#841: Arthur Brooks — Finding The Meaning of Your Life, The Poet's Protocol, The Holy Half-Hour, and Why Your Suffering is Sacred

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/21f76dbca95ea096

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers, people who are exceptionally good in one or more dimensions, to figure out how they do it. How can you take frameworks, influences, books, habits, and copy and paste
From their lives into
your own. My guest today is
A very impressive full stack.
human. He walks the talk. He's not just a commentator. He's a player on the field. And I have observed
How he acts.
and creates meaning in his own life in multiple dimensions with great admiration. Arthur Brooks, Arthur Brooks is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also the host of the weekly podcast Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.
and a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly How to Build a Life column. Who wouldn't like a column titled How to Build a Life. His next book, The Meaning of Your Life
Finding purpose in an age of emptiness.
Will be released on March thirty first, twenty twenty six.
And in this conversation, Arthur and I traverse a lot of terrain. I dig into his routines.
morning routines.
Evening routines.
Work out routines, blood flow restriction.
Bands and technology for greater gains and fewer injuries as you age. I really get into a lot of the tactical, and we also discuss how you could take something that seems esoteric.
Creating meaning.
and turn it into frameworks that you can apply.
To counteract.
The wave and trend of nihilism in the face of overwhelming noise and doom scrolling, and so on. This is
Of course.
a topic, a question, a dilemma that has faced humans that has been discussed for millennia, but it has never been more important, in my opinion. And we cover a lot that you can take.
and use in this conversation. So let's get to it. Arthur Brooks, you can find him at arthurbrooks.com. We will link to all of the socials. He's easy to find. Without further ado,
Please enjoy.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I'll see you personally quite.
No it is.
Like the reality.
cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscopy.
No
Arthur Brooks, we meet again. Nice to see you too. Nice to see you. You know, glad to see your the vascularity in your arms is still visible even through the long sleeve shirt. Yeah.
Because
Every woman wants a vascular man. You know I only take my cues from the internet. Exactly. My wife every day she says
I love you, you're so vascular.
Could really take this a lot of directions, but
I'm gonna take a hard left from vascularity.
And
I'm gonna try to pronounce Brahma murta.
Brahma Mahurta. Okay, Brahma Mahurta. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to offer
S
Candy.
Much like maybe an E T, putting the Reese's
pieces on the floor to lure E. T. out. I want to bring
my listeners and diehards into the conversation with
Yeah.
A morning routine.
And we'll we'll talk about evening routines at the end as bookmarks, and then we're gonna dive into all sorts of stuff.
But what is
Brahma Mahurta.
And
Could you describe your personal
Morning or
I do have a very strong and very disciplined morning routine.
And I studied love and happiness. So it's not as if I'm going deep into the physiology of actually how I can have the best amount of muscle mass and minimum amount of body fat.
I want to have more love and happiness in my life, and it's not easy.
So I'm a
Specialist in human happiness.
Because it's hard for me.
You know, that's the first thing to I know everybody who does research on happiness.
in the psychology behavioral science world, they're doing it for a reason.
It's sort of me search more than research, but uh one of the things that I found is that discipline and an understanding of your own
Human physiology.
Biology and neuroscience is critical for actually becoming a happier person.
So I have a morning routine that I dedicate to being both more productive and
Having higher well being.
So I'm managing mood because high negative affect is characteristic of my personality.
And I also need to be really productive because the morning hours are when you're most productive, especially in creative stuff. Almost everybody experiences this.
And that starts with what you just mentioned, which is called the Brahma Vurta. And I'd like a lot in India. I go to India every year. I have spiritual teachers, but also
I'm very interested in behavioral science in the Vedic tradition.
They came to a lot of truths way before Western social science actually came upon this. And one of the ideas was Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time.
Now a mahurta is forty eight minutes long.
So two mahurta is the Brahma Mahurta is an hour and thirty six minutes before dawn.
And the whole
idea going back thousands of years.
is you get up an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn and you'll be more creative, more in touch with the divine.
More productive.
And happier.
This was always the contention.
So of course it's been put to the test in modern behavioral science research.
And sure enough.
We don't know if it's two mahortas is the right number of mohortas, but the whole point is getting up before dawn.
has incredible impacts on productivity, focus, concentration, and happiness.
If you're getting up when the sun is warm, you've lost the first battle.
for mood management and productivity is what it comes down to.
So my days always start before dawn. Now I usually
Set the clock for four thirty in the morning, which is a lot before dawn. Who knew that Jako Willink was such a fan of Vedic traditions? He also wakes up at four thirty. Four thirty's a good time.
for a lot of different reasons. You try to retrofit your schedule to what you need to do for sure.
And that's a long time before dawn in the winter, and not that long before dawn in the summer. And our listeners in Helsinki are like, What do I do in July? I mean, okay.
You know, you have to tailor the routines to what you're doing.
But it's very clear that this is good for productivity and very good for happiness. And then the most important thing is what do you do right after that? Yeah, what do you do? I pick up everything to run around. Okay. So the most important room in my house is Jim.
And I've always had a good gym in my house down in the basement of my house. Now, down in the basement of my house is also living one of my kids and his wife and their two sons.
So I have to be real I have to be real quiet. I can't be clanking around down there because
So I'm like, I don't want to wake up my grandchildren, but you know, I do generally speaking two thirds resistance, one third
Zone two.
But I tailor that to what my day is gonna look like. So if I have a sedentary day.
I'll do Motor Zone Two to start the day. And if I know I'm walking around, I'm walking around campus or whatever I have to do, I know I'm gonna be walking seven or ten miles that day.
I'll do all resistance.
And so that really depends or if I'm going on a hike with my wife on Saturday or something.
But that's seven days a week. I do an hour in the gym seven days a week. What would the let's just say prototypical
Two thirds resistance, one third
zone to or whatever the the ratio might look like as a template.
What would that look like? What type of exercises, free weights, equipment, kettlebells, what type of zone two do you like?
Because for instance like with zone two, it's like I travel a lot.
Stationary bikes can be a real hassle because of the fitting.
But then all right, maybe you use a treadmill with an incline with a rook
Sack or something like that.
I'd just love to know this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm very old school. So my resistance training actually I learned the routines that I do.
When I was in my thirties. I really started lifting when I was in my thirties. And you know, my dad died, and I I changed a lot of the things in my life. I quit drinking alcohol in my thirties.
And I did a lot of things differently than I hadn't done before because I wanted to not have
the future that I saw, you know, in the the windshield of my life.
And one of the things that I did was I started getting serious about my fitness and going to the gym.
And I thought to myself, you know, what's my goal?
My goal is not to, you know, turn into a statue and, you know, be admired. I mean, I'd been married for a long time at that point. That was
Sort of done. And and besides my wife doesn't care. She just wants me to be happy and healthy.
I wanted to be doing that in my seventies.
I wanted to be healthy in my seventies. I wanted to be hanging out with my wife and you know, dandling my eleventh grandchild on my knee.
when I was seventy eight years old. So what I did was I've always been on tour.
I've always traveled constantly all throughout my career.
Every city I'd go to, I'd find the oldest iron gym I could find. Why? Because that's where the old dudes train.
That's where like the the shredded guys train.
And now I'm the old guy, right? So my wife says that you know, sleeping with me is like holding a leather sack of ropes.

Which is
I think it's a compliment, I'm not sure, you know.
But
I've been married decades, Tim. Decades. But I would go to these
Iron. Better than a leather sack of lard, right? Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's like ropes. Yeah. So I go to these gyms for 78 year old guys who are completely shredded. They look like you know old roosters.
And they're they're working out and I would say
Teach me.
Teach me, Maestro.
You know the sensei?
Teach me what you do. And they would give me this advice. And I followed that advice assiduously. And so what it is is
I'm old school push pull legs.
Don't use a bar.
And is it push pull legs every workout? No, it's push pull legs on different days. Got him. It's not a pure bro split.
But it's near on. Yeah. Right. Making sure that you're not getting heroic with the amount of weight.
You're making sure that you're using dumbbells because you can get full range of motion.
You're super careful about your joints.
If you have any pain in your joints, you back off.
You do for volume, you do more reps as opposed to more weight.
And always be doing it that way and dial it down the actual weight, dialing up the reps as you get older.
And these are these basic ideas. So it's push pull legs and then I'm doing usually
Somewhere between
twenty minutes and forty minutes of zone two cardia, which I have an elliptical machine because it's super easy on the joints.
And I every place, every hotel's got an elliptical machine. I've got a nice elliptical machine at home, and that's what I'm doing. And
This is an hour. A lot of the time I'm doing it without headphones.
It's important because you need to concentrate.
To begin with, that's your most creative time.
That's like taking an hour long shower.
You get your best ideas if you work out without headphones.
There's a lot of good neuroscience on that as well.
And that's four forty five to five forty five in the morning every single day. That's the one thing I can really count on is always gonna be good.
Always gonna be good.
Do you record your workouts?
Videotape my workouts? No, in uh any type of like workout journal. Or is it so intuitive at this point that you're like
I really know since I'm using dumbbells and dumbbell should be consistent from place to place.
I can tell you what I did on this day in two thousand one.
Meaning you remember it? No or meaning it's written down. Okay. Wait a second Yeah, no no no I'm not there's some people who are like that. Sort of a Rainman deal. Yeah. Well, for instance, people you wouldn't expect Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah.
Loves chess.
And when I first interviewed him, I was talking to his right hand man, he said, Oh, he plays chess daily.
with X number of people over the course of a week or two, and he keeps track of every game and every score in his head.
That's amazing. So no, I'm not doing that. But I can tell you, I mean, I've got I have journals that go back and you know, I write it down.
And so I know, you know, what's on what day and
You know what I did.
There's a whole lot of things that I keep records of for sure, just so I understand my own progress in life, making sure I'm not making regress in life.
And for some reason I got into the pattern of writing down every single workout going back, you know, until
Back to Mar.
Thirties.
And now I'm sixty one years old, so that's a lot of date books.
Yeah, I have workouts going back to sixteen and I still I still have to keep them. Yeah, I don't know why I keep them, but I have them.
I can tell you behaviorally why people do that. I mean, what you want is record of progress because that's one of the great secrets to human happiness.
You never arrive. Arrival gives you almost nothing.
But of progress toward the goal.
And this is a record of Tim's progress going all the way back to sixteen. It's evidence that you're a better man than when you were sixteen years old. Let's hope. Certainly not as strong as I was when I was in my twenties, but
Still.
Zone two. Yeah. Not dying. No. Yeah. Things like this. No, it's fantastic. It's really a great way to start the day. And there's a lot of research, once again, on on this is
Especially important for mood management. So half of the population is above average in negative affect.
Negative affect is
Strong negative
Manifestation of mood.
And obviously if it's the median, half has to be above that and half has to be below. And I'm way above average in negative affect. I'm above average in positive affect, too.
Yeah, I mean you're a mad scientist.
Which is typically a poet. We talked about this last time. We did this. You are a poet. So you're below average positive. Below average positive.
High peak negative. High peak negative. So I'm at the ninetiet percentile in negative mood.
And there are ways.
Typical ways that people m self manage negative mood.
that are really, really bad for you.
Like drugs and alcohol.
Like internet use, like pornography.
Horrible.
Negative mood management.
Workaholism.
Awful.
People distract themselves.
The amygdala.

largely m manages fear and anger.
But the amygdala also manages attention.
And so if you can distract yourself with something you can count on, like your work.
What you're effectively doing is you're managing your anger and
Sure.
By redirecting the activity that makes a lot of checks. Yeah.
But there's good ways to do it. Like
Developing your spirituality and picking up heavy things and running around. So we're gonna stick on the heavy things for a second here. As well as the elliptical because we're not even done with that. We're not even done. So we have the waking early, let's call it four thirty. That for me early seven thirty this morning. I was very pleased with myself.
After arriving from travel at four thirty night on the West Coast. Exactly, exactly. It's four thirty somewhere. And
We've covered that briefly. For zone two, are you wearing a heart rate monitor? Are you doing the talk test? How are you tracking test.
Talk to talk test. It's just keeping it as simple as possible.
I
tend to go insane if I'm over measured.
And so that's one of the reasons they use very, very simple, you know, biometrics and very simple
I'm gonna need to move up to something better at some point, but if I get too much data
I'm in trouble.
I mean it's like having
Seven different drafts
A piece of writing you're working on. Yeah.
Now what do you do? I mean in in a sense there's data and then there's information which you need to analyze.
So there is a point of diminishing returns.
I
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Tim.
Yeah.
Talk to us for people, just very briefly. Peter Tia has videos on this of himself on a stationary by demonstrating it on social media if you want to try to find them.
But in effect, and please tell me I'm off base with how you approach it.
You are able to while you're
In this zone too on say an elliptical stationary bike treadmill.
You're able to speak or have a conversation with very short sentences.
But you don't really want to. Right.
That's exactly right. Zone three, you're too out of breath to have a normal conversation. Zone four, you're gasping for
Zone one is just you're strolling.
Is kind of what it comes down to. And your heart rate.
to be in the zone two is usually around a hundred and twenty beats per minute.
And I'll also do some
periods of you know some intervals in that
I'll do two or three intervals during a half hour.
zone two cardio sessions well take it up to one hundred and sixty beats per minute for a full minute.
Bring it back. I'll do some of that hit training while I'm doing it. But 120 beats per minute is a really, really easy thing to ascertain because it's I'm an old musician.
That's the speed of a Souza march.
A what?
Susa March. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun that's twenty beats per minute.
That's how you know. I mean when you put out your elliptical echorse, I think this is the lead in music. This is my bump music, man.
Before we get to after the exercise, for folks who might be interested in really diving into this, number one, Peter has a lot on it.
Number two, if you want to get nerdy.
The
Morpheus device has been recommended to me.
by folks like Andy Galpin and others. There are other options, but that seems to be a pretty good device. So
In terms of
developing if you're not a former French horn player.
the intuition of what is a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty beats per minute.
you can do much like I've already done with, say
glucose readings or ketone readings, I know where I am.
But I'm not yet there with heart rate.
The Morpheus is a nice tool for learning what it feels like to be at.
one twenty versus one thirty versus whatever it might be.
All right, you have your workout. After the workout.
What is your money? I get cleaned up.
Then I go to mass.
I'm a Catholic. I go to Mass every day.
And that's the experience of transcendence.
Which my path is not the only path. So everybody's gotta go to math. That's not gonna be effective because that's not for everybody. There is a period of
Reflection and transcendence, that's very, very important for not just mood management for productivity that's going to follow. And there's a lot of neuroscience behind why that is effective.
But for me it's also an o opportunity because that's my wife gets up at six.
And when I'm home, I'm home about half the time. I'm on tour about half the time home.
I'm home every week.
So I don't go on tour for months at a time. I go on tour for days at a time.
Which means that I've always got
A flight home and that's inconvenient, but that's actually a part of my life protocols is making sure I spend every single weekend at home.
I'm out maybe four weekends a year.
And so that means I have lots of days at home. I have at least three or four
mornings at home and we start today at uh at six thirty mass. The two of us do that.
Haven't we?
Daily Mass is half an hour. You know, Sunday Mass is an hour.
But you know, daily masses happen. You know, during the week
After thirty minutes, no souls are saved.

According to science, no.
So we do that and that's a period of prayer reflection. Some people prefer vipassana meditation.
Our friend Brian Holliday does a lot with actually studying historic philosophers, but you need what the ancients would call the holy hour.
And they would be a full hour. I it for me it's the holy half hour.
And that really works. And it's really good for my relationship. And it's very good for
It's incredibly good for focus and concentration.
So I wanna bookmark
Just
to give a shameless plug for our first conversation. Yeah. For people who are like, Oh yeah, okay, well, I didn't grow up Catholic. You didn't grow up Catholic. Your parents thought that your conversion was an act of youthful rebellion.
Which it might have been. It might have been, but it's fair. But it's stuck. Yeah.
So if you want the backstory.
Including some wild stories, then listen to our first conversation. So I'm basically the equivalent of like a freaked out hippie who, you know, went to India and got converted.
And practiced
an exotic religion for the rest of my life, but my exotic religion is Catholicism.
Depending on where you start, it's pretty exotic. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Alright, so you have the
Holy half hour. Yeah.
mean our routines have a lot of similarities. Uhhuh. Although the flavors are slightly different. We could talk about that. Probably the neurophysiological effects are the same.
Very
Very similar, I would imagine. So after the holy half hour, what happens?
After the holy half hour now, I've taken no nutrition except for
salty water with some, you know, a high dose. I take high dose creatine monohydrate with my
My work out drink.
What time does?
High dose for me is 15 to 20 grams a day. That is a small dose.
The first five is for, you know, muscle protein synthesis or volumization of muscles, which is really good for your workout.
the others for this just exploding area of research on the biological benefits of it, the neurobiological benefits of it.
And for me that's really, really important because you know, I'm a crummy sleeper.
And and you know, Rhonda Patrick has done a lot of stuff on how creatine is really good when you don't sleep.
It's also really good because I'm gonna I'm trying to bank neurologically.
four hours of is mostly creativity.
I have to set myself up for optimal creativity. And that's one of the best ways to do it. That's the best supplement that I've been able to find that affects my creativity later on in the morning.
So I'm adding that to my pre workout drink.
Taking no caffeine. Yeah.
This is important. I don't take any caffeine to wake up. Huberman's right on this. This is very contested in literature.
About A to A adenosine.
And how caffeine blocks adenosine receptors.
But I really believe and Huberman believes this, but I find this the most compelling explanation, and it absolutely works for me.
I don't use caffeine to wake up.
I use caffeine to focus.
Because what I want is I actually want
circulating adenosine to metabolize and to clear endogenously.
And I want lots and lots of clarity.
plenty of open parking spots for the adenosine receptors that I can then fill two to three hours after I wake up with caffeine.
This is just
Modafinel.
At this point. This is just vacuuming
Oh this is gonna vacuum. No, no, I know. Yes, I that's I'm not that. So it's vacuuming the dopamine into the prefrontal cortex. What ADHD drugs do is that they keep more dopamine in the synapse.
Especially in the prefrontal cortex, such that you can focus.
You have more concentration and you have more creativity.
And caffeine is great for this. A lot of people like nicotine.
I don't like nicotine only because I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes.
early on in my life.
All the way through my twenties, I was a smoker.
I blew it.
Well, a lot of people are step by step blowing it also.
With
First microdosing nicotine, and then lo and behold
Since it's sort of dance partners in addictive potential with heroin. Yeah. Then those microdoses become something along.
The line of mesodoses and then before you know it, you're addicted to pretty soon. Nicot all nicotine all the time. Exactly. And and you know, caffeine is highly addictive as well. But as a psycho stimulant
It's better studied.
It's much, much easier to self manage. I you know, I get usually about three hundred and eighty milligrams of caffeine. Oh, that's decent. It's decent. Holy cow. That's a um all right, that's a venti dark roast from Starbucks. I grew up in Seattle town. I mean three hundred and eighty. Yeah. For a lot of people, if you have moderately strong coffee, that's gonna be almost four cups of coffee. Yeah.
Yeah, that's and that's that's twenty ounces of, you know, good. I mean, and again, the darker roasts have less caffeine. Yeah.
But I like'em better because I grew up on the north side of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle when there was one Starbucks. And so I've been doing that since I was in eighth grade. All right, so you have the holy half hour. Yeah.
And then
After the holy half hour, you haven't had any caffeine up to that point. And now it's seven fifteen in the morning. All right. Now back from us. Now what do you do? I brew the coffee. All right. And I know how to brew coffee. Now do you have the three eighty in a
mega dose or is that titrated over time? No. That's in a mega dose that usually takes me about forty five minutes to drink.
Oh my god, we already have forty five minutes to drink.
I know. Well part of it is I've got this grizzled adrenal system. Yeah, yeah. There's my HPA axis is like a building falling down at this point. So just have to donkey kick your adrenals. Yeah. Okay, got it. So then you you brew the coffee. Yeah.
No then I I make my first nutrition of the day.
And the first nutrition of the day is sixty to seventy grams of protein.
And protein is really important, especially with a tryptophan rich source of protein for mood management.
I'm not eating a turkey leg. I'm not you know like Henry the eighth.
It's mostly uh whey protein powder mixed in with non fat.
Unflavored Greek yogurt.
Which is great. And there's so many I mean it's like any more.
I just read that the fastest growing
foods in America today are cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and whey protein powder.
It was just extraordinary. Extraordinary when you think about it. You and I got to this much earlier.
Back when it was harder to find Greek yogurt.
I'll put a little bit of a
No artificial
sweetener in it because I'm not afraid of artificial sweetener. And I get more micronutrients in it with
put in walnuts and blueberries and you know, things that actually give me the micronutrients that I need. By the way, I've also taken a multivitamin at this point.
I take a multivitamin every day. I've been taking a multivitamin for decade after decade after decade.
And there's th these papers that were coming out five years ago saying that they're not only ineffective, they're bad for you.
That's
All been.
overtaken by events. And the newer research actually says it has neurocognitive protective benefits.
Take your multivitamins. And there are a lot of ways to do it.
You know, sometimes they'll take a you know good multivitamin in the morning, sometimes they'll wait later in the day and take A G one.
But you need a good multivitamin. Almost everybody does.
So if you
Not per snickety, but detail questions, because that's how my mind operates.
Why no fat Greek yogurt instead of something with
That would be better for me.
To be sure. It's that the fat bothers my stomach.
So it's just I don't like it. It fills me up too much. It's hard to get to sixty five grams of protein.
When you've got that much fat in the yogurt because the f it's you're gonna just gonna be just
Falling asleep.
I only do that because it's uncomfortable to have the fat. And I'll add just a footnote for some people listening who will say, Wait a second, I thought you could only absorb thirty grams of protein at a sitting. That is That's old school research. Yeah, it is
Somewhere between an old wives tale and just a statement that has been repeated so much that it's taken to be true, but it's not true. It's not true. And in fact
There is
Or I should say there are some data to suggest that as you get older you actually absorb protein more effectively in a larger bolus, meaning
More protein at fewer sittings.
Right. I'm completely persuaded by their research. And over the years I've experimented a lot with that in my diet, just in the protocols of my eating.
And what I found over the past five years in particular is that I'm most comfortable
Because I'm naturally genetically really lean.
I'm most comfortable when I'm sub ten body fat.
And the way for me to do that. Yeah, me too. I'm kidding. But it's just, you know,'cause of my genetics. But the way I get there since I was fourteen. Well if if if you know the the genetics don't want it, then they're gonna they're gonna go to against it. Battle dwarf genetics.
Uh huh.
No, man, if I had your frame, I mean, I would I would love that. I would be able to lift heavy.
But
The way to do that for me is to stay at two hundred grams of protein a day.
So to keep moderate calories and two hundred grams of protein a day, and then I can keep my body fat where I want it, where I feel really good, and I'm never hungry.
And that's the way to do it. It's a really protein rich diet. And of course now
popular culture is catching up with what we've known scientifically for a pretty long time. So you get
Your
Colossus of caffeine.
I can follow the whole half hour just to keep up with the other. Everybody has to drink three hundred eighty milligrams of cafe. You have your your sixty to seventy
Grams of protein as described.
And then you are sitting down to write. What do you do? Yeah, then I can sit down to write. If I'm at home, then then I sit down to write and there's no distractions.
I mean there's no meetings, there's no Zoom. I mean if the President of the United States or the Pope
calls there'll be a morning meeting, but that's kinda it.
You know, and I've got a very quiet place. I'm not looking at email. I'm not, you know, answering text messages. I'm not looking for I'm not reading the Wall Street Journal.
And to do this with when I set myself up this way, I get four hours of productivity. And that's very unusual.
If you're
Doing things the old fashioned way. You know, you're getting up when the sun is warm and you're getting the nice big, you know, three espresso to try to wake up and and you're not optimizing your brain chemistry appropriately. You'll get two hours of creativity, max. Max.
That's why, you know, Hemingway used to write for two hours away. Also, because he would leave things unfinished. He would basically say.
And mid paragraph so that he
had momentum in starting the following day.
And I suppose my question is in a world of ubiquitous interruption and notification where you have iMessage on your computer.
You have Chat GPT, you have
research that you might do concurrently with your writing. There are different ways to approach writing.
How do you set yourself up?
say the day before such that you can sit down
Without interruption.
Or self interruption.
For four hours and right.
To begin with, you need to know what you're gonna do the next day, the day before.
You need to make a list of the things you're gonna do in priority order. And the priority order is not what you like the most, but what actually requires the most concentration and pre and creativity.
So the thing you need to hit immediately, which will be the last ten percent of that page you were writing.
That's a really good protocol to procrastinate that last 10%, because your most creative, most productive, your best quality stuff is first.
And so you want to leave the last to be the first the next day.
And that way you've got consistent creativity.
If I'm running a column, I'm on deadline every single week.
For a column. And it's twelve hundred words a week of science about
human happiness. Sounds stressful. Sounds like a way to make yourself unhappy. Yeah, I know. I'm hunted.
But
Doing that, if I sit down and write it, the kicker's always gonna be worse than the lead.
Yeah. And so the kicker is always the first thing in the morning someday. Right. So the kicker is as good as the lead or better.
Because I'm leaving it so that my
But my brain chemistry is optimized to the product that I'm trying to create. That was a very good protocol from
From Hemingway. His problem was he was a drunk.
And when you're drunk, what you're doing is you're borrowing tomorrow's dopamine tonight.
You're borrowing, as a friend of mine put it also, you're borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Yeah. And and the reason is because your dopamine is gonna be below the baseline and you're gonna have anhedonia in the morning.
And hedonia is the characteristic of clinical depression, which is a deficit of dopamine, meaning you an inability to feel pleasure.
And it's below the baseline when you're hung over, below the baseline when you've popped it really hard and you're getting the trough the next day.
If you drink at night and if you want to be productive the next morning
This morning starts last night.
And it starts by going to bed at a reasonable time sober, which we'll probably get to at the end of this conversation.

That's why he had two hours of good events over. Well also because
If you need any and this is my
kind of repeated realization that should be top of mind all the time, which is if you wear an aura ring,
A whoop band, the one conclusion that you will come to over and over again is if you drink before bed, even a few hours before bed.
Your sleep is garbage. Your sleep their architecture's so messy. It's just so
For me now, for whatever reason at at this age, I'm forty eight.
Even one I had one martini with my brother. I don't see him that much. We went out to a nice speakeasy.
Had a drink and
Just
Shattered my sleep. It was shocking to me. Kind of embarrassing.
The older you got. And you know, the truth is that
Young people are figuring out what
people my age didn't when I was I mean I drank very heavily in my twenties and thirties.
It's what we did. I was a musician. It's what we did.
We knew it wasn't good for us, but the truth of the matter is that all euphorics, if it's euphoric, if it gets you buzzed, is neurotoxic.
And you have to be careful.
applying neurotoxic substances to yourself because you're gonna pay a price for that. Now there's a cost benefit analysis to anything. I don't drive the safest car.
You know, I don't drive a car that if it crashes, I will be completely safe no matter what.
I drive something I like. I'm making a cost benefit analysis. But the truth is that many people are not.
They think it's costless to get buzzed.
It's not.
Just isn't.
Your routine. I'll just pause us there.
Is very, very similar.
to mine. Tell me more. Well, right now I'm day three of seguing into
ketosis. And we're always producing ketones, but I'm probably just because I've done this a lot, I'm probably at right now like one point two millimolars.
In terms of blood concentration of like
You like ketosis.
You like how it feels. I love how it feels in terms of mental acuity.
I also because I have neurodegenerative diseases in my family.
And metabolic dysfunction.
See
Doing it
Let's just call it four.
to six weeks of nutritional ketosis.
Once or twice a year.
to appear to be very cheap insurance.
Oh, what's your Apollo E profile?
APOE three four.
You're three four. Yeah.
Three four. Yeah.
And
There are other risk factors. I also have relatives who are three three, but nonetheless developed early Alzheimer's. So
I'm like, Yeah.
You know what, I like how I feel.
I need less sleep when I'm in ketosis. I naturally wake up very, very alert, which is unusual for me.
So
I wanted to mention that first just to set the stage in a way.
So I
For
Decades did.
minimum thirty grams of protein within thirty minutes of waking up.
I still think that is a great option.
For me now.
For a host of reasons that
I could get into, but I'll keep it simple.
I
almost always do intermittent fasting where I am fasting until two or three PM in the afternoon. But
When I wake up, like this morning I woke up at seven thirty.
And I was preparing for this conversation, so I wanted to block out a few hours to do that.
But woke up.
Had
Now this is mildly stimulating, but I wanted to have a little bit because I'm also
jet lagged and arrived at.
Around midnight last night.
Had some
Cacao with a little bit of cacao butter mixed in.
Just enough under three grams of net carbs. You're keeping your net carbs to thirty a day, probably, right? Keeping my net grams uh to for me personally right now under ten grams. Under ten. That'll be you need to ketosis fast. Under ten, yeah. Especially if I am already adapted to intermittent fasting.
So that I'm doing sixteen to eighteen hours of fasting with a short six to eight hour window of eating.
Once you get to sixteen to eighteen hours, especially if you're doing some exercise, let's just say in the morning or any other point.
You're depleting your liver glycogen and you're going to get into the habit, your metabolic machinery will develop the habit and the capability of producing ketones.
even when you are eating carbohydrates in that limited window of eating. So
And you don't take exogenous ketones.
I will occasionally
on a day like today, because I know that I'm on effectively
Let's call it day two and a half.
of seguing into ketosis.
I think my natural production is
roughly where I mentioned my natural production right now is probably around point nine.
I took
Let me just back up. So I wake up at seven thirty.
I have the cacao plus some cacao butter.
Then I sit in I have a hot tub. This is like one of my indulgences. It's not actually that expensive.
But I sit in a hot tub and I meditated for ten minutes.
with an app, the way app Henry Shookman is my
Spirit animal. Amazing.
Mindfulness slash zen focused practice.
Did that ten minutes, that's it.
Got out.
It is pretty chilly right now in Austin.
Gets down to I think last night was thirty seven low. Got into my pool.
For a few minutes.
And got out.
Cold shower.
Came back in and then sat down and this was my
Kind of deep work prep, right? No interruptions.
Then there's non-trivial similarity to what I'm trying to do. Neurocognitively. Yeah, exactly. And then on the way here.
About fifteen minutes prior to arriving, knowing my start time.
There were a few other bells and whistles that I threw in nutritionally in terms of supplements and so on.
Earlier in the morning.
But had one nitro cold brew.
From Starbucks.
And
About
fifteen milliliters of exogenous ketones.
In this case.
It's BHB bonded to one three beauty and dial, which I do have some reservations about.
long term chronic use I think could be
Liver toxic.
But I'm doing it very intermittently.
And so for the
Let's just call it
Or days.
of Segway into
Nutritional ketosis, I will use exogenous ketones sometimes.
as a boost.
And that's it.
So that was that was the moment it's working great for you. And here's the big takeaway, I think.
You got to that through experimentation.
You didn't get that by, you know, getting it off the internet.
You learned a lot about these different
Variety protocols.
And you tailored it and tried it.
And over a number of years.
came upon what worked best for you. And it's exactly what I've done too.
And everybody watching
Needs to treat their life like a lab.
Experimentation is king. Experimentation is the precursor to good experimentation is information.
is scientific information. And then
It's getting experience.
through the experimentation and figuring out what your own protocol actually is.
Because as they say in the ads, your results may differ.
Yeah, right, exactly. And so for me, if I'm weight training, I will typically weight train late afternoon. That's just always been my preference.
But
If we had not had this podcast.
Today I would have done zone two training.
In the morning.
Right, exactly. So after the meditation. Before you eat.
Before I eat fast and I do like fasting card. Especially when I'm trying to get into ketosis or intermittent fasting.
Because it'll help me deplete that.
The glycogen, stored glycogen.
At a faster rate.
If it is too high.
just for people who may be interested in intermittent fasting or ketosis.
If the exertion level is too high or if it is resistance training, sometimes it will spike.
glucose in such a way that makes it a little counterproductive if you're trying to get into ketosis.
So the zone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're already gonna have
Increased cortisol in the morning, you need that to wake up and also with
Caffeine oftentimes you'll see a pretty noticeable spike in glucose. So I try not to compound it by doing the weight training in the morning.
At this point in the cycle of getting into ketosis, do you you have headaches?
I had a mild headache yesterday.
I will say that
The biggest cheat for me.
in terms of getting into ketosis quickly and relatively painlessly.
Is
training my body to intermittently fast.
And
I have been in ketosis dozens of times in my life.
And I've done extended periods, six months in ketosis.
And so on.
particularly when I was actually training for sports, which seems counterintuitive, but I was doing something called the cyclical ketogenic diet, which is really interesting.
when I was training for the national Chinese kickboxing championships in ninety nine. That was an amazing system for
Cutting weight, getting lean, but also
maintaining or adding some muscle mass.
In any case people can look at it. Confusing your system in a cycle, right?
You're staying out of equilibrium in a way, right? You're definitely doing that. What you're doing with the CKD, people can look it up. There are many people who've pioneered this Baro de Pasquale with the anabolic diet. There are different names for it.
Dan Duchain way back in the day also talked about this.
But you are providing a short window once a week where you are
in my case, doing a glycogen depletion weight training workout.
And then you are spiking the hell out of your carbohydrate intake.
Or let's call it.
fifteen hours, something like that. And you are really piling in carbohydrate.
And you are
leveraging insulin as a storage hormone.
and anabolic signalling.
Pathway.
to ensure that you can
pack on some muscle while you're
In
on average uh catotic state, which is very, very hard to do otherwise.
I don't do that anymore'cause it's just too much brain damage. Frankly. Well, that's a lot to think about. That becomes a full time job. If the protocol becomes the full time job. Yeah, which is not the point, right? Like in my case, I'm sure in your case, like the protocol is in service of life.
Life is not in service of the protocol. The protocol is supposed to work for you. You're not supposed to work for your protocol.
And we're not gonna belabor this point, but in a world and people there's a great Chuck Pallinett quote that I don't want to
Get wrong, people can look it up, but basically says, you know, big brother isn't watching you, he's entertaining you. Entertaining you to death.
And just talking about the sort of modern digital
ecosystem and the role of technology, et cetera. But suffice to say, if you can single task for four hours.
From a competitive advantage perspective, like you're not using pharmaceutical great.
Yeah. Psycho stimulants.
You're in an elite group.
Absolutely group and you absolutely can do it with proper
Health and exercise disciplines.
I'm
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Back to the episode.

I'll just say to your point.
managing the physiology. I had a great conversation with Dave Bazuki recently, who's the founder, co-founder, and CEO of Roblox.
And
He and his wife are the largest well, their foundation is the largest funder of metabolic
psychiatry research, including ketogenic therapy, which includes Chris Palmer at Harvard.
And

it is like taking midafinol and all of the kind of short term powerful but long term penalty.
Mm-hmm. Drugs that I've tested. Have you ever tried have you ever taken a Slexosceroton reuptech inhibitor?
An SSRI? I have never taken one uh
For
Antidepression. I have taken what is similar. It's not exactly an SSRI, but I have used Trazodone for sleep. Well, Trazodone is a monocyclic, right? It's a it's a really early, early generation antidepressant.
It is effectively a failed antidepressant because it put people to sleep. That was repurposed as a sleep drug is my understanding.
Like Unisom was supposed to make you not sneeze.
And it's uh Doc Sylvania six and eight actually was supposed to make you was an antihistamine that was repurposed as a sleeping pill. Yeah, there you go. Why do you ask about SSR? The reason I asked that is because a lot of people will say that they find that a proper keto diet is better than an SSRI, too, for the serotonin effects. Oh yeah. I mean if you look at
People should look up Chris Palmer. I had a conversation with him as well, but
For
Mood stabilization.
mood elevation, but not in a
Peacan trough.
Type of way.
I have found nothing better than the ketogenic diet. That's interesting. So for mood management, this is fundamental.
It is
It is
Without exception.
The number one with no close second. So poets take note.
Yeah, poets take note. And maybe you should just
Yeah, we we should we have to revisit this people are like what is this mat scientist poet stuff. We wanna just explain what we're talking about.
There are four affect profiles, and affect profiles mean the intensity of your negative and positive emotion.
You're born with this. So there are times in your life when you have more positive emotionality or more intense negative emotionality, depending on circumstances, but this is your.
Baseline state.
You can be above average positive and above average intensity negative emotion. Those are the mad scientists. That's me.
There are some people who have high highs and low lows. I'm all about
It's great or it sucks.
No, and it's impossible to be married to a med scientist. Just
My wife.
Reminded me of that this morning. There's you can be above average positive and below average intensity negative. These are cheerleaders. These are the happiest people. They have some weaknesses. They tend to be bad bosses.
Because they won't accept bad news and they can't give criticism.
Like no bad vibes, man.
There's some people who are low, low. They're just low affect people. These are the judges.
They make really good surgeons. You don't want somebody to cut you open and go, Oh my God.
That's not what you want. You want somebody that's going to go?
I can take that out.
Uh or you know, nuclear power reactor operators or something who are really close to the Lolo means
Low positive, low negative. Low positive, low negative. Got it. Their side wave is flatter. They're steady, man. I mean, they're not freaking out about anything. And then there are those who are.
Low intensity positive emotion, but high intensity negative emotion. And these are the poets.
And the poets are the most interesting. And the reason is because they tend to be the most creative and most romantic.
And part of that is because there's this research, all neuroscience research is contested. I should preface this.
But there's a part of the limbic system called the ventralateral prefrontal cortex that is involved in your rumination when you're depressed.
Ruminative depression, ruminative sad depression is a heavy activity of the ventralateral prefrontal cortex.
You also use it when you're ruminating on a business plan or writing a symphony.
And when you're ruminating on another person'cause you're falling in love.
And that's why poets tend to be depressive, creative, and romantic.


Tim Ferris, my friends. This is Tim Ferris. That's me in a nutshell. Yeah. And so the whole point is that you need, no matter who you are, you need to appropriately manage your mood.
The essence of self management is
mood management starts with knowledge about who you are. And they can people can go to my website and take a test and figure out who they are.
Which profile you are.
And then you gotta figure out what you need to do in mood management. Do you need to elevate positive emotion or do you need to manage
You don't need to eliminate negative emotion. You don't want to do that. You'll be dead in a week.
Negative emotion is really important for protection.
Sadness, anger, disgust.
Here.
But
You want to manage it so it it's not disregulating, so it's not exaggerated. And there are lots of techniques for doing it.
But you gotta know what your bigger challenge is by knowing yourself.
Then you can proceed to some of these
Protocols that we're talking about here for appropriate mood management based on your
Challenges is how it works. For you, it's managing positive up.
And managing negative down and ketosis is really, really good for both.
Yeah, I would say for folks who may fit the po profiler.
Oh.
Or curious about my personal experience that
Repeatedly. I mean, I've done this now dozens of times. It is very consistent.
It completely removes the lowest fifty percent.
Of my negative.
And bumps my positive baseline up twenty percent. This is really interesting because this might be the poet's protocol.
Kytosis might be the poet's protocol. For me, it's what I eat, how I administer self administer caffeine.
And it's actually how I do my exercise.
When I'm super fasted first thing in the morning.
is incredibly efficacious for managing down my negative affect without accidentally managing down my positive affect.
Yeah, I want to point out another thing about your protocol, which is by having caffeine later. This is my experience. Because I love caffeine. Yeah. I love stimulants. It's very careful. I know.
If I start later, guess what?
What an incredible sleight of hand trick. I consume less. Why? Because I started later. Right. And no crash.
Yeah. And so I will start later and your total caffeine will be less. Why is this relevant? Because the half life of caffeine is very long.
And if you have too much caffeine.
Early in the day, even if you stop by noon.
it will still impact your sleep, sleep architecture and so on. Yeah. And the older you get, so the half life, the metabolism of caffeine, it changes over the course of your life and the half life extends.
One of the things that I find for friends of mine who are like me in their sixties
And they'll be like, I'm sleeping. I sleep like crap because I'm old. It's like uh probably because you have the Nespresso after lunch.
And when you were thirty, you could metabolize the caffeine effectively. The half life was probably
Eight hours?
And now it's probably
Fourteen hours?
And it's still in your system bothering you when you're trying to go to sleep at night.
Take out that after lunch espresso.
Move your caffeine.
Stop drinking caffeine after it.
eight or nine in the morning.
It's like magic.
Yeah.
It is incredible. I've actually
I reserve
Coffee, caffeine like a nitro cold brew.
For days like today. Yeah.
Otherwise I'm using
Yerba Mate or cacao or puerte or some combination thereof. You like yerba mate?
You like how it makes you feel smooth. I love it. It's a smooth buzz, as we used to say in high school. It really is the smoothest of the smooth. It's just also the most inconvenient. I like to drink it the Argentine way with the wood the wood cup and the metal straw that gets really hot. Exactly.
Which is probably a great way to give yourself throat cancer side note or mouth cancer, but we'll find out. But we'll yeah, we'll find out. Track the RGs there. There is people are looking at that very closely. All right, we probably should
Talk about it.
The meaning of life. Small topic. It's just a little thing, you know. And I've been thinking about for five years. I want to know.
Why after your many books, author fifteen books
Build the life you want, co authored with Oprah Winfrey.
From strength to strength, which was my first introduction to your books, which is an exceptional book, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.
And now the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness.
Why write this book?
So
When I came back to academia, I was gone for a long time.
I'm a third generation academic, actually. My dad was a professor, his father was a professor. This is the vortex of life. I tried to escape it by being in music all the way through my twenties, but it sucked me in, right?
And so this was my natural habitat, but I left for
Almost eleven years'cause I was the CEO of a
big thing tank in Washington, D C called the American Enterprise Institute.
And when I was gone, I wasn't paying attention to academia.
I left at the end of two thousand eight. I came back in twenty nineteen.
My memory of my academic experience going back, you know, intergenerationally, is the happiest place in the world. Everybody has the best time in college, they make all their friends, they get a bunch of adventures, they get exposed to weird new ways of thinking.
People love college and most people say I was happier in college than when I left college.
I come back in twenty nineteen.
And it's like
The plague had gone through my village.
It was g completely different. And in point of fact, clinical depression among adults under thirty especially highly
educated adults under thirty.
College graduates.
Especially if elite colleges had tripled.
Clinical depression up by it.
Three X, anxiety, generalized anxiety.
Two X.
And it's not because of a lack of therapy. On the contrary, the number of therapists has gone up by about
Forex.
And so something's not working. This is what we call in my business a psychogenic epidemic.
Was just simple idea with fancy words'cause that's how we get tenure and
And what it means is there's something that's contagious and creates
Suffering.
And has no biological origin.
No known biological origin. That's a psychogenic epidemic. So eating disorders and cutting and many things, they'll spread around, create tons of misery, but they're not biological in origin. And so those are harder nuts to crack.
the depression anxiety epidemics.
That we see today are a psychogenic.
And so we need to understand what's behind them. So
When I see the data, I mean I set about my research agenda saying, Okay
What's going on. And that's a kind of a Sherlock Holmes kind of a forensic behavioral science experiment. And that's kind of how I do my work. That's the most interesting things to do is to figure out this.
Mystery.
Using the tools or my stock and trade, you know, that suffered through to get my PhD, you know, and applying them a little bit.
And one of the things that I do is I just start
talking to people and doing a content analysis of what they tell me and see the words that start to pop up.
Those are the clues.
'Cause that words will start popping up.
And when you do that, the word that kept popping up again and again and again was I don't know what I'm meant to do.
My life feels meaningless.
And sure enough.
When you do the survey work and ask people if their life feels meaningless.
That's the predictor of depression and anxiety.
And so we have lots and lots of data out there. We have lots of pop arguments about why, you know, so many young people are depressed today. And it, you know, people my age are like, because they're entitled babies.
They're not tough enough. And people who are my kids' age, who are in their twenties, they'll say it's because boomers wrecked everything and made houses too expensive and spoiled the environment or something.
But people've been saying that stuff forever. There's nothing new about that.
These psychological effects that we're seeing are new.
They're really, really a new thing. So that's not it.
Or there's a lot of people, and you've talked a lot on your show about technology, and a lot of people say that technology is screwing us up, and technology is
really has a big role in what I found.
But the problem is not
The technology per se.
But what we're not getting
Because of the technology.
What is it actually that we want that we're not getting? You know when you
Have somebody who is
Deeply malnourished.
You don't talk about what's actually creating the malnutrition. You might. That's important.
But what they're not getting. Right. It's like okay, you're eating all carbohydrates. Yeah. It's not that carbohydrates are inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison and by virtue of only eating carbohydrates, you're not getting any amino acids that you're gonna do. But the problem is you're
The protein you're not getting for pizza is what it comes down to. So I wanted to find the protein that was underneath this whole thing and the content analysis of these interviews is like.
What I'm meant to do. Life feels meaningless. I don't know the meaning of life. I'm like, that's too big.
That's too big. That's like a big philosophical thing, but I couldn't avoid it is what it came down to.
So over the past five years I've been writing a book about
Okay.
What is the meaning of life?
Where do you find it?
And how do you have to live differently so that you can actually find it in modern life? And that's what this book is.
And the most interesting part of this was
You know, people say, where do you find the meaning of life? Like church.
The beach
Italy.
Trying New Jersey.

Yeah.
No that's just run up for a lot of time there. Seattle, my hometown.
We know where you go to find it.
And then you have to do certain things. You know, I'm a very protocols guy.
And so what this book is the six protocols for once you know where the meaning of your life is.
what you have to do to go there and get it.
is what it comes about. So the beginning of the book is okay, what's the meaning of meaning? Because it's too big. Right. It is big. It's too big. The second is where do you find it? And the third thing is how do you have to live differently? That's what this book is. Well let's start with definitions. That's how I like to roll. Yeah. I know. And that's the most important thing that scientists almost never do.
you know, throw out a term and then not define it. So the meaning of life has been, you know, discussed
Forever.
But the best philosophical and psychological definitions, they disassemble it into its component parts.
So the way that you and I have talked about happiness in the past is that happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
So meaning is a macronutrient of happiness.
And when that's missing, that's why you have a happiness problem.
So that's the beginning of this whole thing.
Meaning in turn has macronutrients, has component parts to it as well.
Psychologists will refer to them as coherence, purpose, and significance.
Coherence is why things happen the way they do.
You have to have a theory of why things happen the way they do, or you won't know the meaning of your life.
Meaning how life or why life view the way it and things are happening. Like why?
So is that picking
I don't want to
dislocate the sharing of the three. But just just just to
Maybe we'll come back to it. Is that
coming up with or adopting a story that is enabling. Yeah. It's a adopting a story that actually explains things so that life is not inherently random. Okay. But it doesn't need to be objectively accurate. No explaining it. It's just no it's your way of seeing things. Your understanding of the world is putting things in context and so things kind of make sense.
Otherwise it's this random walk through life, which is a definition of meaninglessness.
For some people the model
Which is an imperfect model at best, but it's a model nonetheless. It's a physics that explains that is religion.
For some people is pure on science.
For some people, it's conspiracy theories why things happen the way they do.
But those are different sort of
Models.
That explained this. Now
You can also have a hybrid model, which I do.
You know, religion and science and all this kind of good stuff. But you gotta
do the work to figure out the physics of that. Why things happen the way they do. So coherence is figuring out why do things happen in my life. Right. Why do things happen the way they do? You know why are things happening all the time.
The second is purpose and people often think purpose and meaning are the same thing. They're not.
Purpose is a subcomponent of meaning. It is why am I doing what I'm doing?
You know, why am I doing all these weird things every single day?
And
That has to do with goals and direction.
If you don't have goals and direction in your life, everybody has said this. I mean, there's like Napoleon Hill said this, and Dale Carnegie said this.
You got it.
have a an end point. In Spanish there's a great word called El Rumbo. Rumbo means in in English it doesn't have a lot of significance. It's a it's navigational term that means rum line.
Which is where you're going. It's the Euclidean path.
From where you are to where you're going.
And you have to have a rum line if you're gonna make any progress, you're gonna have any goals and any directions, but you need to have. It doesn't mean that you have to be linearly making progress.
But you have to have an idea of what that line might be. That's ill rumbo. Yeah, even if the end point changes. Exactly. So that's why you need an intention. And that's what purpose is all about.
Why am I doing what I'm doing? It's the second why question. The why part is really important.
As we'll see in a second.
The third is significant, which is why does my life matter?
Why does my life matter?
And if the answer is
It doesn't, that's a problem.
Or
I don't know. That's not good enough. People need to have a concept of why your life matters and and the
great ways of answering that question are
Having kids and
being married and
You know, believing that God loves you and all kinds of ways to have that significance question answered.
So there's a in my work
In the book, there's a test on where you are in the journey to answering those questions.
how close you are, how much you're looking.
So that's presence and search. If you're looking, looking, looking, like you're a searcher, you're a total seeker.
So your search score is gonna be through the roof.
Now where you are. My finding score may not be. Well that presence. That's presence, right? And what happens over the course of life is that people
Who search more.
their present score tends to go up.
But it might not be that high.
So my present score is very
moderate.
Could you explain this just one more time for me?
Could you just uh start that over?
So there's two ways to kind of measure where you are in this journey of finding meaning, of searching and finding for meaning. The two ways to do it are what's called search and presence.
Search is how intensively you're looking.
To answer these why questions. You know, why do things happen the way they do? Why am I doing what I'm doing? And why does my life matter? That's search. And some people are intent seekers like you, Tim, you're an intent seeker.
This show
Is an exercise in search.
Right. And part of it is because
This is not just
A new hack.
For getting better biceps.
This is a new way of trying to understand why we're alive.
That's what the show is. Kind of the theme of the show. It's why I I listen to the show.
This is why I learned things,'cause I'm a seeker too.
But then how successful you are is your presence score, search and presence.
Presence is ah
I have answers that are satisfactory to me.
As you get older, if you seek, your present scores should go up.
And mine certainly has.
So is a presence just to
A presence of meaning. It is
One is seeking an answer.
And then presence is accepting.
Is is having something is satisfactory. All right, got it. Is having satisfactory. Now, there's some people who have sky high present scores and really low search scores.
Those are people who like those
fortunate individuals who are born going, Yep, I know.
I'm not gonna leave my hometown.
Why am I gonna leave my hometown?
It's awesome here.
What do we need to do? I'm gonna marry my high school sweetheart, I'm gonna work in my daddy's business.
And
I'm gonna go to the church I grew up in, and they're very, very stable. We think of these as conservative individuals.
dispositional conservatives, they tend to have low search and high presence. Right. And to be clear, this is not this is not political political. It might be, but that's not really the point. I'm talking about dispositional conservatism is conserving good things that preceded you.
And why are they good things?'Cause they give you meaning of life.
That's kinda what it comes down to.
On the other hand, you might be somebody who's a seeker, seeker, seeker, seeker, seeker. And you don't find it very much. And I'm a I'm very moderate.
in presence is higher than it used to be.
My presence of meaning was
In the cellar when I was in my twenties for sure.
And in my sixties is much, much higher for sure.
What do you attribute
the improvement too.
is being alive and actually searching a lot and looking at data and optimizing and trying to live a life on purpose. It's self managing. It's
I mean, I'm a behavioral scientist because I want answers.
And I want answers for me.
And so I'm looking for
the biggest questions to at least address the biggest questions of my life. That's why I do what I do for a living.
My life is a an experiment and a pure on
Revolving adventure.
So I'm curious if I can just interject for a second about the the present piece specifically, because I think
Many people listening to the show.
Will self identify as seekers. Right.
But
There are
Traps along the way as you identify as a seeker.
And I talked about these in the book. And I'll I'll just tell one
Quick anecdote and then I I'd love to hear how you have
improved or whether it's just been
maybe not a passive, but something that is unfolded for you.
The presence piece specifically.
I remember talking to a very, very experienced
psychedelic therapy facilitator who's
been doing it for many decades.
thousands and thousands of different people in sessions.

Tell me a story.
Which they said is common and becoming more common.
That
People will come in.
And after their
Session they'll say yeah, I was
Experiencing so much joy, this beautiful light.
This love in the session, but I kept
Wondering when I was gonna do the real work.
when I was gonna do the hard work.
And the way the facilitator explained it was
In a sense, more and more so. She's running into people who
Are in pursuit of this
Durable.
Contentment, satisfaction, joy. When they experience it in these sessions, they're like, Yeah, I'll get this out of the way.
So I can do the hard work.
To reach the joy, but they're just pushing aside all
The joy. Yeah.
as they continue their endless seeking. They're just not gonna take yes for an answer. Right. So I'm wondering how you learn to take yes as an answer. Yeah. So it's not easy because when you're a chronic seeker, there's always something more. There's always something new. You can't be there yet.
Right. And so
The answer to this actually comes I have two of my kids are Marines.
And so I have one enlisted Marine and I have one officer.
In the Marine Corps.
And my daughter's a second legend in the ring corps. And she's right now she's in Quantico and she's going through the basic school.
getting ready to do her MOS. She wants to be a signals intelligence officer. My son
Was enlisted, he was a scout sniper. He was in a scout sniper platoon.
out of camp Pendleton.
And that's a super interesting and dangerous job. And he led a lot as a non commissioned officer, he led a lot of guys.
What they train Marines to do in leadership.
is to get to eighty percent knowledge and then choose and stop looking.
Now that's really, really important because you're gonna be paralyzed if you're trying to get to a hundred percent knowledge. Which is what the the pure seeker mentality does. If you want to seek and get higher presence.
You need to go to eighty percent.
Now, how do you get to eighty percent?
You get to eighty percent by saying
I'm pretty sure this is right.
And this is right enough that I'm gonna turn my attention to another dimension.
On this. And that means
Friends.
If you're in love
You should get married.
That's what that means.
Wow. That means if you're in love and you know each other.
And you think that within three to five years, you really could be best friends.
And you have a certain stability of values.
Stop looking.
Get married.
Why why? Because the longer you don't get married, the longer you're in search for your soulmate.
the more you're putting off the best thing in your life.
You're postponing the best thing in your life.
Marriage is the best thing in life.
For most people.
I mean a bad marriage is the worst thing in life, right?
But for most people, for men and women, all this fiction about the fact that marriage is good for men but bad for women is all nonsense. Brad Wilcox's research at Virginia is completely clear on this. It's better for everybody.
Being in love and living with the person with whom you're in love for the rest of your life is
Great.
But you're not gonna get that if you're trying to get to ninety-nine percent awareness.
If you're gonna search all the way to the point because you'll never
Get that. You're gonna have an argument, you're gonna have a disagreement, you're gonna have doubts.
You're gonna digest something in a weird way and think maybe I'm not in love.
And the same thing is true with
Your faith.
What am I gonna practice? Get to eighty percent awareness and choose.
And then decide that that's what you're actually going to do. Use the marine rule of leadership.
And then the search can actually lead to presence.
Okay.
This is all interesting terrain, which is why I was looking forward to this conversation. It's a lot. It's a lot. And of course, as I said before we started recording, I was like, we're not going to suffer from a lack of topics to talk about.
I want to come back to
The
Coherence, purpose, significance, macronutrients of
Meaning for a moment.
Just in quick review coherence.
Why do things happen in my life, right? Having a story for that that you commit to in a sense.
Why am I doing what I'm doing? That's purpose.
And then why does my life matter significantly?
Looking at
my peer group
My friends
A lot of people in my
Audience.
It seems like
Number three, why does my life matter is where people
struggle the most. A lot of them.

the dozens of factors at play, I am sure, but
For some people, and I have some thoughts on this, but
For some younger people, it's
I don't know what to do because AI is gonna take all the jobs. Right.
And
I don't know therefore how my contributions will matter.
I will become less significant. I will become less significant.
The climate is irretrievably fucked.
Which I don't actually believe is the case, but a lot of damage They have certainly heard that a lot of damage has been done. They've been taught that. Right.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Et cetera.
Right.
Nuclear Armageddon.
That is actually on the list of existential threats, one of the scary ones in my opinion.
Therefore.
I don't know how to conclude that my life matters.
How did you personally arrive at an answer to this question?
Or how do you suggest people explore?
Unpacking that.
I have some thoughts I'll just
Rather than bearing the lead, I'll just throw it out there, which is
Take the time to not just study people who do huge things in short periods of time, but also study people who commit to things that take longer than their lifetimes.
Like scientists.
Like
Clergy.
Clergy.
By simply extending the time horizon.
the spectrum of options opens up quite a bit. But I would love to hear you explain that. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. But there's a compatible point with that, which is
Stop looking for your significance at the macro level.
start looking at the micro level, which is your love relationships around you.
This is where people feel significant.
People feel significance by having children.
People feel significance by getting married.
Or adopting children as I did.
I did both. You know, we did it by markets and by biology.

And people feel significant by working through
their religious tendencies.
to try to understand their relationship with the divine. This is how most people find significance. You don't find significance by getting a million Instagram followers. You will never find significance by doing that, but that's indeed what we're encouraged to do.
You won't find significance by an adequate kind of stable significance by being the world's greatest angry activist.
And that's the cult that's actually going on on college campuses all the time. The cult of activism, which is kind of a substitute religion.
Significance comes from love.
Love is the essence of significance, and it's whom I love.
And who loves me?
That's what it comes down to. And you know, if the answer is my spouse, my children, my parents, my friends.
My creator.
Those are the big answers that people actually get, but you gotta do the work.
You gotta make the commitments and do the work.
And a lot of people today, one of the things that I actually find in this book is a lot of young people today don't have those micro commitments.
And they're trying to establish macro significance.
Which is a big problem. You're chasing your tail. It's unstable, and it's probably not even real.
In a lot of cases.
You mentioned something in passing that I think is really important.
At least I've come to
Believe
It's
helpful to
At least try to unpack.
Each person for themselves.
Substitute for religion.
So you mentioned
This
Cult of the angry activist. And activism has its place.
For sure. There are certain things that that you can
I'm glad we've got some bonus anger for buttons.
over the long term it's not a clean fuel.
So this substitute for religion.
There's a place called
El arroyo here, which is famous for its signs that it puts out front. There are books that collect these now.
Think it's called El Arroyo Hero. Arroyo means the brook. Means the stream. Exactly.
Like Laqua Arroyero for people who might have spent time in Mexico. That's a that's a long one. Anyways, by the way, Arroyo is a surname in English is Brooks.
Oh yeah, there you go. Look at that. In German is Bach. Yeah.
As a pro for a musician, I say.
Coincidence?
Ha ha ha.


This joint in Austin is because they have these signs out front that are very funny that have been collected in books since. Like what if
Soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish, right? Like very funny stuff. They put a lot of them. One is if and one of them is if someone
Is vegan and does CrossFit, which do they tell you about first? Uh-huh.
Which which I thought was pretty good.
And this
ties into I believe there's something
David Foster Wallace said tragic character.
Brilliant.
on so many levels. But in effect, and people could track this down, I put in my newsletter at one point.
But
We all worship something.
And
Task number one is figuring out what you worship.
That's his
Yeah. We talked about that, right? Right. So if it's not religion
It's gonna be something else. Is it money? Is it fame? We talked about this a bit. We did the four idols last year we talked about it. Exactly. Pleasure. That's for
Where I landed, for better and for worse.
And I'm wondering it seems
To me is that religion
belief in
The divine.
might be another way to put it, is almost genetically programmed in humans.
That's an anthropological empirical regularity. So what we find is that
Anthropologists, including paleoanthropologists.
Fine, there's no civilization that they've ever encountered that doesn't worship.
Right.
There are individuals who don't worship. But there are no cultures that don't have a religious
foundation to them. We're built for that. So if we're looking at taking a closer look at that, if people want to make the implicit explicit, the subconscious conscious, which I think is really important.
Because folks are gravitating to these
Pseudo religions, whether it's CrossFit veganism,
Ketogenic. Harvard. Bitcoin. You name it. Famous Harvard. Famous university. I whatever it might be. Yeah.
So
Trying to put that on one's radar, I think is helpful, but then the question is, okay, if this is hardwired, if this might actually be a constitutional psychological requirement.
How do you satisfy that requirement if you are not going to adopt
and organized religion. So
I've looked a lot of quest for me. I hear you. This is very complicent for me. I feel like a lot of progress. Yeah.
For myself.
But I'd love to hear you. So this is a question of
Not of religion, but of transcendence. Exactly. Exactly. Transcendence is the phenomenon in which we move from the me self to the I self, in the words of William James, the father of psychology.
The I self is looking out.
And including looking up and standing in awe.
The me self is looking in the mirror and thinking about yourself.
What we need to actually find meaning to find significance.
Paradoxically, is to look less at ourselves.
Significance, the sense of significance comes from being
This is really paradoxical. And yet
Everybody will understand it when I say it.
To feel significance, you need to be less significant. You need to make your less self less significant. Now I've had this experience where at my university.
The most popular class, arguably, is astronomy one.
And they're not astronomers.
I mean there are like English majors and business majors, et cetera.
And they love the astronomy class.
They flock to it. There's lines for the astronomy class. So I finally ask a student, Why do you love that astronomy one class so much? He's like, I don't know.
But like I go into the morning, Thursday morning at nine o'clock and
It's 90 minute class and I'm bummed out because I just had an argument with my mom and I think I'm breaking up with my boyfriend and I got a B on a test, which at Harvard is like.
You're excommunicated in the church of Harvard. I go in at nine and at ten thirty I come out and I say
I'm a speck on a speck on a speck.
And I'm at peace.
That's transcendence.
That's what it is. It's a standard off. You've had Dakar Keltner on your show before?
No. He's one of the great psychologists of our time. He teaches at Berkeley.
And he has a book called Aw.
A W E
You know, I thought I recognized the name because I was just reading that book. It's a great book. I was just reading that book just a few months ago. That's Transcendence. It's a stand in awe in the eyeself looking out.
In awe of the universe, things bigger than you. And there's two
dimensions of transcendence. The first is to transcend upward and the other is to transcend outward, which is why
Worship of the divine, spiritual and religious experiences do this, and also service to others.
That's why they both have this kind of
transcendent metaphysical
experience that people actually get.
And that's why when you see moral beauty, somebody serving somebody else, it gives you that
Rhett Diesner, the psychologist, who, by the way, is Rain Wilson's uncle.

Yeah.
The world's leading expert in moral elevation and the physiological impact of moral elevation. Wayne is very philosophical also. He's great. He's great friend. We're great friends. We're but we grew up five miles apart from each other. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't know each other's kids, but we bonded over, you know, watching Gilligan's Island on channel eleven when we were in fifth grade or something.
And it's really important to keep in mind that there are ways to transcend and there's some
really well established ones to do it. I go to mass every day. It's a venerable way.
To experience transcendence.
And there are other ways to experience. Now, I'm not gonna speak to the metaphysics of who's cosmically right.
That's a completely different conversation. I don't know.
But I do know when it comes to transcendence,'cause that's research that I've done.
And Lisa Miller has done that. She teaches at Columbia. She does neuroscience and social psychology at Columbia.
She's the world's leading expert on how the brain requires transcendence.
You get experiences that are completely inaccessible unless you experience transcendence.
Lots of ways to do it.
You know, study the stoics and live according to their dictates.
walk the Ramahamahurta an hour.
In the morning without devices.
Starting before dawn.
Practice of apostanum meditation.
Listen to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
and stand in awe of the greatest composer who ever lived or
What a mass.
All right.
I want to tee this up. I didn't know what your answer was going to be, but I I this is an area
It is one of a few areas that have been of greatest interest and focus for me for the last
Well, one could argue.
Since two thousand, probably.
twelve, but it might even predate that.
particularly, I would say, in the last five years. And for people who are interested in digging into this, and I suggest that almost everyone should be very deeply interested. You mentioned the book Awe.
There's also some fantastic writing and articles out of Johns Hopkins.
Alana to Aw.
And if awe seems too abstract, I mean you could think of it as wonder, you could think of it also as self transcendence.
And I'm gonna be shooting myself in the foot a little bit because I just wrote ten pages on this that I need to refine before putting on my blog, but
People think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a pyramid.
And at the top you have self actualization.
In fact, the pyramid and that strict hierarchy were created by
consultants and other people who commercialized the writings of Maslow.
Who later revised that.
to have self transcendence. At the top. At the top. Top.
Yeah. He talked about it much later in his career. Because he got more religious as he got older.
People get more religious as they get older. They believe less in Santa Claus and more in God as they get older. They believe more in death, too. Yeah, yeah. And life is messy and they they come to terms with that. And
Scott Gary Kaufman talks a lot about this, you know, the guy who is sort of the master of the dark triad and a lot of pathologies, but he's also
Really good on how to ask about the dark trauma. I've written a lot about the dark trauma. It's like a great fantasy novel. It's like anybody who wants to know that, that's your first husband.
Anyway that
Okay. I'm gonna have to leave that alone. I'm gonna resist the temptation on the shelf just for a second.
But just so this is important because self transcendence is something that tends to happen a little bit later.
But it's not incompatible with lower order needs.
Do you mind if I just play first'cause I think this is the point you're driving at. Yeah, let me ride the ketones and caffeine for a moment here.
All right.
So
The awe self-transcendence wonder it seems perhaps
Abstracted.
might seem hand wavy for people who've already achieved success. I don't think that's true.
At all.
And in fact.
The happy people
Happy isn't exactly the right word.
But the people who see most of the
At peace.
Calmest.
with regular joy in their lives, good relationships.
All have regular doses of self transcendence.
Whether they are
Wilderness guides.
Who do not make very much money, but they're spending a lot of time in nature, a lot of time with their loved ones, a lot of time in expansive lands. Right.
Yeah.
Whether those are
Musicians and poets who have figured out
How to kind of ride the lightning without suffering too much from the low lows.
There are regular ways to do this, and I cannot recommend strongly enough.
Some form of meditative practice, whether that is
Prayer with
You know, your rosary. Right.
Our friend travels with the rosary and also with blood flow restriction cuffs but that's a story for another time. I'm not doing blood flow restriction with a rosary. No, exactly. Right. I mean you could. I guess that could be interesting. Maybe that's the next niche on your Instagram feed. But the reason that I bring up meditation
Is because
I think one of the easiest path to self transcendence.
And
to
significance in your life.
is training your awareness so that the mundane becomes miraculous.
And when you start to recognize
How fucking unbelievably insane it is that we are even conscious to begin with having this experience. And you start to notice.
How incredible.
The little things are.
Which require you to not be distracted.
Requires you to
Breathe and pay attention. It's not that complicated. It can be challenging.
Then
You start to perceive almost everything as significant without focusing on establishing your own significance.
True.
And I have just found that to be such an unburdening when you realize
that you can do things and should do things.
that help you feel like you are contributing.
That help you feel like
you're having an impact on something other than yourself, whether it's someone or something.
But that in fact
Self-help, self-development can really be
A
Sort of.
Exercise in
Self obsession.
And therein lies the seeds of misery. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It is me, me, me, me, me. And your point about paying attention to what would ordinarily be thought of as mundane. My father, who is a lifelong Christian, he always said, you know
People talk about the miracle of walking on water. You know what the real miracle is?
Water.
Yeah.
And another point based on what you just said, which is really important, is
Self transcendence is really great, being more in the I self, but you also need to do the work to be less in the me self.
And that means getting rid of the mirrors in your life.
We have way too many mirrors. I had a guy who worked on my back.
He was the guy who worked on Tom Brady's back in Boston, so he's the best guy.
He was
Phenomenal. And I asked him, you know, what did you do before you were this incredible acupuncturist and you know great physical therapist? And he said, I used to be a
fitness influencer. I'm like, dude, tell me more. Like, what's this life all about? And and as a social scientist, I'm really interested.
And he would take off his
shirt and you know be on social media and show his abs.
And then you know, sell supplements or something. And
And I said, How was it? He says, Awful. I didn't eat what I wanted for 10 years.
I was so lonely. It was so awful.
And I was so
Bill.
And I said, So how'd you get out of it? How'd you cure yourself? And he said, You know?
I said it had enough.
Got rid of my social media.
I took every mirror out of my house.
All of them.
Bathroom everyone. And then I
showered in the dark for a year, so I couldn't see my abs.
Oh.
Oh the cross we bear. No, but that's like the most Tim Ferris thing ever is the you know the the the the I self protocol or the and he said he was cured. So not just
Serving other people more, worshiping more, whatever happens to be, but also militating against the me self.
And that's not just physical mirrors, it's the notifications on your social media.
There's lots and lots of metaphorical mirrors that are making you miserable all the time.
What are other ways of
Facilitating.
Self.
Transcendents.
And
I for instance
I've interviewed BJ Miller as a hospice care physician. I interviewed him a long time ago.
And he talked about, for instance, at the end of life
Some of the most meaningful experiences were
not these deep conversations about the meaning of it all necessarily, but like bacon cookies together. Right.
He
talked about introducing people
Who are
Weeks or months from dying to art.
Right.
'Cause he wants to induce a flow state.
Yeah. That's what we're talking about. You one of the great things about, you know, transcendence is you know, M Michai Chick Saint Mihai, who wrote the great book Flow.
Oh, that's how you pronounce his damn name. That's right. It's tough, man. That's a tough name.
He talked about the fact that you have a transcendent experience when you're in a state that is
The state of self forgetting.
That's what flow is it's intensely pleasurable for any of us at any particular time. We established the first way is worship or meditation, the second is service to others, but the third is really
Total absorption.
is total absorption, the kind of thing that you do, which, by the way, is one of the reasons not to wear headphones when you're working out.
one of the reasons to be fully there when you're working out.
to establish a mind muscle connection when you're working out. It might sound trite, but it really is because you should be able to attain something of a flow state when you're working out. Otherwise
It's an hour of misery.
that you're gonna wanna distract yourself from. So you've got like better calves.
It's just so dumb, which is the ultimate me self kind of experience. So that's really the third way to do it.
is find your thing is what it comes down to. And by the way, my protocols lead up to four hours of writing.
That four hours goes by in minutes.
Because it's a flow state.
And I'm having a transcendent experience. I'm in an I self transcendent experience.
It's not me. It's like some other guy's writing this thing. I don't know what's going on. Clicky, click it, click it, click.
And before I know it, my wife says
You want lunch?

Nature seems like another option. Yeah.
It's so simple.
Just like walk barefoot.
Outside for a few minutes. Look, if it's two feet of snow it might be harder, but
To the extent that you can, like try to get your feet on the ground.
Beauty.
Beauty. What an interesting, bizarre thing in and of itself.
I actually
wanted to look semi professional as I try to
On occasion.
And instead of holding loose paper, I was gonna bring a clipboard. Couldn't find a clipboard, so I was like, Well
I'm gonna bring a book. And I thought I don't know if you've ever seen this particular artist.
But I wanted to pass to you. Have you ever seen it?
And he calls this. Yeah.
All right. So this is Using Pure Nature. This is Andy Goldsworthy. Yeah. Collaboration with Nature. Everybody should get this book. But just check out
Some of the images in there.
This is the idea of
beauty of working with nature as opposed to against it.
natural
found objects, whether trees
Leaves.
Circle of dandelions.
It is the most mind boggling
If James Terrell were to only work with
Organic materials.
Outside of a Hobbit house.
What would
They look like.
They're just
That's absolutely entrancing.
Yeah yeah.
would be the the word I would use. And so this is the book I want to use as my clipboard.
I like it. And this is of course transcendent.
This is the essence of using human ingenuity.
In a flight of fancy.
Yeah, this is
Pure harmony.
Between
Who we are and what we're meant to be.
I love it. And and you know, this is harder and harder to do.
In an environment.
In which
We're living in the simulation.
This is life out of the simulation.
Effectively.
This is who I am, but outside of the matrix.
Which is why it's so striking and strange.
So
Tell me more.
So the transcendent experiences the one thing the one place that they don't happen is in a simulated
experience of human life.
Fundamentally transcendent experiences require being fully alive. There's a you know, the great
fourth century sage and Saint Saint Irenaeus.
Who's one of these guys where I mean, today it's like
It's pretty costless to be religious like me.
In those days I got you might get your head cut off.
And so you're he was doing a lot of deep thinking. He said the
Glory of God is a man fully.
It wasn't a gendered comment.
A person fully alive is the glory of God. So then the real question is what does it mean for me to be fully alive?
Then I ask my students.
Are you fully alive?
When you get up
And the first thing you do is you pick up your phone, which is by the side of your bed.
And check in with the universe that's being
mediated through the small screen. And then you do your work on the zoom.
And then your friends are on social media and your dating is on the app and your progress is made through your score on your gaming and your relationships are
stripped of their humanity because you're looking at pornography.
Are you or are you not fully alive?
And if the answer is you're not fully alive, the reason for that is because you're living a simulated life.
And a simulated life just
Tim isn't beautiful.
In a simulated life means
Your cosplaying life. That's that's right. And this is one of the things that I found in my interviews for this book as well.
I kept hearing meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning.
But you're talking to a lot of twenty seven and twenty eight year olds and their affect is very flat.
Because they're telling you the same story over and over again.
And this is where the penny dropped. This guy says, twenty seven year old guy, he said
I really do feel like I'm not
living a real life. I really feel like I'm living in a simulation.
Every day and I don't know how to break out.
Because my job is fulmote.
Because I can't meet women on the corner and say, like Bill Ackman said on social media the other day, he said men should come up to women and say,
I would like to meet you.
What does that mean? And watch'em run in terror. Right. Cause my friends really are virtual friends.
Because my sense of achievement really is what I can actually do.
with this gaming experience or whatever it happens to be that I've gotten really good at.
How am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to break out of this.
But I know it's not right. Here's the funny thing.
You can kind of be fooled the Turing test can be passed with respect to the kind of experience you think you're having.
But then there's a deep knowing.
You can't simulate the meaning of your life.
You can only live the meaning of your life.
A simulation is a complicated simulacrum.
for the complex experiences of human life. And that's a non trivial use of language.
This is pops over dinner, right? Exactly.
A complicated problem is that which is very, very hard to solve, but once you solve it, it's static and you can do it again and again and again.
It's an engineering problem. It's a how and what problem.
Complex problems are super easy to understand and impossible to solve.
And I'll give you an example.
Making a jet engine is a complicated problem. We didn't do it for a long time. Making a toaster is a complicated problem. I mean I defy you to build your own toas with with stuff in your you'll burn your house down.
If you're trying to make your own toaster, it's a complicated problem, right?
My marriage is a complex problem.
I understand what it means to love and be loved. I can't
Put it into words. I'm not
Pablo Naruta.
But I understand what it means to love and be loved, right?
But I will never solve my marriage.
Tim.
I mean this morning, before we started, Esther
Texted me, I love you. And she does.
And when we finish, I'm gonna turn my phone back on again. She might be
pissed off at me. I don't know.
I don't know. Part of it is'cause she's Spanish, and you know that adds a layer of complexity in itself. But that's the point of my marriage. The things I care about in life are complex. They're not solvable. They're only livable.
And so if I take a complicated simulacrum of anything.
I'm doing it wrong.
Because I'm not gonna be satisfied and my brain's gonna know.
How much of the
Malaise.
Associated with
the feeling of being in a simulacrum is resolved just by having more in-person human interactions because the older I get, maybe this is just the path of
People as they age, I don't know, but
I have one foot in the cutting edge.
bleeding edge technology. I'm fascinated by
the latest advancements in you name it, doesn't matter, but I AI neuroscience I'm very involved. Biologics, all of it. Like the last twenty four hours I've had conversations with three or four scientists all at the cutting edge of different fields. I love it.
Simultaneously.
I feel like we should pay attention and this is I guess
Not borrowing, but certainly
I mean lockstep with like
Nasim Taleb on this, which is paying attention to things that have persisted for very, very long periods of time.
Mm.
And also paying attention to evolutionary biology.
It's like we are evolved to be very social.
creatures moving through physical space together. Yes. Full stop.
And
If you take that away, if you take one or the other away.
Right.
You're in trouble. You're in big trouble.
And you don't have to understand all the myriad mechanisms by which this and that happens and
Fifteen different hormones interact to produce
Some type of
Subjective experience. Like
If we have evolved with these things as constants.
Over
Millennia upon millennia.
Maybe it's a good idea.
Yeah. Keep them as regular ingredients in your daily experience.
We know why.
We know why the need exists.
We know exactly.
Neuroscientists know exactly what you're talking about.
And this is the theory of hemispheric lateralization.
Again.
Very simple idea with complicated words for tenure.
This is the theory that's being most popularized right now, but probably the most visionary cutting edge neuroscientists living today.
was Ian McGillchrist at Oxford.
He wrote the master in his emissary.
Back in twenty ten.
And the master in his emissary
Talks about the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain do many things the same, but fundamentally
They get it the your two needs.
Which is to figure stuff out.
To dominate world's problems, to make progress and
To feel fully alive by being a beloved person.
Why?
We have two hemispheres of the brain that do those complicated things. That's the left hemisphere. How and what?
And the complex things, which is the why questions, that's the right hemisphere of the brain.
All the mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness.
That's processed in the right hemisphere of the brain.
And how you go out and do stuff is in the left hemisphere.
The problem is modern life.
This gets into the meaning crisis has pushed us all into the left hemisphere of our brain and slammed shut.
The door to the right.
Everything that we're doing from workaholism to to hustle culture to
Making sure that
People don't study humanities, they only study STEM.
And most especially to the similacrum, the technologized similar for ordinary life.
That's all left hemisphere.
And if you're on the left hemisphere, you're gonna know how and what and how and what and how and what and you're gonna be bereft of why.
Including the big why questions, which make up
The meaning.
Of her life.
And so the solution
Where is meaning to be found?
It's the right hemisphere of your brain.
How do you open it up?
That's the meaning protocols.
And it really comes down to these very simple ideas that we've already been
Exploring and it comes down to this. There's something that I promise you that great grandfather Ferris never said.
To your great grandmother, which was honey.
I had a panic attack behind the mule today.
And the reason is'cause it wasn't a thing.
And the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. His life was pretty boring.
And it was boring from day to day, objectively boring, but he never said my childhood was boring. His right hemisphere was exercise as well as his left hemisphere. And the result is he didn't have
Flooding of the HPA axis.
He wasn't morbidly depressed for no apparent reason.
He didn't live in a world of affluence and yet feel like he was experiencing nothing.
And the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. This was not a policy problem, this was a neurophysiological problem.
that he didn't have and that we have actually today. And so the result is
We have to live in an extraordinary way.
That was ordinary a hundred years ago.
The simulation we really need is the old fashioned life, is what comes about because almost
All of the things that I talk about in my research.
That people can experience if they actually put some
Work into it.
is to open up the right hemisphere of the brain and do what was absolutely ordinary.
Not that long ago. Three generations ago, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, complicated versus complex. I like the distinction. And and also having just come back
Brief aside.
Every year I do this past year review, I'm gonna be doing that.
The next few weeks. Me too.
Look at my
Top relationships, top defined as
Dear, close relationships that are reliably nourishing.
For everybody involved.
And energizing.
And then I book time in the next year.
More time with all those people.
So I
Establish these
relationships and then I book more time with them in the subsequent year.
And often with extended trips. I just came back from a trip.
with a number of my very close friends.
And
I look at some of the basics and I think it's replicable where
Three days into it, granted these are my close friends, but
I challenge anyone.
If you put in twenty thousand steps a day.
And you compliment, let's just say two of your close friends.
And three strangers.
And tell me by the end of the week that you don't feel better. Just like there's simplicity
Check your phone only 10 times. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right on the other side. And if you do those things, by the way, you will probably be checking your phone a lot less, hopefully.
I want to touch on something because I know we as expected are gonna run out of time before we run out of
Topics to talk about. But
I'll let you pick.
Where you want to go first.
So there's a line here that I have or it's more more phrasing that I want.
Here you expand on your suffering is sacred.
And then
There is a line here, which is treat your life like a pilgrimage that opens your mind and heart so life's meaning can find
You. Mm-hmm.
So those are both interesting to me, right? Your suffering is sacred.
And so that life's meaning can find you because most people think of themselves as going out to find
Meaning if they think about it at all.
Dealer's choice. Yeah.
Well start with suffering, because suffering is the most misunderstood thing in in most of modern life. We have an eliminationist strategy toward especially mental suffering.
We see, you know, big increases in depression anxiety. And if you go to campus counseling at any university and you're gonna say, I'm feel sad and anxious, we gotta fix that.
We'll probably, you know, you'd have some therapy and there might be some psychiatric medications involved. And I had nothing against therapy or psychiatric medications to save the lives of people in my family.
But the truth of the matter is that suffering per se
Is life itself.
I mean that's the first noble truth of Buddhism dukkha.
But it also suggests that you have a working limbic system, which is your alarm system for threats in the environment. Negative emotion is exists as a threat system, as a threat alarm system.
And negative experiences is the only way that you learn. There's a reason that great philosophers always say the suffering is your teacher.
Because suffering is the ultimate complex right hemisphere experience that teach you
about the meaning of your life. And if you try to eliminate your suffering, you will inadvertently eliminate meaning.
That's what will happen. The worst mistake that people can make is trying not to suffer. I still tell my students.
These are MBA students at Harvard.
I say.
You're studying
at Harvard University getting your MBAs. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy.
Something's wrong with you.
If you're actually not suffering. So the real question is
How can you learn and grow from it? The math.
That Buddhists have about suffering is as following.
Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance.
Pain times resistance.
And it's really important because what we know about that is that
People are trying to lower their suffering by lowering their level of pain.
And what they should be doing is actually understanding and putting into proper context and proportion their suffering by lowering their level of resistance. Resistance. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. And every good athlete understands that. And by the way, just very quickly.
The meditation that I was describing and recommending is effectively that. Yes. It's lowering your resistance to everything that you would be inclined to resist. Mm-hmm. And you know, my students have a little mantra they start at the beginning of the day and say,
I am truly grateful.
For the pleasant things that are gonna happen this day.
You know, in the Psalms, this is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.
And I'm also truly grateful for the troubles I'm going to face.
Because my learning and growth will come from these troubles.
Bring them on.
And that's just like bracing and I say this every day when I'cause I'm gonna suffer today. And Tim, you're gonna suffer today. And if you try to eliminate that suffering, all you're trying to do is lower your pain level to
Ephemerally and artificially and ineffectually lower your suffering.
Well have been also
Put right next to Marcus Aurelius.
Meditations. Absolutely. I mean Christian thinking is heavily influenced by
The Stoics.
They were contemporaneous.
This is why they sound so familiar to each other. And the whole idea is like
You got a choice. You can learn and grow from your suffering, or you can try to avoid your suffering and and have the same amount of suffering and not learn and grow.
What do you choose? And that's what it comes down to. So that's the most
The most difficult lesson, but the most bracing and empowering lesson about how to find meaning in your life is to lean into your suffering and you will find your meaning.
And that's what grandpa
Ferris had to do because he had no choice. He had no therapist. He didn't even have
Advil.
Yeah.
You know?
And so that's what what I'm talking about. Then the second point that you made, the second question you asked.
It's okay when you're on this
When you're in search.
To get presents. You're in search, search, search, search.
There's a mistake that people commonly make was thinking if I search enough, I'm gonna find
Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be open unto you.
But the process is a little bit counterintuitive and different.
Every religious tradition.
has a protocol
For finding truth.
And that is

In which point it is revealed that your truth finds you.
Now there's a lot of ways that that's described in the Bhagavad Gita.
Where you know trying to going to the birthplace of the Lord Krishna in Mathura.
in the Hindi heartland.
In Christianity for the community of the Santiago, which I've walked twice across the ancient route, a one thousand one hundred years old.
Doing the Hajj.
If you're Muslim.
What you find is that when you when you make a pilgrimage, that's a metaphor for your life.
And the end of the pilgrimage is the metaphor of
The ultimate goal of life. Which in you know, Abrahamic religions is
Heaven.
And it's the end of some sara in the karmic religions, or whatever it happens to be, is they're reuniting in the Godhead with the Godhead in the Hindu body of religions.
What's most important is is actually what's happening to you in the process of this pilgrimage.
And what actually happens to you neurobiologically
Is that you beat yourself to the point that you have an open aperture.
So that you're no longer in a defensive crouch.
Such that you're
You weaken yourself on purpose. This is why you walk twenty five kilometres a day.
and you're walking on blisters and you're actually inducing this amount of pain.
And I remember this the first time I walked my community. I was in a liminal space in my career. I just stepped down as the CEO of this big think tank and I
I didn't know what I was gonna do.
I mean, I was fifty five years old and I was spent, dude. I was
Out of gas. I was burnt out. I'd been working eighty hours a week. I missed a lot of my kids growing up. I'd made mistakes.
They stuck with me by the grace of God.
And I was walking the Camino day after day after day. I was praying.

tired and I was in pain.
And when I entered into Santiago de Compostela, this medieval city northern Spain, and I saw the cathedral
I realized my mission.
was to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together.
In bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas to be a scientist in the
public interest but for love and happiness.
And
I didn't find that.
It found me.
Question.
How did that
Up here.
Was it
Drop by drop?
Was it
A Japanese breakfast on a silver platter in your mind? I mean, did it did it all come at once, or was it bits and pieces that you slowly
We're able to weave together.
It was bit by bit. Because it's not this
Epiphany. It's not like falling off my horse on the road to Damascus and you know temporary blindness, which is probably, you know
temporal lobe epilepsy in the case of Saint Paul, but
It was a realization.
It was a realization. It was something that had already existed out there.
It felt like it came to me little by little.
Particularly over the last couple of days of the pilgrimage. It was um
What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to return to my roots as a scientist, says
And to use that as missionary work for, you know, greater love and happiness.
to get into the mission field as a behavioral scientist going back to the roots of what I've actually learned. Why?
What do I want?
For me and for everybody, I want more love. I want more happiness. I want more meaning. That's what I want for me and for everybody, because that's the sustenance of actually what we need.
Did that want?
Come into
high resolution.
In part because of the nature of that particular pilgrimage.
the religious and the prayer along the way? Or do you think that that was already
Just
a little beneath the surface and waiting to come out and it would have come out in a different environment.
That's a good question. It's an empirical question. But
I will say.
that all of the components of the pilgrimage, not to be metaphysical about it, not to be mystical about it at all.
All the components of a pilgrimage, which is the
physical difficulty, the strain that actually comes from it, the intense
effort that you're making while away from these technological distractions, the work that I'm doing on my relationship with God and my wife, with whom I'm holding her hand and praying the rosary.
You did the pilgrimage with I would have done thirty three days, except she's like no
Yeah. So we did the last eight.
All of these things turn out to be the ways that you open the vault of the right hemisphere of your brain.
Where the mysticism is actually found, the mystical side of your brain, which I believe God creates for a reason.
But it might just be nature and it might just be a coincidence.
But the bottom line is you must open that door and all the things you do in a pilgrimage.
Open that door.
And also
If it is nature, it serves some very
important, at least from an evolutionary perspective, function.
Yeah. I mean when you look back at just like the history of science, but just to take a slight digression.
At all the many things that we thought were junk DNA, all the many things that we thought were vestigial, all the many things that we thought were just
Left over and nature forgot to get rid of it.
Male nipples.
Yeah, male devils I still don't have a great explanation or a great use for. I mean maybe I'm sure I'll get some suggestions on on actually. Let's watch the comments, Tim. Sure we'll have plenty of suggestions, but
I mean it's half your brain. Right. So the this along with the uh
You know, everyone needs whatever, eight glasses of water a day and
Can only have thirty grams of protein at a given
Sit in.
The we only use ten percent of our brain. Not true. Like we use all of it.
True, absolutely. I mean that was a thing when I was a kid in the seventies.
The only tempt Oh, if you can get access to the other ninety percent and then a a science fiction story will have you the person who knows how to use the other ninety percent and can fly or something.

So gaining
really embracing and fullizing.
that right hemisphere.
Kind of characterized.
the capacities that you're mentioning are
I have just found it to be such an incredible unlock for me in so many ways.
And just to deepen the


And psychological texture of life.
Like you really need that right side.
And at least as you're describing it.
I've seen this in your work, by the way.
So I've been
Very aware.
And familiar with your work for a long time.
And the typical algorithm.
For people who are seekers.
is to start on the left side.
And then they find their way to the right.
You become more spiritual, more mystical.
More cosmic in your outlook.
As you've gotten older.
You wouldn't
Right.
the four hour body the same way today.
I'm sure you wouldn't. No.
I stand by all the tactical stuff. I love it. I love it. I read that book. I've just really enjoyed it. I mean, I learned a lot from it, but it's a very left brain approach. Yeah. Yeah. And you realize in your own life, as people generally do.
that you needed the right hemisphere as well.
And so that's why you talk about it's like why is
Why is Tim getting all mystical again? No, no, no.
He's actually moving.
hemispherically into the full brain.
Also, it's like the how to the technician's side, the engineering
problem of let's just call it self improvement, whether that's physical
Cognitive, psychoemotional.
What is that in service of for most people, if they ask why a few times, they're trying to improve their quality of life.
And
the quality of the lives around them they care most for.
To do that.
You need to do things like
distinguish between the me self and the I self. Anthony DeMello has a lot of really good writing on this as well.
You need to lower
Resistance.
Which you could think of as also
Paying very close attention to the Serenity Prayer.
Or stoicism or fill in the blank and
There's something to be said, I think, when I
also have conversations with some of the most
As far as I can tell.
Uh
Peace.
Reconciled.
But yet still productive in the world, people.
Whether that's Henry Shuman who I mentioned.
Or the Jack Cornfields.
Or CEOs who also pay attention to these things.
They are all
Reading and learning from people, whether it's the Christian mystics
Whether it's roomy.
So Sufi mysticism.
You go down the line, it's all the same thing.
Zen Buddhism.
When I check my wifi connection, I always go to dailyzen.com and occasionally you find something that's pretty interesting.
They're all
Talking about the same stuff.
Maybe we should.
Take a gander.
To put a point on what you just said.
The meaning of life comes from the right hemisphere of your brain and you can't get to the right by going further and further left. No.
That's a probably a political point too, I'm not sure, but
Yeah.
This is a
problem that a lot of people have. They want more and more and more. I mean, I've got protocols. I got protocols of the Wazoo man.
But protocols.
Aren't it.
What they can do is they can facilitate
It's the same thing people ask me all the time, how is AI gonna interact with happiness?
The answer is that AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain.
The way that it can bring you happiness is that if you do left brain things with it, thus
bring up a whole bunch of time that you then use to deepen your relationships in real life with real people.
That's an algorithm right there, man.
the way that that you won't get it is if you try to use it as an adjunct to the right hemisphere of your brain by making it your lover, friend, or therapist.
Or if you use it to do certain things more quickly so that you can simply consume
The
Quote unquote.
free time you've created with more
left dominant by frittering away your time which is what I predict most people will do. Exactly right. So the idea of this my morning era of leisure time is on its face pretty ridiculous because that's been predicted with
Every advance in technology. Exactly. And and you we knew started off by talking about the technology that I use, which is my morning protocol.
The morning protocol per se is not the secret to happiness.
It
Instantiates it enables
It's what it is is an architecture.
Such that I can actually have the freedom
to live in the right hemisphere of my brain and find the meaning of my life.
That's what all these protocols are. That's why, you know, blood flow restriction is a left brain protocol.
But the reason that you do anything like that is because ultimately what you want is more freedom.
In a way, more freedom to spend it in what really matters most in your life, which is
More love.
It's more love, it's more meaning, it's more significance, it's more coherents, it's more purpose.
I want to end where I promised we would end.
And
The meaning of your life. This is the new book, Finding Purpose in an Age of Us. I love your writing.
I love your thinking.
People should absolutely check out the book.
I need to ask you briefly about a specific element.
Of
Your evening routine.
And window.
And that is personal evening reading.
Yeah.
What do you read before you go to bed?
Before I go to bed, I read something that's not
Trying to educate me better, but trying to be generative to me.
I want to use
And again, this is very left right thinking.
I want
My sleep.
to be concentrated in the hemisphere of my brain that'll bring me the most meaning and what you read before you sleep.
will actually stimulate the part of your brain that you're going to use most while you sleep. It's one of the reasons that if you want to remember something,
Read about it right before you go to sleep.
And you'll actually remember, but you won't learn something you don't know, but you will remember something better.
That's the reason that I read
The psalms.
Actually I like to have the psalms read to me in a feminine Spanish accent. Sounds great. Sign me up.
I read
Love poetry?
Do you have any favorite songs and then love poetry? What are we talking about? Well, actually we are talking about Naruto.
The greatest love poet ever.
The Chilean love poet in Spanish, which is
Which pronounced in Spanish from your beloved is like a narcotic. And yet won't ruin your life.
The song, Psalm one twenty one.
Any of the psalms actually because they ca they have the a different flavor as you work your way through them.
The first psalm is like a tree planted by streams of water who prospers in all that he does.
The idea of God's promise and love for you, Tim.
And that promise and absorbing that promise of the intense love for you, which is the essence of significance at the metaphysical level.
And absorbing that and having it read to you or reading it or having it read to you is so significant.
That's a
The evening protocol is you know
Happiness and better sleep.
Deeper love.
generativity in the you know the nighttime hours, which by the way, for me are a torment. I'm a terrible sleeper.
I'm terrible. And you can't get the machine off, right?
Machine.
You can't get the machine. There's no off switch. Right, the off switch. I've become much, much better at it.
Much better.
But that has for my entire life been the
Ruminative. Yeah.
challenges that I lay down to go to sleep and my mind is like I've been waiting all day to tell you so many things. I know.
I know. We have to we have some there's some things we need to discuss here. You're probably wondering why I gathered you here tonight. The boss has something on his mind.
When your spouse, your partner, is a good sleeper.
That can be really problematic because then they'll have a heavy conversation with you and then go
Oh yeah, no, that's no flies out. Yeah, that is for both.
Part of the protocol, this is really important for everybody watching us who doesn't sleep alone.
is actually the oxytocin protocol, which is as we all know, the the love molecule, the bonding.
Neuropeptide that functions as a hormone of the brain. Women have three times as much as men.
Side note.
Here's how you fix every marriage. You do four things.
Number one, you have more fun together as opposed to rehearsing grievance.
More fun, less grievance.
Therapy is like
Rievance, grievance, grievance. Have more fun together. Number two. And how long have you been married? Thirty four years. Mm-hmm. Okay.
Second is pray together.
Because you're
The fusion, one flash, there's the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brains.
This is the goal.
If you get married, Tim, the goal is to fuse your right hemispheres.
The best way to do that is by meditating together.
is by praying together, is by doing right hemisphere activity together.
The third protocol is to make eye contact whenever you talk.
Never be talking without making eye contact. Way more important for your wife than it is for you.
Way more important because she gets three times as much oxytocin, which means she's better at bonding, but it also means that she's better at starving.
When she's not getting enough oxytocin and an eye contact from the beloved, which is, you know, when you have eye contact with the newborn baby.
Oxytocin is like the fourth of July inside your head. Which is why you wouldn't leave the baby on the bus because suddenly the baby babies kin.
It's an evolved phenomenon.
And last but not least is remember A B T always be touching. Always be touching.
Always be touching. More important for men than for women.
As a matter of fact. That's why when you're with your beloved and she hooks her arm into your arm while you're walking down the street, you're like,
I'm big and strong. Why? Because that's that's super important. So
The last thing before you go to bed when you're reading to each other.
Or when you're talking.
Go five minutes earlier to that.
Five minutes are literally bad.
And stare at each other.
And it's hard.
It's scary. It's like
The eyes, according to Saint Paul, or the windows.
to the soul.
And that's when you know you really feel it. And biologically the reason is because oxytocin is just like
All Faithful.
For her. She will love you more.
If you have five to ten minutes of intense eye contact before you go to sleep,
While you're holding hands under the covers.
And by the way, for anyone who's not tried this.
You've done this, right? I have done this.
Five to ten minutes is
Yeah.
So long. Yeah, yeah. It's a really long time. You could start lower.
You can start lower, but here's here's the most intense exercise you can do. If you want like the break glass plan for fixing your relationship, right. Here's what you do.
You stand in front of each other, staring at each other in the eyes, silent.
And you hold your arms out to the side like in an iron cross, holding hands like this.
For eight minutes.
And so what's going on? Shaolin monk therapy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super painful. And it's gonna be more painful for you because pretty after about four minutes, you're holding her arms up. Yeah, yeah, right.
So it's like five pound weights in each hand. And so you're in intense, excruciating pain while having your soul.
Opened with a crowbar.
This is like intense thing. How did you arrive at this?
There's a, you know, it we I've experimented with this and also I read the research, right? And and I participate in the research. I've actually done this a number of times. There's a number of religious traditions that will do exercises actually that are like this.
I did one in Spain last year.
It's called El proyecto amor con Yugal.
And that's the Marital Love Project. It's a very big deal across Spain. It's not in English yet.
And so it was a in a little retreat center outside Madrid. And we were seeing'cause my wife and I, we do a lot of talks together.
And you know, we counsel couples that are engaged, et cetera.
This is our side hustle, right? Is that you know helping people fall in love and stay in love.
And so we were just like, What's this method everybody's so crazy about? We were doing stuff like this. It was like holy mackerel. I mean, because they don't know how much neuroscience they're actually doing.
Then somebody came up with this and said, I wonder if this works as like
It's really, really heavy. It's just top notch.
Neuroscience matched up with it's as left and right brain as you can get.
Wow.
And also
Not yet in English. That sounds like a job for Arthur Brooks and some AI tools. And and and Esther Brooks who's like, she's she's the spiritual leader in our family. There you go. Job job for Esther who wouldn't need the AI.
Arthur always so
Much fun to spend time together. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you, Tim.
Thank you for what you're bringing into the world.
Even when I'm not in person.
I'm with you virtually and you enrich my life. Oh, thanks, man.
This is uh
Boy. Talk about lucky timing.
All the serendipity required to end up with this is a job.
Remarkable. Right. And I get get to spend time with
People like yourself, the meaning of your life, folks, check it out. You can get it everywhere books are sold.
And
People can find you at Arthur Brooks dot com on all the socials. Yeah.
Presumably, is there anything else you would like to share? Anything else you'd like to say or
Request to my audience anything at all.
Before we wind to a close.
You don't know what to do today.
And meaning feels out of reach.
Turn off your device and go love somebody.
And it doesn't really matter how you feel.
Because love is an act.
It's a commitment, it's the decision.
And you'll lift up yourself and that person
And a little bit of the whole world.
Happiness is love.
Um.
I think that is the perfect place to end and
Folks will link to everything as usual. Tim dot blog slash podcast.
Go left somebody.
Including yourself.
Right on. See you next time. Thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
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Thanks for listening.
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