There are three macronutrients to the happiest life. The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab. Satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle. And last but not least is meaning. The why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering. If you spend your life, which many people do today, trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering, they will paradoxically miss their own happiness.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Arthur Brooks. Arthur Brooks is a professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School. Today we discuss what makes people truly happy and what this thing we call happiness is really all about. What I love about Arthur Brooks and what you'll realize today is that he looks to experimental data, philosophy, his and others' experiences to arrive at specific questions that you can ask yourself to determine what matters most to you and what stands in the way of you actually getting those things. In fact, I must say this episode with Arthur Brooks is one of my favorite ever on the Huberman Lab podcast. He is brutally honest. He's open. He's generous with knowledge that can help you, the listener. And he's incredibly humble. Thanks to Arthur, the conversation you're about to hear is one that I'm confident you'll want to think about, act on, and come back to periodically. I can say for myself with certainty that it's the conversation I wish I'd heard long ago. Arthur doesn't have all the answers, nor does he claim to, but I do think he has a sort of hard-earned compass and a set of maps that we can all apply to have a much better and indeed a great life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Arthur Brooks. Dr. Arthur Brooks. Welcome.
Thank you, Dr. Andrew Huberman.
We're only going to call each other doctor once at the beginning of this podcast. I'm so happy you're here.
Yeah. I consider you a friend. And before we became friends, you were already my teacher. I was learning a ton from you. You have a ton of wisdom. Before you like step into your humble self and push aside, I just really want to highlight that because there are a lot of people influencing, educating, advising, coaching, etc. But you represent like really the confluence of ideas and practices and wisdom in ways that I and people can really understand and benefit from. So really looking forward to having you here.
Thank you. Likewise. I mean, what you've done over the past now five and a half years with this podcast...
You changed the whole way that educators can reach a lot of people. What we want as educators, science in the public interest. We want to touch people's lives. We want to lift them up and bring them together using science, using ideas. And how do you do that? You showed the way because what you did was you started this podcast within six months. It was a big deal. And what you showed was a whole generation of people younger and older than you. I'm older than you, that this is something that people can do, that we can reach people. You made that possible. You made that possible for me. It was an incredible gift.
Oh, well, I'm honored and thank you. I realized today that perhaps the toughest part about this conversation is going to be make sure that I keep you focused on you a little bit. You're so humble, but I appreciate the kind words and I consider us colleagues and friends. So you're known as the happiness guy. You know a lot about it, what it is and what it isn't. So let's start with first principles there that people can really wrap their head around and apply. What's the difference between unhappiness and happiness, or is that even the right model?
Yeah, most people start with the wrong model of what happiness actually is. So you can't define unhappiness until you can define happiness. And happiness is not what most people think. Most people conceive of happiness as a feeling, as an emotion. And that's quite wrong in the same way that the smell of your turkey is not the same thing as your Thanksgiving dinner. The smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. And the feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. And when I first came into the field, I mean, I've been a behavioral scientist for 30 years, but I started specializing in the science of human happiness exclusively. I wrote the first book of mine on this in 2008. But I decided in 2019 after I took a hiatus from academia to go run a big think tank in Washington DC that I was going to specialize for the rest of my career in this thing that most people believe they wanted. I was going to really make it work. And there's of course happiness. People want to be happier. And the first thing that I realized is there wasn't a very good definition of happiness. It was just so crazy. The thing that everybody wants, they can't quite define it. I can't put words to it, but I know it when I feel it. This is what I would get when I would ask my classes. So, what do you think you're studying? Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or doing the things that I enjoy. And I recognized that this would be completely inadequate in any other area of science. And so, I went back to try to find the right metaphor, the right parallel field to define happiness. And I felt that the field of nutrition did it really well by taking food and breaking it into macronutrients and micronutrients. So I asked myself, okay, what are the macronutrients of happiness? What are the fundamental elemental building blocks of happiness? And to figure that out, you go and you look at the people who have the highest life satisfaction that's measured in robust and proper ways, good construct validity, good science behind it. And what you find is doing kind of a factor analysis is that there are three macronutrients to the happiest life. The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life. And you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab, right? And so you have to understand, right? For sure. And satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle. And last but not least is meaning, the why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering. And so the first, or I should say the second, misunderstanding about happiness is that it's incompatible with unhappiness. It's not. If you spend your life, which many people do today trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering, they will paradoxically miss their own happiness. So that's the first thing to understand.
Could you drill a little bit deeper into enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning? Yeah. And maybe just put some contour on each of those. We'll go back to unhappiness and suffering and how it relates to all three.
For sure. So, enjoyment is very much related to pleasure. But pleasure is fundamentally a limbic phenomenon. I mean, just if you touch in experiments, you've done these, you've seen these experiments forever, the ventral striatum or the ventral tegmental area, you can get the stimulation of these parts of the brain that will give you this sense of a bouleance, this sense of, you know, immediate joy from anything, from your girlfriend saying 'I love you' or a big bump of cocaine, not that you would, because the brain is so unbelievably thrifty, right? That's not part of happiness. That's a phenomenon from sort of the paleocerebral brain, from something in the middle, paleocerebral, what, 250,000 years ago, saying that's rewards, you go get more of that is kind of what it comes down to. You don't want to have that as your goal in life. I mean, like the hippies used to say, 'If it feels good, do it.' My dad said, 'That's the end of America.' He was kind of right.
I think your dad and my dad either were friends. I don't think we have the same dad, but...
Yeah, my dad, and no disrespect to the hippies, but my dad had very clear thoughts about how the children of people with that mindset were at a disadvantage because of that message specifically.
What will happen of course very quickly is that your pleasures which are fundamentally animal. I mean, your dog, your beautiful new dog, friendly new dog that I just met. He has a limbic system not that different than yours and he feels emotions that are not that different than yours. Right? I mean, he has amygdala, you know, he has a dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, he has a ventral striatum. I mean, he's got all these different parts and just kind of like we do, but he's not human because he's managed largely by these emotions and we have this choice. We have this incredible prefrontal cortex, this human cortex that's enormous. Your dog's is wafer thin, ours is like 30% of the weight of our brain. And what that supercomputer allows us to do is to choose between animal impulses and moral aspirations. We get to make that choice. That's a conscious executive choice. When we convert pleasure into enjoyment, it's because it takes on moral aspiration to it. We take our pleasures and we add people and memory, thereby kind of delivering them to an executive experience that we're managing, that we understand, that we're conscious of, that we can remember, and that's fundamentally social. It's quintessentially human. As a matter of fact, that's what it's all about. So I talk to my students who are graduate students or 28 years old on average and my kids who are 28, 26, and 23. You know, what does this mean? And for most people, what it means is if there's something that makes you feel good, because we all have our thing, whether it's highly glycemic carbohydrates or any kind of addictive behavior. And in point of fact, it can be dependence-provoking, which many things can. And when they wire into the dopamine system. You've talked about this ad nauseam so many times. I've heard you talk about this. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. Probably it's probably more about pleasure and less about enjoyment. It's not a perfect rule. I like to walk in the woods by myself and say my prayers, but those things aren't addictive. And so that's how to think about it. You need to enjoy your life. And that means there are things that give you pleasure at a metaphysical or physical level, but they also have people and memory and you're managing them and they're not managing you. So that's kind of in a nutshell how I think about enjoyment. Now many people are bad at that, especially strivers. Who listens to your podcast? People who are serious about their lives. There's nobody who's like, 'Ah, whatever.' Who's going to listen to your podcast?
We're not a whatever podcast.
You're a striver podcast.
We should do a title card sometime. How to whatever.
Yeah. I know it won't go very well. April Fool's episode.
I know, right? This is not one of those podcasts.
You had guys like me on, right? And what strivers, one of the things they often struggle with if they're very, very, very competitive, if they're ambitious, if they're successful, is that they want to be special more than they want to be happy. And so they want to put points on the board. And if it's not putting points on the board, they're not going to do it. And these are the people that I have to work with to work on the macronutrient enjoyment.
Is there fear that were they to enjoy life more, be happier, I'm probably using these terms incorrectly, that somehow they would lose their drive? Because as you were describing enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and by the way, I love this description of enjoyment as, you know, we have animal impulses and then there's this other end of the spectrum which are moral aspirations. Wouldn't at least some component of a great life be to marry those two things so that your pursuit of these animal impulses actually raised you up morally? I mean, that's the ultimate. I mean, we have so many examples now in the media of prominent politicians in particular with all the elections going on where their careers are tanked. I do believe they might have been trying to be good people on average, but the temptation ruined that career anyway. Totally. Totally. And so it's clear it exists in them and in many, in everyone, right? But the fact that that can happen to... it almost feels like a misuse of the animal impulse.
Is there a way to marry animal impulse to moral aspiration in a way that's seamless, or does it always work?
No. No. You have just defined enjoyment. Proper enjoyment is one where you're doing what you think is prudent and natural and good to do. It's something that you want to see yourself doing and at the same time is pleasurable. You know, that's why the best moments over the course of my 35-year marriage are highly pleasurable and extremely enjoyable. And it's the kind of thing where I could get, you know, found out by the press that I'm having another beautiful night with Esther. You know, that's good is what it comes down to. And the truth is we all struggle with these things because we are biological creatures. You know, I'm fundamentally a behavioral scientist, but psychology is biology. One of the things I've had to retrain in so many of these areas, especially over the past 10 years, is because the biology has become so salient in our field. And one of the things that you find is that the trouble that people actually have is when animal impulse and moral aspiration go in different directions. And one of the great strategies for life is how to point them in the same direction.
How to, and sometimes you have to choose.
Sometimes you have to choose and people feel like it's, I should, you know, if it feels good it must be good for me. But that's having the same life goals as protozoa or something, you know.
Or if it feels bad it must be bad for me. And there are probably a lot of things that people could benefit from doing that are going to feel quote unquote painful in the process.
Now we're in the gym. I'm a gym rat. So are you.
Do you like training? I like training.
I really do like training. But it's a funny thing because when leg day, I still want to throw up. I've been in the gym almost every day for 30 years.
And you're in great shape, by the way. It's obvious to anyone watching, but you know what? I feel good.
Is it okay to share? You're 62.
62 years old. Yeah. And it's, and you know, I've got genetics that keep me really lean. So, it's not like it's any flex that I can stay at, you know, 10% body fat or something like that. That's just nature. But the truth is I really recognize that I need to keep the machine in good shape because the brain is part of the machine. And as we both know, hard exercise, picking up heavy things and running around is fundamental to affect management and also to the maintenance of the overall functioning of how the machine works. I don't want to fall prey to, you know, type three diabetes, which is what we're calling Alzheimer's these days. I don't want metabolic disorders that are avoidable. So, I actually do that. Now, leg day sucks, man. I mean, I've been doing leg day every fourth day for 30 years, and I still don't like it. I would still skip leg day. Every day would be chest day because everybody likes chest day, right? Because it feels better. But the truth is that I do it because I actually know how the muscle protein synthesis works. I know that for hormone balance, leg day is the most important day for these really large muscle groups. And what am I doing? I'm making the decision to do something that foregoes my comfort, my pleasure, even a moment of my happiness for the moral aspiration that I actually have. And that leads to this important conclusion from the research in this area, which is that mother nature doesn't care if you're happy. This is, you know, we all think it's like if I'm not happy, then something's not right. No, no, it might very well be not right. You know, there are all kinds of suffering that you actually need to grow as a person. You need negative emotions because negative emotions are an alarm system that show that your reptilian brain has registered signals, sending these signals to your limbic system and setting off alarms from sadness and anger and disgust and fear. That's unpleasant, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong. It means everything's right. How you react to it can be how you want to in so doing have a better life notwithstanding the fact that it doesn't feel good. And that's a life of discipline. That's a life of the kind of behavior that you actually want. That's worth moral aspiration.
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I've got this statement that you just mentioned like ringing in my ears in the best way, which is that you're saying this moral aspiration piece has a lot to do with or reflects doing what you want to see yourself doing. I really like that because I think for many people they want to see themselves doing things that others would approve of, right? And from a young age we're told what we should do and why, right? You need to like get dressed up for this event or you need to, you know, sit up a certain way, eat a certain way, be polite and these things which are all important parts of our training, right, as humans. But there's something really special that happens when we, as you pointed out, when we see ourselves doing something and it feels good and it's a positive self-reflection of the non-egotistical kind. Right. And I don't think we talk enough about this because there's so much out there now about how social media is all about comparisons. So people are showing other people, here's what I'm doing. But there's a different version of that where somebody does something that they're proud of and puts it to the internet and they're seeing themselves do something that they're proud of and they get the feedback and, you know, provided that their ego is in check and they don't let the positive comments go to their head or set them up for disappointment when they don't get as many of them the next time. All things that are wired into those reinforcement circuits.
I think that's great. They're seeing themselves exercising. Oh, by the way, it could be painting. It could be time with family. It could be being a volunteer in service. And we tend to look at that stuff and say, 'Oh, you know, they're just doing the display.'
So my question is to really get the ideal match between this animal impulse and moral aspirations piece that we see ourselves and experience ourselves doing what we want to see ourselves doing, and that we not share it because I'm open to the idea that the sharing diminishes it somehow.
It can. Yeah, it can. But fundamentally, I think it's actually quite important that you declare what your moral aspirations are. And part of the reason is because this gives you a commitment bias. So there's a lot of behavioral science about that. A lot of psychology that actually talks about commitment bias when you say, 'Here's the thing that I'm actually going to do. I'm going to finish my PhD.' Right?
This is a big part of weddings. I've attended a lot of weddings. And it's kind of an amazing thing, this wedding ceremony.
Yeah. Makes you path dependent toward your own aspirations.
People stand up and give a bunch of really amazing promises in front of all their friends and then they get a bunch of gifts and that there, I'm not cynical about this at all, like from a reward pathway perspective it's like you're rewarding the promises that they're making in addition to the union that they're in right then. A lot of the reward is like you're giving them things for their life going forward. Sadly I have a number of friends who've been divorced and depending on how long ago the wedding was, they often feel quite sheepish about all the gifts, like what they got all these gifts for the promises they made. Now they've changed their mind, right? In some cases broken those promises, but they've changed their mind, right? It's not till death do us part. It's now until it got inconvenient enough that we're going to part ways. And it's an incredible still occurring kind of ancient display of promising publicly, I'm not going to quit.
Yeah. No, totally. This is my person through thick and thin, through sickness and in health and all the things that you actually talk about. You're actually talking in the wedding promises. You're saying it's going to suck sometimes.
That's what you're saying. I mean, it's like richer and poorer and we're going to stick this thing out despite the fact that we're stating right up front that there's going to be times of poverty, there's going to be times of sickness, there's going to be trouble ahead. And that's basically saying that happiness has unhappiness in it. I'm defining happiness. How am I defining happiness? That I'm going to get 80, 90 years and as I take my dying breath, I'm going to be looking. I'm like Don Juan and this is my Dulcinea. And I'm going to be looking into her eyes as I recite the holy scriptures and take my dying breath. That's basically what you're saying. And you're defining that as your bliss. I mean, if it weren't your bliss, you'd be like, 'Why are you doing it? I want it.' Because that's a good life. That's what you're stating. And you're laying out what actually happiness looks like and you're saying it's going to be full of unhappiness. That's what you're saying and that's the thing for people to understand that that's what it comes down to when you are laying out publicly your moral commitments, when you're actually saying this. What you're saying is you're recognizing that happiness and unhappiness are intertwined and you want the full, you're basically saying bring it on.
It's a declaration of your independence from the world and your dependence on each other, which is a beautiful thing. It's what you do when you're publicly baptized as an adult. Anytime that you're taken into a new religion, there's always these commitments about these moral aspirations that you're making. Recognizing, yeah, sometimes this is going to go contrary to my animal impulses. Absolutely. And you know, this is one of the things that I love about sort of the modern internet culture. There's a lot to regret. There's a lot that you and I look at like, oh man, you know, but the other thing I really, really like is it's facilitated this wholesale movement of aspiration for excellence. A lot of people, they want to be excellent, you know, it's like, so this isn't just the Huberman podcast, it's not just entertainment, high class entertainment. People want an edge. They want to know, you know, why are they so attracted to the protocols? Protocols toward what? Toward being better. They want to be more successful. They want to be better liked. They want things to go better for them. That's a human drive for excellence. And when people can finally make peace with the fact that your animal impulses will not always and frequently not lead you to excellence, then you can finally be free.
Do you think that a lot of the friction out there politically, socially is basically about drawing the line between what is animal impulse and what is moral aspiration?
I mean, I don't want to take us too far down.
Tell me more. What do you mean?
I mean, some of the animal impulses are obvious, right? And they're all for the neurobiologists, we would say they're very like limbic, hypothalamic, right?
But, you know, some people would say, okay, like here's the quote unquote traditional model of marriage and morality.
And some people would say actually we want to kind of bend that a certain way where people could have quote unquote unconventional relationships or unconventional families or I mean I think everyone would agree that lying, cheating, and stealing is bad. Right.
Right. But there's an attempt, I think, to draw a kind of jagged line between moral and immoral that, you know, certain things that are not of biblical traditional morality are okay because as long as they're done consensually and in the name of love.
Right. And we're not talking about breaking laws here, although some people really push this to the extreme, but that's not what I'm talking about.
And I'm staying off specific issues not to be like politically careful here but just because I feel like a lot of it is like where are we going to draw the line between limbic and higher order. In fact it actually gets inverted where people will say no that the more evolved way of thinking is past all that where you can really get beyond this very, you know, black and white morality and really say no there's all sorts of versions of what love, family, marriage, commitment, child rearing could look like.
Conscious pilot. What is truth?
Right. It's very postmodern.
Yeah, it is very postmodern. But I think that I mean I feel like this is that like people are pulling back and forth on this line just like in science people are trying to say the scientists and doctors that are all, you know, traditional scientists and physicians they have the knowledge and then the general components of the general public are saying actually during the pandemic you lied, you know, like a teenager following their and like you need to admit you lied and then they're like I didn't lie, you know, and so there's just trying to pull back. We have the torture of truth. No, we have the torture of truth and of course there are elements of truth on both sides. But in this case it's sort of... I think at the extremes we all understand murder is bad, right? Lying, cheating, stealing, bad, right? But then what constitutes a moral aspiration to one camp is actually a moral insult and vice versa.
So Jonathan Haidt, you've had him on the show, right?
Yes, Jonathan Haidt's great. And Jonathan Haidt and I go way back. We go back to the early part of the 21st century. So, and Jonathan Haidt and I are just the same age and we've had these sort of parallel careers writing about the science of human happiness. The guy's a visionary. He's probably the greatest social scientist of our generation.
He's that great. I mean, it's, he's unbelievable. He wrote a book about moral foundations. And he talked about the fact that there are two moral foundations that everybody has in common, and that's care and fairness. Care for others and fairness. Now, we define those things differently. I mean, what does care mean? Does care mean giving everybody, you know, taking care of them at the base level or does it mean everybody gets an apartment and free groceries? I mean, you figure out what that means.
And that's a legitimate argument about, you know, what it means.
Fairness is really, really different, especially between political poles where one side is about redistributive fairness and the other side is about meritocratic fairness. You know, what fairness actually means, but everybody wants a fair and caring society and you believe that you should be fair as a parent. You should care for your kids. Then what he shows empirically with his work which no doubt has a huge neurobiological basis and I'm sure has a huge genetic basis as well because these personality characteristics generally do, are usually between, in the identical twin studies it's usually 40 to 80% genetic all the aspects of personality which is super interesting in and of itself, is that there's three elements of morality that are very different between the political poles. They are loyalty, purity and authority. And so loyalty is like flag burning is bad, right? You know, I come from a very mostly progressive family, politically progressive family. And if I asked somebody, you know, from my family of origin, what do you think about flag burning? They'd be like, inadvisable, right? As opposed to morally evil, right? Soft answer.
When it comes, right? And the second is loyalty, you know, loyalty to tribe. And what you find is that people who are more on the politically conservative side, they have a different sense of loyalty. Loyalty towards sports teams. So you find that when you, in these interesting studies that you go into a political conservative's office and you'll find like a sports poster where for political liberals' office, you're very, very much less likely to find this is what you find. And then of course where it really has teeth is toward, you know, national identity. You know, where you're loyal toward national, it's like my country right or wrong, which is one of the reasons you find such a strong political preponderance of one side in the military forces, in the American military as opposed to the other. Not to say that one side's right or wrong, but that's just, you know, how it comes down. Haidt would say that's a difference in moral foundations. And the last that you were really touching on here is purity, is moral purity. And the moral purity is about, for example, in sexual matters is very, very profound, you know. And so, you know, there's a, you know, I've seen a bumper sticker in San Francisco that says, 'Your body may be a temple, but mine is an amusement park,' right? It's funny in its way, right? But what that is basically saying...
It's very, it's very what I would call, because I'm from the Bay Area, sort of older San Francisco like circa '70s to now. Now there's a kind of a growing conservative movement somewhat tucked into the tech community although you find a mix of both.
You find a mix of both too but it's kind of a libertine thing.
Where libertarianism and libertinism diverge, which is a really interesting boundary too is what you find.
But that actually describes those differences are, you know, so, you know, each side will say the other side is immoral. No, they're differently moral and you decide, you know, which you think is right. And if you tell me in a structured survey what you think is right on those particular issues, I have a very high degree of certitude in guessing how you vote, actually. Now, some people are in these weird things. You can be in kind of a, you can be a political conservative, but a cultural liberal, right? Those aren't very many people, but you do find them. They tend to be the political libertarians. As a matter of fact.
It's fascinating because ultimately here we're talking about drawing boundaries between different brain areas. At least that's what the neurobiologist in me thinks. But I mean obviously politics, laws and behavior matters a lot.
It really matters because ultimately people can say all sorts of things about what they believe, what they want to be, but we are ultimately judged on what we do.
And I think we probably judge ourselves on the basis of what we do or ideally we would look at that. Let's talk a little bit about, we've gone through one macronutrient, right? One macronutrient. What exercises do you suggest to students to start to explore their own relationship between animal impulse and moral aspiration?
Yeah. So, one of the things that I talk about is how they understand leisure. So, leisure is what you do and they're not compensating you for in the time that's actually free. How you understand leisure. So, and the greatest writer about this is Josef Pieper, the mid-20th century German philosopher. His most important book was 'Leisure: The Basis of Culture'. That's his most influential. It's actually a long essay. It's very, very beautiful. He says, 'I can tell you everything you need to know about a culture by how they actually use leisure.' He doesn't want to know what you do for money. He wants to know how you use your...
Time when nobody's paying you, that's because, he says, that's what reflects who you actually are. That's why I never liked the 'Oh, you can tell by the books on somebody's shelf' thing, because books on somebody's shelf doesn't mean they actually read those books first.
They own those books, right?
Exactly. Many people own my books who haven't read them.
Well, I've spent some time with it. I still need to pore through it again, but...
Can't wait to read 'Protocols', by the way.
Oh, thanks. If nothing else, 'Protocols' will cure insomnia. The thing is almost 600 pages long. Thank you. Your book's awesome and I spent some time with it. I want to spend more time with it, in part because it marries theory with practical steps and prompts — not AI prompts, but the kind of prompts to really give oneself. So, this thing about leisure is fascinating.
Yeah, leisure is really interesting. It's like that tells you what you need to know about a culture, but also about a person in a way. And so, if you find somebody who's using their leisure time to meet animal appetites, that's one thing. If they're actually using it for personal betterment — not career betterment, not for the compensation that actually comes from the worldly rewards. There's four worldly rewards: money, power, pleasure, and honor. And if you're doing something such that it doesn't reward you in one of those areas — that actually comes from Aristotle and Aquinas, etc. — then you're actually doing what he would call proper leisure. You're doing proper leisure toward, you know, moral aspiration, which is ultimately the most rewarding thing. That's ultimately what will take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness. That's the theory, and it's actually been verified a lot. In a lot of these ideas, the best questions come from the philosophers, and then the structural mechanisms come from neuroscience, and then the testing of these ideas comes from the behavioral sciences, right? The experiments, etc. Then, of course, applying them to your life is a different kettle of fish. And so what he says is that there's kind of three areas that make proper leisure and ultimate enjoyment. You want me to tell you the...
Number one is deepening relationships on purpose, man. I mean, on purpose. And so leisure is: this weekend I'm envisioning myself not touching my phone while I'm with my wife, right? Deepening my relationship, being fully present for my wife. And I'm going to go someplace not because I want to chill on the beach, but because I want to be on the beach with the love of my life. So, deepening relationships on purpose with, you know, a real focus on that. The second is learning something you don't need to learn. And the third is actually developing yourself metaphysically — your spiritual, your religious life, or your philosophical life — to transcend what's going on here for no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence. Those are the three areas of proper leisure. And that's how he would say, 'I know that you're going from pleasure to enjoyment.' That's how I know, based on what you're doing, even though you don't have to.
I love this. I'll tell you several of the reasons why I love it. One is, people from time to time will say, 'What do you do for fun?'
It's a very difficult question for me to answer because people...
But your work is fun, by the way.
My work is so much fun. Like, I'm reading this book about sunlight and how the dermatology world is revising their understanding about sun and skin cancer, and I'm loving that. I love my... I mean, I could list it off, but I just say those things to just get people to think about what they enjoy doing.
But the word that, you know, keeps coming up in my mind, because I have a hard time with the fun thing, because yeah, I do other things that are purely recreational, is this word 'enrichment'. I mean, it sounds kind of, you know, like somebody's trying to be an academic when they say, like, 'What do you do for enrichment?' It's not as natural a question these days as, like, 'What do you do for fun?' It's like, 'What do you do for your own enrichment?' It reshapes the question a little bit because the implication is it's not just about immediate pleasure.
Kind of falls into the group of pleasure.
Yeah. You come out of it better, right? Not just for having experienced whatever the activity was, but like there's something carried forward into other things that you do, and in a good way. And so the word enrichment, you know, feels good. It's the reason why even though I was in the sciences as an undergraduate, I, you know, decided to take a course in Greek mythology and, like, loved it. Loved, loved, loved it.
And it turns out it was neuroscience too, right? [laughter] You know, years later, like we talk about, you know, the myth of the cyclops is all about anger and it has everything to do with the lack of depth perception that you have with one eye versus two eyes. It turns out like the Greeks really understood stereopsis and depth perception there. I couldn't help myself. In any case,
So, like, this notion of enrichment, and I love that in the example you gave of going to the beach with a friend or with a spouse or someone else you care about. It's not about your own experience of it. You said not just because you want to be there, but because you're actually there. That's a physical grounds for creating something else. So, it's not really about the beach. It's about what you leave the beach with. And it's not just memories of the beach. You actually both change as a consequence of being there. Maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways, but you've enriched the relationship. And so, the beach becomes incidental. When people talk about wanting to go out drinking, what I want to know is, is it about the drinking or is it the people you're drinking with? That's what it comes down to. Now, I strongly recommend that people reconsider that decision. I mean, I've heard you: two drinks a week is the safe level. I've got it, Andrew. I've got it.
Yeah. More than that, it's probably not a good idea for most people.
I'm at zero. You know, I'm a non-drinker because it's the right cadence for my life. But, you know, people who do use alcohol responsibly — I wish I were a person who could use alcohol responsibly. I'm not, right? So I don't, and I don't use it at all. But, you know, when people say 'I'm going to go out drinking,' I mean, I don't know if that's pleasure or enjoyment. I don't know if that's animal impulse or moral aspiration. I need more information. I need to know the reason for that. When people are talking about getting a beach house — 'I'm going to get a beach house' — I don't know whether or not that's animal impulse towards social comparison, toward actually a scoreboard effect so I can actually feel like I mean something. That's all animal impulse. That's just like your troglodyte brain actually saying, 'You're not good enough unless you have a beach house like old Bill over there at the office,' right? But on the other hand, if you tell me, 'It's like I got to create a place so that my kids and grandkids are here a lot' — okay, now I'm listening. Now I'm actually paying attention. And so a lot of things that people will say, I need a little bit more information such that I can categorize it in the right way. Whether or not we're on the right side — we're on the animal impulse side or the moral aspiration side, whether we're on the pleasure side or the enjoyment side, whether it's actually going to bring happiness. I'm pausing because I have so many questions about this, but I want to make sure we touch on the other macronutrients because otherwise I'm going to...
I'm going to encourage you to give a tutorial on how to really maximize every single choice in not just my life, listeners...
Enjoyment protocols. We should have leisure protocols.
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, we all know that, like, one of the major pillars is social connection and relationships, but the idea that leisure is part of that as a substrate for enriching those is obvious once we hear it, but it reframes everything. If exercising with somebody, you know, turns out to be a way you deepen the relationship, which actually has been my experience with a lot of male friends, frankly. Like,
One of the best ways to get to know somebody in my experience is to have an intellectual conversation with them, like really deep dive with them, or to go do something difficult. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Rob, our producer and close friend, he's sitting to my left right now. I mean, one of the first things we ever did was like go for a run where he kicked my butt.
And by the way, a Vanderbilt graduate. Very pleased.
Places that... [snorts]
Yeah. And I don't recommend people box, but years ago I boxed and I'd spar on Wednesday nights. Don't recommend it. Yes, I wore headgear. Yes, I probably took some damage. I don't recommend it. But you feel so close to people that you've actually tried to hurt and they tried to hurt you, but with rules.
It's an amazing — it's very primitive and yet there's a bond there that is obviously nonverbal. It's a lifelong bond. You see that person the next time and it's a like...
Especially if they played fair and they hurt you. Yeah. You're like,
'Yeah, like we know one another. I've seen you.' You know, there's a respect level. I'm not suggesting people do this, but...
You added people in memory to a strong experience, thus rendering it enjoyable and being part of happiness. Yeah. In point of fact, it wasn't strictly pleasurable, but that wasn't exactly the point.
No. The point was to suffer together in some way. There's a great book by a guy named Sam Sheridan called 'A Fighter's Heart'. He's actually a Harvard grad.
I think he was an art major there. His dad was a Navy SEAL. Very interesting guy. And he has this joke that, you know, you know that sparring is like a...
It's like a one-night stand or something. You've like done something very intimate with someone you barely know.
And so it has both a feeling of connection, but it's also the illusion of connection. So he hits it better than I did. Don't run around and start sparring with your friends. Well, the military — why it creates such, you know, bonds for life. I mean, my son is a sniper, scout sniper in the US Marine Corps, and these are friends for life. I mean, these are guys who would literally give their lives for each other, who looked out for each other in very, very dangerous situations. And they were suffering together. Now, the word compassion in Latin means to suffer together. That's what it means to be compassionate with somebody, to suffer alongside that person. That's what it comes from. And it's, you know, it has this — the passion of Christ in the Christian religion is all about the suffering of Christ. That's what it comes from. And to have compassion towards somebody, to suffer with that person through that. And when you even induce that suffering, as dumb as it is — beating each other up, you know, getting into the octagon — you know, that is what you're doing. This is the experience of compassion, which gets us to a primordial need to move beyond the animal impulse into the moral space that actually makes us quintessentially human, that makes us fundamentally different than all the other beings, that makes us the dominant species. By the way, it also renders us the most miserable of all these species as well, which is so interesting.
There's some dark and terrible examples of this. And sometimes people will call it trauma bonding, like the sort of Sid and Nancy story — like they kill each other at the Chelsea Hotel in like a drug-induced rage. But then, like, if you watch that great movie with Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, right? 'Walk the Line' — like their relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter, right, was — June Carter Cash, I think was eventually her married name — it was a contentious one. It was like that, it was the feistiness, it was the fighting, like they were forged in this challenge. She was divorced at a time when divorce wasn't really frowned upon, and she was religious, and so there was just a lot of contention. And then there's this peace that they achieve in being together. But you always sense that it's like that, that there's this recognition that there's fight in them and they've been through it.
And that's part of — like we used to kind of hold up relationships like that. Now we like to see everything look perfectly smooth, right? But this gets back to like the marriage vows and this gets back to relationships of all kinds. It's the suffering.
The suffering — suffer with. I'm going to suffer with my wife until I take my dying breath. And it's like because we have a relationship.
She's going to suffer with you. My god, you know, the width is there. The both of you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. To be clear. Yeah.
No, for sure. I mean, it's no walk in the park being married to me, that's for sure. I mean, it's a pain for sure. But she will. I mean, this is like the bond that we've actually taken for life. And central to that — and we have great enjoyment. It's fantastic. But that enjoyment has everything to do with the fact that it's pleasurable. It's interesting. It's fascinating. It's funny. And it's also hard, and there's a lot of suffering, and it's dagger strong. I mean, my wife is Spanish, so you have to understand that there's a high level of complexity and suffering, you know, there.
And words per word density per moment.
Yeah. Exactly. Right. And we have a 50/50 Spanish and English marriage, which means that we can, you know, we can suffer in, you know, two languages is what it comes down to. But the truth is, you know, that's what people need to expect. You know, that's what people need to expect, that it's like, okay, let's suffer together, baby. Come on, honey. Let's just bring it on. And that's a beautiful thing.
That's really what it means.
And people talk so much about peace and ease as the goal.
I'm hearing some of that, but I'm hearing a bunch of other things too here.
I get it. And particularly true that men, they want peace at home. They do want peace at home. And I see that, by the way, women want peace at home too. But you're not going to get peace all the time. You don't want peace all the time. You want a full life, fully lived. You want to be — it's like to be fully alive. What does that mean? That means the whole range of your emotions. You're using all the parts of your limbic system. We're wonderfully made, Andrew. And it's just like I want the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to give me this sense of suffering and grief when I'm feeling social exclusion or the sense of loss. You know, I want the insula to be highly active when I have this sense of disgust or whatever it happens to be, or the amygdala to be active with fear and anger, etc. I want that. I want my brain to work the way it's actually supposed to. I mean, I want to suffer, and I'm going to if I'm actually being fully alive and if I'm taking the chances and if I'm doing the things that I actually need to do, because that is ingrained in the full experience of what human happiness is, properly understood.
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So we have the second chapter in the book that maybe we write together. Although you're the real writer. I confess I've yet to decide I'm a writer.
Which you're good at when you do, man.
Oh, thanks, man. [laughter] Appreciate it. One chapter will be on leisure.
You've told us that how one spends their leisure time is a critical window into self, and the other will be to how to suffer more.
In pursuit of moral aspiration.
But also how to experience pleasure in pursuit of moral aspiration.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So we've gotten through enjoyment.
Yeah. Let's talk about satisfaction.
Because [clears throat] because it sounds similar, but it sounds like deeper, more pervasive, more like an — I don't — define a satisfaction.
Yeah. So, I mean, again, the definition — everything is in the definitions. And one of the problems with happiness is that everybody can define it in different ways, etc. So I try to stay out of the linguistic wars.
And it's like [clears throat] consciousness. Yeah.
No neuroscientist really wants to talk about consciousness anymore because it's like it's so circular.
Absolutely. It's being awareness and being aware of the fact that you're aware because you're aware or something. I what you know [laughter] many billions of dollars and euros in particular. That's a joke aimed at one Swiss scientist in particular.
You've read Michael Pollan's new book.
I haven't read the new book, but I think the world of him.
He's fantastic. And the new book is actually the book to read for people who are not either, you know, philosophers or neuroscientists or even psychologists for that matter. 'Why A World Awaits' is what it's called. I really — I've never met him, but I love the book. I think it's absolutely fantastic. And at the end of the book, you know a lot more and you still don't understand what consciousness is. You don't understand what it is.
It's a lot of things. It's many things. It's sentience and it's feelings and it's awareness of others and it's awareness of yourself, and we don't know where it is in the brain, and oh my goodness. But the truth is that that's one of the problems in the field that I have too, which is the definition of terms. And satisfaction is one of these things. Satisfaction, as I define it, as many people define it, is the joy that you get from an accomplishment after struggle. That's satisfaction. So the satisfaction that you got from your PhD was proportionate to the suffering that actually went into getting your PhD, and mine too, right? And they were like, 'Oh man, I'm not doing that again.' But it was so awesome. And you know, I think about, you know,
But it was so awesome. Those are the key words.
I know. And it's like I talk to, you know, my kids — my kids in the military there. I mean, being a Marine is no — you're not screwing around. And you know, I saw what my kids went through, you know, the infantry training battalion and the scout sniper indoctrination. And my daughter is, you know, and she's an officer. She actually got her first salute from her brother. He's 6'5" and she's 4'11". It was awesome. You know, actually, your older brother has to salute you. It's great. So cool.
But, you know, it's people talk — when I say, you know, 'Tell me the story of your success,' I mean, people make jokes about it. You remember David Koch, one of the Koch brothers, you know, of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas. And he was a very, very funny guy. And he used to say — people say, 'How did you get so rich?' And he'd say, 'Well, it started when I was 12 years old and I found an apple and I was shining it up and I had paid a nickel for it and somebody offered me a dime and I said, "Oh, it's a 100% profit margin." So I went back and bought two apples and I doubled my money. And I started doing this every day and every week, doubling my money and doubling my money. And you can do the math week after week and year after year. And finally, my father died, left me $100 million.' [laughter]
And the reason that that's funny is because that flicks the parahippocampal gyrus and it makes you feel like that surprise, like in every joke, right? But the reason it's funny is because real satisfaction from your accomplishments comes from the struggle, not from the accolades. That's what it really comes to, because you earned it. And human beings are made to earn their success. This is the reason that they'll convince themselves that when somebody's giving them absolute utter largesse that they actually earned it in some way. If you want to have your career destroyed as a politician, go to a bunch of senior citizens and tell them you're getting a lot more back from Social Security than you ever paid in. Your career is over because you basically just, you know, flicked their parahippocampal gyrus in a very unpleasant way. You kicked it, right?
And they don't like it. And so the truth of the matter is that he was saying that because the answer that people are expecting is, 'I suffered and I had three bankruptcies and, you know, I almost lost my marriage and I had to raid my kids' college fund and I was afraid.' You know, like Bernie Marcus talks about the Home Depot and they were down to their last dollar and it was grim is how he talked about it. And so that's really, really important. And that's one of the reasons that satisfaction, which is so important — you know, we got to make progress, why arrival leads to frustration — but progress toward goals is how we're wired. Purpose in life comes from goals of direction and progress toward purpose and goals. That's where our purpose in life actually comes from. And so the result of it is that we need to have this sense that we're sacrificing for something, that we're doing something that's bigger than who we are and we're willing to give something up. That's really one of the great secrets. It's one of the reasons also that when people hit their goals, they get so depressed, is because there's no more progress. You know, it's why Olympic athletes are so likely to fall into a clinical depression after they win their gold medal. And why people are so — when they win a billion dollars, they're like, 'I guess I need another billion. I guess I need,' you know, because I don't — I'm not feeling it, man. Because we're actually made for this progress. But the progress entails the struggle. We judge — your students, my students — there's no satisfaction that comes if they cheat on an exam. But if they work hard and get an A, that's very, very satisfying. And you teach your kids this: don't eat before dinner. It's not because of nutrition. It's because you want their synaptically plastic little brains to register the fact that if they come to dinner hungry, dinner's better.
And you tell Junior, you know, 'Don't eat before dinner because it's unhealthy.' But if you were being honest, you'd say, 'I want you to suffer. That's why you can't have a snack.'
A few years ago, I was out a lot on the internet saying, you know, dopamine that comes without effort is very pernicious. And...
I stand behind that. But some people took the interpretation too far, in part in an attempt to malign me, which is fine. Like, you know, I'm out there, you know. Yeah, sure. That comes with the territory. But they sort of implied — I didn't have the language for it, but now I do, thanks to you — it sort of implied that I don't believe in leisure, right? I don't want to return us to the first macronutrient in a way that distracts us, but I think this is appropriate now. So, of course, leisure is great, but I would say leisure is way better when you've been working hard. And so if you've been working hard towards something that has its own intrinsic reward, the work itself can become intrinsically rewarding or not. You know, there are a lot of things I did in graduate school that I absolutely loved the process. And there were some of them that, like, the only word for it is it sucked.
All-nighters, like two days recording experiments and like just breathing all that is in the room, and it was just — it sucked. But it was awesome. But there are forms of leisure. Like on those Fridays when we finished those experiments, I would drive out to this orchard outside of Davis where I did graduate school, to Winters, and I would just — there would be four phones. I would just listen to music in my car, and I just felt like I'd been transported in time. And I felt connected to all the people who had worked a hard week and then were just listening to music in their car. And then eventually my girlfriend and I would drive out there and now I could share that experience with her, and she was a scientist and worked really, really hard too. Arguably even harder than I was because the experiment she was doing took yet another level of persistence that was really remarkable. So it's not that saying that effort has to be there before dopamine means you're a one-track, like, self-optimization junkie, right? It's just an important pie slice in being a good human being, in my opinion. So I kind of bristle at the idea that a concept like that could be construed as anti-pleasure, but in a sense it's really like there's something about the human mind where we want — we hear one piece of this, we hear about one pie slice, we say, 'Oh, so that means like leisure doesn't exist for this person.' But what I love about your work and what you're telling us today is that it's really about the complete pie chart. It's not about working with our brains, working with our biology. We are built to earn our rewards.
We are built to earn our success.
We have no concept of what anything is worth if we don't earn our success.
And, you know, the reason that we want to do things — we think that, you know, a Snickers bar gives you pleasure. No, no, no, no, no. It's actually the neurochemicals that are giving you pleasure that are [clears throat] actually making you feel this pleasure. It just happens that through the way that the brain works. Getting your PhD didn't give you pleasure per se. There was nothing about the piece of paper. It was actually the knowledge that you had done this thing. And so, one of the greatest secrets to excellence and success in people's lives is the sense of earning it. And that means making peace with suffering, making peace with pain, making peace with struggle is what it comes down to. Now, that doesn't mean — and one of the biggest mistakes that strivers often make is that it's all struggle. You mean — you remember the not discredited but complicated Walter Mischel marshmallow experiments at your fine institution, and what they — you know, the follow-up. You know, the kids who ate the marshmallow within five minutes, they had no impulse control and they went on to actually get worse grades and worse jobs, etc. And the 20% of the kids in the marshmallow experiment who were able to not eat the marshmallow and they got the second marshmallow, they did much better in life. And the whole point was the deferral of gratification is a big signal of how well you're actually going to do. One of the biggest problems the strivers have — and I'm speaking to all the strivers watching us right now — is that they don't know what their marshmallow even is. And so they're just going to wait their whole lives, and that's not what you've been saying. That's not what you're talking about — to never, never, never drive out to Winters, to never actually listen to the music, to never actually wait for the second marshmallow and enjoy that second marshmallow. That's a mistake too. That's actually a huge mistake. But the whole point is we're trying to find the golden mean between earning it and not earning it. That doing enough and struggling enough and then actually taking the reward and then starting again. This actually feeds into a lot of experiences that people have. A big part of my work is how to age well, about how to get happier as you age.
Yeah. I mean, it's super important. And part of the reason is because, man, I'm no spring chicken. And this is me-search, right, for all of us. We're always doing me-search instead of research. And so I want to know how can I be happier at 60 than 50. And now I want to know how I can be happy years down the road at 70 instead of 60. I want to know how to retire. And so when I'm giving people advice, I'm doing public education about these things because I've been trying to answer these questions for myself. Retirement is a classic case of screwing up the satisfaction part of happiness. It's like, 'I'm going to work and work and work and work. I'm going to be a miserable sob and then at 65 I'm going to stop completely and just goof around.' That's the recipe for misery all the way through because it was no fun. It was all suffering without reward and then it's all reward without suffering. That's neurophysiologically unsound, but it's also philosophically unsound. It doesn't actually make sense. So I help people retire constantly, but I also try to help them have the best life as they move through the course of their careers, do what they're actually naturally good at that is both hard and rewarding, which changes over the course of your career. There's a lot of research on that, but it all gets into how can I maintain satisfaction. The mystery comes when we actually do get the thing that we actually want and then we find that it leaves us cold.
That seems like a real tyranny. Like mother nature had a trick up her sleeve, which kind of she did.
I mean, you actually — people, 'If I can get that watch, that car, that marriage, then I'll be happy forever.' I mean, guys will say to women, you know, 'If you marry me, you'll make me happy forever.' That's not right. You know, it doesn't matter what she says when you propose. It doesn't matter what she says on her wedding day. It's what you say to each other over the course of your entire marriage that actually will give you, net-net, the best possible life. That's why Mick Jagger sang 'I can't get no satisfaction.' He should have sang 'I can't keep no satisfaction.' And that's a whole different, as we say in Seattle, a whole another problem, mystery.
I guess so. I don't know. As I did.
There's so many articles out there and websites and blogs that are like the six things that people say on their deathbed. Nobody says, 'I wish I worked more.' I don't know. My dad, he's in his early 80s and he's still rocking and he loves his work, right? And he loves his wife and he loves his kids and he loves his coffee and he loves his meditation. He loves life.
