You actually need to have aversive experiences. You need pain, you need failure, you need loss, you need fear if you're actually going to figure out your resiliency and what you're made of and find the why of your life. So if you work too hard to avoid unhappiness paroxically, you're going to avoid happiness.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome back Arthur Brooks to the show. Arthur is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He's also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the Popper weekly How to Build a Life Calm. A world renowned speaker, he talks about human happiness and works to reads well being within private companies, universities, public agencies,
and community organizations. His latest book, which he co author with Oprah Winfrey, is called Build the Life you Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier. In this episode, I talked to Arthur Brooks about building the Life you Want. People often think that happiness is a static end goal, but in reality, life will always have its ups and downs. According to Arthur, we can make choices that can improve
our well being despite the presence of challenges. He talks about how to find satisfaction through family, friends, meaningful work, and faith. Arthur also shares actionable steps around managing emotions and habits that can help us create a better life. We also touch on the topics of neuroscience, transcendence, evolutionary psychology, and Arthur's favorite topic love. It's always great chatting with Arthur. He's a good friend and I really respect his work
a lot. His new book with Oprah really dives deep into the science of happiness and offers everyone a way to find happiness in their own way. I think you'll really enjoy this episode as much as I did. So with that further ado, I'll bring you Arthur Brooks. Hey Arthur, welcome again to The Psychology Podcast.
Hi Scott, it's good to be on the podcast. It's been a long time.
You know.
I always listen, so I feel like I'm with you every week, but I only get to be on the podcast once every couple of years or so, So what a delight.
That's really kind of you to say that. Well, you're you might get the record for the most times ever appearing on this podcast. You're a real friend of the show. It's official.
Well, it's you know, it's you know, it's amazing what you've been able to do, which comes this role in public education. I mean, you're you and I are trained social scientists, but and you're and you continue to be a major force publishing as an academic but at the same time bringing these big ideas to a you know, this is the most popular psychology podcast out there, and so you're bridging the gap. You're running the scene between
the practical and academic. You're the old you're the ultimate pro academic.
Scott what oh I like that? Who know the ever called me that before?
You're pro academic?
Yeah, thanks, Arthur. But obviously we're we're going to sign the spotlight on you today. Let me return that volley. Congratulations on this new book, Build the Life you Want. I'm kind of glad in all lot Transparentcy. I'm kind of glad you didn't title with the word happiness in the title.
There's too many books with the word happiness. Although the subtitle is The Art and Science of Getting Happier. But that's actually one of the big things good look right, I mean, the point is that that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction.
It comes from building a life. Yeah.
Yeah, and not to mention the fact that you don't want unmitigated happiness. You don't want, you know, happiness that has no intrusion from negative emotion, or you'd be dead within about a week plus. You wouldn't be able to find more happiness because you need challenging opportunity and you need growth that comes from suffering. So the whole point actually Oprah my co author, Oprah Winfrey, she was the one who who coined the right now. She created a
new word. She said, the goal is not happiness, The goal is happierness.
Yes, well that seems in line with the Dan Harris ten happier yeah sort of idea.
Yeah yeah.
How did you become friends with Oprah? Where did you two? Do you two meet? It a enough?
It's sort of interesting. So you and I talked after my last book came out, from Strength to Strength, which was about finding purpose and significance in the second half of life, and Oprah read that book too. Turns out that she, all the way through the coronavirus epidemic, had been reading my column in the Atlantic on Thursdays. She's a super super heavy reader. I mean, she reads everything all the time. She's a fast reader. She loves to read,
and so she reads a lot of stuff. But she was she became kind of a kind of a fan of the column, and I didn't know that. I mean, it has five hundred thousand readers a week, so who knows, you know, when who's reading your stuff. And so when the book came out, she read that and then she called and she's like, this is Oprah Winfrey. I'm like, yeah, and this is Batman. Really, who is this right? And
because I've known I've known of her. She's an iconic figure my whole life, but I'd never met her before. And she asked me to be on her podcast about the you know, she has a book podcast called super Soul, which a phenomenal podcast, and she's an incredible interviewer. I mean, she's the best in the business. And she was interviewed me about my book and she was quoting me by memory while she was interviewing me, and and afterwards, I said, that was that was amazing. I mean it's like we
were separated at birds. She said, yeah, I know, I know. And so we just started talking, you know, offline, and you know, cooking up things we might be able to do. And I went out there, you know, we had dinner a couple of times, and and then and then she said, you know what we ought to do. She said, we should write a book together that takes this class that
you write that you teach at Harvard University. I teach at the Harvard Business School this class called Leadership and Happiness and turn it into something that's like academics, academically significant, but it's accessible to millions of people. Why can't millions of people get a version of your class, which is a class on how to get happier and help other people become happier? And I said, yeah, right on. So
we actually started on that. I went, you know, to her place in California, and over about a three or forty period, we sat out in her tea house and cooked up this book and the whole structure of the book. And then we went back to our corners and started writing chapters and passing back and forth. And the rest, as they say, is history. It's fantastic.
That's fantastic. It's a fantastic book. So I assume you two see eye to eye. Then on a lot of things, was there anything you two didn't see eyed eye on, or she's like, I don't think happiness is that, you know, or whatever it.
Was, it's a you know not Really when she challenged things, she was almost always right, and I realized that. And part of the reason is because she's not a she's not a happiness scientist like you and me. I mean, she doesn't have this economic background, but she has incredible common sense and she's extremely well read and highly intelligent.
So so the questions that she would ask would be these clarifying questions that would help me remember exactly what we were talking about, like the happiness versus happierness idea that we talked about, the desk that it's not a destination, it's a it's a direction. You know. That kind of stuff really came from Oprah on this, and it put a much finer point on what I'm trying to do and say in a lot of the science part. And then you know, I was cooking through a ton of references.
I mean, you're you're in the book, of course, because your work is so significant in our field. There's a thousand academic references in the book, but they won't trip anybody up, because the book is written in pros for normal people that are not trying to read academic journal articles.
Yeah, that's what's needed. Get this stuff. You know, you can't every person in the street, you know, it's all these things are hind behind paywalls. Yeah, you know, you can't read these and even if you did read them, most people want to understand them. Academics don't even understand them.
You have to read so carefully. And you know, these days, thirty percent of what I do is neuroscience and really, yeah, for sure, and thirty percent of my class is neuroscience at this point because you know, those social scientists, we have to know how the brain works more and more. I finished my PhD in nineteen ninety eight. There was no neuroscience in my field in nineteen ninety eight, and
today it's every place. And so you know, the way that I introduce happiness ideas is all the questions they come from the philosophers and the theologians and you know, the big thinkers. Then the mechanism of causation is the neuroscience. And then all of the testing and evidence comes from social psychology and behavioral economics. And then you apply it to your life. But the point is you need that step. And so thirty percent of my class at Harvard is
actually neuroscience. So you know, I'm studying neuroscience on my own literally every day, and I have been for about five years now right on.
You know, I have my own concerns about the reductionism of neuroscience. Sure happiness. There's a famous philosophical thought experiment that I start off my class on happiness with with my students, and I ask them, would raise your hand if you would rather hooked up to an IV drip that gives you feeds happiness twenty four to seven into your veins and you don't have to work for it, or you have to intentionally work hard for the happiness.
Most people end up choosing the working hard part. So I guess I get concerned about using too much of neuroscience for like supplements, you know, like, oh, we change your brain with this supplement and then it'll make you happy. I don't think most people want the easy route to happiness? Is that fair to say?
What it is? Because people, they intuitively know they want to be fully alive, They want to be less uncomfortable and actually have less suffering, but they don't want to completely numb themselves. They want to have this fully live experience.
And people understand intuitively that all of the components of happiness, the enjoyment that you get in life, of satisfaction with the things that you're achieving, the meaning that you're trying to derive from your life, all of those parts, the macro nutrients of the of happiness, they all require unhappiness. And so if you could, you know, if you could get the blue pill of perfect happiness, it would mean that you're sitting on a chair someplace, you'd be someplace
in the matrix. That's the truth of the matter, and nobody will. I mean, the point of that movie The Matrix was that the red pill is it hurts, man, but it's totally worth taking. And everybody who watched that movie be like, yeah, I'd take the red pill. I'd take the red pill. And that's what they're telling you, Scott, and on the first day of class that they'd take the red pill.
So what I I thought the blue pills, viagra, the new blue pill. Okay, let's not get that confused.
Yeah, no, that's not that one.
Yeah, although that can increase happiness. You know, I just I just posted on my Instagram yesterday an evolutionary psychology study about well being that found that in the well being positive psychology researcher they research, they tend to leave out some really evolutionary important things like sexual satisfaction and status.
Right, oh, yeah, for sure. And the point and the really interesting thing about that is if you look, if you get the data on anything from you know, the amount of sex that you have, to how beautiful you are, to how much status that you have, you find that from a very low level happiness or wellbeing, day to day life satisfaction and contentment rise and then they hit a high point and then they start to fall again, which is really interesting. So you think, you know, people
are listening, they're like, what too much sex? It's impossible, It is possible. So you find that beyond you know, for most people, beyond about one hundred and twenty times a year, satisfaction in life starts to fall, and relationship satisfaction starts to fall.
Be lad or not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, beyond that, and most people they start to have lower levels of relationship satisfaction. In some and there's actually been some experiments that have shown this where you have treatment and control, and you know control is whenever you want, and treatment is you have to do it every day. And you find that that couples start to get along less when they feel like they have
to do it every day. And there's lots of reasons for that, right, I mean, there's there's a there's not a it's not always a good time, and in the happiest of marriages, it's not always a good time. It's the whole point. But the same thing is true with beauty, for example, physical beauty that you find that people they get more attention. The world is made for beautiful people.
I mean beautiful people can be incompetent and still get jobs, can say stupid things and people will laugh at their jokes, for sure, But beyond a certain level of beauty and people start to objectify you. I wouldn't know by the way. People start to objectify you in such a you know, a strong way that is dehumanizing, and then your life satisfaction starts to fall. So a little is good, too much is bad. This is one of the reasons that once you get past a certain level of money, more
money raises your anxiety. I mean you can actually have. There's a curve linear relationship in that that does not go up and up and up and up forever. Good things too much we need. I mean, this is Aristotelian, right, Scott, this is the Golden meding.
I'm really glad you know we're telling about this. I am so excited to announce that registrations are now open for our self Actualization Coaching intensive. While the coaching industry has taken great strides over the years toward integrating more evidence based coaching approaches, there's still a lot of work to be done. Many coach training programs still lack strong foundations in science and do little to incorporate research informed tools, methodologies,
or approaches for helping clients thrive. For twenty years, I've dedicated my career to rigorously testing ways to unlock creativity, intelligence, and our potential as human beings. Now, for the first time ever, I've compiled some of my greatest insights to bring the new science of self actualization to the field
of professional coaching. This immersive three day learning experience will introduce you to self actualization coaching, an approach intended to enhance your coaching practice by offering you evidence based tools and insights from my research that will equip you to
more effectively help your clients unlock their unique potential. Self Actualization coaching is a whole person approach to coaching that aims to help the client find their most alive and creative center of being, connect deeply with themselves, and become
who they truly want to become. Grounded in the foundational principles of humanistic psychology, self actualization coaching also draws from the latest psychological science, including the fields of positive psychology, coaching, psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience, and the science of creativity. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity. Join us and take your coaching practice to the next level. Register today
and get twenty percent off. Don't miss out on this very special event. Go to SA coaching dot oorg. That's SA coaching dot org and get twenty percent off today. I look forward to welcoming you in December. So Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant I believe they both wrote an article showing that almost every psychological trade in psychology goes with that kind of inverted U shaped curve sort of thing, you know, too little is not good, but too much
is not good either. I think they went like they were this seminal paper where they went down the line showing that revise to everything.
Yeah, you can actually be way too fit. For example. You know, you find that you know, body fat percentages before they get to the point that they're damaging for your health, you'll start to become unhappier. And there's a reason for that. There's a balance that we're trying to get between, you know, body fat and eating what we want and all these kinds of things. The truth is that life requires that we be fully alive and that
we be balancing different things. There's no there's no benefit without cost, you know, and there may be some costs without benefits, but the whole point is you have to live like a normal person. And this kind of extreme version of everything that we're pushed into in our internet culture is really deleterious, it's really unhealthy.
I agree you. Also, let's add even more nuanced to this, because you argue in this book that unhappiness is not your enemy, and I think that's that's important because some people might infer from when you talk about the benefits of happiness and for the inverse you know is yeah, that it's it's always necessarily bad, but that's not the case, right.
It isn't And you know it's it's funny because our society tends to oscillate back and forth between unmitigated positive emotion and trying to eradicate negative emotion. And you and I both know, being you know, trained academically, that that happiness and unhappiness are actually not opposites. Unhappiness is not a lack of happiness. On the contrary, that the emotions on the negative and positive sides of the ledger are produced sometimes in physically different parts of the brain, and
we need them both because they're simply signals. The problem is that when we become sort of extremist, like in you know, Woodstock, if it feels good, do it, that's life ruining advice. But so is if it feels bad, treat it and make it stop. That's life ruining advice too, because what you're doing then is that you stay in the mode of searching for pleasure, for example, and never get to you never add the grit into the pleasure seeking parts of life that can make it into enjoyment,
which is part of happiness. Never you can get stuck on the hedonic treadmill trying to feel good, feel good, feel good, feel good, which, as we both know and anybody who listens to the Psychology podcast knows what the hedonic treadmill is. It's I can't keep no satisfaction basically, so you try and try and try, or even worse, they can't get a sense of meaning in their lives. Meaning is so critically important, and you actually need to
have aversive experiences. You need pain, you need failure, you need loss, you need fear if you're actually going to figure out your resiliency and what you're made of and find you know the why of your life. So if you work too hard to avoid unhappiness paroxically, you're gonna avoid happiness.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a really deep truth that I think it's hard to maintain that you're in your working memory on a day to day you know, minute by minute basis, right, But it's a really deep truth. You talk about the four pillars of happiness, I just wanted to mention them real quick. Family, friends, meaningful work, and faith. I feel like you've called the faith things something else in the past. You've called it like the divine or.
Or transcendence, and you know that's that's more along the line of how you talk about it when you're when you're looking sort of late Maslow, I mean, you're you know, your hero. You've got a poster up in your bedroom next to your bed of Abraham Maslow.
I know, in a kate and next to my Britney spear is a poster.
So the whole idea of of you know, early on, of course Het you know, the pinnacle of human life is self realization. But later, of course he talked about transcendence, and self transcendence is something that was actually bigger than that. And so when I say faith, it's a placeholder for transcendent experiences, things that actually put us into perspective to as they used to say in the old days, to
get small. And part of the reason for that is that if you're stuck me me, me, me, me, my lunch, my commute, my job, my podcast, it's just man, it's just super boring and unbelievably tedious. And if you can zoom out on the majesty of life and put things into perspective, and you do it regularly through you know
the wisdom of the ages. I don't care if you're studying the Stoics like our buddy Ryan Holiday, or if you are you have a meditation practice, or you're walking in nature without devices, or you're studying the works of Johann Sebastinbach, or you're practicing you know, a traditional faith like I do. I'm a I'm a serious practicing Catholic.
All I won't tell you which one is cosmically or metaphysically right, but I will tell you that they all have the same transcendent benefit and give you access to experiences literally that we simply don't know how to achieve
any other way. I mean, you've seen this new literature, Scott, haven't you about that that religious experiences or transcendent experiences are the only way that we've been able to stimulate the sympathetic, comparasympathetic, nervous systems simultaneously to give you alert calm. It's just this crazy stuff that we're actually starting to see in the literature right now that you know there's no substitute for these experiences.
It's so true, and I just feel like that is so tied with the ego transcendence I think I feel like these things are so tied to each other.
Yeah.
For sure, our own ego is such a source of our own stress that we don't even realize, right, Like our parathetic, sympathetic, nervous system is a lot of it internally generated. You know. It's like, Oh, this person's doing so much better than me, I've gotta domin eat them.
Yeah, or something bad is about to happen to me. Something bad is about to happen to me. And part of that is that, you know, you've written about this and talked about this so much, is the maladapted stress responses that come from modern life. We treat you a bad tweet the same way that we would you treat an animal stocking us on the savannah, you know which, you extreme spikes and epinephrin ouropenephorn and cortisol. It's complete craziness.
And the result of that is in the modern life, we can go through with these chronically elevated levels of stress hormones, which is incredibly dilaterious to both health and happiness, and so we need relief, is the bottom line. And part of that comes from knowledge, part of that comes from changing habits. But a lot of that is just this four pillar life that's based on different kinds of love, which is the ultimate balm, is the balm of Gilead.
I mean, it's like this, you know, love of the divine, love of your family, love of your friends, and love express to the whole world through the way that you earn your daily bread. I mean, not everybody can do the psychology podcast, which is your act of love for the universe. But if you do anything in love, there's nothing small and nothing insignificant.
Yeah. I know that you're a big fan of love. I know you talk a lot about love. Sometimes there's like fake love, you know, sometimes there's people who you know because you've said, look for real friends, not deal friends. Can there be deal friends in the guise of love? That does that exist? I know this sounds cynical, but does that exist?
Yeah? So what you're referring to is this one of these one of the other pillars. So we started with a faith pillar. Another pillar of happiness that's really indispensable is friendship. And there's a friendship crisis all around the world, but especially in the United States. I don't know if it's especially so, but it's certainly the case. You know,
our wonderful Surgeon General VIVEC. Murphy has written a book on loneliness, and it shows chapter and verse how people have fewer and fewer and fewer people who are close to them and know them well, even though they're more and more surrounded by people. Of course, all of this has been exacerbated about the catastrophe of COVID nineteen, which is like, you know, the loneliness Full Employment Act is the worst. But what we find is that we've lost our friendship chops, and so far as it, we become
so and believably practical. You know, we have a lot of deal friends, but not so many real friends. And the difference between the two is that the deal friends the people to whom you do you work, for example, you see every day. They're useful and that's great, but your real friends that you need to be happy are useless. You need useless people, not worthless. I have those people
in my life too, useless friends. We need more of that, and that just takes work, because, you know, keeping up with the guys you went to college with, and you know, the people that can't do anything for you when you're working twelve or sixteen hours a day, like so many people do, is really really hard thing to do. So the question is does that mean the deal friends are bad or or not helpful and truth, that's no, that's okay too. Those are good things too. They're just not enough.
It's just not as a it's a diet that's just not nutritious enough for your friendship. You need both and you can't do without the real friends.
So you need friends. Yeah, the point categorical imperative of uh, you don't need anything from.
You don't need anything from And by the way, kantient in the sense that they tell you the truth.
Yes, I love it, Yes, I love that. I love those kinds of friends.
Yeah, I like them sometimes.
Yeah. I was gonna say, not too much of the truth, not too much of the truth. It just seems paradoxical to say you need friends that you don't need. What does that mean?
You need friends that are not useful? Yeah, you know, you need useless things in your life. There's all kinds of cosmic uselessness that we need. And that's a deeply Aristotelian point. So Aristotle talked about the tellic versus the atelic, and that that based on the Greek te lose, which is the purpose of something. And he said, there's special joy that comes from atellic love. You know, that's what
you know, the perfect friendship is based on. You have this this ladder of friendship where at the bottom are the transactional friends that we have to be, the deal friends. And then above that they're friendships based on beauty, where you admire something about somebody. But that the highest level that the friendship of virtue. The perfect friendship is a
telic in this way. And usually the way that you know it, you can recognize it is because you have a shared love, often for a third thing, and that's all there is. It's not useful in any any you know, economic sense, but maybe it's you love to build bird houses, or you love baseball, or you know, sometimes it can be deeply, deeply meaningful and even useful. My wife and I were best friends. We have the shared love for children and grandchildren, and you know, that's a really special thing,
you know. And so but it doesn't have to be that cosmic. It can be something that's as silly as a hobby whatever it happens to be. But that's that thing that and and Aristotle talks about walking together side by side, looking outward at the thing that you both love, and that's that's that has a special kind of metaphysics to it.
Well, that's beautiful. Yeah, not just metaphysics, but poetry. Yeah, that certain poetry to it. Well, okay, let's talk about the work pillar for a second, because you say your work can be love made visible. Yeah, what does that mean?
Well, that actually that phrase comes from the Lebanese, the early twentieth century elevenes post at Khalil Gibran, who talked about make your work love made visible and if you can't do your work with love, it would be better to you to sit by the gate and beg alms from those who do their work with love. So it's funny is that you know, as an old fundraiser, that has special special meaning for me, I spend a lot
of time at the village gate begging for alms. Let me tell you, it's raising money for my nonprofit organization. But you know that the whole idea is that your work can be loved made visible. That's a central idea in many religious movements. And so that's not just something that you and I, as social scientists would want to latch onto, you know. On the contrary, you know, there's a there's a movement in Catholicism called Opus Day that many people have heard of, and that means work of
God in Latin. But really the whole idea is that work is prayer. That you should make your work a form of sanctification by using it to love others and to show your love for God. By the excellence with which you do, your work, which will then be understood by others, will be magnetic. It will bring joy all around you. And I know that's hard to do sometimes, I mean, that's unrealistic. Sometimes it's not kid ourselves. You know.
I have the probably literally the best job in the world, and I teach it Harvard, and I have a call in the Atlantic and I write books. I mean, it's like what's not to light? But there are days when I'm sitting at the airport for a three hour delayed flight, you know, cursing my fate, and then I have to remember, am I making my work love made visible? You know?
If somebody says, off chance, I think that guy is that guy who writes about happiness for the Atlantic, And I'm sitting there, you know, cursing or you know that's not right, and so it holds you to a higher standard such that your love really can lighten the burden of somebody else, lift other people up. And then when you do that, here's the I mean, the really interesting thing that you and I have both noticed in our work is that if you really want something in your life,
give it away. If you want more love, don't go around asking for love. Love more people. That's what you do. If you want more happiness in the world, display more happiness, figure out ways to actually get that done in your own life and give it to other people and then then boom, the world starts helping up God.
Love is such a big theme in all your work. You wrote this book Love Your Enemies, which we had a whole other podcast hot and what to what extent can learning to love your enemies increase your happiness versus being the kind of person and we all know these kind of people who hold resentments for every small slight. You know, those people like every you know, the kind of the victimhood mentality you run amuck on stereoli.
Yeah, yeah, well, hatred. The Buddhists always say that hatred is like holding a hot coal in your hand because you want to throw it at your enemy. The first one who gets burned, and the person who has burned the worst, of course is you. Hatred is incredibly self defeating and deleterious, and so it's just it's actually dangerous. Hatred is really dangerous. And I get why evolution has
given us hatred. You know, it's unambiguous why we would actually have this response to fear and anger is that we would have hatred for another because we need to defend ourselves. But it's so maladapted in so many social situations today, and it's so greatly accelerated by the technological means in our disposal. I'm talking about Twitter or x
or whatever we call it these days. That is just that, you know, it's something that's a hate machine, man, and then people will start to adapt their brain chemistry to little hits of hate. I mean, we, you and I do so much stuff on dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter of the anticipation of reward. And then you can get hits of dopamine around almost anything if you continuously hit
the lever again and again and again. So people go to Twitter looking for the almost outrageous, hateful content content because that gives them that little neurophysiological reward and on and on and on.
Wait wait, why is rewarding?
Hate is rewarding because it's a It gives you this little sense of your rightness.
Oh it's an ego, yeah right, yeah.
Yeah, it's like I hate that guy, and the reason I hate that guy is because I'm good and he's bad. This is what was it? It's Adam Waite's and Northwestern calls motive attribution asymmetry. Right, who has that really beautiful research that shows that almost every implacable hostility is based on the error where both sides believe that they love but the other side hates, right, And what's actually happens in that is that both sides hate.
Yeah, yeah, if you got to think that way.
Yeah, But it's also usually it's often based on the error that the other person hates you, which is not the case. So most marriages can be saved if there's actual honesty, which says that I'm acting like I hate you because I feel like you hate me, but I actually love you, So let's just make a deal and love each other. What do you say? That's how John Gottman actually brings couples back together again is by resolving this motive attribution asymmetry in a very practical way. And
that's love your enemies, man. I mean, that was the most transgressive teaching in human history. Comes from, you know, the fifth chapter of Matthew the forty fourth first, where Jesus tells his disciples. You have heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies, pray for those
who persecute you. Unbelievably transgressive. I mean, it's like, if you do something that transgressive to your biology and your tendencies, if you stand up to your the animal self, you will be on the divine path. And it's just it's completely life changing. It is the whole bottom line. I asked the Dalai Lama about that one time, because, as you know, he and I've been working together for like eleven years on this, and I heard him say one time, I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
And I said, your holiness, I thought you were a pacifist. Why do you want to destroy anybody? He says, no, no, no, no, What I mean he destroys the illusion that the person was his enemy. Yeah, and what we're trying to do is destroy illusions along the way. Look, not everybody bears us goodwill. I get it, but you're never never going to be you know, sorry that you were not a jerk.
I love that. But there's a big, wide space gulf between hate and love. Those are two extremes on the Research shows that people with low self esteem view ambiguity as hate. So most people, they just don't care about you. It's not that they love or hate you. But for some people who demand respect all the time, you know, like people a lot of people with low self esteem tend to actually start to demand that they are respected everywhere they go. Because they don't have that internal sense.
They tend to view just ambiguous facial expressions as hate. You know, I don't know what's exactly to make of that, but it seems like it just seems like, you know, love and heat aren't the only two options. We also can kind of just be neutral to each other, like and just tolerant sometimes just tolerant, Like there's certain faiths that are not for some things right, And it doesn't mean you need to hate the things that you're not for you can still be tolerant of them, but doesn't
do it mean you have to love them. That's an interesting I know that's a real controversial a question, but it's nuanced right.
Well, it is, except that it's also worth pointing out that love doesn't have to be a feeling. As a matter in fact, it's best when it isn't a feeling.
An attitude, a verb.
It's an act of will, when it's a commitment, you know. Saint Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle, Aquinas said in twelve sixty five, to love is to will the good of the other as other.
That's wonderful.
That's the definition of love. And Martin Luther King he preached about that when he was preaching about you know, love your enemies. There's a very famous sermon. It's on the internet. People can listen to it if they want. It's so beautiful, you got to go listen to it. He actually had the flu when he was giving it too,
and it was still, you know, the best. It was in nineteen fifty seven and in Montgomery, Alabama, November seventeenth at the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and he said Jesus didn't say that we have to like our enemies, because liking is a sentimental something. But to love our enemies. We have the opportunity to redeem our enemies if we decide to love our enemies. And this is the key point. So yeah, for sure, you know the idea that love and hate are these feelings and
how am I going to negotiate these feelings? And you know, I write all the time about the science of emotion, I can you know, I can go on and on about that, But when it comes to love, the biggest problem, like happiness, is assuming that these things are feelings. They're not. They're actually not. They transcend feelings. Thank god, they transcend feelings because you know, I've been married for thirty two years. I would have been married for thirty two minutes if love were a feeling.
Oh damn. Oh well, you know, I'm really glad you made the point. They made the point about kind of these things are more of attitudes or ways of being, as I would put it, ways of being in the world. Eric from just wrote about that so wonderfully in the Art of Loving. Oh yeah, I'm sure you've read that book of course, And you know, love is an attitude, but also heat is an attitude. He said. People have a readiness to heat. And I see, I feel like
I'm seeing that all around in this society. People are ready to hate people who they perceive in their out group. And it's a readiness, it's an attitude. It's not you know, it's like they even meet the person already they're hating the person.
Yeah, no, that's true. And part of the reason for that is just because we such an identity culture and identitarian culture and identitarian cultures, they tend to be very primitive. They tend to be sort of tribal. And the first thing that our evolution tells us is that anybody who's outside your tribe should be seen with suspicion, and you should start with the baseline of hate before love, because otherwise you're going to trust the wrong person and the
cost of that. If you get it right, that's nice. If you get it wrong, you're dead. And so you know, evolution does not favor love your enemies indiscriminately. That's why you have to fight evolution if you want to transgress these sets of ideas. And what we what we have right now is a period in which we've become primitive.
Quite frankly, you know, you and I hang around on college campuses a lot, and it's extremely tribal, it's extremely identitarian, and furthermore, it's rewarding certain personality types that feed off of hatred. I mean, you're sort of the grand daddy of the dark triad personality. You've written as much about that as any academic I think in the world, at least, the.
Granddaddy of dark triad.
Wait, can I just like put that on my website.
By which I'm not saying that you're a dark triad personality.
Can I be the granddaddy of the light triad?
Can I be that you literally invented the light triab Yes?
Yes, literally, not the dark triad, but the light Triad.
Yeah. I mean the dark Triad comes from two thousand and two. When people recognize that narcissism, mochabelanism, and psychopathy trait psychopathy, they tend to go together. You've estimated it's about seven percent of the population, and then you've identified it's kind of opposite. It's personality opposite, which is the light triad of virtuous personality characteristics, which is so incredibly important.
The problem is that when you're in a sort of a primitive tribal moment societally with a lot of polarization and being fired up by media that profits off the sort of outrage industrial complex, and politicians that we have who are incredibly populist, which you know, they're not leading this, they're just following the general trend that you're going to have all kinds of energy that feeds on hate. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and you know, dark triad polarizing
populism feeds on hate. And so the result of it is that you have narcissists that are saying they're victims, you know, virtuous victims. You have machiavellian people who say that these enemies you, of course you lie and you cheat, of course, because you know they're going to cheat on elections. I'm gonna cheat on elections or whatever your thing happens
to be that you're talking about. And you have people with trade psychopathy, which means that they're willing to basically break any rule because might makes right or you know, justice at any cost as we define justice. And that's that's the kind of moment that we're in politically. It's the kind of moment that we're in socially as well, and that's you know, hatred is the fuel of all.
That, it really is. And you made a really good You made a lot of good points in your book, but one other good point in here. You made one good point in your book, but you're the Granddaddy.
That was a good point.
Well, by the way, I love that on the grand Daddy, But I think, yeah, you made a really good point in your book about the fact that conflict it's not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean you're showing hate to someone.
If you have a conflict with someone, you can show love and have conflict. This is such an important point. Let's double triple quadruple click on this, because we're not seeing that in our society today. We're conflict and hate kind of being the same thing.
Yeah, I know people are super worried about conflict, and the worst part is that when you're really conflict averse, you're going to sacrifice relationships. You can paradoxically become more hateful towards somebody because you're because you're a witting conflict. This is one of the biggest problems that couples have.
I worked with a guy for a long time and he told me about his first marriage and he said, yeah, you know, we never had one single fight until one day we just sat down and talked about it and realized we'd never been in love. And it's funny because you know, I'm married to a Spaniard, as you know, my wife's from Barcelona. We got married in Barcelona, and there's not been one day without a fight. I mean, it's like for Spaniards, fighting is just another form of
communication basically. And you know, for the first five years or so I'm an American, I was kind of aggrieved and sort of injured until I realized this is how we roll, man, and we're not gonna we never lie. We never lie. And if you never lie, you're gonna have disagreements and you're gonna have to work them out, is the bottom line. The thing is not to disagree less, it's to disagree better inside relationships. That's that's really what it comes down to. And there's a funny thing, Scott
that you notice. You know, I work a lot with young couples. My wife and I we counsel young couples that are engaged. Actually as part of our you know we're Catholics, and that's a common thing for older couples to do. And one of the things that we tell our young couples is that that you know, people will say, there's sort of a cliche that after you have a huge fight, sometimes a couple will make love. That's makeup sex or something. It's not actually what's going on when
you have a fight. That's constructive where you use WE words as opposed to I in you. It's not accusatory. It's kind of a project. We need to work something out, even if it's quite bitter. Those sometimes are the most intimate moments in a relationship, in a romantic relationship, because you're saying saying things that are really on your heart that you might not have said for a long time, and you're hearing things that are deep truths, even if
they hurt you. And sometimes after a fight, you've never felt closer to that person, even though you're angry and sad and she's crying, and but you haven't felt that close in a super long don't waste it, don't waste it. That's when you're close. That's that's generative.
Yeah, no, it's a really good point. A lot of this is very kind of monogamy, monogamous sort of focused can you build a good life being polyamorous, which is very popular these days the younger generation. They're obsessed with, you know, sex positive things now, which is anything but monogamy right now. Have you looked into that, into that well being researched, because I bet there's large swats of our audience that are that are not into monogamy.
Yeah. So the interesting thing is when you look at the data that there's a lot of sympathy towards non monogamy among a lot of people that aren't having any sex. So, which is a really interesting phenomenon because yeah, because you find that that sexual activity is actually much lower than
it has been in a long time. They find that more people, more young people and people in their twenties, for example, are having no sexual activity, and very frequently they tend to display attitudes that are quite progressive or liberal when it comes to monogamy. So that's an interesting thing. So one of the things that I think is possible is that that non monogamy is more theoretical than practical in a lot of people's lives, and that's worth looking into.
I haven't seen anybody do that. You know. The granddaddy of this research, of course, is Eli Finkel, and he was on this podcast. Yeah, he's fantastic. He's fantastic. He's thought a lot about, you know, how marriages work, et cetera.
One piece of research that actually uses a data source that you and I have used in our research as well, the General Social Survey of the University of Chicago has looked at, you know, across the population, what's the ideal number of sexual partners in a year for self reported life satisfaction.
Don't say with the same partner.
This is a number of how many partners in a year, So it has to be the same partner if it's one, obviously, yeah. Yeah. And it turns out that happiness peaks at one. It turns out that less than one is lower happiness than one, and more than one is lower happiness than one. So that's what you find is that one person in a committed relationship, according to those data, for most people. Now, what we don't know empirically, and you can, you know,
we can differ morally on this, we can. We're not having a conversation about what's morally No science we're talking about happiness and et cetera. And what we don't know is if there's substantial variation across the population, you know, different strokes kind of thing. But for most people, according to that that research, one is the right number.
Yeah, I guess the there's a there's a contradiction between research looking at most people and the whole notion of building the life that you want, right, you know, because I associate building the life with you want with my project as well, which is self actualization. And you know, each every person's on their own unique self actualization journey.
I mean, I know, I have friends who are polyamorous, are so happy they couldn't stand the idea of being monogamists that they would break out in hives they had to be monogamous. But and they're having a lot of sex, you know. But I don't know, So I guess, like I just think that's it. There's an I don't know what to do with that. But let's put a pin
in that duality between the project, the dual projects. We both have one on the one hand, wanting to look at the science of averages and then also helping each individual build the life they want. They don't. Those two things don't always go together.
No, And you know that's actually the case when almost everything in the social sciences where you want to get big patterns across major ideas, but then you want to look at the variegation across individuals as wall. So for example, I talk in the in How to God Life about the four pillars of the happiest life, which I believe for pretty much everybody works. But what they mean inside each pillar. What you know, when I talk about faith, as we mentioned before, my Catholic way isn't necessarily the
way for somebody else. That's good, but the faith pillar is the real deal. It's the transcendental pillar. So you try to you try to zoom out as much as you have to to get general patterns, and then zoom much, zoom in as much as you need to to give individual recommendations to people so that they can figure out what their version of that happens to be.
This is really good. So when you when you talk about family, you know there can be kind of a loose definition of family.
Family is a political arrangement, but it's a personal arrangement as well. It really defends I mean, like everything else you know, how are you defining it? Are you defining it like the government defines it? Or are you defining it like you define it? Is what comes down to.
But the truth is, however, when I'm talking about families in this research, mostly when I'm talking about people who are biologically related to each other, Oh, I see, yeah, And that's really the most mystical kind of love because you didn't choose it. But it's super intense, right, It's crazy. It's crazy, you know. It's like these are people who can absolutely push your buttons and you really care what they think. It's funny, I mean, how unbelievably heavy it is.
You know. My dad has been dead since two thousand and two, and every day I still think, wonder if you'd be proud of me. I mean, I'm not, it's not a problem, you know, I'm not suffering from this. But I think about my dad a lot. And the reason is because he's imprinted on He was an academic like me, you know, and it's the family. It's always my grandfather, it's the family business. But I wonder, you know, I wonder if my dad would be bragging to his
friends about this new book that just came out. They know that kind of thing. And that's because these mystical bonds are so are so unindelible kind of on our souls. And you know, that's mostly what I'm talking about, that we have to turn that into something good as opposed to a source of ongoing pain by letting schisms happen in our family life, which so many people do for stupid things like politics.
Oh man, it's such a good point. And you talk about honesty and forgiveness is absolutely key to cultivating a healthy family, right right. But that's yeah, but that's easier said and done with with blood relatives.
It's hard. It's hard, and that's part of the point because when you have that ongoing challenge, there is so much growth. You know, when you're working on these family relationships and you're turning them into a project as opposed to just you know, a source of annoyance, it's really it's very generative and you learn about yourself an awful lot.
It's one of the things that Open and I write about is how to turn these conflicts, these inevitable conflicts, into a source of growth as opposed to a source of pain, ongoing pain. And you know, we all experience these things. You know, I have three I have three grown kids. My twenty five year old and twenty three year old sons are both married. My twenty five year olds a father, and so you know, it's like we're proliferating, and so there's lots of opportunities to learn these new things.
And the framework of the family relationships and the fact that it isn't easy is actually a good thing.
Yeah, it is a good thing. I mean that that idea of suffering leading to ultimately greater levels of happiness. I mean, having children can be suffering at times, but it leads to some of those.
Oh man, there's a lot of suffering with kids, trust me.
Yeah, it leads to some of the most meaningful things.
No doubt that a text has come into my my phone since we've been talking that if I looked at it, I would be alarmed. Right now.
You keep it real, my man, You keep it real. Your I'm still I'm still actually chuckling at your earlier comment about your wife saying I'd be married for three minutes. No, I mean, you keep it real, You keep it No.
No, people actually think, you know, it's the funniest thing. You know, people you know, I study happiness for a living. I teach and write and speak about happiness for a living, and people like, man, you must be so happy. It's like, dude, that's why I write about happiness. It's me search, you know, and you know you and I both we know almost everybody in the happiness field they're they're in search of happiness. That's the reason that we deploy our toolkit to this
is because it's a challenge for us. You know, one of the things I write about in this book, for example, is there's this very very very good self test on that separates your positive and negative emotion levels intensity. It's called the Panis test, the Positive effect Negative Effects series. You've seen it a million times. It's psychometrically really valid.
It's a good construct. And you know, one of the reasons that my general well being levels tends to be lower than a lot of my students, despite the fact that I do all this work, is not because my happiness is too low. It's because my unhappiness is too high. And I wouldn't know that if it weren't for this test everybody should take, by the way, because we classify people into different quadrants of their personality profile or their
emotional profiles. They can understand themselves better. But you know, that's that's how this work actually gives you knowledge. And then once you have knowledge, you can you can do work on yourself, which is a huge adventure and super fun, and you can make a lot of progress. God knows I have. In the past five years. I've gotten sixty percent halfier.
I can tell. So I just want to say, I just want to say, first of all, your energy today is incredible. Like I'm so happy for you, Like I can tell that you're like there's that well, you've a happy halo around you right now.
There are days, you know, it's you know, I mean days, Yeah, for sure. You know. I just my semester started yesterday, and I have a book that's a brand new book and all that, and so there are going to be days when I sleep three hours, et cetera, and I'm
not going to be in my perfect self. But the truth is that one of the things that we wrote about this book, partly because I've been trying to practice this so much, is a topic that you and I have discussed before called metacognition, which is thinking about thinking, and it's so doing moving the experience of your emotions from the limbic system of your brain into the prefrontal
cortex where you can actually manage your emotions. And one of the techniques for doing that is called emotional substitution. Where I recognize an emotion that I'm having, which is a reaction to phenomena and might be quite logical, but it's not the only emotion that I could have under the circumstances. And when I analyze myself appropriately, I can take the one that I have, and I can take the one that I want, and I can choose the one that I want. I give examples of this in
this book. A guy that I pal around with is a guy named Rain Wilson, who's who is an actor. He was He played Dwight in the Office. For those you know who don't know, Yeah, Rain Wilson is fantastic. And you know, he grew up five miles away from me in Seattle, and we're the same age. I played the French hornet, he played the bassoon. We're not childhood friends,
but we bonded over those similarities anyway. And Rain says that one I asked him one time, I said, why why is it that so many professional comedians there they suffer from depression. And he said, it's not because comedy makes you depressed, it's because depression makes you into a comedian. And I said, well, tell me what you mean. He said,
because in the terms, because he knows my research. He says, in the terms that you talk about your limbic system gives you sadness and you switch it for jokes, because that's also an appropriate response to the things that you're feeling. But you can only do that if you're metacognitive. You can only do that if you're self managing your emotions and you recognize you can do that. So for me, you know, a lot of days when I feel resentful,
I choose gratitude. When I pessimistic, I choose hope because I can and and I've I've learned how to do that through my research. It didn't just come to me, you know, immaculately conceived. It came to me because I believe I have this gift that was given to me of this education that made it possible for me to improve my happiness and try to spread into other people.
Yeah, so many really deep truths there. You know. The as I teach my students with the panas that you just mentioned. The positive motions the negative emotions, they're not opposites of each other. They're actually not as strongly negatively correlated with each other as people might think. It's only like ze point three, you know. Yeah, and also with earlier you said the light triade was the opposite the dark tride, but we found that's not true either.
That's true there, I know, yeah, a lot of both.
So that's why in that analysis I sent you a paper today. We looked within person and at profiles of within people. We found most people are a mixture of light and dark. It's very hard to find pure darkness individual, you know, but it's also kind of it's actually it is easier though to find a pure light individual. So that's there's some optimism optimism there for humanity. Like we have like forty percent are pure light, which is cool. But but yeah, but uh and they lie, Yeah, yeah,
those are really the dark. But will we corrected for that. We corrected for that bias.
I know you're a good researcher, you're super good researcher. But it's interesting that I think it was a one to five scale of dark triad, which is narcissism, machivilianism, traits psychopathy, and light triyad, which is the sort of the opposite sounding sounding.
But it's just it's just a an antagonistic orientation towards others.
Versus a positive, loving orientation.
A beneficient We call it a beneficent orientation. Yeah.
Yeah, And the average person on a one to five scale is two point five dark and about three light a garding to your estimates.
Amazing, amazing, Yeah, yeah, but more people really are light traits dark traits, and maybe we don't really acknowledge that as Much's it's same with progress. A lot of people don't want to acknowledge that we've made progress in five hundred years of humans. You know, we've also you know, not most people really are at least a little bit above the light you know, the average mark. Most people are not walking around.
Well there's a reason for that, though, I mean, there's a reason that we have a hard time acknowledging that. And it's not because we want to think that humanity is doomed, although some people do want that. I mean, you're gonna get clicks and followers if you say humanity is doomed for sure. But there's there's a negativity bias that's programmed into us by evolution. You know, if somebody's smiling sweetly across you, across the room from you, that's nice.
But if somebody's frowning at you in an angry way, that gets your attention in a big way, because that can actually be dangerous if you don't notice it. You know, you miss a nice thing, too bad, you miss a bad thing wo be unto you and to your family. You don't know. And so the result is that that evolution has made us a lot more acutely aware of the negative. So even if the negative is a small percentage of the positive, it's going to get our attention.
That's why those studies, those really interesting studies ask for you to remain in a neutral mood. How many good things have to happen to you versus how many bad things at in a day, and for Americans is about three to one. You need three good things per one bad thing for you to go to bed and say
it was an okay day. It's different in Asia, interestingly, so if you look in the studies that look at Japan and Korea for examples, two to one, because these are culturally different places for sure, But the negativity bias is a real deal that we have. Now, how can we how can we understand ourselves and self emotionally self manage by recognizing that and to say, I'm not going to maladapt that tendency into thinking that I'm having a
crummy day because I'm paying attention to crummy things. I'm paying attention to crummy things because my inner troglodyte leads me to do so. But if I choose gratitude when I feel resentment, then I can recalibrate intellectually toward greater reality for all of us and for Scott and Arthur and everybody watching us. I mean, we have a lot to be grateful for, but we don't recognize it because that's not evolved to keep us alive and passing on our jenes. If we want to be happy, we have
to recognize that mother nature doesn't care. Mother nature does not care if you're happy, and so you have to make a lot of adjustments. And with the knowledge and practice you can do that.
I love that. I would refer for more. I'd refer people to my course I taught with Oprah on gratefulness thanks to thanks to the recommendation of Ye, that's.
A nice video. It's called build the Life You Want, which is Oprah's that's her video, her YouTube show that it's really nice that that was a nice thing you did. I liked it.
Thank you, Thank you for commending me. Let's just leave with it what I think is one of the most profound points of them all, and that's that to build the life you want to have happiness, it's actually a lot simpler than you think. You know, you say, keep simple. Maybe it's just commit a period of time each day to your spiritual or philosophical life. Maybe it's going out connecting with nature or spending time with the loved ones. It's a lot more simple than we tend to think, is that right?
Yeah? And a lot of it has to do with discipline and routines, it really does. And you know, learning all of this has very much changed my life, you know, And so you know, I was always kind of a spontaneous guy. I mean, as you know, I started my life as a musician. I spent from am I was nineteen un till I was thirty one. It was a full time professional performing musician, classical musician. So there's a lot of discipline in that. It was in the Barcelona Symphony,
a lot of it. But you know I had this kind of smoking and drinking and.
What else, and what else, Arthur, you Almo said something else.
You know, twenty something. I was a twenty something, you know. But you know, the good thing is when I was twenty four, I fell in love, and you know, that was the last and only, so that was my my It took me, by the way, it took me two years to convince my Spanish wife that marriage was good, that marriage. I don't believe in marriage. She said, I I don't know. Well, we'll have to see about that.
And so it took me two years of I literally moved to a country where I didn't speak the language and knew no one to try to convince a girl who didn't speak a word of English that she could marry me. It was the It is ridiculous anyway, but you know, all's well, it ends well, three adult kids, one grandchild, thirty two years later and still going strong. But the whole point is that during those years I was a kind of an undisciplined character. But today I
mean it's like it's like anything else. You know. I was also not that healthy. I used to get a lot of colds, and you know, I didn't feel good. And now I feel at fifty nine, my health is way better than it was.
When I Wow, you're fifty nine.
Yeah, fifty nine. And I start the day the same. I get up before forty five in the morning, I work out for an hour at the gym, and then after that I go to Mass. I go to Mass every morning wo and then I come back and I tank up on coffee at least ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes after I wake up. So the dynasty and clears of my brain, all of this stuff is based on the social science and the neuroscience because I got to optimize my path so I can be creative.
So i'm, you know, as good as I can be under the circumstances with the people that I love. And it really comes down to these particular routines. At night, before I go to bed, I pray my rosary, which is an ancient Catholic meditative prayer. I make sure that I read scripture every day. I make sure that I
call people in my family that my real friends. I spend at least an hour a week on the phone with each of my real friends and people I've designated as such in my heart and my mind, and all these come from my It's like I have a life built on research.
I know, I know, you're putting Andrew Huberman a shame here, Well, put.
Andrew Huberman a shame. I mean Andrew Huberman's got I mean he he probably has two hundred pounds on my bench press.
Yeah, yeah, I know, but I hate But I know, I'm joking. He's a friend of mine.
I don't know him. I hear he's fantastic. I love this stuff. He's another person I listened to every week. Besides you, there's only like two of you.
I should make an intro between you guys. Actually, yeah, yeah, I've seen you on Instagram with those tight shirts. You don't do that. You don't put them on by accident. And you you look good. You look really great.
Hey man, When you're bald, you got to get whatever you can.
Well, it's just but bald signals height, testosterone too so or something.
This is a this is a once great civilization. Suffice it to say that I would gladly give up muscle mass for your hair.
I've got a lot of hair. It's true, you look great. Go on or stop and stop going. You know, my friend has the stop hand with the go on hand at the same time. Hey, I really want to just thank you again for being such a return customer of those idea repeat and uh congratulations in the book. I wish you and Oprah well. Please tell Oprah doctor Scott's is high.
I will absolutely tell her that doctor Scott, my friend, doctor Scott is uh. You know. And I and I thanks for thanks for reading the book and and and helping to spread the message that all of us can know more about happiness, practice more happiness, achieve more of it in our lives in this ongoing journey, and as much as anything else, lift other people up in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. It's the best news of my life that we can do this.
Let's let that sit there for everyone. Thanks again, Arthur, thank you Scott. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology Podcast dot com 'or on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page
as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.