The Art of True Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Huberman Lab
In this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, Dr. Andrew Huberman sits down with Dr. Arthur Brooks, a leading expert on happiness from Vanderbilt University and Harvard Business
Key takeaways
- Happiness is not a feeling but a state built on three core elements: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
- Enjoyment differs from pleasure; true enjoyment comes from engaging in activities that bring joy without relying on fleeting dopamine spikes.
Main topics
- The science of happiness
- Enjoyment vs. pleasure
Notable quotes
The pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab.
Conclusion
True happiness is not about avoiding pain or seeking constant pleasure but cultivating
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) There are three macronutrients to the happiest life. The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab. Satisfaction, which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle. And last but not least is meaning. The why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering. If you spend your life, which many people do today, trying to avoid unhappiness, trying to avoid and eliminate suffering, they will paradoxically miss their own happiness. Speaker 1 (0:59) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Speaker 1 (1:08) I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Arthur Brooks. Arthur Brooks is a professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School. Today, we discuss what makes people truly happy and what this thing we call happiness is really all about. What I love about Arthur Brooks and what you'll realize today is that he looks to experimental data, philosophy, his and others experiences to arrive at specific questions that you can ask yourself to determine what matters most to you and what stands in the way of you actually getting those things. In fact, I must say this episode with Arthur Brooks is one of my favorite ever on the Huberman Lab podcast. He is brutally honest. He's open. He's generous with knowledge that can help you, the listener, and he's incredibly humble. Thanks to Arthur. The conversation you're about to hear is one that I'm confident you'll want to think about. act on and come back to periodically. I can say for myself with certainty that it's the conversation I wish I had heard long ago. Arthur doesn't have all the answers, nor does he claim to, but I do think he has a sort of hard-earned compass and a set of maps that we can all apply to have a much better and indeed a great life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Arthur Brooks. Dr. Arthur Brooks, welcome. Thank you, Dr. Andrew Huberman. We only get to call each other Dr. once at the beginning of this podcast. I'm so happy you're here. Me too. Yeah, I consider you a friend. And before we became friends, you were already my teacher. I was learning a ton from you. You have a ton of wisdom. And before you step into your humble self and push aside, I just really want to highlight that because there are a lot of people influencing, educating. advising, coaching, et cetera. But you represent like really the the confluence of of ideas and practices and wisdom in ways that I and people can really understand and benefit from. So really looking forward to having you here. Thank you. Likewise. I mean, what you've done over the past now five and a half years with this podcast. Just about. Yeah. Speaker 2 (3:30) You changed the whole way that educators can reach a lot of people. What we want is educators. science in the public interest. We want to touch people's lives. We want to lift them up and bring them together using science, using ideas. And how, how, how do you do that? You show the way. Because what you did was you started this podcast within six months. It was a big deal. And what you showed was a whole generation of people younger and older than you. I'm older than you. That this is something that people can do, that we can reach people. You made that possible. You made that possible for me. It was an incredible gift. Speaker 1 (4:03) I'm honored and thank you. I realized today that perhaps the toughest part about this conversation is going to be to make sure that I keep you focused on you a little bit. You're so humble, but I appreciate the kind words and I consider us colleagues and friends. So you're known as the happiness guy. You know a lot about it, what it is and what it isn't. So let's start with first principles there that people can really wrap their head around and apply. What's the difference between... unhappiness and happiness, or is that even the right model? Yeah. Most people start Speaker 2 (4:37) with the wrong model of what happiness actually is. So you can't define unhappiness until you can define happiness. And happiness is not what most people think. Most people conceive of happiness as a feeling, as an emotion. And that's quite wrong in the same way that the smell of your turkey is not the same thing as your Thanksgiving dinner. the smell of the jerky is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner and the feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. And when I first came into the field, I mean, I've been a behavioral scientist for 30 years, but I started specializing in the science of human happiness exclusively. I wrote the first book of mine on this in 2008. But I decided in 2019, after I took a hiatus from academia to go run a big think tank in Washington, D.C., that I was going to specialize for the rest of my career in this thing that most people believe they wanted. I was going to really make it work. And there's, of course, happiness. People want to be happier. And the first thing that I realized is there wasn't a very good definition of happiness. It was just so crazy, the thing that everybody wants. They can't quite define it. I can't put words to it, but I know it when I feel it. This is what I would get when I would ask my classes. So what do you think you're studying? Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or doing the things that I enjoy. And I recognize that this. would be completely inadequate in any other area of science. And so I went back to try to find the right metaphor, the right parallel field to define happiness. And I felt that the field of nutrition did it really well. by taking food and breaking it into macronutrients and micronutrients. So I asked myself, OK, what are the macronutrients of happiness? What are the fundamental elemental building blocks of happiness? And to figure that out, you go and you look at the people who have the highest life satisfaction that's measured in robust and proper ways, good construct, validity, good science behind it. And what you find is doing kind of a factor analysis is that there are three macronutrients to the happiest life. The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients. Now, that's important because it means you need to enjoy your life and you need to know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, which many people don't. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret to happiness. It's the secret to rehab. right and so so you have to understand right for sure and uh um satisfaction which is the joy of an accomplishment or an activity after struggle And last but not least is meaning the why of your existence. The happiest people have a bead on those three things and they pursue those three things really, really actively. Now, inside all three of those things, there's this funny thing called unhappiness. Inside each of the macronutrients of happiness, you find discontent and frustration and a lot of suffering. And so the first or I should say the second. uh misunderstanding about happiness is that it's incompatible with unhappiness it's not if you spend your life which many people do today trying to avoid unhappiness trying to avoid and eliminate suffering they will paradoxically miss their own happiness so that's the first thing to understand could Speaker 1 (7:44) you drill a little bit deeper into enjoyment satisfaction and meaning yeah and maybe just put some contour on each of those and go back to unhappiness and suffering and how it relates to all three for sure so so Speaker 2 (7:56) enjoyment um is very much related to pleasure but pleasure is fundamentally a limbic phenomenon i mean if you if you touch in experiments you've done these you've seen these experiments forever the the ventral striatum or the ventral tegmental area You can get this, you can get the stimulation of these parts of the brain that will give you the sense of ebullience, the sense of, you know, immediate joy from anything from your girlfriend saying, Andrew, I love you, or a big bump of cocaine. Not that you would, because the brain is so unbelievably thrifty, right? That's not part of happiness. That's a phenomenon from sort of the Pleistocene brain, from something, the middle Pleistocene, what, 250,000 years ago, saying that's, rewards you, go get more of that is kind of what it comes down to. You don't want to have that as your goal in life. I mean, like the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. My dad said that's the end of America. He Speaker 1 (8:52) was kind of right. I think your dad and my dad either were friends. I don't think we have the same dad, but my dad and no disrespect to the hippies, but my dad had very clear thoughts about how the children of people with that mindset were at a disadvantage because of that message specifically. What Speaker 2 (9:11) will happen, of course, very quickly is that your pleasures, which are fundamentally animal, I mean, your dog, your beautiful new dog, friendly new dog that I just met, he has a limbic system not that different than yours, and he feels emotions that are not that different than yours, right? I mean, there's... He has amygdala, amygdalae. You know, he has a dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. He has a ventral strain. I mean, he's got all these different parts just kind of like we do. But he's not human because he's managed largely by these emotions. And we have this choice. We have this incredible prefrontal cortex, this human cortex that's enormous. Your dog's is wafer thin. Ours is like. 30 % of the weight of our brain. And what that supercomputer allows us to do is to choose between animal impulses and moral aspirations. We get to make that choice. That's a conscious executive choice. When we convert... pleasure into enjoyment, it's because it takes on moral aspiration to it. We take our pleasures and we add people in memory, thereby kind of delivering them to an executive experience that we're managing, that we understand, that we're conscious of, that we can remember, and that's fundamentally social. It's quintessentially human, as a matter of fact. That's what it's all about. So I, you know, I talk to my students and who are graduate students are 28 years old on average and my kids who are 28, 26 and 23, you know, what does this mean? And for most people, what it means is if there's something that makes you feel good because we all have our thing, whether it's highly glycemic carbohydrates or any kind of addictive behavior. And in point of fact, it can be dependence provoking, which many things can they when they when they're when they when they wire into the dopamine system. You've talked about this. ad nauseum so many times I've heard you talk about this. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. Probably it's probably more about pleasure and less about enjoyment. It's not a perfect rule. I like to walk in the woods by myself and say my prayers, but those things aren't addictive. Speaker 1 (11:11) And Speaker 2 (11:12) so that's how to think about it. You need to enjoy your life. And that means there are things that give you pleasure at a metaphysical or physical level, but they also have people in memory and you're managing them and they're not managing you. So that's kind of in a nutshell how I think about enjoyment. Now, many people are bad at that, especially strivers. Who listens to your podcast? People who are serious about their lives. There's nobody that's like, eh, whatever. Who's going to listen to your podcast? We're not a whatever podcast. You're a striver podcast. We should do a title card sometime, How to Speaker 1 (11:45) Whatever. Yeah, I know. That won't go very well. That'll be our April Fool's episode. I know. Right. No, this is not one of those podcasts. You had guys like me on, Speaker 2 (11:52) right? And what strivers, one of the things they often struggle with, if they're very, very, very competitive, if they're ambitious, if they're successful, is that they want to be special more than they want to be happy. And so they want to put points on the board. And if it's not putting points on the board, they're not going to do it. And these are the people that I have to work with to work on the macronutrient enjoyment. Speaker 1 (12:15) Is there fear that were they to... enjoy life more, be happier. I'm probably using these terms incorrectly. Speaker 2 (12:23) No, no, no. Why not? Somehow they would Speaker 1 (12:24) lose their drive. Because as you were describing enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, and by the way, I love this description of enjoyment as, you know, we have animal impulses, but then there's this other end of the spectrum, which are moral aspirations. Speaker 1 (12:39) wouldn't at least some component of a great life be to marry those two things so that your pursuit of these animal impulses actually raised you up morally? That's the ultimate. I mean, we have so many examples now in the media of prominent politicians in particular with all the elections going on where their careers are tanked. I do believe they might have been trying to be good people on average, but they... temptation ruined that career anyway. Totally. And so it's clear it exists in them and in many and everyone, right? Yeah. But the fact that that can happen, it almost feels like a misuse of the animal impulse. Yeah. Is there a way to marry animal impulse to moral aspiration in a way that's seamless or does it always work? No, no. You Speaker 2 (13:29) have just defined enjoyment, proper enjoyment. is one where you are you're doing what you what you think is prudent and natural and good to do is something that you want to see yourself doing and at the same time is pleasurable you know that's why the the best moments over the course of my 35-year marriage are highly pleasurable and extremely enjoyable and it's the kind of thing where i could get you know found out by the press that I'm having another beautiful night with Esther. You know, that's good is what it comes down to. And the truth is, we all struggle with these things because we are biological creatures. You know, I'm fundamentally a behavioral scientist, but psychology is biology. One of the things I've had to retrain in so many of these areas. especially over the past 10 years, is because the biology has become so salient in our field. And one of the things that you find is that the trouble that people actually have is when animal impulse and moral aspiration go in different directions. And one of the great strategies for life is how to point them in the same direction. And sometimes you have to choose. Sometimes you have to choose. And people feel like I should... You know, if it feels good, it must be good for me. But that's how this and so I'm going to do it. That's having the same life goals as protozoa or something, you know. Or if it Speaker 1 (14:48) feels bad, it must be bad for me. Yeah, for example. And Speaker 2 (14:50) there's Speaker 1 (14:50) probably a lot of things that people should, could benefit from doing that are going to feel, quote unquote, painful in the process. Speaker 2 (14:57) Now we're in Speaker 1 (14:57) the Speaker 2 (14:57) gym. I'm a gym rat. So are you. Do you like training? I like training. I really do like training. But it's a funny thing because leg day, I still want to throw up. I've been in the gym. almost every day for 30 years. Wow. And you're in great shape, by the way. I feel good. I Speaker 1 (15:14) mean, it's obvious Speaker 2 (15:14) to anyone watching, but you're Speaker 1 (15:15) - Speaker 2 (15:15) You Speaker 1 (15:15) know Speaker 2 (15:15) what, I feel good, yeah. Is Speaker 1 (15:16) it okay to share? You're 62? Yeah, right. 60 years old, yeah. Great shape. 60 years old, yeah. Speaker 2 (15:20) And I've got genetics that keep me really lean. So it's not like it's any flex that I can stay at 10 % body fat or something like that. That's just nature. But the truth is, I recognize that I need to keep the machine in good shape. Because the brain is part of the machine. And as we both know, hard exercise, picking up heavy things and running around is fundamental to affect management and also to the maintenance of the overall functioning of how the machine works. I don't want to fall prey to, you know, type three diabetes, which is what we're calling Alzheimer's these days. I don't want metabolic disorders that are avoidable. So I actually, I do that. Now, leg day sucks, man. I mean, I've been doing leg day every fourth day. for 30 years. And I still don't like it. I would still skip leg day. Every day would be chest day because everybody likes chest day because it feels better. But the truth is that I do it because I actually know how the muscle protein synthesis works. I know that for hormone balance, leg day is the most important day for these really large muscle groups. And what am I doing? I'm making the decision. to do something that forgoes my comfort, my pleasure, even a moment of my happiness for the moral aspiration that I actually have. And that leads to this important conclusion from the research in this area, which is that Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. This is, it's, you know, we all think it's like if I'm not happy, then something's not right. No, no. It might very well be not right. You know, there are all kinds of suffering that you actually need to grow. as a person, you need negative emotions because negative emotions are an alarm system that show that your reptilian brain has registered signals, sending these signals to your limbic system and setting off alarms from sadness and anger and disgust and fear. That's unpleasant, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong. It means everything's right. How you react to it. can be how you want to in so doing have a better having a better life notwithstanding the fact that it doesn't feel good and that's a life of discipline that's a life of of the kind of behavior that you actually want that's worth moral aspiration Speaker 1 (17:35) I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware. 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If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27 % off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TruMed, which allows you to use your HSA, FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to Speaker 2 (20:39) 20%. Speaker 1 (20:41) I've got this statement that you just mentioned like ringing in my ears in the best way, which is that you're saying this moral aspiration piece has a lot to do with or reflects doing what you want to see yourself doing. I really like that because I think for many people, Speaker 1 (21:02) They want to see themselves doing things that others would approve of. And from a young age, we're told what we should do and why. You need to get dressed up for this event, or you need to sit a certain way, eat a certain way, be polite, and these things, which are all important parts of our training as humans. But there's something really special that happens when we... as you pointed out, when we see ourselves doing something and it feels good and it's a positive self-reflection of the non-egotistical kind, right? And I don't think we talk enough about this because there's so much out there now about how social media is all about comparisons. So people are showing other people, here's what I'm doing. But there's a different version of that where somebody does something that they're proud of and puts it to the internet and... They're seeing themselves do something that they're proud of doing and they get the feedback. And, you know, provided that their ego is in check and they don't let the positive comments go to their head or set them up for disappointment when they don't get as many of them the next time. Things that are wired into those reinforcement circuits. I think that's great. They're seeing themselves exercising. By the way, it could be painting. It could be time with family. It could be being in volunteer and service. And we tend to look at that stuff and say, oh, you know, they're just. doing the display. So my question is to really get the ideal match between this animal impulse and moral aspirations piece, that we see ourselves and experience ourselves doing what we want to see ourselves doing and that we not share it. Because I'm open to the idea that the sharing diminishes it somehow. It Speaker 2 (22:41) can. Yeah. It can. But... fundamentally, I think it's actually quite important that you declare what your moral aspirations are. And part of the reason is because this gives you a commitment bias. So there's a lot of behavioral science about that. A lot of psychology actually talks about commitments bias. When you say, here's the thing that I'm actually going to do, I'm going to finish my Ph.D. This is a Speaker 1 (23:02) big part of weddings. I attended a lot of weddings. It's kind of an amazing thing, this wedding ceremony. It Speaker 2 (23:07) makes you path dependent toward your own aspirations. People Speaker 1 (23:10) stand up and give a bunch of really amazing promises in front of all their friends, and then they get a bunch of gifts. And I'm not cynical about this at all. Like from a reward pathway perspective, it's like you're rewarding the promises that they're making in addition to the union that they're in right then. A lot of the reward is like you're giving them things for their life going forward. Sadly, I have a number of friends who've been doing it. And they, depending on how long ago the wedding was, they often feel quite sheepish about all the gifts. Like they got all these gifts for the promises they made. Now they've changed their mind. Some cases broken those promises, but they've changed their mind. It's not till death do us part. It's now until it got inconvenient enough that we're going to part ways. And it's an incredible, still occurring kind of ancient display of promising. Speaker 1 (24:00) publicly, I'm not going to quit. Yeah, no, totally. Speaker 2 (24:03) This is my person through thick and thin, through sickness and in health and all the things that you actually talk about. You're actually talking in the wedding promises. You're saying it's going to suck sometimes. That's what you're saying. I mean, it's like richer and poorer. And we're going to stick this thing out, despite the fact that we're stating right up front that there's going to be times of poverty, there's going to be times of sickness, there's going to be trouble ahead. And that's basically saying that happiness has unhappiness in it. I'm defining happiness. How am I defining happiness? That I'm going to get 80, 90 years, and as I take my dying breath, I'm going to be looking, I'm like Don Quixote, and this is my dulcinella. And I'm going to be looking into her eyes as I recite the Holy Scriptures and take my dying breath. That's basically what you're saying. And you're defining that as your bliss. I mean, if it weren't your bliss, you'd be like, why are you doing it? I want it. Because that's a good life. That's what you're stating. And you're laying out what actually happiness looks for. And you're saying it's going to be full-on happiness. That's what you're saying. And that's the thing for people to understand, that that's what it comes down to. When you are laying out publicly your moral commitments, when you're actually saying this, what you're saying is you're recognizing that happiness and unhappiness are intertwined and you want the full. You're basically saying, bring it on. It's like courage. It's a declaration of your independence from the world. and your dependence on each other, which is a beautiful thing. It's what you do when you're publicly baptized as an adult. Any time that you're taken into a new religion, there's always these commitments about these moral aspirations that you're making, recognizing, yeah, sometimes this is going to go contrary to my animal impulses. Absolutely. And, you know, this is one of the things that I love about sort of the modern Internet culture. There's a lot to regret. There's a lot that you and I look at like, oh, no. You know, but the other thing I really, really like is this facilitated this wholesale movement of aspiration for excellence. A lot of people, they want to be excellent. You know, it's like this isn't just the hero in podcast. It's not just entertainment, high class entertainment. People want an edge. They want to know, you know, why are they so attracted to the protocols? Protocols toward what? Toward being better. They want to be more successful. They want to be better liked. They want things to go better for them. That's a human drive for excellence. And when people can finally make peace with the fact that your animal impulses will not always and frequently not lead you to excellence, then you can finally be free. Speaker 1 (26:44) Do you think that a lot of the friction out there politically, socially is basically about drawing the line between what is animal impulse and what is moral aspiration. I mean, I don't want to take us too far down the road. No, tell me more. Speaker 2 (27:01) What Speaker 1 (27:02) do you mean? Speaker 2 (27:02) I Speaker 1 (27:02) mean, some of the animal impulses are obvious, right? And they're all, for the neurobiologists, we would say they're very like limbic hypothalamic, right? Speaker 2 (27:10) But, Speaker 1 (27:10) you know, some people would say, okay, like here's the quote unquote traditional model of marriage and morality. Yeah. And some people would say, actually, we want to kind of bend that a certain way where people could have quote-unquote unconventional relationships or unconventional families. I mean, I think everyone would agree that lying, cheating, and stealing is bad. Right. Right? But there's an attempt, I think, to draw a kind of jagged line between moral and immoral that, you know, certain things that are not of biblical, traditional. morality are okay because as long as they're done consensually and in the name of love. Right. Right? And we're not talking about breaking laws here. Some Speaker 2 (27:54) people Speaker 1 (27:54) really push Speaker 2 (27:55) this Speaker 1 (27:55) to the extreme, Speaker 2 (27:56) but that's not what I'm talking about. And Speaker 1 (27:57) I'm staying off specific issues, not to be like politically careful here, but just because I feel like a lot of it is like, where are we going to draw the line between limbic and higher order? In fact, it actually gets inverted where people will say, no, the more evolved way of thinking is past all that, where you can really get beyond this very, you know, black and white. and really say, no, there's all sorts of versions of what love, family, marriage, commitment, child rearing could look like. Pontius Pilate, what is truth? Right. It's very Speaker 2 (28:34) postmodern. Speaker 1 (28:35) Yeah, it is very postmodern. But I think that it, I mean, I feel like this is that, like people are pulling back and forth on this line. Just like in science, people are trying to say, the scientists and doctors that are all, you know. traditional scientists and physicians, they have the knowledge. And then the general components of the general public are saying, actually, during the pandemic, you lied, you know, like a teenager telling their end, like, you need to admit you lied. And then they're like, I didn't lie. You know, and so there's this trying to pull back. We have the torch of truth. No, we have the torch of truth. And of course, there are elements of truth on both sides. Yeah, yeah. Right. But with this, in this case, it's sort of, I think at the extremes, we all understand murder is bad, right? Lying, cheating, stealing, bad, right? But then what constitutes a moral aspiration to one camp is actually a moral insult. Right. And vice versa. So Speaker 2 (29:24) John Haidt, you've had him on the show, right? Yes. Yeah, John Haidt's great. And John Haidt and I go way back. We go back to the early part of the 21st century. And John Haidt and I are just the same age, and we've had sort of parallel careers writing about science of human happiness. The guy's a visionary. He's probably the greatest social scientist of our generation. Speaker 1 (29:44) Wow. Speaker 2 (29:44) He's that great. I mean, he's unbelievable. He wrote a book about moral foundations. And he talked about the fact that there are two moral foundations that everybody has in common. And that's care and fairness. care for others and fairness. Now, we define those things differently. I mean, what does care mean? Does care mean giving everybody, you know, taking care of them at the base level? Or does it mean everybody gets an apartment and free groceries? I mean, you figure out what that means. And that that's a legitimate argument about, you know, what it means. Fairness is really, really different, especially between political polls. where one side is about redistributive fairness and the other side is about meritocratic fairness. You know what fairness actually means. But everybody wants a fair and caring society. And you believe that you should be fair as a parent. You should care for your kids. Then what he shows empirically with his work, which no doubt has a huge neurobiological basis, and I'm sure has a huge genetic basis as well, because these personality characteristics generally do, are usually between, in the identical twin studies, it's usually 40 to 80 % genetic, all the aspects of personality, which is super interesting in and of itself, is that there's three elements of morality that are very different between the political poles. They are loyalty, purity, and authority. And so loyalty is like flag burning is bad, right? You know, I come from a very mostly progressive family, politically progressive family. And if I asked somebody, you know, from my family of origin, what do you think about flag burning? They'd be like, inadvisable, right? As opposed to morally evil. Right, soft answer. Yeah, when it comes, right? And the second is loyalty, you know, loyalty to tribe. And what you find is that people who are more on the... politically conservative side, they have a different sense of loyalty, loyalty towards sports teams. So you find that when you, in these interesting studies that you go into a political conservative's office and you'll find like a sports poster, where in a political liberal's office, you're very, very much less likely to find this is what you find. And then of course, this, where it really has teeth is toward, you know, national identity. you know, where you're loyal toward national. It's like my country, right or wrong, which is one of the reasons you find such a strong political preponderance of one side in the military forces and the American military as opposed to the other. Not to say that one side's right or wrong, but that's just, you know, how it comes down. John Haidt would say that's that's a difference in moral foundations. And the last that you were really touching on here is purity. It's moral purity and the moral purity is about, for example, in sexual matters is very, very profound. You know, and so, you know, there's a there's a you know, I've seen a bumper sticker in San Francisco that says your body may be a temple, but mine is an amusement park. Right. It's funny in its way. Right. But what that is basically saying is it's Speaker 1 (32:33) very what I would call because I'm from the Bay Area, sort of old. older San Francisco, like circa 70s to now. Now there's a kind of a growing conservative movement somewhat tucked into the tech community, although you find a mix of both. You find a mix of Speaker 2 (32:49) both, too. But it's Speaker 1 (32:50) kind Speaker 2 (32:50) of a libertine thing where libertarianism and libertinism diverge, which is a really interesting boundary, too, is what you find. But that actually describes those differences. So each side will say the other side is immoral. No, they're differently moral. And you decide which you think is right. And if you tell me in a structured survey what you think is right on those particular issues, I have a very high degree of certitude in guessing how you vote, Speaker 1 (33:18) actually. Speaker 2 (33:20) Now, some people are in these weird things. You can be a political conservative, but a cultural liberal. Those aren't very many people, but you do find them. They tend Speaker 1 (33:30) to be the political libertarians, as a matter of fact. It's fascinating because ultimately here we're talking about drawing boundaries between different brain areas, at least that's what the neurobiologist in me thinks. But I mean, obviously politics, laws and behavior matters. A lot. It really matters because ultimately people can say all sorts of things about what they believe, what they want to be, but we are ultimately judged on what we do. Right. And I think we probably judge ourselves on the basis of what we do, or ideally we would look at that. Let's talk a little bit about her. We've gone through one macronutrient. Right. One Speaker 2 (34:06) macronutrient. Speaker 1 (34:06) What exercises do you suggest to students to start to explore their own relationship between animal impulse and moral aspiration? Yeah. Speaker 2 (34:18) So one of the things that I talk about is is how they understand leisure. So leisure is what you do and they're not compensating you for in the time that's actually free. How you understand leisure. So and the greatest writer about this is Josef Pieper, the mid 20th century German philosopher. His most important book was Leisure, the Basis of Culture. That's his most inflecting. It's actually a long essay. It's very, very beautiful. He says, I can tell you everything you need to know about a culture. by how they actually use leisure. Interesting. He doesn't want to know what you do for money. He wants to know how you use your time when nobody's paying you. That's because he says that's what reflects who you Speaker 1 (35:00) actually are. That's why I never liked the, oh, you can tell by the books on somebody's shelf. Because books on somebody's shelf doesn't mean they actually read those books. Because they own those books. Right, exactly. Many Speaker 2 (35:10) people Speaker 1 (35:10) own my books who haven't read them. Well, I've spent some time with it. I still need to go. pour through it again. Can't Speaker 2 (35:17) wait to Speaker 1 (35:18) read Protocols, by the way. Oh, thanks. If nothing else, Protocols will cure insomnia. The thing is almost 600 pages long. Thank you. Your book's awesome. I spend some time with it. I want to spend more time with it, in part because it marries theory with practical steps and prompts, not AI prompts, but the kind of prompts you really give oneself. So this thing about leisure is fascinating. Speaker 2 (35:41) Leisure is really interesting. It's like that tells you what you need to know about a culture, but also about a person in a way. And so if you find somebody who's using the leisure time to meet animal appetites, that's one thing. If they're actually using it for personal betterment. for personal betterment, not career betterment, not for the compensation that actually comes from the worldly rewards. There's four worldly rewards, money, power, pleasure, and honor. And if you're doing something such that it doesn't reward you in one of those areas, that actually comes from Aristotle and Aquinas, et cetera, then you're actually doing what he would call proper leisure. You're doing proper leisure toward you know, moral aspiration, which is ultimately the most rewarding thing. That's ultimately what will take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness. That's the theory. And it's and it's it's actually been verified a lot in a lot of these ideas. The best questions that come from the philosophers and then and then the structural mechanisms come from neuroscience. And then the testing of these ideas comes from the behavioral sciences, right? The experiments, et cetera. Then, of course, applying them to your life is a different kettle of fish. And so what he says is that there's kind of three areas that make proper leisure and ultimate enjoyment. Want me to tell you that? Please. Yeah. Number one is deepening relationships on purpose, man. I mean, on purpose. And so leisure is this weekend. I'm envisioning myself. Speaker 2 (37:07) not touching my phone while I'm with my wife, right? Deepening my relationship, being fully present for my wife. And I'm going to go someplace not because I want to chill on the beach, but because I want to be on the beach with the love of my life. So deepening relationships on purpose with a real focus on that. The second is learning something you don't need to learn. And the third is actually developing yourself metaphysically. is your spiritual, your religious life, or your philosophical life. It's to transcend what's going on here. For no other reason than the fact that you seek transcendence. Those are the three areas of proper leisure. And that's how he would say, I know that you're going from pleasure to enjoyment. That's how I know, based on what you're doing, even though you don't Speaker 1 (37:50) have to. I love this. I'll tell you several of the reasons why I love it. One is people from time to time will say, what do you do for fun? It's Speaker 2 (37:59) a Speaker 1 (37:59) very difficult question for me to answer because people might Speaker 2 (38:02) be- Because your work Speaker 1 (38:02) is fun, by the way. My work is so much fun. I know. Like I'm reading this book about sunlight and how the dermatology world is revising their understanding about sun and skin cancer. And I'm loving that. I love my, I mean, I could list it off, but I just say those things to just get people to think about what they enjoy doing. But the word that- you know, keeps coming up in my mind because I have a hard time with the fun thing because yeah, I do other things that are purely recreational is this word enrichment. I mean, it sounds kind of, you know, you know, like somebody is trying to be an academic when they say like, like, what do you do for enrichment? It doesn't, it's not, it's not as natural a question these days as like, what do you do for fun? It's like, what do you do for your own enrichment? It reshapes the question a little bit because the implication is it's not just about immediate pleasure, which fun kind of falls into the group of pleasure. It's about personal Speaker 2 (38:55) excellence. Yeah, like you come out of it Speaker 1 (38:57) better. Right. Not just for having experienced whatever it was the activity was, but there's something carried forward into other things that you do and in a good way. And so the word enrichment feels good. It's Speaker 2 (39:11) the Speaker 1 (39:11) reason why even though I was in the sciences. As an undergraduate, I decided to take a course in Greek mythology and loved it, loved, loved, loved it. That was leisure. And it turns out it was neuroscience too, right? Years later, we talk about the myth of the Cyclops is all about anger. And it has everything to do with the lack of depth perception that when you have one eye versus two eyes. It turns out like the Greeks like really understood stereopsis and depth perception. There, I couldn't help myself. In any case. That's interesting. So like this notion of enrichment. And I love that. in the example you gave of going to the beach with a friend or with a spouse or someone else you care about, it's not about your own experience of it. You said not just because you want to be there, but because you're actually there. That's a physical grounds for creating something else. So it's not really about the beach. It's about what you leave the beach with. That's right. And it's not just memories of the beach. You actually... both change as a consequence of being there, maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways. But you've enriched the relationship. And so the beach becomes incidental. When people talk about wanting to go out drinking, what I want to know is, is it about the drinking or the people you're drinking with? Speaker 2 (40:19) That's what it comes down to. Now, I strongly recommend that people reconsider that decision. I mean, I've heard you. Two drinks a week is the safe level. I've got it, Andrew. I've got it. More than Speaker 1 (40:29) that's probably not a good Speaker 2 (40:30) idea for most people. I'm Speaker 1 (40:31) at Speaker 2 (40:31) zero. You know, I'm a non-drinker because it's the right cadence for my life. But, you know, people who do use alcohol responsibly, I'm not. I wish I were a person who could use alcohol responsibly. I'm not, right? So I don't, and I don't use it at all. But, you know, when people say I'm going to go out drinking, I mean, I don't know if that's pleasure or enjoyment. I don't know if that's animal impulse or moral aspiration. I need more information. Speaker 1 (40:56) I Speaker 2 (40:57) need to know the reason for that. When people are talking about getting a beach house, I'm going to get a beach house. I don't know whether or not that's animal impulse towards social comparison, toward actually a scoreboard effect so I can actually feel like I mean something. That's all animal impulse. All it is, that's just like your troglodyte brain actually saying you're not good enough unless you have a beach house like old Bill over there at the office, right? But on the other hand, if you tell me it's like I got to create bait so that my kids and grandkids are here a lot. Okay, now I'm listening. Now I'm actually paying attention. And so a lot of things that people will say, I need a little bit more information such that I can categorize it in the right way, whether or not we're on the right side, we're on the animal impulse side or the moral aspiration side, whether we're on the pleasure side or the enjoyment side, whether it's actually going to bring happiness. Speaker 1 (41:46) I'm pausing because I have so many questions about this, but I want to make sure we touch on the other macronutrients because otherwise I'm going to encourage you to give a... a tutorial on how to really maximize every single choice in not just my life, but listeners' lives. Enjoyment Speaker 2 (42:05) protocols. Yeah. We Speaker 1 (42:06) should have leisure protocols. Absolutely. You know, we all know that like one of the major pillars is social connection and relationships. But the idea that leisure is part of that as a substrate for enriching those is obvious once we hear it, but it reframes everything. If exercising with somebody. you know, turns out to be a way you deepen the relationship, which actually has been my experience with a lot of male friends, frankly. Yeah, totally. One of the best ways to get to know somebody in my experience is to have an intellectual conversation with them, like really deep dive with them or to go do something difficult. Yeah, yeah. Rob, my producer and close, close friend, he's sitting to my left right now. I mean, one of the first things we ever did was like go for a run where he kicked my butt. And by the way, a Speaker 2 (42:50) Vanderbilt graduate. Yeah. Very pleased to see that. Yeah. Speaker 1 (42:54) And I don't recommend people box, but years ago I boxed Speaker 2 (42:57) and Speaker 1 (42:57) I had Speaker 2 (42:57) a Speaker 1 (42:57) spa on Wednesday nights. Don't recommend it. Yes, I wore headgear. Yes, I probably took some damage. I don't recommend it. But you feel so close to people that you actually tried to hurt and they tried to hurt you, but with rules. Yeah. It's an amazing, it's very primitive. Yeah. And yet you, there's a bond there that it's obviously nonverbal. It's a lifelong bond. Yeah. You see that person the next time, and it's like, especially if they played fair and they hurt you, you're like, yeah, like we know one another. I've seen you, you know, there's a respect level. I'm not suggesting Speaker 2 (43:32) people do this, but. You added people in memory to a strong experience, thus rendering it enjoyable and being part of happiness. Yeah. In point of fact, it wasn't strictly pleasurable, but that wasn't exactly the point. Speaker 1 (43:44) No. Yeah. No, the point was to suffer together in some way. There's a great book