am i enjoying today is it all well go to go to that arthur because that's an a grappling that i find even very wise people having with the delayed gratification aspect yeah i don't want to delay it all out here that we may never get to so we want some but but give us reconcile that a little bit well

that that really is the difference between pleasure and enjoyment and it sounds like you know kind of splitting hairs right but it's not it's not logic chopping really the way that it works is Pleasure is is a phenomenon that proceeds from a part of your brain called the limbic system.

That's a that's a console of tissue deep inside your brain.

That's really one job, which is taking information from the outside, which you see and smell in here, which is all autonomic.

You're not conscious of it necessarily.

And turning those stimuli into emotions.

Now, why do we want to do that? Because emotions are kind of a universal language that tell us, that can tell our conscious brain to either avoid something or to approach something.

It's not resonating.

Okay, so tell us about the right brain, left brain, how we're atrophying the

right brain.

Exactly right, well done.

So this is the theory of hemispheric lateralization, which is a fancy way of saying, we gotta get tenure in academia, so we gotta make a fancy thing.

So Ian McGilchrist, who's a great neuroscientist at Oxford and practicing psychiatrist and psychotherapist, as a matter of fact, So he deals with human problems, but he wants to know the science of how the brain is actually working when we're suffering.

He has brought back an old idea that the two halves of the brain do different things.

In the old days, you'd say the right side is the artsy side and the left side is the analytical side, right? That's not right.

Look, poor countries have the internet and smartphones.

But we like to want that.

But we wanna be happy.

We wanna be happy, and we deep down think that we can actually be happy.

So think about what that actually is saying.

We have this vision of actual unremitting happiness, and we want it even though intellectually we know we can't get it.

Now, philosophers say, and, and it's a good definition, of evidence that something exists is hunger for it.

So evidence that water exists is thirst.

[laughs]

Yeah.

A lot of young people listen to this podcast, and when they're coming out of school and you're giving this advice for a, for a gap year, that's great advice by the way.

It was a gift to me that I couldn't continue in college, that I had done everything wrong, because I was able to back up and assess what I was actually trying to do with my life.

You know, I was the first person, you know, people are like, "Ah, I'm the first person to go to college in my family." I was the first person not to get a PhD in my family, you know? And so it was very controversial when I, when I told my parents, "Yeah, I think I'm, I think I'm gonna go on the road as a traveling French horn player." They're like, "Is that a thing? Is that even a thing?" My dad was a college professor.

His dad was a college professor.

A- and it was, it was great because I actually, by the time I was in my late 20s, I'd grown up and, and that actually made me a better father by the way.

I've got three adult kids.

So that seems unfair.

Yeah.

A lot of young people listen to this podcast, and when they're coming out of school and you're giving this advice for a, for a gap year, that's great advice, by the way.

It was a gift to me that I couldn't continue in college, that I had done everything wrong, because I was able to back up and assess what I was actually trying to do with my life.

You know, I was the first person, you know, people are like, "Ah, I'm the first person to go to college in my family." I was the first person not to get a PhD in my family, you know? And so it was very controversial when I, when I told my parents, "Yeah, I think I'm, I think I'm gonna go on the road as a traveling French horn player." They're like, "Is that a thing? Is that even a thing?" My dad was a college professor.

His dad was a college professor.

A- and it was, it was great because I actually, by the time I was in my late 20s, I'd grown up and, and that actually made me a better father, by the way.

I've got three adult kids.

So that seems unfair.

... that people don't realize.

Yeah, yeah.

So the, the way that the brain works is it's kind of...

You can...

There, there's this ancient theory of the...

I s- It's a way of explaining how the brain works called the triune brain, where the most primitive parts of your brain are called the reptilian brain.

That's the brain stem in the part of the back of your head where you perceive things below your level of consciousness, and it governs all the stuff that you do that you're not aware of, like your heartbeat and your breathing.

Mm.

And this is sort of the next level version of that.

Yeah, it is.

And that's actually what we have to get used to.

So the telephone did that as well.

If you look at what the New York Times was writing about when telephones were starting to be introduced, they said, nobody's going to go out of the house anymore.

You know, people are just going to hold a phone up at church and then not go to church.

That's how people were talking about it.

I just don't see how

go?

Well, it's actually initiated by them.

They wanted to bring our family more together.

And they noticed.

I mean, they're the younger generation.

They rebel in their own way.

They rebelled in kind of a good way.

But I do think that on some level, if there's a good relationship, don't they owe something?

So there's these different forces through history, right? Historians will argue about this, but there's a theory of the great man of history thing where it's like, oh, you have the Einsteins, you have the Teslas, you have the Genghis Khans and the Caesars, right? They determine the flow of history.

And then there's the other point of view that, no, there are these massive forces at play, you know, demographics and geography and so on.

And then the particular great man doesn't matter.

They just come and go.

Napoleon doesn't matter.

They would have been somebody else.

And yet people are just like submerged up to the bottom of their nostrils, basically drowning in So how, yeah, is it a battle to sort of stay out of the news when you're saturated in it?

Yeah.

which I think you kind of have to fish for it.

I think you have to work for it to get with that statement.

But, oh, there's such a thing as too much discipline.

And if you have so much discipline in your life, then you won't be enjoying your life.

And cool, yep.

If you are so disciplined that you never go out and you never eat a pizza, cool, you might be bummed out.

literally takes more discipline to not do the

thing.

How do you advise people do it? How do they break free?

Yeah, well, any addiction.

And the number one is you need to understand what's going on.

You know, for people who are addicted to alcohol, it's very, very helpful for them to understand how behavioral and chemical addictions work.

They can say, oh, that's what's happening inside my brain.

I've been sort of subjugated to this thing.

And so I have a whole chapter in this book on the neuroscience of how our brains are broken by technology.

die for this baby.

you have to have an answer to the question.

Why are things happening the way they are in my life? Things are happening all around me all the time.

Why? Part of meaning is having an answer to that.

Maybe that's your religious answer because of the mind of God.

Maybe that's your scientific answer because these are the laws of the universe.

Maybe you're a conspiracy theorist and say because powerful people are doing these things.

Why is it the case that modern people confuse the two? Part

of the reason is because what strivers they get into, there's actually a pathology that is in the middle of this.

I'm in a cage and I'm tired of it.

I'm tired of actually being a wholly owned subsidiary of that company or this behavior or this culture.

I'm tired of it.

I'm not going to put up with it.

You need to fight back by rebelling.

That's number one.

There's a meme online of a guy starves to death even though he had food because he couldn't watch YouTube because his phone had run out of

battery.

Make sure you get your coffee in the first five minutes.

So you get a big dose of caffeine and make sure that you're looking and scrolling on your phone while you're eating your first meal.

That's a really important thing to do.

Make sure that your whole first hour is neurocognitively programmed to be on the screen.

Then make sure that you have a remote job.

It's very important that you go to work back in your bedroom and you look at a screen and you look at a screen all day long so that your colleagues are kind of squares on the Zoom screen.

If

I had your hair, I'd be President of the United States right now.

Mm-hmm.

It's who I am as a person.

I don't actually need that.

And, and by the way, there are all ve- very compelling explanations that are not consistent or necessarily consistent with the idea that there's an all-knowing, all-loving God.

I mean, Stephen Cave at Cambridge has written a, has a really beautiful book called Immortality.

Have you actually seen it? Have you read it? And, and he's a philosopher.

And he talks about the fact that the human brain is able to, is able to cap, uh, to capture the concept of physical death.

Mm-hmm

of my life isn't raised up.

So Aquinas, the good doctor, he's the patron saint of scholars, as a matter of fact.

But he's really the most important, arguably the most important philosopher of the Middle Ages because he brought Aristotle to modern people.

I mean, until then, until the 13th century, everybody read Plato.

But Aquinas said, no, no, no, no, no.

The student of Plato is the one we need to be reading.

He's much greater, and that's Aristotle.

So for yourself, your pilgrimage that you took, what was the conversations you were having? What were the messages that were coming to you as you were going through that?

Hmm.

Humans are really funny.

I mean, uh, you know, my dog Chucho doesn't like to struggle for his rewards.

You know, if you could just have him lay around all day and, you know, occasionally put his, flop his head over into the bowl and eat, that would be the blissful existence for my dog Chucho.

But because he can't follow the divine path, I don't think, we as humans, we need to struggle.

We need to strive.

We need to sacrifice.

Say more.

Brilliant book.

It was a, it was a...

It...

I learned a lot.

And it was based...

It was a very personal book because, you know, I was... my life was changing a lot, and I wanted to understand how the back half of my life, the second half of my life, was gonna be really meaningful and successful in its own way.

And I was interviewing a lot of people, and I was interviewing this woman, this icon on Wall Street, who's incredibly rich, incredibly successful, um, one of the most famous women in the world in finance, and she's my... she was my age at the time.

Mm.

Which really takes me to my first question, because you've spent decades studying human happiness, and I just wondered, are people actually less happy right now, or is it just that we know so much? We can know and we see what everybody else is doing.

Yeah.

The answer to that is that people are less happy than they've been in the past, and we've been keeping data on, on average levels of happiness across 150 countries around the world since 1970.

Now, some places are doing just fine, but the, you know, developed, the OECD countries, the United States, where we're sitting right now, and, and your home, the UK, have been declining in happiness almost every year since about 1990, and there's some reasons for that.

There's kinda the climate of happiness and there's the weather, which are two different [laughs] phenomena.

And the climate of happiness has to do with the fact that we're ticking down by half a percentage point per year in the percentage of people who say they're very happy about their lives, and that has to do with how the people practice or don't practice any spirituality or faith, how family relationships are getting attenuated.

People are less likely to get married and have kids.

What do you say, though, when somebody is completely uncertain and they don't know what's going to make them feel better? As somebody who has really studied this, what's the f- what, what do you tell people?

What, what do you think a good settlement would look like in terms of the mental health of kids?

kids?Yeah, I think what a good settlement would look like actually is something along the lines of more age restriction.

I think it's actually important to move the age up.

I think 16.

John Haidt has really come ...

You probably had him on the show.

Jonathan Haidt at New York University.

How should Americans be thinking about it?

And it's stuck to your hand, right?

So imagine you're on the train and this is actually happening.

You got nothing to do.

You got nothing to read.

So you're just looking out the window.

Sheep, trees, right? That, it feels like a waste of time.

And it's actually unpleasant in the short term.

Yeah.

... work, and yet allow ourselves to be away from the infinite scroll and open to boredom that could help us grow and feel more creative and help us find that meaning you're talking about.

I recommend three things that are based in really the cutting edge studies in this area at this point.

Number one is not looking at your phone for the first hour of the day, which means don't have it by the side of your bed.

That neurocognitively programs you for the day in very, very positive ways.

I recommend going for a walk, and I recommend doing that at least a half hour before dawn.

That's called a Brahma Muhurta in Sanskrit, an ancient Vedic idea that there's special properties of getting up before the dawn.

And it's interesting because new neuroscience research absolutely backs this up.

First, why do things happen in my life? Second, why am I moving in this direction? And third, why does my life matter?

Can you walk through that for people who aren't familiar?

Yeah.

So this book basically has the seven habits of people who get happier as they age.

And one thing to keep in mind that's really important that I found over the course of my research is that there's a lot of similarity in the patterns of happiness over the first part of their life.

So generally speaking, adults, they kind of all pack together, and the older you get, the more that people diverge.

And so you see that people after about 65 go into two groups.

One gets happier and happier, and the other gets less and less and less happy.

So let's at least include, like, love or romance and money and maybe other common things people think are associated with happiness, and how do they fit into the picture?

... near, that, now, that, if you were to give me a real-life scenario, that, that seems near impossible.

It's so hard.

It's so hard, but, you know, that is what the great sages have always talked about in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam.

That's what they always talk about, is learning to love the will of the divine even when you don't like it.

That's what it comes down to.

No, that's the, that's the fundamental teaching, love your enemies.

Love your enemies.

Yeah.

And, and give me an example of the parts that we've vacated that we shouldn't have vacated.

Well, the brain is divided into two hemispheres.

This is a theory, a neuroscientific theory, very cutting-edge, that comes from the work of Iain McGilchrist, a, a neuroscientist at Oxford, called hemispheric lateralization.

Just a fancy way of saying the brain has two hemispheres and they do different things.

The left hemisphere of the brain is the how to and what side that's based on information to solve problems.

That could be very hard problems, but you can solve them.

So your car is a left hemispheric complicated problem.

Do, do I just live my life and it will show up, or are there things I can do to try to find it?"