the context of marriage.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 that's the rule on the on the moral religious front is no sex without marriage, which means something like no sex without commitment and mutuality and long-term relationships.

Speaker 1 So it's contextualizing it. That makes it more sophisticated.

Speaker 1 Now, you also associate that, no, but the thing that's interesting about the argument you're making is that you also associate that with a, what, a deepening and intensification of, you call it enjoyment.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, I just call it enjoyment.
Right.

Speaker 1 And I'm using that particular term because this word, enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more nuanced, dimensional, and sophisticated than pure pleasure.

Speaker 1 Now, this is a problem with the language, of course, because this is

Speaker 1 happiness in general because there's a couple of different things. So, that's where we have to get to the definition.

Speaker 1 Well, so if you're talking to a young person, you would say

Speaker 1 a wise man would substitute enjoyment for pleasure. Right.
And his logical response to that would be, why? Right. Okay, so why?

Speaker 1 And the reason is because enjoyment is permanent and pleasure is temporal, automatic, and animal.

Speaker 1 That's the problem.

Speaker 1 Okay, but I say, so, okay, so I get it. My dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can.

Speaker 1 My dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can. My dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife that I can because my dog's brain is incapable of.

Speaker 1 So is it, do you think it's fundamentally, would you reduce it to the degree that you can reduce it?

Speaker 1 to something like predictable iterability like is that the payoff probably um and i I think that that's part of the miracle. Reciprocal iterability.
So I can say, I like that.

Speaker 1 I want to do that again for these particular reasons. Okay, so that would be my relationship.
Okay, so that would be the difference.

Speaker 1 Because you could, okay, yeah, that's exactly right. Here's an example.

Speaker 1 Tell me what you think of this. This example, people who are watching will be familiar with this story, but it's such a useful story.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 When

Speaker 1 animal behaviors started to study play,

Speaker 1 they watched rats wrestle.

Speaker 1 right okay now the assumption was that they noticed that if you take a juvenile rat male they like to wrestle if the one juvenile was 10 bigger than the other he could reliably win in a single bout pretty much every time every time he'd pin and that was the formula studies are yeah okay so then the conclusion from that was that play was a form of dominance behavior and what the victorious rat did was dominate and that that was pleasurable because it was a victory.

Speaker 1 But then, but then

Speaker 1 Panksep did this. He thought, yeah, but rats live in a social environment, so they don't play once.

Speaker 1 They play repeatedly, which is like, he should have got a Nobel Prize for this. It's such a brilliant insight.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, do the rules for iterable play, are they the same as the rules for one-bout play?

Speaker 1 And the answer was no, because what Panksep showed was that if you paired rats together repeatedly, the big rats that didn't let the little rats win 30% of the time didn't get invited to play.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So then you could imagine that maybe this is a technical way of thinking about enjoyment instead of pleasure, is that pleasure is a one-off and you could even exploit for pleasure.

Speaker 1 But if you want, instead, let's say you want to make an arrangement that's iterable and if it, if better maybe, one that iterates and improves. Right.
Right. Because obviously that's better.

Speaker 1 If it's good once,

Speaker 1 then it should be good multiple times. And if it's good and could be made made better, that would even be better.

Speaker 1 Right. So that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within a relationship.
Exactly right.

Speaker 1 You know the people who have the most sex are religious married people, which is hilarious.

Speaker 1 That's Brad Wilcox's.

Speaker 1 Here's the funniest thing.

Speaker 1 And it's like, nobody believes that. I know.
It's like so much for the sexual revolution.

Speaker 1 It's like, you want sex? Be religious and married. And be loyal to your wife.
That's right. Oh, great.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing that gets back to the work that you've done over the years. Who is it who can't learn this? And the answer is dark triads.
Who doesn't learn this? Why?

Speaker 1 Because narcissism, it's all about me. Machiavellianism, I'm willing to hurt you.

Speaker 1 Psychopathy, I feel no remorse.

Speaker 1 Sadism, I enjoy it. Yeah, right.
I'm not going to learn. And so the result is that dark triads, they tend to

Speaker 1 exhibit.

Speaker 1 compulsive, addictive behavior over and over again.

Speaker 1 It's self-defeating. They don't enjoy their lives

Speaker 1 because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoyment yeah they're incapable of actually yeah well so in the biblical story of cain and abel so cain is a dark tetrad type and he becomes a murderer and then his descendants become genocidal but the end of that story is extremely interesting eh because god

Speaker 1 sentences cain to wander

Speaker 1 so he has to move from place to place which is what psychopaths do by the way because they they can't exploit the same people over and over. They have to move.
But he also wanders in the land of Nod.

Speaker 1 And the land of Nod is being traditionally associated with sleep and unconsciousness. So

Speaker 1 the moral of the story is that if you're a psychopathic manipulator, you end up wandering unconsciously. Right.
And your life, Kane says, my life has become a... He says, I can't stand the punishment.

Speaker 1 I can't tolerate the consequences of my actions. Yeah, which sounds just like an addict, which sounds just like an alcoholic.

Speaker 1 It sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling gambling or pornography, somebody who's subjugated to something, a repetitive behavior that they can't control. Right.

Speaker 1 That's what that sounds like. And that's the reason, ultimately.
And so how do you break out of it?

Speaker 1 You know, when we talk, I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in addiction communities and people say, I got to quit drinking. No.

Speaker 1 You need to substitute something better. Yeah, right.
That's what it comes down to. Because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap.

Speaker 1 Something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on pleasure. Yeah.
That's what, and that, and that,

Speaker 1 and that requires relationship and that requires love and that requires memory.

Speaker 1 Why memory? Memory is such that you can actually, enjoyment requires that you can, that it be a permanent experience. Right.
But what's the specific role of memory?

Speaker 1 I get the role of permanence, but you've you've brought up memory a couple of times. It's like, is it that the experience enriches as it's multiplied? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So like listening to a song that you love in many different contexts.

Speaker 1 When I was a kid, I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in Seattle. And

Speaker 1 we would have Thanksgiving like every other family. And every year, my mother was a good cook.
And there would be this big turkey, you know how we do it.

Speaker 1 I think you have Thanksgiving in October, but and with, but November, it's such a because by November, there's nothing to be thankful for. That's why I am at that point.

Speaker 1 You know, north of the border, it's pretty crimped. Exactly.
Every year, my mother would make this golden brown, beautiful turkey. And my dad would say, oh, it's so beautiful, honey.

Speaker 1 My dad loved my mom so much. And he would go and get the instomatic camera and he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment, that beautiful moment.

Speaker 1 Now, what was he trying to do? He was trying to memorialize something that was going to be highly pleasurable to eat such that we could enjoy that moment again and again and again.

Speaker 1 Now, we have 30 pictures of identical turkeys in the identical oven. Okay, so memory there is something like a marker for a marker

Speaker 1 not just a marker for permanence but an actual indicator of permanence that's just how

Speaker 1 permanent okay so basically it's a function tell me if i'm correct about that you you seem to me making the case that

Speaker 1 i mean this is a restatement of something we already discussed but it i want to get right to the heart of the matter is that well why would you settle for pleasure

Speaker 1 why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could have

Speaker 1 when you could be like walking in the eternal garden, so to speak.

Speaker 1 You're going to substitute permanence and maybe improving permanence for the momentary pleasure why would right well okay so so okay so i've been thinking about this in terms of maturation because i think a lot of the things that we see as hedonistic and power mad pathologies are just just sustained immaturity right so because toddlers are immature and they're whim driven and they're not social.

Speaker 1 They can't truly play, not until they're about three.

Speaker 1 Right. That's when they start to unify.

Speaker 1 a three-year-old begins to be able to adopt a shared mutual goal and that's the basis of mutual understanding and friendship right and true friendship emerges when that process of establishing a mutual goal iterates right across play bounds okay and so you can see a an extension of temporal awareness there and a broadening of social relationship and the reason the two-year-old it's weird hey because the two-year-old now has to take turns and that's a sacrifice because he doesn't get to be first right all the time and that that'll produce a tantrum when that's first being learned especially with the aggressive kid but the payoff is well you don't get to be first but you get to have way more games yeah it's the rats right yes yes it's exactly the same thing the rat gets to have a friend and so he only wins 70 of the time but he plays 100 games instead of one it works out right right exactly okay so like

Speaker 1 I worked with these guys in Montreal.

Speaker 1 We delved very deeply into the origins of antisocial and psychopathic behavior. Okay, so the first thing that we learned was that the most aggressive human beings are two-year-olds.

Speaker 1 So, if you group human beings together in age-matched groups, there is more kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing among two-year-olds than any other group.

Speaker 1 Okay, now if you now if you look at the two-year-olds, what you see is that most of the two-year-olds who do that are male, and it's a minority of males. Yeah,

Speaker 1 most of that, yeah, 5%.

Speaker 1 Most of that minority is socialized by the age of four.

Speaker 1 Okay, the ones that aren't socialized are the repeat psychopathic offenders. And so, what it seems to me is just

Speaker 1 the absence of cortical maturation. Now, you know, classic penalogical theory, like I learned this kind of painfully because I was a little romantic in my attitude, I suppose, before this.

Speaker 1 There's a crime-age relationship, right? So, criminality spikes like mad at 15, right? And then it's at 15 to 19 is the real like crucial period for being a delinquent psychopath.

Speaker 1 So what happens is these aggressive kids, they maintain a high level of aggression. Right.

Speaker 1 Normal boys match that level of aggression from 15 to 19, and then it goes down, whereas the chronic antisocial types just stay high.

Speaker 1 If you imprison them till they're in their late 20s, they mature. Right, right, right.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 So, and part of this is the synaptic development between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. That wiring is not complete in human females till about age 21, in human males till like 70.

Speaker 1 I don't know, but it's later. And that's one of the reasons, by the way.
Two of my kids are military. Two of my kids are U.S.
Marines. And my son, Carlos, my middle son, he's a special operator.

Speaker 1 He's a scout, he was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, where he would, his job was to jump out of helicopters at night, down a rope, into a theater of battle and with a high-powered rifle, and then shoot

Speaker 1 with optics at night. That's a really dangerous thing to do.
That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do. That was super fun for him at 20.
I don't want to have anything to do with that. Why?

Speaker 1 Why was he willing to do this? And the answer is because he did not have adequate synaptic development between his limbic system and his prefrontal cortex.

Speaker 1 Well, there'd also be, there'd also likely be, like, you know, males are more expendable and the more adventurous males, adventurousness is a high-risk, high-return investment.

Speaker 1 And men, well, so there's these great studies, you must know about these studies of the drug gangs in Chicago.

Speaker 1 The guy who did the studies promised the gang leader, it's a big drug gang, that he would write a book about him. I love it.
Yeah, yeah, you know about this. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And so

Speaker 1 they found out that the default drug dealer made less than minimum wage and almost all of them.

Speaker 1 And almost all of them were employed. Yeah.
Right. But the reason they were willing to take the risk was because the status kick made them much more reproductively successful.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 deaths among the higher-ups opened up avenues of progress. Right.
So even though low-level drug dealing didn't even pay minimum wage, the opportunity for status was high.

Speaker 1 And the relationship between status and reproductive success was unbelievable because it's like the relationship between socioeconomic position and male reproductive success is like 0.6.

Speaker 1 It's insanely high.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And so it's not surprising that young men who are looking to maximize their reproductive success when they have nothing concrete to offer are going to take a high risk, high adventure route because that differentiates them.

Speaker 1 And even if it's that at the cost of their own skin. Sleep being a CEO,

Speaker 1 if you're a CEO of a company, you're probably going to have to leave in disgrace. If you're the prime minister of the UK, you're going to leave in disgrace.
Or Canada, for that matter.

Speaker 1 To take a reason. Congratulations, by the way.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, but why do they do it? Because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime in terms of the prestige.

Speaker 1 That's how much, that's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward. By the way, Aquinas was really good on this.

Speaker 1 So Thomas Aquinas, I don't think you've actually, you haven't talked very much about Tomistic thinking, right? Which is this. So Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St.

Speaker 1 Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. He was a Platonist, but he said the pupil is greater than the master and introduced St.

Speaker 1 Thomas, introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13th and 14th centuries. And he said that we are animated by four idols, that God is what we ultimately want, but God is inconvenient.

Speaker 1 You know, God is hard to understand and a lot of one-sided conversations and a ton of rules. And so we take things that have kind of a god-like feeling to them and they're fourfold.

Speaker 1 He was an outstanding behavioral scientist. He could stand up to anybody today.

Speaker 1 He said that the four idols that we have that substitute for God are money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Yeah, that's

Speaker 1 power, pleasure, and honor. We've distinguished, we've talked about why

Speaker 1 happiness. We talked about discernment.
We talked about the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Okay, so let's bring this down to practicalities.

Speaker 1 Now, you teach leadership courses at Harvard, and you, I presume that you take a relatively practical approach to your students in relationship to what will constitute happiness.

Speaker 1 So, well, so walk us through that. Like

Speaker 1 we talked about the necessity of establishing a goal. Right.
And we talked about the conceptualization of happiness. And so how do you make that,

Speaker 1 how do you ground that in your classes? And what have you observed as the effect?

Speaker 1 So there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And we dug in on enjoyment.

Speaker 1 We could do exactly the same thing for satisfaction and exactly the same thing for finding meaning what is meaning how do you interrogate meaning in your life how do you actually find it that would get us back to discernment because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient then yeah i talked about okay so you you mean by discernment i think probably something very similar to what i've focused on as attention.

Speaker 1 You know, one of the things that I used to tell my

Speaker 1 clients, for example, let's say they were having mood dysregulation problems, one of of the things I would teach them to do is to notice, this is way different than thinking about, notice when they were particularly miserable during the week and when they weren't.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
And to approach that with a completely blank mind. It's like you'll see that there's variation in your mood.
Right.

Speaker 1 If you can catch yourself when you're less miserable than usual, then you can think, okay, what exactly. What did I do right? Or what's the context that's informing that? Well, that's discernment.

Speaker 1 It's right, right? That's kind of. Well, you're certainly discerning something.

Speaker 1 But when I'm talking about discernment, I use it in an almost theological sense, which is to actually find the essence of your life. I think it's the same thing.

Speaker 1 I think it's the same thing because there's something gleaming there that's calling to you, that's setting your life in order. And this is what happens with Moses in the burning bush, by the way.

Speaker 1 That's something that beckons to him. And he discerns.
That's why he goes more deeply into it. And he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him.

Speaker 1 And I would say, like those moments in your life where things come together, if you're discerning enough and attentive, there's an unlimited depth to that exploration. Right.
Okay, okay. So, anyways,

Speaker 1 so that discernment is really trying to find this essence of discovering what your essence is.

Speaker 1 I just don't agree with Sartre. I just don't

Speaker 1 believe that you can invent your essence. We're not self-inventing.

Speaker 1 I believe that we exist

Speaker 1 in ad infinitum and trying to. Otherwise, we could just tell ourselves what to do.

Speaker 1 It'd be simple. I'd just say to myself,

Speaker 1 be happy. Right.
And I'd obey. Well, that doesn't happen.
Or even worse, you would invent your essence as your identity, which is exactly what we're doing.

Speaker 1 See, to invent your essence is a Gnostic heresy. It's to say, I am a self-inventing creature.
Right, right, right. I'm this, I'm not that.

Speaker 1 I'm one of these people. I'm not those people.
There's no shared story. There's no humanity.

Speaker 1 There's no love in that. And that's the problem.

Speaker 1 There's no relationship either. But to discover your essence, that's pure humanity because that's what links you to everything that it has always been and everything that it always will be.

Speaker 1 And that's exciting. That's an adventure.
That's just. Yes.
I think that's by definition an adventure, actually. That's the adventure.

Speaker 1 That's what the hero is doing in the hero's journey. Right, right.
That's what a quest is. The quest is actually discovering your essence.
Discernment is you on the hero's journey.

Speaker 1 That's a Juniorian thing. Okay.
Right. okay so now did you familiarize yourself with Jung as well

Speaker 1 yeah I mean everybody who's a fan of yours yeah yeah well I was wondering if there's a separate pathway to this in my innovation that's not standard academic no no knowledge no no no but when when I actually came back five and a half years ago as a process of discernment to teach happiness and to create a big public uh apostolate in this as well to talk in public education because I'm working in the public sphere not just at Harvard University I'm talking in media I write a column every week in in the Atlantic.

Speaker 1 I write books that I want people to watch. I do television.

Speaker 1 And the result of that is that I actually can't, I have to range really far from

Speaker 1 the roots of my discipline. You know, my discipline is theorem proof in economics and running regressions.
That's just not good enough.

Speaker 1 And so when I looked at it, I have to know where do the most interesting questions come from. They come from theology.
They come from philosophy. They come from art.
They come from history.

Speaker 1 That's where the interesting questions come from. They They don't come from when you and I were writing our papers, when we were writing our papers inside the university,

Speaker 1 we were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data.

Speaker 1 That's the wrong place to start, which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I've ever been before.

Speaker 1 Then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation, which is the modern neuroscience, which is the... cutting edge of our field.

Speaker 1 And only then could I expose it to the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained and you and behavioral science. And then I had to talk about

Speaker 1 how do you use it? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing I'm really curious about.
It's psychoanalytic because it's that's young. Okay, okay, okay.
So when you're doing this at the business school

Speaker 1 or at the Kennedy school for that matter, now you're focusing on the personal and the relational, but you're doing that in the context of business and government. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, how do you how do you square that circle? It's it's business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people.

Speaker 1 You know, the whole idea of work-life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life. If your work is not in life, it presumes alienation.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 absolutely. It presumes self-objectification, which is a deeply problematic and simple thing to do.
That makes you homoeconomicus. That's no good.
Work-life balance is a problem is the bottom line.

Speaker 1 So what I say to my students on the very first day. Yeah, it also implies that work isn't life.
No. Nope, absolutely not.
Your life is...

Speaker 1 Or that your home life isn't life. One of the two.
Yeah. And then what's life?

Speaker 1 life leisure right and what's leisure i mean there's a complicated i'll take joseph pieper's argument that leisure is the basis of culture but only when it's based in learning and contemplation that that's good as opposed to right what is and leisure is not the people often think of leisure as the absence of work yeah right it's like well that's that's actually boredom no no i mean i want work

Speaker 1 before the fall yeah right tend the garden tend the garden that's blessing and you discover that by discernment yeah and that's what you're teaching. It's a business.

Speaker 1 So, but what do they think of that? Well, it's amazing. So the first day of class, I say, look, a bunch of you, you want to start your own companies and your startup entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 And the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs because you're going to make your fortune working for companies that other people have started, et cetera, et cetera. That's great.

Speaker 1 But it's trivial because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the enterprise of you and you're the founder. Start treating your life as a startup

Speaker 1 today.

Speaker 1 This is what we're going to do.

Speaker 1 What do startup entrepreneurs do? They're willing and able to take risk

Speaker 1 in exchange for the potential explosive rewards that come from it.

Speaker 1 And to understand

Speaker 1 that's an adventure. And by the way, you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are.
If you're thinking in terms of terms of money, power, pleasure, and fame, woe be unto you.

Speaker 1 But if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness, game on.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about how to get explosive returns in love and happiness for the entrepreneurial endeavor of of you incorporated that's how the class starts because that's the hero's journey and everybody's entitled to that and what do you mean by entitled you mean it's available to them because we're born to it because this is to be born in the divine image of god where god is inherently generative god is inherently creative god is inherently loving and this is the gift not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have

Speaker 1 positive affect all day long. On the contrary.
Well, I guess part of the argument you're making is that that's actually a second-rate substitute for the real thing. Absolutely.
Right.

Speaker 1 Hedonistic happiness is, I thought about this in terms of like addictions. It's a false adventure.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Absolutely. On the contrary.

Speaker 1 And so that's one of the reasons that the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which is a good life well-lived, full of suffering and full of experiences. And

Speaker 1 adventure, again. That's the thing.
And that's what I want everybody to have. That's what excites me.
That's what gets me up in the morning.

Speaker 1 And the master stroke is to be able to say, I am truly grateful, Lord, for this day full of blessings and happy feelings. And I'm also grateful for the things that are going to challenge me.
Well,

Speaker 1 you want your life to be enough of an adventure so that if you wake up in pain, you get out of bed. Yeah.
Because you think, no,

Speaker 1 this is worth doing. This is my life.
Right, right. This is my journey.
This is part of, this is the, the dragon I'm going to slay. Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 that's what I'm teaching.

Speaker 1 That's the gist of the class. And

Speaker 1 so how do the students, okay, so so I would suspect that the typical, or many of the typical students, particularly in business, it's a bit of a stereotype, but I'm going to run with it anyways for the time being, is they're, they're going to be much more materially focused.

Speaker 1 And maybe I'm wrong about that, rather than admiring entrepreneurship. Like, look, I worked with a bunch of

Speaker 1 a bunch of startups and a bunch of these incubators in Academy, which are all fake, by the way. It was just, oh, it was so corrupt.
It was just beyond comprehension.

Speaker 1 But in any case, you know, they would dangle these these visions in front of these young people who are trying to start a business of you know making a unicorn and selling out for a hundred million dollars and then sitting on the beach and having my ties it's like it was just complete well it was so complete it was a complete lie right it was corrupting beyond belief and it's counterproductive because

Speaker 1 while your enterprise should be the thing it's like you don't you don't want to sell your company unless you can think of a better company because you get to have your company and you get to expand it and you get to bring benefit to the world and and you get to learn and then it's like, okay, now, when you get your students at the Kennedy School or at the School of Business, what is their ethical orientation towards the political or the business before they take your course?

Speaker 1 So it's the same as everybody. where they want to have a good life well lived, but they don't necessarily know what that means.
Yeah, right. So they're the same as all of us.

Speaker 1 So are they defaulting to those four things? Of course, because we all do.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 1 So I play a game with my students. It's called What's My Idol.
This is what I found at the very beginning, one of the very first sessions of the class, What's My Idol?

Speaker 1 Where I take them through a little bit of Aquinas. They read a little bit of Aquinas.

Speaker 1 And I say, look, this is the first modern, really great behavioral scientist is St. Thomas Aquinas.
And it's don't read it for the religious parts. Let's read it for the behavioral parts of this.

Speaker 1 And I say, okay, he says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately there's going to be one that attracts you more than any other.

Speaker 1 And that when you do, you'll always do the things that you'll later regret. That's that's the thing about it.
Okay, and that's behavior. That's what makes them idols.
I know, right?

Speaker 1 They beckon falsely in the present. And that's very empirically robust, a very empirically robust assertion, of course.

Speaker 1 We know this from all the literature: that you know, that when people chase these idols, that they are ultimately they don't get what they want and they're self-defeating a lot of regret.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I say, okay, let's play a game. And the way to do this is not to say, What's your idol, but to eliminate the ones that they're not your idol.

Speaker 1 Okay, you want to play? Sure, okay, Sure.

Speaker 1 So money, power, pleasure, honor. And honor is not what we say with my marine children, which is to start with honor.
That means to be honored. Yeah.
And so that's narcissistic. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that means shame or

Speaker 1 what we have in academia, which is prestige. To walk in and people say, oh, this is Jordan Peterson who wrote that paper.

Speaker 1 You know, that paper that got the award last year, or whatever it happens to be, or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people, right? Which we want.

Speaker 1 It's your lobsters, right? That raises serotonin levels. Okay.
Okay. So think of those four.

Speaker 1 And then let's think of the one you would first eliminate, which doesn't mean you don't have it at all, but rather that you have the population mean level of it.

Speaker 1 So you've got rid of money, for example, you wouldn't be poor. You just have exactly the population mean amount of that.
So you wouldn't be in, there would be no deprivation whatsoever.

Speaker 1 Money, power, pleasure, fame. Which one do you kick away? Power.
Why?

Speaker 1 I'm not interested in exerting control over others voluntary actions so if i were to you're the clinical psychologist and i'm just a you know a working class economist but i would say that the reason for that is because you hate when people have power over you

Speaker 1 well that's certainly an indication of the undesirability of power that's my lived experience of the i hate yes i hate that yeah i hate being

Speaker 1 told what to do not everybody hates that

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 people who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently. So

Speaker 1 it's kind of an interesting thing. So you'll find that totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems.
They would just like to be the totalitarian. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 Dictators admire dictators. Funny, I was just writing about exactly that this morning.
It's like, yeah, well, this is part of our misunderstanding of totalitarian systems.

Speaker 1 Everyone is striving to be free except the bully on the top. No, it's bullies all the way down.
I know. So that's okay.
So then we've established that about you. You kicked away power.

Speaker 1 You got three left. Money, pleasure, and honor.
What's next?

Speaker 1 Pleasure, probably.

Speaker 1 Pleasure. No, money, probably.
Money. Why?

Speaker 1 Taste is an excellent substitute for money.

Speaker 1 Like you can, you can, you can, you can, you're talking about the population mean of money. Population mean of money.
If you're

Speaker 1 wise and discerning, that you're rich with that amount of money. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I would also postulate, correct me if I'm wrong, that given the fact that your material success, among other things, has taught you using your self-awareness as a behavioral scientist, that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money.

Speaker 1 It's really not that interesting. Well, the big advantage to me of having money is that there are, it opens up avenues of possibility.

Speaker 1 It makes some things easier. Right.
Medical care. It does.
But it opens up sources of unhappiness. Yes.
Yes. And it opens up avenues of adventure

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 would otherwise be impossible. But they're not the things you care about the most.
Well, there's other ways of doing them. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's other ways of doing them that are, that, are they equally valuable? Um,

Speaker 1 sufficiently so that that was my second choice, anyways. The things that I love the most are not things you buy.

Speaker 1 I just, if, you know, people say, if I could keep everything in a knapsack, I would be detached.

Speaker 1 And I say, no, I would still rent everything I want. The whole point is that, you know, buying stuff is

Speaker 1 interesting. Well, money.
Money is useful to me because it enables opportunity. Right.
It's not particularly useful to me because I can buy stuff with it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I buy some things, but look, in a culture like ours, you can buy virtually everything you need for nothing if you pay attention. I know.
Like virtually everything is free. Food, maybe not.

Speaker 1 I have a whole lecture on how to actually how to buy happiness with money. And

Speaker 1 you have to go exactly against your limbic system. Why? Because your limbic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your

Speaker 1 evolutionary fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate

Speaker 1 you need more buffalo jerky and animal and flints in your cave.

Speaker 1 Anyway, okay, so you got two left, pleasure and honor. Now it's hot in here because

Speaker 1 these are things that you like. And this is normal.

Speaker 1 But you've got to get rid of one and go to the population mean, which is a

Speaker 1 pleasure, probably next.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now we've established what your temptation is. Now we've established, that doesn't mean that you can't tame it, but you must know it.
You must say to yourself, honor, honor.

Speaker 1 When I do the wrong thing,

Speaker 1 it's because I pursue honor. By the way, I'm exactly like you.

Speaker 1 Why? It's too bad for you. Well, it's too bad for my wife.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and your wife. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's because, you know, I hate people having power over me.
I don't want to have power over others. I was a chief executive for 11 years.

Speaker 1 And the thing I hated was when people called me boss. It made me intensely uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 It made me feel embarrassed, even humiliated when people said boss, because I felt like they were setting up a hierarchy. It felt passive-aggressive, even when it wasn't

Speaker 1 aversion. Money.

Speaker 1 Okay, great. well you know if you're someone's boss it's not who's it's not obvious who the slave is right right because if i have to tell you what to do

Speaker 1 then i have to tell you what to do it's hard enough to get myself to do things much less bother with you maybe there's some temporary thrill in ordering people around although it's not a thrill i've ever appreciated but

Speaker 1 I'd rather that you did your own thing. I'd hate, you know, I hate dictatorships and I wouldn't want to be the dictator is the bottom line.
Money. Okay, yeah, what? I mean, pleasure.

Speaker 1 I I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a very self-disciplined person. You know, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning.
I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before dawn. How old are you? 60.

Speaker 1 And I'm in better health than when I was 30. And part of it is because I'm not a sensualist because I can actually do that.
I mean, I like feeling good, but it's not high on my list of priorities.

Speaker 1 You know what tempts me? This.

Speaker 1 That's what tempts me. And I know it's true.
And I know I have that particular tendency.

Speaker 1 And that knowledge is power why because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus and it's accessible by my prefrontal cortex and I can use it to manage my limbic system and that's that's being fully alive as far as I'm concerned that's being fully alive and when my students understand that they can not just avoid errors they can feel like they have control they can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey that's what this that's how do you get them to start envisioning their future pathway in a more multi-dimensional manner?

Speaker 1 So I, among other things, we talk about the process of discernment. Yeah, discovery.
Yeah, discovery of their own. And what do they have to do practically to engage in that?

Speaker 1 I asked them to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers, but do have understanding. Because this is the essence of how philosophically discernible questions.

Speaker 1 I'll ask, and I've done this to my adult children as well. When my kids were 18 years old, I would make them write a business plan.

Speaker 1 As a B school professor, I I could kind of get away with that, right?

Speaker 1 And the whole point was, what are you going to do with the next five years of your life? I'm the entrepreneur of your enterprise, and I'm the venture capitalist kind of, so I deserve a business plan.

Speaker 1 I want you to tell me what you're going to do to find the answers to two distinct questions or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions. Why are you alive?

Speaker 1 And for what would you gladly give your life on this day? I want to know the answers to those questions.

Speaker 1 Why didn't you come in? Okay.

Speaker 1 Explain the rationale. these are deeply existential questions that are that are rooted in almost everything.
Right, so what's more important to you than the mere continuation of your life? Yes.

Speaker 1 That's a hard one. Yeah.
So that's kind of like, what would you die for? And also, what would you live for? Yeah. These are the same thing.
And the other one was...

Speaker 1 Why are you alive? Which means who created you and for what purpose in your belief? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 So one of the ways that I had my clients answer that question is we did this in this exercise that I made commercial, this future authoring exercise.

Speaker 1 It's something, and you can do this when you're arguing with your wife, for example.

Speaker 1 Well, so one of the things I always ask my wife, and she asked me too, when we're arguing, is like, what are your conditions for satisfaction? Yeah, like you disagree with what's going on here, right?

Speaker 1 Even hypothetically, if I did what would satisfy you, what would that look like? Right.

Speaker 1 Well, you can ask yourself the same thing in your own life, which is like, okay, life is difficult and it's rife with existential doubt.

Speaker 1 Could you you imagine a situation where you were thrilled with your circumstances? Right. Right.
So, what are your conditions for satisfaction? That is an exercise of discernment. It is.

Speaker 1 You have to treat yourself like you're someone you don't know. Right.
Right. It's like learning to please someone else, like in a relationship.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, it takes a long time to know what makes your wife happy, partly because it takes her a long time to know too.

Speaker 1 It's hard because people have a nature and what satisfies that nature has to be discerned. You have have to notice it.
You know, it's so interesting to understand that.

Speaker 1 It's like you have to discern what it is that actually motivates you, for example, rather than what you think should motivate you. Absolutely.
Those aren't the same thing. Oh, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 There's what you desire, what you desire to desire. There's a whole series of iterations about that.

Speaker 1 And a well-constructed life, the one of which you're really in charge, has good knowledge such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are, you can make the alterations that are appropriate.

Speaker 1 Right, exactly. That's what it really comes down to.
And that's what,

Speaker 1 that's the best that has been, that we can use in behavioral science. This is.
So that's all that part of discernment as well.

Speaker 1 Because one of the questions would be an analogous question is something like, well, if you were in pain, what would get you up in the morning? This is why it's so useful for people to have children.

Speaker 1 Right. It's like, because a mother, my wife said something very interesting when she had her first child.
When she had Michaela, we went up north to where my parents were in this old, this cottage.

Speaker 1 It was all old people up north of saskatchewan there's like 20 of them in the room and they were watching this little like 12 month old toddle around like she was on fire right it's like they're just completely entranced right and my wife said it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention yeah that someone else had it was a great relief to her that someone else had become far more important in her life than she was self-evidently and you know the the statistical studies show that there's no distinction between being aware of yourself and being miserable right Self-consciousness loads on neuroticism.

Speaker 1 Right. And so what is the corresponding psychodrama? The problem with the psychodrama is that it's me, me, me.
Yeah, yeah. You know, and me is the wrong answer.
Me is the wrong answer.

Speaker 1 So that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in what I teach. It's not about a particular religious faith, notwithstanding the fact that I practice one.
It's self-transcendence.

Speaker 1 Self-transcendence is the essence of awe, of getting small.

Speaker 1 I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the Dalai Lama.

Speaker 1 And he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when he saw that photo that the astronauts, the American astronauts took of the Earth from orbiting the moon.

Speaker 1 That famous photo.

Speaker 1 And he said, I'm so little. And it was a sense of peace that came over him.
Now, there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace, according to Scott Barry Kaufman. It's dark triads.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes. They can't get outside themselves.
No, no, because of the narcissism. Yeah, right.
The narcissism component of the dark triad or dark tetrad.

Speaker 1 So the problem with the dark tetrad types is they can't actually be in awe of themselves. They cannot be.
How annoying. They cannot experience the happiness that comes from self-transcendence.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right. And that's why they're stuck in this, the land of Nod.

Speaker 1 That's why they're stuck. pacing and

Speaker 1 roaming the land of Nod.

Speaker 1 They're the most miserable creatures for that reason. That's why they've most self-transcendental.

Speaker 1 That's a good place to stop. And we're pretty much exactly at the time we should stop.

Speaker 1 I think what we should do, what we will do on the Daily Wire side for those of you who might join us there, is I think we should talk more specifically about Harvard and about the relationship.

Speaker 1 I'd like to know more about your life, about how you're conducting your business and what you're doing and what your plans are and how that fits in with your academic strivings and your role as a teacher at Harvard.

Speaker 1 What you think of the... Well, of the institution.
I was there in the 90s. I loved it.
It was firing in all cylinders as far as I was concerned when I was there.

Speaker 1 It isn't obvious to me that that's the case anymore. And I'd like to talk about that.

Speaker 1 And so, if you all would like to join us on the Daily Wire side for an additional half an hour, please, you're more than welcome to do that. We would appreciate the support as well.

Speaker 1 So, thank you very much for coming here today and talking to me. It was a pleasure.
Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, much appreciated.
Likewise. Yeah, yeah, great, great.

Speaker 1 And thank you to all of you for your time and attention, the film crew here too, and Scottsdale, and to the Daily Wire for making all of this accessible, possible,

Speaker 1 professional, and well-produced because those are the attributes that they bring to bear on this enterprise.

Speaker 1 One note is that I've been a subscriber to the Daily Wire for years

Speaker 1 and highly recommend it.

Speaker 1 What do you recommend about it? I recommend that it's

Speaker 1 a well-produced and high-integrity organization with

Speaker 1 quality that one can count on run by people who truly believe in what they're doing and are mission-focused. And there's not enough of that in the world.
Ah, well, there you go.

Speaker 1 Well, that's been my experience working with the Daily Wire as well. So, genuinely, and I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky.

Speaker 1 So, all right, thank you, everyone, and thank you very much, sir. Good morning.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 You too.