Adventure as Lasting Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks | EP 528

Summary

Dr. Arthur Brooks joins Jordan B. Peterson to dissect the nature of true happiness in Episode 528. They explore the distinction between fleeting pleasure and sustained enjoyment while advocating for a life of expanding goals and deep discernment. The conversation introduces the concept of discernment as a method to understand one's true essence and the importance of setting a direction in life without a definitive end. Arthur Brooks shares insights from his role at Harvard, teaching students to integrate happiness into their life goals, emphasizing actions that align with enduring fulfillment. This episode seamlessly merges insights from behavioral science and ancient wisdom into an engaging narrative on achieving a meaningful existence.

Highlights

• Arthur Brooks discusses his shift from economics to the study of happiness. 📚
• Understanding the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment is pivotal. 🎯
• Leveraging ancient religious insights helps in finding lasting happiness. 📜
• Teaching at Harvard, Arthur focuses on happiness as a core life goal. 🎓
• Discernment is the key to unraveling our life's purpose and achieving fulfillment. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• Happiness isn't just fleeting pleasure; it's about sustained enjoyment and fulfillment. 🌼
• The concept of discernment helps us discover our true life essence and direction. 🧭
• A life of expanding and infinite goals keeps our hope and motivation alive. 🗺️
• True enjoyment includes others and isn't solitary like mere pleasure. 🤝
• Set goals that stretch beyond the finite to avoid the pitfall of satiation. 🚀

Overview

In this fascinating episode, Dr. Arthur Brooks sits down with Jordan B. Peterson to delve into the complex nature of happiness. They explore the distinctions between fleeting pleasure and true enjoyment, emphasizing that the latter carries depth and sustainability. Arthur shares his journey from economics to behavioral science, inspired by a search for a deeper understanding of human happiness and meaning.

Together, they unpack the concept of discernment, a crucial aspect of understanding our essence and pursuing a life rich in meaning. Arthur introduces the idea of viewing life as a string of expanding goals, each step providing hope and motivation. This conversation touches on religious themes, examining how ancient wisdom intersects with modern psychology to illuminate pathways to a fulfilled life.

Arthur's engaging teaching methods at Harvard focus on actionable steps toward happiness, helping students discern their essence while navigating life's entrepreneurial journey. This episode invites listeners to redefine success by incorporating love and happiness as core life goals. It's a compelling blend of science, philosophy, and practical advice that rejuvenates the quest for personal and collective well-being.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 09:00: Introduction: The Path to Happiness The chapter 'Introduction: The Path to Happiness' explores the idea of continual personal development, emphasizing the importance of having expanding goals that drive progress and enhance happiness. It compares life to 'Jacob's ladder,' indicating endless growth and improvement. Additionally, the chapter addresses the concept of prayer and gratitude, presenting them as technical yet vital components of managing one's emotional state rather than being controlled by it, and suggests valuing eternal fulfillment over fleeting pleasures.
• 09:00 - 18:30: Conversation with Arthur Brooks The chapter presents a conversation with Arthur Brooks, who is well-known for his tenure as CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. The discussion provides insights into his experiences and perspectives shared during the meeting.
• 18:30 - 26:51: Finding Happiness: Beyond Immediate Gratification The chapter discusses the professional journey of an individual who served as a professor at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. His active public life revolves around exploring the psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience of happiness. The conversation in the chapter focuses on these aspects.
• 26:51 - 32:00: The Role of Aim in Positive Emotion This chapter delves into the essential role that aim or purpose plays in cultivating positive emotions. A key point discussed is the necessity of having a clear and correct understanding of what happiness truly is—not simply fleeting pleasure or hedonistic gratification. The distinction between mere pleasure and genuine enjoyment is explored, emphasizing the importance of pursuing joy with a proper, long-term aim rather than chasing temporary satisfactions.
• 32:00 - 37:18: Discernment and Understanding This chapter begins with an introduction that sets the tone for the discussion, focusing on the concept of discernment and understanding. The conversation explores the idea of pleasure, particularly when reduced to immediate hedonistic gratification. The issue with equating pleasure to a solely good pursuit is exemplified by the behavior of Psychopaths, who seek pleasure without considering long-term consequences. The broader discussion implies that discernment requires understanding the balance between immediate desires and longer-term effects, where Psychopathic behavior serves as a cautionary tale of misunderstanding genuine self-interest.
• 37:18 - 43:45: The Adventure of Self-Discovery In 'The Adventure of Self-Discovery,' the discussion revolves around the concept of pleasure and its implications within social and community contexts. The text explores how mere pleasure can be detrimental when not elevated or sanctified, and introduces the idea of 'enjoyment' as a higher form of pleasure. This enjoyment is described as being iterable, reciprocal, social, future-oriented, and stable. It implies a deeper, more sustainable form of satisfaction that aligns with broader social and personal goals.
• 43:45 - 49:45: The Importance of Gratitude and Resilience The chapter explores the concept of gratitude compared to a perpetual gift that continues to bestow benefits over time. The discussion delves into how gratitude combines elements of wisdom and pleasure, making it a significant aspect of happiness. The conversation is aimed at enticing listeners to explore further chapters and continues with a welcome from Mr. Brooks, hinting at upcoming discussions on related topics.
• 49:45 - 55:30: The Concept of Happiness: Enjoyment vs. Pleasure The chapter discusses the concept of happiness, specifically differentiating between enjoyment and pleasure. The speaker, a behavioral scientist with a background in behavioral economics and behavioral science, explores their publishing work on human happiness. They express delight in sharing their insights on the program. The focus of their work has transitioned from primarily behavioral economics to a more psychological and behavioral science perspective.
• 55:30 - 66:37: Student Engagement and Learning at Harvard This chapter explores the increasingly important interdisciplinary approach within the behavioral sciences, particularly the integration with neuroscience. The discussion highlights how modern psychology is deeply rooted in biology, a shift from the perspectives of the 1980s and 1990s. It also touches on the personal academic journey of the author, who has focused on human happiness in recent years, writing two significant books since joining Harvard as a professor.
• 66:37 - 76:00: The Philosophical Approach to Education The chapter "The Philosophical Approach to Education" explores the concept of transitioning from fluid to crystallized intelligence, particularly in the context of people experiencing burnout in mid-life careers. It suggests that instead of burning out, individuals can actually become stronger, better, and happier as they age. The text also references two books: one on finding success, happiness, and purpose in the second half of life and another co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, which delves into the art and science of achieving happiness.
• 76:00 - 83:00: Conclusion: The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life This chapter emphasizes the pursuit of a meaningful life by discussing the impact of influential figures like Oprah Winfrey. An anecdote is shared about Oprah's dedication similar to how she hosted her talk show, illustrating the inviting nature and significant reach of her book promotions. Furthermore, the author reflects on his experience teaching a popular seminar called 'Leadership and Happiness' at Harvard Business School, which attracts a significant number of students and has a high demand, highlighting the importance and desire among people for guidance in leading fulfilling lives.
• 83:00 - 100:00: Discussion on Harvard and Personal Insights with Arthur Brooks Arthur Brooks shares his unique career trajectory, discussing his roles as president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C., and his earlier careers as a behavioral scientist and a professional French horn player. He describes his unconventional path to academia, including studying by correspondence during his late 20s and early 30s and earning a PhD after leaving the music industry.

Adventure as Lasting Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks | EP 528 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 do you want to have progress in your life do you want to be a happier person do you want to have a life full of meaning what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit and that's exactly what you see in Jacob's lad there's another weird angle on this though I've been trying to think about prayer technically that's a complicated topic gratitude is a Divine thing it's managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the Eternal
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Music] Garden hello everybody I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks now I met Mr Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise in Institute and
• 01:00 - 01:30 after that he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the business school at Harvard and that's where he is currently he has a very active public life as well and it focuses on psychology philosophy Neuroscience of happiness and so we talked about that that was the focus of our conversation and part of that was a matter of
• 01:30 - 02:00 definitional clarification which is crucially important because to understand happiness and to pursue it properly means that it has to be defined correctly you have to know what it is and what it isn't and it isn't for example in Arthur Brooks conceptualization reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification in the moment right and so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment and
• 02:00 - 02:30 well that understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation so pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment now the problem with that a problem with that for example is that Psychopaths can be pleasure seeking and if pleasure is regarded as a good in and of itself then Psychopathic pleasure seeking also becomes a good and that's not tenable not least because Psychopaths don't operate in their own best interest because they fail across time and
• 02:30 - 03:00 they're terrible socially familiarly from a community perspective they're devastating and so pleasure itself has to be elevated or Sanctified that's another way of thinking about it and the terminology that Arthur uses for that is enjoyment and enjoyment is the elevation of pleasure let's say to something that's iterable reciprocal social future oriented permanent and stable so you
• 03:00 - 03:30 could think about it as the gift that keeps on giving and that is something that's akin to what would you say a combination of wisdom and pleasure so we talked about many elements of Happiness other than that but that gives you a flavor of the discussion and hopefully a reason to continue listening so welcome aboard all right Mr Brooks I think what we should start with lik ly is just a
• 03:30 - 04:00 brief or lengthy for that matter walkth through of let's start with your publishing record let get give everybody a sense of what it is that you're doing and and how that came about thanks and you thanks for having me on the program it's a pleasure I'm delighted and um I I I write about human happiness I'm a behavioral Scientist by background um my PhD is largely um my work was dedicated to behavioral economics but it moved much more toward um the Behavioral Science and the psychological angle and
• 04:00 - 04:30 then later more toward Neuroscience because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more Neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our phds just because we've we recognize that psychology is biology much more than we did in I guess the old days in the in the 80s and 90s um I came late to what I'm doing right now however I've only been writing about human happiness in the way that I am for the past five and a half years since I've been a professor at Harvard I've written two big books um since uh since I came
• 04:30 - 05:00 to Harvard one called from strength to strength finding success happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life for Strivers were trying to understand the the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence and how what why they feel like they're burning out in the middle of their careers how they can actually get stronger and better and happier as they get older and the second book I actually co-authored with Oprah Winfrey called build the life you want the Art and Science of getting happier which is this the basic straightup science of human happiness that I wanted
• 05:00 - 05:30 to introduce to you know large groups of people that was and opra Winfrey U she she hosted the book much as she would have hosted you know somebody on her show when she had a when she had a talk show back in the old days um before I was doing this teaching at Harvard and I teach a large seminar at the business school the Harvard Business School called leadership and happiness that has 180 students um something like 450 on the waiting list and and illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of and and and that's since before I was doing that
• 05:30 - 06:00 which is fun um as an academic um I was actually the president of a think tank in Washington DC I was the president of the American Enterprise Institute a free market oriented Think Tank which I was the chief executive of for 11 years before that I was a behavioral scientist at Syracuse before that I was a professional French horn player right from when I was 19 until I was 31 I went to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s and then left music and and went and got my PhD and and and became a scientist your PhD is what is
• 06:00 - 06:30 the what was the focus of your PhD public policy analysis public policy anal and my Fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling and while I so that's where you moved from into into behavioral ex psychology exactly right so I was like lots of economists right that's happening more frequently right yeah I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist I got a great technical toolkit as an economist but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria
• 06:30 - 07:00 what I'm really interested in is why people do the weird things that they do so motivation exactly right studying things that don't have typical economic rationale like why do people give to charity why do people admire Beauty why do people love each other and using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn in in in in an economics milu made it possible for me to study these things and and the tap rot of all those things turned out to be human happiness so when I left my Think Tank and I was trying to figure out what
• 07:00 - 07:30 do I want to do for the rest of my life um I actually had a a long process of discernment that that that culminated when I walk the community of Santiago across Northern Spain hundreds of kilometers walking across Northern Spain praying the rosary and and every day saying Lord guide my path which is in a process of discernment is important you've talked about this an awful lot in your work and you talk about how how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment I found I thought it was to go back to my Behavioral Science roots
• 07:30 - 08:00 and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness okay so let let's start with that issue of discernment so I've been trying to think about prayer technically let's say and so that that's a that's a complicated topic but you could imagine this imagine that your your decision is to aim up which is the opposite of iniquity by the way I found the word iniquity means fundamentally to
• 08:00 - 08:30 aim down to do bad things while you're aiming at them okay so instead you decide you're going to aim up now you can leave that kind of a morphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance you could say well I would like things to be as good as they could be let's say although I'm not sure what that means and I'm not sure how to do it but you open the door that way to the beginnings of something approximating fantasy I mean part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward right and so you can set
• 08:30 - 09:00 something like an unspecified uphill goal and that would be like a meditative or prayer practice and then you could say well um my desire my aim is to flesh out that conceptualization and to specify A Way Forward right now then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on a particular project right the goal is to walk uphill whatever that means to clarify the nature of what uphill is right and to discern a strategy right okay and then
• 09:00 - 09:30 you said you walk this route right and that gives you time for contemplation okay so so walk me through that a little bit you you said you were praying the rosary and you were concentrating on something like upward aim right and and then you took time to do that right so it's like you give your dreams an opportunity to make themselves manifest in a situation like that and that's part of that clarification process that's right so what happened to you when you did that and why did you do it well as a neurocognitive matter we actually understand what a discernment process
• 09:30 - 10:00 does literally through pilgrimage so you know Ian M gilchrist's work who phenomenal the psychiatrist neuroscientist it's a Scottish he you know he wrote The Master in his Emissary about the right and left hemispheres of the brain the hemispherically lateralized brain where the right side of the brain asks the big questions but doesn't actually come up with the answers because the biggest questions in life don't have answers they only have understanding now the left side actually solves complicated problems the right side deals with complex problems complex
• 10:00 - 10:30 and complicated are fundamentally different in so far as complicated problems they they're hard to find the solutions to but once you have the solutions you can you can replicate them with almost effortless right make them into an algorithm exactly right yeah and the left hemisphere is actually specialized for production exactly right and that's the reason that you use you use the the left side of the brain disproportionately when you're looking at social media or or or using technology engineering Solutions are left brain Solutions the right brain problems are those that have very easy
• 10:30 - 11:00 answers we won the football game they lost the football game she fell in love with me she didn't fall in love with me I have something I want to do I don't have something that I want to do but but you can't answer the questions you can only have an understanding of the questions and to come to the understanding of those questions you have to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain and to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain you have to be undistracted and let your mind water wander to to to stimulate the default Network in your brain which is intensely
• 11:00 - 11:30 uncomfortable because we hate boredom when you were at Harvard Dan Gilbert your colleague Dan Gilbert who's wonderful you know uh social psychologist he did all those experiments about people being bored so he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except they had a button in front of them you remember these experiments they touch the button they get a painful electric sh yes yes and he turn it turned out that 80% of the participants shocked themselves rather than letting their default mode Network Run free even animals will do that yeah bored animals
• 11:30 - 12:00 will shock themselves absolutely and and what one they had to throw out this particular guy because he was such an outlier shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes we hate boredom we hate the default mode network but unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain in the default mode Network by by purposively just walking and repetitively praying unless you you you you manually stimulate that part of your brain you are not going to come to understanding about the why of your life you're going to be stuck on the how and
• 12:00 - 12:30 what and you're going to be path dependent and I knew that I knew well probably part perhaps part of that discomfort so Carl friston we did some work in this regard too Carl friston has Associated negative emotion anxiety more specifically with high entropy state so and you could think about a high entropy State as a state of navigation where a very large number of pathways are potentially open to you right and so if you open Pandora's box if you if you
• 12:30 - 13:00 move away from a determinant goal and you open Pandora's Box which is what direction should I go then that is anxiety-provoking because there's a multitude of possibilities that backck it now there's opportunity in that but it can easily overwhelm you especially if you're tilted more strongly towards negative emotion right say so the problem with opening up a space of contemplation is that Open Spaces are unprotected and high entropy and so there's negative emotion well that's why
• 13:00 - 13:30 we know too that the default emotion associated with right hemisphere activation is negative emotion itens high high negative effect and so you're familiar with the panis test the positive a negative effect sequence which is I administer it to all my students at Harvard I make them take this because I I I I put them into four categories the high positive High negative category that's high AFF effect people that's you and me which are the mad scientist profile the high positive low low negative which everybody want want to be which is actually not great
• 13:30 - 14:00 for a lot of things which is the cheerleader makes impulsive yeah yeah that's the cheerleader and they make Bad Bosses too by the way because they can't take criticism or hear bad news you have people who are high negative and low positive which is the poets and then the people who are low affect low low those are the judges you know very very low affect sober jid they make good surgeons right you don't want somebody to cut you open and say oh my God right that's not that's not what you want and so I actually categorize people and then talk about the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has now the people who
• 14:00 - 14:30 are most likely to be able to affect discernment most most at least conventionally by by undertaking these techniques are the Mad scientists because they have access to very high levels of affect but they have to understand themselves to do that this was the thing I had this background as behavioral scientist and I wanted to know the why of my life and from that to figure out the direction forward or uphill as you say so I so that was two questions yeah the why and the direction yeah why why is that two questions rather
• 14:30 - 15:00 than one well the the why of life is really the the meaning of it all and then once you understand the meaning then you can figure out what direction you're going in because the direction per se is not meaning the direction is Direction F fine so in other words here here's here's the that's the difference between strategy and aim exactly and so in in um in sailing there's a concept called the rum line are you familiar with it no rhu M line and it's a it's a very important metaphor in Spanish it's called rbo in Spanish and that's
• 15:00 - 15:30 something you use a lot the rum line what it is it's a Direction with the destination and you have to have it if you're doing navigation and sailing yeah that doesn't mean you're going to go exactly to that point or you're not going to get blown off course you can't actually make any progress unless you have a rum line and so so that's the whole idea the meaning is the rum line and then you can start making progress toward the goal not withstanding the fact that it's not perfect so there's an idea in the old Testament that the
• 15:30 - 16:00 firstborn is to be Sanctified to God and I think the reason for that is that the aim sets the frame right right so if you start a new Endeavor which you do sequentially during the day right because your day is composed of a whole variety of Journeys essentially events towards a destination right you set the aim and that sets the frame of perception and it sets it actually calibrates your emotions right because positive emotion this is another thing that friston has estblished I think better than anyone else this is very
• 16:00 - 16:30 cool so negative motion indicates a high entropy State too many convening room rum lines let's say positive emotion makes itself manifest when the entropy in relationship to a goal is decreased so once you establish the goal right there's a certain calculated cost to getting there right right and that's that cost is going to be indicated in part by anxiety because it indicates well what it's going to the risk for the Endeavor okay when you take a step
• 16:30 - 17:00 forward to the location you reduce the entropy because the probability that you'll succeed is now increased and that decrease in entropy is marked by dopaminergic activation positive emotion so it's so cool because it means this is so cool it's one of the things I've been lecturing to people about as I travel it's like your aim sets your emotional frame like there's almost nothing more important to understand than that it's like because your brain can't compute what's positive until it knows what the
• 17:00 - 17:30 direction is and that sees you making progress so no aim first rule there is no aim no positive emotion and the second rule is progress towards name once specified is positive emotion and then there's a coraly which is something like well it's like it's like steepness of approach let's say you make some approach to a goal but the goal doesn't really matter it's like you're not going to get a lot of kick but let's say if you have a really high order goal that
• 17:30 - 18:00 would be one that would be divinely inspired let's say well then any progress towards that is going to give you a kick the progress is actually what instantiates the the the liking the wanting liking learning process that's that's from dopamine that's what it comes from humans are made for Progress not for arrival yes and so the whole process is okay discern the rum line yeah figure out the instantiation of what that means practically speaking and then start making progress toward it yes that's what a leader communicates to
• 18:00 - 18:30 people that's exactly right that's why people will run through a wall for a great leader but that's what you must do for yourself so I got something cool to to tell you about that psychobiologic I learned this from a friend of mine I did a podcast with him and uh he's a deep biological thinker and he was very interested in honeybee communication so what honeybees do is they go find a flower patch that's a treasure store let's say right so it's it's an name for the honeybees and they go back and they communicate about the direction and the
• 18:30 - 19:00 distance so they communicate about the energy that has to be expended to go to this flower bed but one question the other bees have so to speak is well is the journey worse worth the effort and the way the honey bees communicate that is that the more Rich The Storehouse the faster they dance and it's exactly the same thing that enthusiastic leaders do when they're talking about the goal it's like so the way people calibrate that is like if I can see you enthusiastic and energ IC about something I assume that
• 19:00 - 19:30 you truly believe that the goal is worth the effort because otherwise you wouldn't risk expending that much energy so well I think it's so damn comical that it's stable across like honeybees and people oh yeah no no I mean anybody who doesn't believe that psychology is biology they just don't know the biology they just don't understand the biology right and so so but there's another weird angle on this though did you know that Andre belli Steph Curry Justin Bieber and Tim t IO share something remarkable each of their
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• 20:30 - 21:00 can support mothers and transform families and Futures see this is one of the great paradoxes of this so do do you want to have progress in your life do you want to be a happier person do you want to have a life full of meaning number one discern number two create a strategy about actually how to arrive at the object of your discernment and number three start making progress toward it yeah exactly this is like one two three this is what I advise behavior therapy 10 this is what I'm talking to young men
• 21:00 - 21:30 because all the email that I get all the email that you get is from young people in their 20s you know how do I fall in love and stay in love how do I find a job that's actually going to give me fulfillment how do I have the the life that I want to have because I have this holess in my life it's like one two three this is this is what we talk about here's the the Paradox here's the hell of it if you arrive it's a problem yeah right because that's the arrival that's the Rival fallacy that we come up with so a lot of people will say why do all diets fail because they basically do 95% of diets
• 21:30 - 22:00 fail in so far as at one year after the Inception of a diet people weigh more than they did at the beginning of the diet right this is before the glp1 drugs etc etc um why and the reason is because you will forego all of the food that you like if you see the scale go down because progress is everything yeah because humans are made for Progress all of our utility all of our we get so much dopamine in the wanting liking learning process actually from progress the reward for actually hitting your goal is
• 22:00 - 22:30 you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life congratulations that's why 30% of of of stringent diets lead to eating disorders because people are like I want more progress and so they keep making progress and that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much so the Paradox of all this is you better have a rum line and that rum line better pinned someplace else so so one of the I've
• 22:30 - 23:00 been studying these ancient stories in the Old Testament a lot congratulations on the new book than it's phenomenal oh thank you so one of the things that I really tried to delve into was Jacob's Vision yeah it's very cool because Jacob when he has the vision of Jacob's Latter Jacob's a bad guy yeah he's in collusion with his um edle mother he's he's deceived his father he's betrayed his brother he's a mama's boy he's an he's
• 23:00 - 23:30 intellectually arrogant he's a coward he's a bad guy unlikable character yes exactly but then he leaves yeah and he decides that he's going to be good he's going to try to be good that's when he has that dream now the thing that's cool about the dream that's relevant to our discussion is that so you have this Jacob's Ladder which which what would you say spirals up into the ineffable right you can't see The Pinacle the Pinnacle is wherever God is but you can't see that and the reason I think that that's relevant and important is because of the Paradox
• 23:30 - 24:00 that you just described if you reach your goal you saate the system and the motivational framework disappears right so that means there's there's no direction and there's no hope that's the problem it's weird because you've attained your goal but now you're directionless and technically you're hopeless because hope comes in consequence of positive emotion in relationship to a goal so actually what you want you might think that paradise is the land of milk and honey so to speak that it's the land of infinite
• 24:00 - 24:30 satiation but the problem with that is satiation destroys the frame and destroys hope so actually what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit and that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder it's like so you clim this is slight this is different than Copus right Copus pushes the rock up the hill and then it rolls back down the same Hill right it's like no that what you actually want is a mountain and then when you get to the top of that you can see and then when you get to the top of that
• 24:30 - 25:00 you can see another one and that never comes to an end so that would be an inexhaustible source of motivation and hope and it is independent in a way it's independent of accomplishment because you there is no final goal but you don't want there to be a final goal because then you run into the problem of the paradoxical problem of satiation right and it is also strange and you you're you were touching on this that one of the really weird things about human beings is that we're far more seeking oriented than S satiation oriented right
• 25:00 - 25:30 is that we do want the adventure we want the craving we want the desire the progress yeah and the progress more than we want the attainment absolutely you know like I had a client once I had a funny conversation with him he had this dream of retiring when he was like 50 you know and uh and he had a pretty cut and dried ordinary algorithmic job you know and so it was okay but it wasn't a thrill it wasn't the meaning of his life
• 25:30 - 26:00 you know and I said well what's your vision for retirement and he said well I imagine being on a beach in the Caribbean with like a my taii in my hand and I thought well that's a travel poster not a plan and so I talked to him about it I said well look you're like a middle-aged white guy you're going to sit on the damn Beach for one day and you're going to be so sunburned you're going to have to hide for two weeks right and then what look what are you going to do you're going to drink like five my ties a day or 20 for how long right you're going to be an alcoholic in no time fly you've got no orientation or
• 26:00 - 26:30 goal there was nothing to it at all right good luck on your divorce well right and your sorosis these guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years so you you can make a bunch of money in F of course and if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go by 49 you have $400 million and I've seen this again and again and again the people I've worked with a privilege to work with they retire at 49 why because they don't like their work their work is backbreaking and they can't see their family and they don't have love in their lives but they've lost their chops on
• 26:30 - 27:00 actually how to do these things cuz the the plot has been lost in their lives and so they retire at 49 yeah and then and then they become very good at golf or tennis and they get a nice dark tan and pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach and then their their life really falls apart yeah and here's the thing here's the thing Jordan woe be unto the man whose dreams come true because he will find that he had the wrong Dreams yeah right exactly this is a real problem well that's also part and parcel of the call to religious
• 27:00 - 27:30 humility it's like I want to get what I want it's like what makes you so sure you're right about what you want so I think that notion of this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot because she really learned this in the last few years is that so we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal yeah okay so that's sort of predicated in part you could think about that as a religious relationship with the unknown it's sort of predicated on part on your apri presumption that you don't know finally
• 27:30 - 28:00 what's good for you now but what you could want is to learn that and Discover it right but that's like an ongoing relationship and what that does is it provides a solution to the problem of you getting what you want and finding out that it wasn't the right thing right because you still want to Journey forward you want to Sally Forth so to speak but you have to do that in ignorance and humility and you have to do that understanding that as you make progress you're going to shift the goal that you're seeking and that that should
• 28:00 - 28:30 happen because otherwise you run into exactly the Paradox that you ex right and you have to recognize that heaven is not on Earth Heaven is in heaven it's fine if there's an end to the rum line as long as it's unattainable in this particular life because we not geared toward it yeah well that's observation yeah well you know i' I've thought about that a lot this notion of life life abundant in eternity like that's we tend to read that concretized and think about
• 28:30 - 29:00 that as something like life after death but that's not what it is it's as far as I can tell it's something like the state that exists when you posit an amorphous indefinite goal as your ultimate goal because that imbus everything local with a kind of global significance right I'm pursuing the best and that's how it's manifesting itself in the moment yeah and that's life eternal because there's an element of it that's Timeless so you know in the sermon on the mount it's a it's a guide to what you
• 29:00 - 29:30 just described Christ says it's very specific he says first of all Focus your attention on the highest imaginable right okay whatever that is like you don't know exactly right but it's because it's indefinite and it's ineffable and it's beyond you but that's what you want to that's what you're orienting towards so you establish your then pay attention to the moment exactly and let me put one more twist in this as part of discernment so making progress in the realm line is practically
• 29:30 - 30:00 speaking in on in worldly terms having more having more of what more money power pleasure Fame more family relationships more Prestige whatever it happens to be but the real twist is not just having more satisfaction that you can actually count on in life is not more having more of the things that you want it's wanting less haves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust and so the goal should be for All of Us
• 30:00 - 30:30 increasing the numerator having more with respect to our goals moving on the rum line right and wanting less or or learning to be okay so wanting less my my wife just did a talk in Salt Lake City and what she had focused this talk on was gratitude and she learned this she started to practice being grateful when she was dying it's a very strange time to start practicing being grateful but one of the things that you can think through when you're in dire Dire Straits
• 30:30 - 31:00 this is what happens in the story of job by the way is that well imagine everything falls apart for you right okay now you could ask yourself how could I make this worse and the answer to that is well I could be resentful and deceitful and arrogant and unhappy and bitter which by the way is our psychological baseline from the P toine we're evolved toward resentment we're evolved toward anger and fear because it literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative negative
• 31:00 - 31:30 effect in the lmic system of the brain as opposed to positive aect because it's protective it keeps you alive yeah yeah like it's like you're Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors starting the place the scene were resentful and the result of that is that you're evolved to say you know first class in the United Airlines has really gone downhill right as opposed to I'm getting there safe and fast and I'm sitting in the front of the plane I'm going to get off early and they're going to give me something to eat it's unbelievable that's why gratitude gratitude is a is is a Divine thing and
• 31:30 - 32:00 it's a practice it's a it's standing up to your lyic system is managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you right yeah so you're you're well the well the presumption would be exactly that is that the default attitude the default untrained attitude is likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotion and resentful right right but that isn't that isn't fate you can train out of that and part of the way you do that and I saw her do this when she was
• 32:00 - 32:30 dying which was really quite something to see she decided as an act of will to focus on what she was grateful for and to become an expert at that right and that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when they think about expertise right because they think of something like propositional knowledge rather than attitude but it's definitely the case that you can you can what cultivate
• 32:30 - 33:00 well the what traditional people traditional European Christians for example knew that you could cultivate virtue and that's a very specific phrase is that cultivation is practice yes absolutely now this discernment by the way one thing by the way yeah when your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference of Salt Lake City my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness uhuh which is also adapted which is also standing up up to the to the to the living right
• 33:00 - 33:30 right see our our wives who are Godly Catholic women W be end to them being married to us imagine this I us of righteousness yeah yeah yeah it's a beautiful parallel so discernment that's an archaic phraseology discernment yes and that wasn't something that I saw a psychologist study when I was in the thick of the research Enterprise and so why discernment specific like why discern M why that terminology why
• 33:30 - 34:00 happiness why why did those things and and how was that related how was your pursuit of those as an intellectual Enterprise associated with that pilgrimage that you took so discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and Essence dichotomy so philosophically we've been going back and forth forever what what what precedes what essence or existence the the of course in the 19th and 20th Century SRA and you know all of the existentialists would say that that
• 34:00 - 34:30 existence precedes essence you're born without a meaning meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it or or no no till you create it that's what sart said the ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning the n's presumption as well exactly right well actually n was Stronger n said that there is no Essence so stop looking for all intents and purposes it's like stop wasting your time for Pete's sake because actually trying to create this this this this illusion of of meaning this illusion of
• 34:30 - 35:00 essence what you're going to be you're feeding into this Global kind of delusion that people have now the ancient Greeks which of course led to and and the and the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition is no no no no Essence precedes existence and that means your job in life is to discover your essence to discover and that's discernment okay that's what I believe it seems to in the story of in the Genesis account God basically tells
• 35:00 - 35:30 Adam and Eve that they have unlimited freedom in the garden except for one thing right right and I think it's associated with this idea of discernment because they're not supposed to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil which I believe means they're not sort of they're not to make the presumption that they can establish the fundamental axioms of the moral order they have to discern it they have to find their way but that way is implicit in being and reflective of its substructure something like that there
• 35:30 - 36:00 is truth there is rightness there are things there there are things that actually exist it isn't all subjective we're Edmund holl I mean in phenomenology talks about the the essence of reality is what you perceive that's the beginning of the problem right there that's the beginning of the problem we believe you and I believe I think that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality and the adventure of life is figuring it out yes and so that I want to align my perception with reality that's my goal
• 36:00 - 36:30 in life yeah well I think that's also a good definition of mental health okay fine I I understand yeah yeah so well how did you then come to the conclusion that there was an implicit or an implicate order and that the goal was discernment rather than because the typical intellectual the typical luciferian intellectual is going to make the presumption that there is no moral order but that it can be imposed by a powerful intellect right and that well
• 36:30 - 37:00 that is the luciferian Temptation and it tends to go very badly wrong but I'm very curious about why it was that you took the alternative pathway like what what clued you into the fact that well misery can do it if you're wise but what clued you into the fact that there was an implicate order and that the goal was discernment that that's a I got lucky I think I got lucky I was my father was a mathematician and here's the funny thing you know all there's a
• 37:00 - 37:30 lot of social science studies people ask me all the time how do I raise my kids in the church so the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith the most important thing in my life that started when I was a kid How old uh since before I can remember I mean I why was it the most important because it was just the central thing in my life and here's the re here's probably the reason so what we find when people ask how do I how do I raise my kids in the faith right um the answer is is have them see the most powerful physical person in
• 37:30 - 38:00 their life worshiping it doesn't matter what you say you know this about because your dad your father like me it does not matter what you say all that matters is what they see success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service though that's certainly essential what truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful Reliable Tools working behind the scenes to streamline every aspect of the selling process these are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels effortless and natural that's
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• 39:00 - 39:30 that indicates the status hierarchy in a very Concrete Man exactly right and my father who was a scientist he was a he had a PhD in biostatistics he was a mathematician by background and what he taught as a university Professor he was a proud man he would have been on his knees in front of no other man but on Sundays he was on his knees and that had a huge impact on the little guy that had a huge impact on me so you respected your father there was something bigger than my I mean I thought my dad was so
• 39:30 - 40:00 powerful that he could lift the house right right right he was a math professor he could not right and and I saw my father on his knees and and that had this impact now maybe maybe I have the God Jean you know may maybe what we'll actually find out with you know the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science that that there's a God Center in the brain that we have particular proclivities for it whatever it happens to be but I don't think so I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be I wanted
• 40:00 - 40:30 to be an honorable admirable man like my father and my father stood in awe of the Lord that's what I wanted to be look I wake up Jordan I wake up many days an atheist I wake up I don't know but then I decide to worship and I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do that's the ultimate rum line of my life and Behavioral Science notwithstanding that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious in I actually think
• 40:30 - 41:00 that we I actually think that we've probably got this relatively well modeled on the neuroscientific front it's not completely compiled yet but like proximal goals are nested in distal goals and distal goals are nested in still further distal goals and some of those are explicit but then they fade off into implicit and they're nested in higher order implicit goals all the way up to the Unspeakable the ineffable like
• 41:00 - 41:30 one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize conscience conscience is a very weird phenomenon I think about it as the voice conscious conscious yeah it's like the voice of negative emotion so conscience is an orienting function that tells you when you've deviated From the Path right okay what path right well okay so imagine now you're pursuing a proximal goal but in that Pursuit you um betray a more distal goal the voice of
• 41:30 - 42:00 the more distal goal will appear to you as conscience right and you know the distal goal has a more distal goal because these things are nested all the way up because we have some relationship with what the future and other people and the infinite and so there is a voice of the infinite distal yeah and that's conscious this is ttic this is purely ttic and it's right I mean this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until the that ultimately there is a creation of the first goal it's the first mover the first teleological mover were right
• 42:00 - 42:30 which is also operating constantly yes mean that's so I mean the the operation of the god in Genesis at the beginning of time it's not the beginning exactly the beginning of time it is that but it's not just that it's all Beginnings right including the beginnings that start now it's the same process that's operating and it is the voice of that process that makes it self manifest his conscience I think that's I think that's literally
• 42:30 - 43:00 and neurologically true as well as theologically I think that's right and I think that we could make a a very compelling argument that people have in our field that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic I think that's a I think that's a totally legitimate argument well you could imagine too imagine this is that our as our cortex evolved we moved from immediate local gratification to long-term future orientation right okay
• 43:00 - 43:30 so the cortex allows for that and that's what maturation does but it's not just the future so now everything that makes itself manifest in the present on the hedonistic front right so the satiation of immediate motivations has to be construed in relationship to its future consequences right okay so that puts and then the future is well what time span yeah know this is the time travel which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by way called the prefontal yeah right exactly and many people believe by the way that Adam and Eve
• 43:30 - 44:00 became our ancestors fully became our ancestors with a with a with a knowledge of Good and Evil because of self-consciousness which became in the moment that the prefer cortex allowed that that's the right that's appr well there's a parallel I think as well like I don't think there's any difference between inclusion of the future in the purview of your perceptions and inclusion of other people and it's partly because so one of the things that
• 44:00 - 44:30 I studied Psychopaths for a long time and you think of psychopaths as selfish right self-centered but it's weird because self Psychopaths betray themselves all the time because they don't learn from experience so they get what they want now but they fail and so then I thought oh well Psychopaths don't care about other people they also don't care about their future selves and I thought oh that's the same thing they don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse they don't well they certainly don't dark Triads or you like to talk about dark tetrad you're bring in sism of
• 44:30 - 45:00 course but the the characteristic of people above average in Psych in psychopathy is a lack of remorse yeah and a lack of remorse is an inability to learn yes you hurt somebody you did something wrong it had consequences if you don't feel remorse that remorse is activating the dorsal interior singular cortex of your brain which is making you feel social pain right you don't feel that if you have Psychopathic tendency yes and then well and if that pain doesn't make it self like I think that pain is the felt sense of the
• 45:00 - 45:30 eradication of a neurological system so like imagine that you that a system emerges in this darwinian sense to dominate so now you're under its sway okay now it has a goal in mind and when it makes itself manifest it fails okay the consequence of that failure should be the destruction of that system I think that felt pain is the psychological consequence of the the death of a system that failed to meet its goals now it's going to struggle and
• 45:30 - 46:00 fight to maintain itself even in the face of failure right which is why it's hard to get rid of a bad habit for example it's a living thing it's not going to give up without a struggle but the the corollary that would be approximately equivalent to what you just said there's no learning because there's no remorse because there's no difference between remorse and learning the first stage of learning is oh oops I was wrong that has to go that's a sacrificial offering to right that part of me has to
• 46:00 - 46:30 go and it's going no no you know I want to live and fair enough and sometimes like if you're really poorly oriented in your life and you fail cataclysmically an awful lot of you has to go you know when gets back to your wife talking about gratitude by the way because the same thing it's the prefrontal cortex saying no no no no no you lmic system evolved to feel resentment that that's not that that's not that's maladaptive
• 46:30 - 47:00 yes and I have decided to reprogram the limic system which tends toward resentment and I'm going to reprogram for it's the same basic pattern this is self this is self-management this is the essence of self- leadership doing what feels good if it feels good do it if it feels bad avoid it is being managed by your an yeah well the problem with that attitude is well in relationship to who and over what time span right and that's a huge problem if you have a dominant Lobster
• 47:00 - 47:30 did a lot of Investigation into crustation know crust neurology because it's well it's well mapped out if a dominant Lobster who ages is defeated in a battle his brain dissolves and reconstitutes as a subordinate brain right exactly the same thing happens to us because the neurom modular activity in the limic system of the lobster brain because once again because psychology is
• 47:30 - 48:00 biology the lobster can't do anything about that the big dominant Alpha Lobster if there is such a thing is going to fight to try to maintain that position yes and if it fa if well the the pro the lobster brain is so simple that it can't be subordinate sometimes and dominant sometimes so it's either Victor or not and when it loses the the Victor brain is no good so it has to go and so it disol can make decisions and that's the Divine in US that's the difference and and and this
• 48:00 - 48:30 is the essence of being fully human and fully Alive St ARA said the glory of God is a man Fully Alive what does it mean to be a man Fully Alive it is managing your lyic system it is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people it is actually it is is getting Beyond who you were as a person it's deciding to worship even though you don't feel a single milligram of of of faith on a particular day when when everything
• 48:30 - 49:00 falls apart for job his wife says and we presume she loves him and that she knows he's a good man she says there's nothing left for you but to curse God and die right and she means it yeah yeah and his attitude is no matter what's happening to me right now no matter the depth of my suffering I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness and I refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being and becoming itself and that is a decision right it's a decision right
• 49:00 - 49:30 right because it's weird because the evidence and this is what his wife tells him it's like the evidence is that you're done you've you've tried really hard you were a good person everyone knows it even God and yet everything's been Stripped Away from you and you're in the most miserable imaginable position you you should Curse God and die that's that's what you would do if you were acting in accordance with the facts if you're purely limic there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely uh uh a logical decision to commit
• 49:30 - 50:00 suicide if they're purely limpic however the Divine in us the Divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral our our our our our less evolved selves default default sell it's the it's the bumper of tissue behind the behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex which is the what a miracle my dog Chucho can't do that he can't time travel he can't manage his emotions the essence of being Fully Alive is doing
• 50:00 - 50:30 exactly that this is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so desperate they don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks they don't have to go you know suffer through a PhD they don't have to become behavioral scientists they have to learn to manage themselves they have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their liic systems that's what and and that takes practice and that takes commitment and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along it's because the best indicator of somebody being able to
• 50:30 - 51:00 manage in a man his limic system is a good partner job's wife is the one who says curse God and die right interestingly chapter 38 of job is where he puts God in the dock and he says he says you know all right everybody told me to you know curse you and die and all that all this bad stuff so what gives a righteous man what gives and then God actually turns it around and says what do you know smart where were you when I created the stars in the sky the the
• 51:00 - 51:30 whole story is not evident to you job accepts that he says look I can take solace in my ignorance yeah which is very useful to take solace because your ignorance is infinite there's a lot of place for Solus in that self-management is the essence of well humility requires self-management too we're not evolved to be humble yes we are evolved as a as tribal societies to be humbled but not to be humble to be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to to live our best
• 51:30 - 52:00 lives that's wisdom and that's the 30th chapter of job that's the Capstone of that thing that's the big point at the end of the day where he is Victorious but still doesn't understand puts God in the dock and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives yeah okay so let's let's go back at happiness so because the what you could say that the folk understanding of happiness is something is something like the gratification of a toddler's whim right
• 52:00 - 52:30 right a toddler's having a tantrum in the store and his mother defeated gives him the chocolate bar and so now the child stops squawking and bitching and being subsumed by negative emotion and maybe smiles and so you think well that's happiness okay but that's not the kind of happiness that you're describe that's gratification okay just gratification and that's a feeling okay so why look if if you're hedonistically oriented why not why not be skeptical
• 52:30 - 53:00 about your proposition that it's something other than immediate hedonistic gratification that constitutes happiness and certainly epicurus would have been you know and so the whole epicurian tradition of trying to maintain positive feelings as much as possible yes is and and again he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense he was actually a highly moral character but the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who like you and to have non- disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has as little conflict as possible which is catastrophically
• 53:00 - 53:30 wrong because unless you have Sanctified suffering your in your life you will not become strong you will not learn you will not grow and you'll make no progress on your life well you also won't be able to withand suffering when it comes it will which is it's like my students ask me so Professor you saying I need to go look for suffering and say don't worry it will find you yeah right don't you don't need to look for it exactly right so okay so but what then why conceptualize it because happiness isn't a feeling feelings and happiness
• 53:30 - 54:00 are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner you would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey that the feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible so we we know IU and I are pretty interested in in in nutrition that all food is a combination of protein carbohydrates and fat these are the macronutrients of all food including your Thanksgiving dinner the macronutrients of Happiness which have residual smell just emotions from the lmic system the the the constituent parts of Happiness
• 54:00 - 54:30 are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning these are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that they consider to be the highest levels of well-being now enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure on the contrary pleasure is a limic phenomenon it's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area in the ventral stum of the brain and you tap it in all sorts of you can get pleasure from all sorts of things if your girlfriend say I love you or you have a big bump of cocaine whatever it happens to be you'll get the same
• 54:30 - 55:00 because we have a Thrifty brain but that's not enjoyment enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex of the brain in other words it has a it has pleasure involv but it adds people in memory thus making it a permanent experience and that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I teach my students right so the problem with immediate gratification at least in part is that it lacks the dimension of sustainability exactly right inability and self-management because once it's in
• 55:00 - 55:30 your prefrontal cortex you can manage your pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you so one of the things I'll tell my students is it's something that gives you a lot of pleasure and it can be addictive which most Pleasures can be not all I mean walking in the woods and saying your prayers not particularly addictive but but highly glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all that if you're doing any of those things and you're doing it alone you're probably doing it wrong because you're not going to be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and
• 55:30 - 56:00 it won't be a source of Happiness what's the mediating what mediating role does social engagement what is that something like a precondition for iteration yeah well it's such that you part part of it is that by adding a human Dimension to it you're you're you're you're largely mediating The Experience using your prefrontal cortex that's just as an empirical observation when you take because because it it becomes memorable when you add people into it it's pleasure is not memorable but when you
• 56:00 - 56:30 add a relation so let's think about the difference between pornography and sex with a partner because that's a good comparison okay so now the thing about sex with a partner is that especially if you want it to be repeated you you need to take the other person into account so there's a there's a you could call that a civilizing fact right it's much more complicated activity it's a higher level of
• 56:30 - 57:00 Consciousness you're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about the physical act you're thinking about the the the the mediating Human Experience that you're having diality all right so you're you're under the thrall of the sexual impulse right which has a drive like characteristic and which has a certain set of biological activations and pornography would would only be that it strips it of everything except for those
• 57:00 - 57:30 biological impulses right so it reduces it to the lowest possible right right okay the question is why that why is that not optimal right because that's what we're trying to get at okay so now you introduce a partner well there's novelty in the partner so that's dopaminergic K because you don't know exactly what the partner is going to do right then it it complexifies it in the positive way because it brings elements of love and
• 57:30 - 58:00 relationship and mutual caring which are be the pure limic system so it's not just a purely limic activity so the whole problem is when you when you that's sanctification a sense or sacralization it really is exactly right which is why it's placed in the context of marriage I mean that's the that's the rule on the on the moral religious front there's no sex without marriage which means something like no sex without commitment and mutuality and long-term
• 58:00 - 58:30 relationship so it's contextualizing it that makes it more sophisticated now you also associate that no but the thing that's interesting about the argument you're making is that you also associate that with a what a deepening and intensification of you call it enjoyment right well I just call it enjoyment as and and and and I'm using that particular term because this or enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more nuanced dimensional and sophisticated than pure pleasure can you believe that Good Friday and Easter are just around the
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• 59:00 - 59:30 challenges about sacrifice and surrender Jonathan roomy and sister Miriam James will guide you through these powerful stories and prayer experiences and father Mike schmidtz his Sunday sermons are absolutely spectacular this is already shaping up to be Hallow's biggest lent ever with thousands of people from all over the world joining together in prayer here's the best part you can get 3 months completely free when you sign up at hall.com Jordan that covers the entire lent challenge once you join you'll discover a huge catalog of guided prayers meditations music and
• 59:30 - 60:00 so much more all designed to help you grow closer to God and find the peace that we're all looking for so download the hall app today and jump into the lent prayer 40 challenge your spirit will thank you now this is a problem with the the language of course because you know this is a happiness in general because different things that's why we have to get to the defition not yeah well so if you're talking to a young person you would say A wise man would sub subtitute enjoyment for pleasure and his logical response to that would be why right okay
• 60:00 - 60:30 so why and the reason is because enjoyment is permanent and pleasure is temporal automatic and animal that's the problem what if I okay but I say so okay so I get my dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can my dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can my dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife that I because my dog's brain is incapable of so is it do you think it's fundamentally
• 60:30 - 61:00 would you reduce it to the degree that you can reduce it to something like predictable iterability like is that the payoff probably and I think that that's part of the miracle reciprocal iterability so I can say I like that I want to do that again for these particular reasons my relationship so that would be the difference because you can okay yeah that's exactly right here's an example tell me what you think of this this example I people who are watching will be familiar with this story but it's such a useful story it
• 61:00 - 61:30 doesn't matter when animal behavior started to study play right they watched rats wrestle right okay now the Assumption was they noticed that if you take a juvenile rat male they like to wrestle if the one juvenile was 10% bigger than the other he could reliably win in a single bout pretty much every time every time pin and that was the mar those studies are yeah okay so then the conclusion from
• 61:30 - 62:00 that was that play was a form of dominance behavior and what the Victorious rat did was Dominate and that that was pleasurable because it was a victory but then but then PP did this he thought yeah but rats live in a social environment so they don't play once they play repeatedly which is like he should have got a Nobel Prize for this it's such a brilliant Insight it's like well do the rules for iterable play are they the same as the rules for one bout play and the answer was no because
• 62:00 - 62:30 what pep showed was that if you paired rats together repeatedly the big rates that didn't let the little rats win 30% of the time didn't get invited to play right right so then so then you could imagine that maybe this is a technical way of thinking about enjoyment instead of pleasure is that pleasure is a oneoff and you could even exploit for pleasure but if you want instead let's say you want to make an arrangement that's iterable and if if better maybe one that
• 62:30 - 63:00 iterates and improves right right cuz obviously that's better if it's good once right then it should be good multiple times and if it's good and could be made better that would even be better right right so that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within their relationship exctly right you know the people who have the most sex are religious married people which is hilarious that's Brad WX funniest statistic know and it's like nobody believes that I know it's like so much for the sexual Revolution like you
• 63:00 - 63:30 want sex be religious and married and be loyal to your wife that's right oh great so but but here's the thing that that gets back to the work that you've done over the years who is it who can't learn this and the answer is dark Triads who doesn't learn this why because narcissism it's all about me melanism I'm willing to hurt you yeah psychopathy I feel no remorse sadism I enjoy it I'm not going to learn and so the result is that dark Triads they tend to to to
• 63:30 - 64:00 exhibit um compulsive addictive behavior over and over again the reason self-defeating they don't enjoy their lives y because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoyment they're incapable of actually yeah well so in the biblical story of Cain and Abel so Cain is a dark tetrad type and he becomes a murderer and then his descendants become genocidal but the end of that story is extremely interesting e because God sentences Cain to wander so he has to move from place to
• 64:00 - 64:30 place which is what Psychopaths do by the way because they they can't exploit the same people over and over they have to move but he also wanders in the Land of Nod and the Land of Nod is being traditionally associated with sleep and unconsciousness so the the moral of the story is that if you're a psychopathic manipulator you end up wandering unconsciously right and your life Kan says my life has become a he says I I can't stand the punishment I
• 64:30 - 65:00 can't tolerate the consequences of my action yeah which sounds just like an addict which sounds just like an alcoholic it sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or pornography somebody who's subjugated to something a repetitive behavior that they can't control right that's what that sounds like and that's the reason ultimately and so how do you break out of it you know when we talked I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in in addiction communities and and people say I I got to quit drinking no you need to substitute something better
• 65:00 - 65:30 yeah right that's what it comes down to because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on Pleasure yeah that's what and that and that that requires relationship and that requires love and that requires memory that re why memory memory is such that you can actually enjoyment requires that you can that it be a permanent experience right but what's the specific role of memory I get the role of permanence but you've
• 65:30 - 66:00 you've brought up memory a couple of times it's like is it that the experience enriches as it's multiplied like listening to a song that you love in many different context when I was a when I was a kid I I grew up in a lower middle class home in Seattle and uh we would have Thanksgiving like every other family and every year my mother was good cook and and there would be this big turkey you know how we do it yeah I think you have Thanksgiving in October but and with but November it's such a because by November there's nothing to
• 66:00 - 66:30 be thankful for that's at that point you know north of the Border it's pretty C exactly every year my mother would make this Golden Brown Beautiful turkey and and and my dad would say oh it's so beautiful honey my mom my dad loved my mom so much and he would go and get the instatic camera and he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment that beautiful moment now what was he trying to do he was trying to memorialize something that was going to be highly pleasurable to eat such that we could
• 66:30 - 67:00 enjoy that moment again and again and again now we with 30 pictures of identical turkeys and The Identical oven okay so memory there is something like a marker for a marker not just a marker for permanence but an actual indicator of permanence that's just how permanent okay so basically tell me if I'm correct about that you you seem to be making the case that I mean this is a restatement of something we already discussed but I want to get right to the heart of the matter is that well why would you settle for pleasure why would you settle for
• 67:00 - 67:30 momentary pleasure when you could have when you could be like walking in the Eternal Garden so to speak you're going to substitute permanence and maybe improving permanence for the momentary pleasure right well okay so so okay so I've been thinking about this in terms of maturation because I think a lot of the things that we see as hedonistic and power mad pathologies are just just sustained immaturity right so because toddlers are immature and they're whim
• 67:30 - 68:00 driven and they're not social they can't truly play not not until they're about three right right that's when they start to unify a three-year-old begins to be able to adopt a shared Mutual goal and that's the basis of mutual understanding and friendship and true friendship emerges when that process of establishing a mutual goal iterates across play bouts okay and so you can see a an extension of temporal awareness there and a broadening of social relationship and
• 68:00 - 68:30 the reason the 2-year-old it's weird because the two-year-old now has to take turns and that's a sacrifice because he doesn't get to be first all the time and that that'll produce a tantrum when that's first being learned especially with an aggressive kid but the payoff is well you don't get to be first but you get to have way more games yeah it's the rats right rats exactly the same thing the rat gets to have a friend and so so he only wins 70% of the time but he plays 100 games instead of one it works
• 68:30 - 69:00 out right right exactly okay so like I worked with these guys in Montreal we we delve very deeply into the origins of antisocial and Psychopathic Behavior okay so the first thing that we learned was that the most aggressive human beings are two-year-olds right right so if you group human beings together in age batched groups there is more kicking hitting biting and stealing among two-year-olds than any other group okay now if you now if you look at the
• 69:00 - 69:30 2-year-olds what you see is that most of the two-year-olds who do that are male yeah and it's a minority of males yeah most of that yeah 5% most of that Minority is socialized by the age of four right okay the ones that aren't socialized are the repeat Psychopathic offenders and so what it seems to be is just just the absence of cortical maturation now you know classic penological Theory like I this kind of painfully because I was a little romantic in my attitude I suppose before
• 69:30 - 70:00 this there's a crime age relationship right so criminality spikes like mad at 15 right and then it's at 15 to 19 is the real like crucial period for being a delinquent psychopath so what happens is these aggressive kids they maintain a high level of aggression right normal boys match that level of aggression from 15 to 19 and then it goes down whereas the antisocial types just stay high if you imprison them till they're in their
• 70:00 - 70:30 late 20s they mature right right right yeah that's right so and part of this is the the synaptic development between the Olympic system and the prefrontal cortex that that wiring is not complete in human females till age about age 21 and human males till like 70 I don't know but it's later and that's one of the reasons by the way two of my kids are military two of my kids are US Marines and my son Carlos my middle son he's a special operator he's a scout he was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps where he would his job was to jump out of
• 70:30 - 71:00 helicopters at night down a rope into a theater of battle and with a high-powered rifle and then shoot with with a with a with with with Optics at night that's a really dangerous thing to do that's an incredibly dangerous thing to do that was super fun for him at 20 I don't want to have anything to do with that why why was he willing to do this and the answer is because did not have adequate synaptic development between his lyic system and his prefrontal cor well
• 71:00 - 71:30 there' also be there'd also likely be like you know males are more Expendable and the more adventurous males adventurousness is a highrisk high return investment and and man well so there's these great studies you must know about these studies of the drug gangs in Chicago the guy who did the studies promised the the gang leader is a big drug gang that he would write a book yeah yeah you know about this yeah yeah and so so they found out that the the
• 71:30 - 72:00 default drug dealer made less than minimum wage and almost all of them and almost all of them were employed yeah right but the reason they were willing to take the risk was because the status kick made them much more reproductively successful and deaths among the higher ups opened up Avenues of progress right so even though low-level drug dealing didn't even pay minimum wage the opportunity for status was high and the relationship between status and
• 72:00 - 72:30 reproductive success was unbelievable because it's like the relationship between socioeconomic position and male reproductive success is like 6 it's in it's insanely high Y right and so it's not surprising that young men who are looking to maximize their reproductive success when they have nothing concrete to offer are going to take a highrisk high adventure route because that differentiates them and even if that at the cost of their own skin it's like being a CEO by the way if you're a CEO of a company you're probably going to
• 72:30 - 73:00 have to leave in disgrace if you're the prime minister of the UK you're going to leave in disgrace or Canada for that matter to take a reason Congratulations by the way oh yeah the I mean it's but why do they do it because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime in terms of The Prestige that's how much that's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward by the way aquinus was really good on this so Thomas aquinus I don't think you've actually
• 73:00 - 73:30 you haven't talked very much about t mistic thinking right which this so Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St Thomas aquinus in the su theolog he was a platonist but he said the pupil is greater than the master and introduced St Thom introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13 13th and 14th centuries and he said that we are animated by four Idols that God is what we ultimately want but God is inconvenient you know God is hard to understand and a lot of one-sided
• 73:30 - 74:00 conversations and and a ton of rules and so we think take things that have kind of a Godlike feeling to them and they're four-fold he was an outstanding behavioral scientist he could stand up to anybody today he said that the four Idols that we have that substitute for God are money power pleasure and Prestige yeah that's power pleasure and honor we've distinguished we've talked about why happiness we talked about discernment we talked about the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment right okay so let's let's
• 74:00 - 74:30 bring this down to practicalities now you teach leadership courses at Harvard and you I presume that you take a relatively practical approach to your students in relationship to what will constitute happiness so well so walk us through that like we we talked about the N the necessity of establishing a goal right and we talked about the conceptualization of happiness and so how do you make that how do you ground that in your classes and what have you
• 74:30 - 75:00 observed as the effect so there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning and we dug in on enjoyment we can do the exactly the same thing for satisfaction and exactly the same thing for finding meaning what is meaning how do you interrogate meaning in your life how do you actually find it that would get us back to discernment because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient then I talk that's so you you mean by discernment I think probably something very similar to what I've focused on as
• 75:00 - 75:30 attention one of the things that I used to tell my my my clients for example let's say they were having mood disregulation problems one of the things I would teach them to do is to notice this is way different than thinking about notice when they were particularly miserable during the week when they weren't right right and to approach that with a completely blank mind it's like you'll see that there's variation in your mood right if you can catch yourself when you're less miserable than usual then you can think okay what
• 75:30 - 76:00 exactly what did I do right or what's the context that's informing that well that's discernment it's right right that's kind of well you're certainly Discerning something but when I'm talking about discernment I use it in in an almost theological sense which is to actually find the essence of your life I think it's the same thing I think it's the same thing because there's something gleaming there that's calling to you that setting your life in order and this is what happens with Moses in the burning bush by the way that's something
• 76:00 - 76:30 that beckons to him and he discerns that's why he goes more deeply into it and he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him and I would say like those moments in your life where things come together if you're Discerning enough and attentive there's an unlimited depth to that exploration right okay okay so so so that discernment is really is is trying to find this essence of discovering what your essence not not I just don't agree with SRA I just don't believe that you can invent your essence we're not self
• 76:30 - 77:00 inventing I I believe that we exist in in in in in ad infinitum and and trying otherwise we could just tell ourselves what to do totally it'd be simple I'd just say to myself be happy and I'd obey well that doesn't happen or even worse you would invent your essence as your identity which is exactly what we're doing see to to invent your essence is a gnostic heresy is to say I am a self- inventing creature I'm this I'm not that I'm one
• 77:00 - 77:30 of these people I'm not those people there's no shared story there's no Humanity there's no there's no love in that and that's the problem but but but but there's no relationship either but to discover your essence that's pure Humanity because that's what links you to everything that has always been and everything that always will be yeah and that's exciting that's an adventure that's just yes I think that's by definition an adventure actually that's the adventure that's the that's what the hero is doing in the hero's journey right right that's what a quest is the
• 77:30 - 78:00 quest is actually discovering your essence discernment is you on the hero's journey you know I've been thinking a lot about the early days of the internet remember when it fell like this vast open Frontier a place where you could truly be free free from corporate oversight free from tracking and free from somebody looking over your shoulder kind of like America itself used to be but these days every time we go online we're being watched your internet service provider sees everything every site you visit every click you make and here's the kicker in the US they can legally sell all that information to
• 78:00 - 78:30 third parties your privacy data becomes just another commodity that's exactly why we here at the daily wire started using expressvpn it's This brilliant piece of technology that routes all your online activity through secure encrypted servers everything you do online is shielded from prying eyes your internet provider data Brokers all of them because expressvpn hides your IP address for the first time in years you can make your data actually feel like it's yours again imagine that both our host and production teams here at the daily wire use expressvpn to reroute all their daily activity through expressvpn secure
• 78:30 - 79:00 encrypted servers to hide their IP addresses that means no one can track them or build profiles of their behavior and it's easy to use one tap to connect that's it it works on up to eight devices phones tablets TVs computers you name it it's protected so if you want to return to the good old days of online privacy and freedom get expressvpn you can use our special link to get four extra months of expressvpn for free at expressvpn.com Jordan that's EXP s s vpn.com jordant that's a union thing okay right
• 79:00 - 79:30 okay so did you familiarize yourself with Yung as well yeah I mean everybody did who a fan of yours yeah yeah well I was wondering if it was a separate Pathway to that that's not standard academic knowledge no no no no but when when I actually came back five and a half years ago as as a process of discernment to teach happiness and to create a big public uh uh apostolate in this as well well to talk in public education because I'm working in the public Sphere not just at Harvard University I'm talking in media I write
• 79:30 - 80:00 a column every week in the Atlantic I write books that I want people to watch I do television and and and the result of that is that I actually can't I have to range really far from from the roots of my my discipline you know my discipline is you know theorem proof in economics and running regressions that's just not good enough and so when I looked at it you know I have to know where are the most interesting questions come from they come from theology they come from philosophy they come from art they come from history that's where the
• 80:00 - 80:30 interesting questions come from they don't come from when you and I were writing our papers when we were writing our papers inside the university we were we were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data that's the wrong place to start which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I'd ever been before then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation which is the modern Neuroscience which is The Cutting Edge of our field and only then could I expose that the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained and you and Behavioral Science and then I had to talk about how
• 80:30 - 81:00 do you how do you use it behavi Psy analytic practices and that's you so when you're doing this at the business school so that be or at the Kennedy School for that matter now you're focusing on the personal and the relational right but you're doing that in the context of business and government right okay well how do you how do you square that Circle it's it's business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people you know
• 81:00 - 81:30 the whole idea of work life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life if your work is not it presumes alienation yeah it absolutely it presumes self-objectification which is a deeply problematic and sful thing to do that makes you homoeconomicus that's no good work life balance is a problem is the bottom line so what I say to my students on the very first day yeah it also implies that work isn't life no no absolutely not your life is or that your home life isn't life one of the two yeah
• 81:30 - 82:00 and what's life Leisure right and what's Leisure I mean there's a complicated I'll take Joseph peer's argument that Leisure is the basis of culture but only when it's based in learning in contemplation that that's good as opposed to right what you say and Leisure is not the people often think of leisure as the absence of work yeah right it's like well that's that's actually bored no no I mean I want work before the fall yeah right tend the garden T the garden that's blessing and
• 82:00 - 82:30 you discover that by discernment and that's what you're teaching your business what do they think of that well the it's amazing so the first day of class I say look a bunch of you you want to start your own companies and your startup entrepreneurs and the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs because you're going to make your fortune working for companies that other people have started etc etc that's great but it's trivial because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the Enterprise of you you and you're the founder start treating your life as a startup today this is
• 82:30 - 83:00 what we're going to do what do startup what do startup entrepreneurs do they're willing and able to take risk in in in in in in exchange for the potential explosive rewards that come from it and what and to understand that's an adventure that's an adventure and by the way you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are if you're thinking in turistic terms of money power pleasure and fame will be unto you but if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness game on let's talk about how to get explosive returns in love and happiness for the
• 83:00 - 83:30 entrepreneurial Endeavor of you Incorporated that's how the class starts because that's the hero's journey and everybody's entitled to that and what do you mean by entitled you mean it's available to them because we're born to it because this is to be born in the Divine image of God where God is inherently generative God is inherently creative God is inherently loving and this is the gift not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have positive AFF all day long the contr
• 83:30 - 84:00 well I guess part of the argument you're making is that that's actually a second rate substitute for the real thing absolutely right hedonistic happiness is I thought about this in terms of like addiction it's a false Adventure absolutely yeah absolutely on the contrary and and so that's one of the reasons that that that the Aristotelian concept of udonia which is a a good life well lived full of suffering and full of experiences and all and Adventure again that's the thing and that's what I want everybody to have that's what excites me that's what gets me up in the morning and the the master stroke is to be able
• 84:00 - 84:30 to say I am truly grateful Lord for this day full of blessings and happy feelings and I'm also grateful for the things that are going to challenge well you want you want your life to be enough of an adventure so that if you wake up in pain you get out of bed yeah because you think no this is worth doing this is my life right right this this is my journey this is part of this is the the dragon I'm going and and that's what I'm teaching that's that's theist of the class and and so
• 84:30 - 85:00 how do the students okay so I would suspect that the typical or many of the typical students particularly in business it's a bit of a stereotype but I'm going to run with it anyways for the time being is there they're going to be much more materially focused maybe I'm wrong about that rather than admiring entrepreneurs like look I worked with a bunch of uh a bunch of startups and a bunch of these incubators which are all fake by the way just it was so corrupt it was just beyond comprehension but in any case you know
• 85:00 - 85:30 they would dangle these Visions in front of these young people who are trying to start a business of you know making a unicorn and selling out for $100 million and then sitting on the beach and having my ti it's like it was just complete well it was so complete was a complete lie it was corrupting beond belief and it's counterproductive because while your Enterprise should be the thing it's like you don't you don't want to sell your company unless you can think think of a better company because you get to have your company and you get to expand it and you get to bring benefit to the world and you get to
• 85:30 - 86:00 learn and it's like okay now when you get your students at the Kennedy school or at the School of Business what is their ethical orientation towards the political or the business before they take your course so it's the same as everybody where they want to have a good life well lived but they don't necessarily know what that means yeah right so they they're the same as all of us are they defaulting to those four things of course because we all do of course we all do so I play a game with
• 86:00 - 86:30 my students it's called what's my idol this is what I very one of the very first sessions of the class what's my idol where I take them through a little bit of a coinus they read a little bit of a coinus um and I say look this is the first modern really great behavioral scientist is St Thomas aquinus and and it's don't read it for the religious parts let's read it for the behavioral parts of this and I say okay he says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately there's going to be one that attracts you more than any other and that when you do you'll always do the things that you later regret that
• 86:30 - 87:00 that's that's the thing about it okay and that's behavor that's what makes them Idols I know right they beckon falsely in the Pres and that's very empirically robust a very empirically robust assertion of course we know this from all the literature that you know that that when people chase these Idols that they're ultimately they don't get what they wanted a lot of regret so I say okay let's play a game and the way to do this is not to to say what's your Idol but to eliminate the ones that they are not your idol okay you want to play
• 87:00 - 87:30 sure okay sure so money power pleasure honor and honor is not what we say with my Marine children which is a Ser With Honor that means to be honored yeah and so the narcissistic that means shame or or or what we have in Academia which is prestige to walk in and people say oh this Jordan Peterson who wrote that paper you know that that paper that got the award last year whatever happens to be or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people right which we want it's your lobsters
• 87:30 - 88:00 right that raises serotonin levels okay okay so think of those four and then let's think of the one you would first eliminate which doesn't mean you don't have it at all but rather that you have the population mean level of it so if you got rid of money for example you wouldn't be poor you just have exactly the population mean amount of that so you wouldn't be in in there would be no deprivation whatsoever money power pleasure fil which one do you kick away power why I'm not interested in
• 88:00 - 88:30 exerting control over others voluntary actions so if I were to you're the clinical psychologist and I'm just a you know a working class Economist but I would say that the reason for that is because you hate when people have power over you well that's certainly an indication of the undesirability of power that's my lived experience of the I hate yes I hate that I hate being being told what to do not everybody hates that so people who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people
• 88:30 - 89:00 have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently so it's it's it's kind of an interesting thing so you find that totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems they would just like to be the totalitarian right right right dictators admire dictators funny I was just writing about exactly that this morning it's like yeah well this is part of our misunderstanding of totalitarian system everyone is striving to be free except the bully on the top like no it's bullies all the way down I know so that's okay so now we've established
• 89:00 - 89:30 that about you but you kicked away power yeah you got three left money pleasure and honor what's next pleasure probably pleasure no money probably money why h taste is an excellent substitute for money like you can you can you can you can you're talking about the
• 89:30 - 90:00 population mean of money population me of money if$ 75,000 you're wise and Discerning that you're rich with that amount of money yeah yeah and and I would also postulate correct me if I'm wrong that given the fact that your material success among other things has taught you using your self-awareness as a behavioral scientist that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money it's really not that interesting well the the big advantage to me of having money is that there are it opens up Avenues of
• 90:00 - 90:30 possibility it makes some things easier right Medical Care it does but it sources of unhappiness and it it opens up Avenues of Adventure right that would otherwise be impossible but they're not the things you care about the most well there's other ways of doing them there's other ways of doing them that are that are they equally valuable um sufficiently so that that was my second choice anyways the things that I
• 90:30 - 91:00 love the most are not things you buy I just if you know people say if I could keep everything in a napsack I would be detached and I say no I would still rent everything I want the whole point is that that you know buying stuff is interesting well money money is useful to me because it enables opportunity right it's not particularly useful to me because I can buy stuff with it I mean I buy some things but look you know cult
• 91:00 - 91:30 culture like ours you can buy virtually everything you need for nothing if you pay attention like virtually everything is free food maybe not you know but I have a whole lecture on how actually how to buy happiness with money and it's it go you have to go exactly against your limic system why because your limic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your your your evolutionary Fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate you need more Buffalo jerky and animal and and and flints in your cave and the guy anyway okay so you got two two left
• 91:30 - 92:00 pleasure and and honor now it's hot in here because we're these are things that you like yeah and this is normal yeah but you got to get rid of one and go to the population mean which is it pleasure probably next yeah and and and and now we've established what your temptation is now we've established that that doesn't mean that you can't tame it but you must know it you must say to yourself honor honor when I do the wrong
• 92:00 - 92:30 thing it's because I it's because I persue Honor by the way I'm exactly like you EXA why it's too bad for you well too bad for my wife and yours yeah and your wife yeah yeah I mean it's because you know I hate people having power over me I don't want to have power over others I was a chief executive for 11 years and the thing I hated was when people called me boss it made me intensely uncomfortable it made me feel embarrassed even humiliated when people said boss cuz I felt like they were setting up a hierarchy it felt passive aggressive even what it was because aversion
• 92:30 - 93:00 money okay great well you know if you're someone's boss it's not who's it's not obvious who the slave is right right because if I have to tell you what to do then I have to tell you what to do it's hard enough to get myself to do things much less bother with you maybe there's some temporary thrill in ordering people around although it's not a thrill I've ever appreciated but I I'd rather that you did your own thing I'd hate you know I hate dictatorships and I wouldn't want to be the dictator the bottom line money okay yeah what F pleasure I'm I mean I'm
• 93:00 - 93:30 I'm I'm a very self-disciplined person you know I wake up at 4:30 in the morning I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before Dawn how old are you 60 and and and I'm in Better Health than when I was 30 and part of it is because I'm not a sensualist because I can actually do that I mean I like feeling good but it's not high on my list of priorities you know what tempts me this that's what tempts me and I know it's true and I know I have that
• 93:30 - 94:00 particular tendency and that knowledge is power why because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus and it's accessible by my prefrontal cortex and I can use it to manage my lyic system and that's that's being Fully Alive as far as I'm concerned that's being Fully Alive and when my students understand that they can not just avoid errors they can feel like they have control they can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey that's what this that how do you get them to start envisioning their future pathway in a
• 94:00 - 94:30 more multi-dimensional manner so I among other things we talk about the process of discernment yeah to Discovery okay yeah discovery of their of their own what do they have to do practically to engage in that I asked them to to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers but do have understanding because this is the essence of philosophically so um I I'll ask and I've done this to my adult children as well when my kids were 18 years old um I would make them write a business plan as
• 94:30 - 95:00 a b School Professor I can kind of get away with that right yeah and the whole point was what are you going to do with the next five years of your life you're the entrepreneur of your Enterprise and I'm the venture capitalist kind of so I deserve a business plan right I want you to tell me what you're going to do to find the answers to two distinct questions or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions why are you alive and for what would you gladly give your life on this day I want to know the answers to those questions I why did you come in what okay explain
• 95:00 - 95:30 the rationale these are deeply existential questions that are that are rooted in almost every so what's more important to you than the mere continuation of your life that's a hard one yeah so that's kind of like what would you die for and also what would you live for those are the same thing and the other one was what why are you alive which means who created you and for what purpose in your belief yeah okay so one of the ways that I had my clients answer answer that question is we did this in this exercise that I made
• 95:30 - 96:00 commercial this future authoring exercise is something and you can do this when you're arguing with your wife for example well so one of the things I always ask my wife and she ask me too when we're arguing is like what are your conditions for satisfaction yeah like you disagree with what's going on here right even hypothetically if I did what would satisfy you what would that look like right well you can ask yourself the same thing in your own life which is like okay life is difficult and it's rif with existential doubt could you imagine
• 96:00 - 96:30 a situation where you were thrilled with your circumstances right right so what are your conditions for satisfaction that is an exercise of discernment you have to treat yourself like you're someone you don't know right right it's like learning to please someone else like in your relationships like well it takes a long time to know what makes your wife happy right hard because it takes her a long time to know too it's hard because people have a nature and what satisfies that nature has to be
• 96:30 - 97:00 discerned you have to notice it you know it's it's so interesting to understand that it's like you have to discern what it is that actually motivates you for example rather than what you think should motivate those aren't the same things AB oh absolutely not there's what you desire and what you desire to desire there's a whole series of iterations about that and and the well constructed life the one of which you're really charge has good knowledge such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are you can make the
• 97:00 - 97:30 alterations that are apply right exactly that's what it really comes down to and that's what yeah that's the best that has been that that we can use in Behavioral Science this is so that's all that part of discernment as well because one of the questions would be an analogous question to something like well if you were in pain what would get you up in the morning this is why it's so useful for people to have children right it's like because a mother my wife said something very interesting when she had her first child when she had Michaela we we went up north to where my parents were in this old this Cottage it
• 97:30 - 98:00 was all old people up in Northern saskat there's like 20 of them in the room and they're watching this little like 12mon old todle round like she was on fire right it's like they're just completely entranced and my wife said it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention that someone else had it was a great relief to her that someone else had become far more important in her life than she was self-evidently and you know the the statistical studies show that there's no distinction between being aware of
• 98:00 - 98:30 yourself and being miserable right self-consciousness loads on neuroticism right and so one of the cor pych drama the problem with the Psycho Drama is that it's me me me you know me is the wrong answer me is the wrong answer so that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in in in what I teach it's not about a particular religious faith not withstanding the fact that I practice one it's self-transcendence MH self-transcendence is the essence of awe of getting small I I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the do
• 98:30 - 99:00 Lama and he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when he saw that that photo that the that the astronauts the American astronauts took of of the Earth from orbiting the Moon that famous photo and and he said I'm so little and it was a sense of peace that came over him right now there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace according to Scott Barry Kaufman it's dark Triads oh yes they can't get outside themselves no no because of the narcissism yeah right the narcissism
• 99:00 - 99:30 component of the dark Tri Triad or dark tetrad so the problem with the dark tetrad types is they can't actually be in awe of themselves they canot they cannot experience the happiness that comes from self Transcendence and that's why they're stuck in this the Land of Nod yeah that's why they're stuck pacing and and and roaming the Land of Nod they're the most miserable creatures for that reason that's why they that's a good place to stop and we
• 99:30 - 100:00 are pretty much exactly at the time we should stop I think what we should do what we will do on the daily wi side for those of you who might join us there is I think we should talk more specifically about Harvard and about the relationship I'd like to know more about your life about how you're conducting your business and what you're doing and what your plans are and how that fits in with your academic strivings and your roles as a teacher at Harvard what you think of The Well of the institution I was there in the '90s I loved it it was firing in all cylinders as far as I was
• 100:00 - 100:30 concerned when I was there it isn't obvious to me that that's the case anymore and I'd like to talk about that and so if you all would like to join us on the daily wire side for an additional half an hour please uh you're more than welcome to do that we would appreciate the support as well so thank you very much for coming here today and talking to me it was a pleasure thank you Jordan yeah much appreciated likewise yeah yeah great great and thank you all of you for your time and detention the film crew here too in Scottdale and to the Daily wire for making all of this accessible
• 100:30 - 101:00 possible professional and well produced because those are the attributes that they bring to bear on this Enterprise so uh one note is that I've been subscriber to the Daily wire for years ah and highly recommend it ah what do you recommend about it I recommend that it's uh it's a a a well produced and high integrity organization with with quality that one can count on run by people who truly believe in what they're doing in their mission focused and there's not enough of that in the world ah well
• 101:00 - 101:30 there you go well that's been my experience working with the daily wire as well so genuinely and I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky so all right thank you everyone and thank you very much sir good Lu you today you too [Music]